went to a bookstore today. they had cats. and a typewriter where people could write whatever and tape it to the walls. really got to me
people are just people and i love us so much
[ID: Photos of pieces of paper with typed text on them. Image 1: “I hope you get the happiness you deserve and then some. life is too beautiful to not enjoy and be happy. :)” Image 2: “this is the sign you were waiting for…the one that confirms that thing you’ve been wondering about so go create it. 2 2 2 2020″ Image 3: “Love yourselves and each other. Kris and Wayne 8/18/21″ Image 4: “I wish I remembered the names of all the cats I’ve ever met”
Image 5: Multiple overlapping pieces of paper. “heaven is a bookstore full of cats”, “…is thing is really cool to typoe on. thank”, “Wes and Anna’s honeymoon trip. November 2021″ Image 6: Multiple overlapping notes. “hello my name is emilia / i love ariana grande / thank you”, “dressed as a banana / dressed as a banana! EaAaaAaaA - Harold Styles, Love on Tour / October 2, 2021″ Image 7: “U think you’re better than me just because you know how to use a typewriter??? ok boomer / boomer I mean / okay I guess u got me on this one” The first “boomer” is illegible because it shows double and is overlapped with multiple X-letters. Image 8: “it is my birthday / I am 20 / 10/01/01 / my mom is visiting”
Image 9: “don’t worry. times are hard. and scary. but we too, shall prevail. together. be gentler with yourself.” Image 10: Multiple notes. “This bookstore is full of sweet and soft kitties. EN 6.19.21″, “The feline bookstore typewriter is fun to use / will come back again” Image 11: Multiple notes. “Don’t take life too seriously. No one makes it out alive.”, “earth it is zombie daycare ddy bears are cute so is mouse I don’t know what I [cut off by another paper on top of it] —king about so I am going” Image 12: “hi I’m clara / I’m 19″ Image 13: “Legit question for rural Americans how do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 minutes while my small kids play?” Image 14: Written in all caps. “Your mom / -You” Image 15: “owen and derek are nerds” Image 16: “love”
Image 17: “December 3 / hello, Patty n Erica. we’re here! We are happy :3 / It is a nice day XD / We’re getting BOBA! 8D / bai bai” Image 18: Multiple notes. Majority of the image shows a longer text that is mostly cut off on the left so it can’t be read in full. On the side of it reads: “hello people that [illegible]” Underneath is part of another note, reading in all caps: “Sisters I am coming for you / hehehe / I can see you”
Image 19: Multiple notes. On the top is a note with the beginning of it cut off, but a part of it is shown: “This typewriter is crazy with the s key. We have seen two cute cats so far with many to come. We hope for many more amazing trips with all four of us. Hopefully those trips will include cats as well. I wish I had a typewriter at home because this is super fun except that you cannot backspace.” Other two notes read: “hello my name is cole” & “November 5th 2021 / Got hot chocolate today / it was very nice / Love you.”
mark thompson, gay body: a journey through shadow to self, 1997
[“Suffering as Grace
The crunch of wet, pristine sand made a satisfying sound as we walked along the storm-cleansed beach. It seemed as if we had been talking for hours; the trail of white footsteps dotting the shoreline marked the sure progress of our conversation. With all of the candor I could muster, I was coming out, once again, to my friend Cathy. We had gone through school together at Carmel High and knew each other well; both loners, we’d taken Thoureau’s advice to heart long ago: to march to a different drummer, "however measured or far away.” Neither one of us was particularly surprised when we announced to the other that we were queer. It was just one more declaration in a lifetime of shared intimacies. Now it was time for yet another revelation: my growing involvement with sadomasochism and the South of Market leather scene.
Entering the leather world was like coming out a second time, I carefully explained to Cathy as we sidestepped the darting waves. Announcing my homosexuality was child’s play compared to the struggle I’d had in admitting my interest in leather sex. It was like there was another closet within the closet, and bogeymen lived inside even that guarded space. I had been so afraid to investigate that inner sanctum and confront its demon voices until now.
“I want you to do whatever is going to make you happy and whole,” said Cathy, after hearing my confession. “Besides, you help to open doors for me as we go along. But what is it exactly what you are so worried about?”
“I believe I’m most afraid of what other people will think,” I quietly replied.
My friend only smiled as we trudged along the coast while I continued to unload my pent-up feelings. Monterey Bay seemed to curve forever into a blue cosmos of matching sky and water. The low rumble oft he incoming tide and the persistent squeal of hungry sea birds overhead filled the silence between us when we finally came to a halt.
“It’s all right, Mark,” she responded after a while, reaching out to offer a speckled feather found on the sand. Her brown eyes were full of understanding. “I trust your exploration and accept what you’re doing without any problem at all. It’s your soul medicine.”
