HELLO and MERRY CHRISTMAS @thetidewaters! i have spent many hours scribbling and (mostly) fiddling with the hue slider to get this picture to look cohesive and I think i have?? succeeded?? anyway. This is She Who Knows Ten Thousand Things, aka Ten, the twilight caste. I am a big fan of twilights, probably because i play one but also, theyre just fun.
that supergirl lesbian kiss where the girls look like they are going to quit after that take is the polar opposite of the scene in brokeback where alma sees jack and ennis making out and heath ledger almost broke jake gyllenhaals nose
the binary
#someone said ‘the supergirl kiss looks like when michael kissed oscar on the office’ and it does and i’m screaming
this is literally the same gif
I fucking choked
Hollywood cast queer folks to play queer characters challenge. And cast POC to play POC
This last point is absolutely true.
HOWEVER.
Having been in high school when Brokeback Mountain came out, I can tell you Heath and Jake took A LOT of heat for many of the scenes in it (including this one), because they WEREN’T all awkward and afraid to touch each other. They both went in with the attitude of “we’ve been hired to portray a relationship, and we’re going to do that.” I lost count of the number of times they were asked if it was weird/different to kiss another man. I think it was Jake who made the most confused face ever at the camera and kind of went “….no…..? A kiss is a kiss?” The speculation on their sexualities ran RAMPANT—at the same time that Heath started dating Michelle Williams (who played his wife, in the most positive-but-ironic turn of events ever). They literally were basically not allowed to say “queer people are people, and you don’t have to be queer to see that queer people can love and cherish each other emotionally and physically.” They did their best to do that, working against a mass media that was going “look, it’s a story about TWO MEN!! And they HAVE SEX!!! HOW FREAKY!!!”
So while I agree that in 2019 we should be aspiring to cast queer actors to play queer roles, please recognize that the fact we can aspire to that now is partly because of what two straight actors did fifteen years ago, when they decided they weren’t going to be afraid to risk breaking each other’s faces in a show of passion and longing.
#I’m happy that young queers are getting so much compared to my youth #but there’s such a lack of understanding at the same time #like you can tell they never grew up in a world where their first experience with queerness was a brutal violent murder
Brokeback Mountain was released in 2005.
Lawrence v Texas, the lawsuit that overturned sodomy laws that made gay sex illegal, was in 2003.
The cast was set before SCOTUS made that ruling. The film was already being planned at a time when gay sex was a crime in more than a dozen US states.
They couldn’t “get queer actors to play queer roles” because the majority of queer actors were deeply closeted, because it was a crime in a lot of places, including all of Texas and Florida. Your movie has a scene at Disneyworld? Can’t have known queer actors or they could be arrested during filming.
I don’t know how to get across how different it is now.
Lots of important stuff in this post ❤️
History is changing fast, and for the better. But it still had to change, and it hasn’t been that long ago. Many of the people making content last decade had grown up in very different situations, where the only explicitly queer content you saw had unhappy endings.
THIS! This is the perspective that young purity culture folks are lacking when they start getting self-righteous and start dinning older media about lack of representation.
They have absolutely no idea how fortunate they are to live right now. They didn’t live through Matthew Shepard being tortured and tied to a fence and left to die. They didn’t live through the pre-Stonewall police raids on gay clubs and bars that were the norm. They have no idea who Alan Turing was, or why his treatment at the hands of a government he ostensibly and literally saved from Nazi Germany remains so reprehensible, even with a so-called “pardon.”
Babies. Please. Learn your history before you decide to come lecture your elders.
