So this probably won’t get as much attention as my other ATYD posts because this one’s actually serious, instead of “oh my god this fic is sad!” But I feel like it’s a crucial conversation we need to have.
I feel like for the most part, people in this community do really well with talking about how mlm is fetishized, but I’m becoming increasingly concerned because of the posts I keep seeing where allies are trying to make sure wolfstar or gay ships aren’t being fetishized, when in reality sometimes it’s okay for things to just be slightly sexual.
Sexuality is not taboo and we need to be careful not to make it out to be taboo.
I feel like the LGBT and MLM communities have come so far and I think it could be harmful to our communities to reintroduce a stigma around gay sex and gay people being sexual.
It is not fetishizing to talk about gay sex in passing, and it is not a bad thing.
For example, I saw someone make a joke about Sirius and Remus having a sexual relationship (specifically in all the young dudes) and someone called them out (politely) asking why they had to go to a sexual place to describe the relationship between Sirius and Remus. And while I think it is important to have these conversations and check our internal biases about gay men and make sure we are not constantly sexualizing them, sometimes, things are just related to sex, sex can be a subject and not be inherently bad.
I then saw someone else saying that ATYD can get fetish-y because of the way Remus is more sexual around the full moon. But that’s not a bad thing! And it actaully fits the story perfectly, around the full moon remus feels everything deeper. Magic,emotions, and so it makes sense for his desires to also increase. 
This is been all over the place but basically what I’m trying to say is yes it is good to check our biases and politely call people out when they might be accidentally fetishizing gay men. But we can’t talk about sex, specifically gay sex, as something that is improper or wrong, because it is the opposite of progress to denormalize talking about gay people being sexual. Gay sex isn’t a subject that we should discourage having conversations about.
I really wish I could better articulate what I’m trying to say but I’m tired and I cant word things to save my life, just be careful when trying to deconstruct fetishization of gay men, because as much as that is bad stigmatizing gay sex isn’t helping anyone either.
{So after i read all the young dudes i was obviously wrecked and i wanted to change the ending so it didnt hurt as much. I dont think you need to read ATYD to read this (i am kida taking it as canon) but if you haven’t you really should. Anyway the chapters vary in veiwpoint and this one is from Lily’s. Enjoy :) }
Chapter 1 (read here on Ao3. i think i have like four chapters posted now)
She had heard the scream from her husband and the cruel words the monster had sneered at him and the flash of green had shone through the entire house but she couldn’t let herself think about it. She would later. If there was a later.
Instead she had to focus on her son.
She held the boy close to her chest, tears streaming down her face, before placing him in his crib.
She could hear the footsteps of the man walking through the house, the charms for changing the layout only slowing down the inevitable.
Her voice shook as she whispered to Harry that she loved him. That his father loved him. That Sirius and Lupin loved him. She was about to say Peter but then realised that he must have given the information to Voldemort. Anyway it didn’t matter now.
She told her son how much he was loved by her and his father and their friends. And how much his grandparents would have loved him. How much anyone who met him had loved him.
Then the door flew open and ‘he’ stood there.
She pleaded with him. Pleaded and pleaded but green light shot towards her and the world went black.
She had visions in that darkness. Visions of her son and her husband. Of her friends and her family. Happy ones to start. Memories of days in Hogwarts spent by the lake. Of days before Hogwarts when tuney had been kind to her and Severus had been a good person. Of her wedding day and the day Harry was born. But slowly they turned darker. Memories of Harry crying. her friends arguing. Of her and James arguing. Meetings about the war. Severus and Petunia cursing at her. Hearing the lists of the dead which had grown longer everyday. Seeing the corpses at the funerals. Seeing Marlene lying so still. Hearing the thud of James hitting the floor.
Then darkness crept in again and she saw nothing more.
When she awoke she couldn’t see anything. She was lying on something hard, perhaps a large rock and there was wind whistling loudly and the sound of waves crashing somewhere near. She shivered and peered into the darkness.
She felt hollow. She hadn’t a clue what had happened and where she was. She supposed she was dead but she felt very cold and she was definitely corporeal as she could feel herself and the rock she was on.
As she waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness she tried to use her magic. No luck. Not that she had expected there to be a result as she had died far away from her wand. Well, had she died?
Lily Potter had always been a quick and logical thinker. One of the things that had set her so apart from her husband and that had held her back when she started liking him was that she would think things through carefully and try and come up with the best solution to a problem whereas James would rush straight into things without giving a second thought to the matter. At first she had struggled with that but had eventually realised that his need to protect his loved ones, that often hindered his thoughts was what would keep them safe during the war. At any rate he wasn’t as nearly so reckless as his best friend. That was something at least. As she was sitting in the dark thinking about this Lily wondered how Remus could deal with being with sirius. Knowing that the man’s recklessness and impulsiveness had put both of them in danger so often. Yet Remus is always stuck by him.