Cathy’s simple observation rang so true it left me embarrassed for the rest of the day. Here I was trying to hide from myself and others activities thought to be shameful. But the real shame and source of immediate discomfort was my inability to see the truth of my experience. I had been too locked up in false myths and memories from childhood, which, too, were submerged in shame. In fact, a sense of shame, systemic and overshadowing, had permeated my being so thoroughly I could hardly imagine life without it.
I had gravitated toward the heaviness of the leather scene because of its weight, its mysterious ability to pull one down into depths that might not ordinarily be ventured. It was tricky business navigating a way into the pitiless well of one’s psyche, but the chains and restraints, the brunt of the whip, even the scent of the leather itself, all assisted in making this passage possible.
The blunt, heavy means of dark eros was the best transportation I had yet found to help me go into my own terror, that awesome, ever-rising fear I had known all my life. By submitting at the feet of a masterful guide, I was, in effect, signing a contract where my ego-driven self could be temporarily annihilated, loosed from its mooring. My surrender to the demands of the scene marked a descent into an inner domain of similar upheaval and disintegration, of other things that immobilize and sting. Being a masochist gave me the permission and the means to face my total being: the self that exists in both worlds.“]
mark thompson, gay body: a journey through shadow to self, 1997
[“To be wounded is not enough. We can claim our shame, count off each infraction against the Self as we would list souvenirs from a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world. We can exalt that martyrdom, to, festooning the flesh with new wounds to better declare the one festering inside. But it is not enough only to see and then say what happened. There comes a time in every man’s life when he must ask: What is to be done about it? The hurt and betrayal, the feelings which exist as facts, those time-blasted pinnacles of memory as real as any monumental rock.
Our wound is not the soul’s germinal seed, but merely the gateway to that which grows beyond its other side. It is a point of entry, a way through to where that plant of eternal life we know as gay love takes root and prospers. Our gay wound is the gods’ gift to us surely, but in itself is nothing to either celebrate or covet. It is the means toward the creation of a Self rather than its meaning.
Creation requires sacrifice, and what is gained stands in proportion to what of oneself is given up. Certainly, one must relinquish past insult and injury in order to spiritually grow. That is the hero’s way. But we gay men have to sacrifice our attachment to the wound as well. What, at birth, seems inevitably fated, cannot alone be our destiny.
For, at some point on the journey, the hero’s work is done. The heroic myth itself must be sacrificed before self-creation can continue. From Gilgamesh to the Grail knight, to the gay shaman-warrior of today, each must finally put down the sword and let that part of himself which clings to the wound die. In other words, we must die before death itself, sacrifice what is most prized in order to truly live.
The choice is ours to make, and I look in wonderment at when and how it is made by some and avoided by others. Often it is the circumstances of literal dying that determines the question of how we gay men die inside. Whatever the case may be for each individual, there is no denying the wholesale fact of our physical leave-taking. Stories about final moments abound, with dizzying proximity, in my life and the lives of those close around me. On either one level or the other, sometimes both, we gay men have become pros in the necessary act of dying.”]
mark thompson, gay body: a journey through shadow to self, 1997
“Disregard for the self, an almost overwhelming sense of being less than fully human, is a condition endemic to gay lives. It is the price we pay for being "other” in a society of calculated sameness. “It is virtually impossible to be different, particularly in this culture, and not feel deficient for the difference, because any awareness of difference inevitably translates into a devalued comparison,” state Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael, life partners who have written extensively about the crippling effects of shame in gay people. “First we are devalued by others, then we devalue ourselves.”
Sociologist Carlton Cornett observes that because we are continually bombarded by negative evaluations, “many gay men internalize representations of themselves as inadequate or morally bad. However, there is also a realization that there is no other way to be. The only compromise available in many cases is to maintain an alienation from the self.”
Once this damaged self is set in place, the tragedy is compounded by its projection onto similar others. We are destined to fall short in one another’s eyes because the deficiencies seen in friends and lovers are usually our own. The disagreeable aspects of one’s negated self is time and again cast onto these convenient living screens. This is why the theater of all possibility I thought I had moved to soon regressed to the haunted house of my youth. Rather than remain a land of milk and honey, mecca began to sour.“
-Mark Thompson, ‘Gay Body: a Journey Through Shadow to Self,’ 1997
Transneumascfem, transmascneufem, transfemneumasc, transneufemasc, or transneufemmasc: being transmasculine, transfeminine and transneutral; transgender individual experiencing gender neutrality, femininity and masculinity.
Mixing trans flag colors (in borders) with neumascfem flag [transcript: 11 stripes colored with cyan, gradient from pink to yellow to blue, and pink. end ID]