Thinking of her friends had helped Lily calm down. But then she remembered that her husband was dead and her son probably was too and she melted down into tears. Light drops of water at first. Just enough to coat her lips with salt before she was sobbing loudly and uncontrollably.
After a few seconds of sobbing loudly someone from somewhere in the darkness asked
“Is someone there?”
She would have recognised that voice anywhere and despite the situation she grinned happily.
“James?” She asked, not caring that he couldn’t be speaking, that he was dead.
“Lils!” James shouted, the relief in his voice obvious. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah. I think so. Nothing really hurts. Are you OK?”
“Yeah. What happened? Where are we?”
“I don’t know darling. But he’s got Harry. I’m sorry I tried to hold him off but he cursed me. I thought I was going to die. I thought…. I thought he killed you” The tears started again as she tripped over her words.
“Darling it’s alright. You did everything you could and obviously I’m not dead.” He joked, a bit of humour in the dank place they were in cheering Lily up immensely.
They tried to find each other by following their voices but they came to the conclusion that they were trapped apart from each other. They tried magic again and again. Spells for light. For letting people know where you were. For help. For heat. Even patronuses but nothing worked. So they gave up and talked to each other through the darkness. Hours later, or at least what Lily thought to be hours later James drifted off to sleep and she sat in the silence listening to his snoring. She must have fallen asleep soon after and she woke up with a dim light shining through the room.
She could see it more clearly now. Cavernous with tall ceilings and rough walls. There was a gate of sorts at one end of the room,enclosing her. A thin slit in the wall gave way to light behind it and she could hear seagulls screeching over the sound of the waves.
James was awake too and his cell, for want of a better word, faced Lily’s. They were so close. Barely a meter and a half between the two sets of bars and when they stretched their arms through their fingertips scraped each other.
If they strained their ears and tried to listen past the deafening waves they could hear screaming coming from far above them.
Food and water appeared in their rooms three times that day and they ate in silence, so rare for the two of them. So rare that it was just the two of them. Whilst in hiding they had barely a moment together without Harry and before that there were always friends, usually Sirius and Remus spending time with them.
In between meals they talked. They tried to figure out where they were and what had happened to them. They also tried to assure each other that Harry would be OK but neither of them really believed it. However if the unspeakable had happened neither of them would have been able to face it and they both cried themselves to sleep that night. The next day the sound of the waves disappeared for awhile and the screaming above them stopped as loud shouts and jeers sounded through the hall and cells they were in.
And those shouts were what led James to his theory of where they were.
They were sitting in silence a few days later when Lily suddenly felt very cold and she shivered. Dark memories and thoughts infiltrated her mind and she looked over at James who had started to cry.
Then the feeling was lessened and James jumped up with a triumphant laugh.
“Lils! I figured out where we are!” He said gleefully.
“Where?”
“Azkaban!” He said, the happiness in his voice fading.
“What? How?” She asked incredulously.
“I don’t know how we got here but it just seems the most likely outcome. We know we’re in a castle near the sea. We know that there are other people in this place who are being tortured or something and we both keep on getting periods where we feel terrible. So dementors possibly. ”
Lily didn’t know what to make of this other than admiring her husband’s thought process.
This revaluation didn’t help the two of them much however perhaps it calmed them a little to know where they were and shake off some of the uncertainty.
Over the next few days they could hear more shouting and heckling coming from above but not as loud as from the second day.
And soon days must have passed into weeks and weeks must have passed into months. They tried keeping track by scratching tallies on the walls but they kept on having different answers.
They tried not to think about what might have happened to Harry or to their friends or what was going on with the war and instead they talked about memories. Happy ones usually especially that summer in Cornwall before everything went downhill. As more time passed they were starting to run out of things in their life to talk about so they started making up stories about different worlds.
Months stretched into what must have been years and any hope they might have had at the beginning of escaping or being rescued was scuppered. They had tried hundreds of times to escape but nothing worked and no one had come near them.
At a certain point talking and thinking about their friends was too much and they spoke very rarely of them if at all. They spent most of their time telling stories and surprisingly dancing.
Lily had never been amazing at dancing. Sure she could dance in a party in the gryffindor common room but that was about the extent of her talents. James however had been taking lessons his whole life.
In a suppressed memory, Sirius has taught Lily to dance for her wedding but she had resigned not to think of her friends and that memory had faded. James taught her to dance in the prison. They would sing songs that they had played on Sirius’ record player in Hogwarts and music they had listened to after school and they would dance to the music together, waiting for when they could hold each other again.
So for years and years, they would tell tales from worlds they had constructed in their heads and they would dance and sing and scream until they fell asleep, their hands stretching towards each other through the barriers.
