#obviously not a queer space per se but. this is just my band

[sidewalk-scrawls]

WIP Meme: List the titles/filenames/descriptions of your WIPs and tell us a little bit about them/wail about them/beg for inspiration/whatever you want! Then tag some people for a no-obligation mutual wailing/cheering/complaining session!

ALRIGHT, the first time I wrote up this post, my computer crashed as I was nearing the end, so I’m finally trying again (while saving the draft every 3.5 seconds this time). I was tagged by @astriiformes for this! I’m going to go ahead and define WIP as anything I’m *actively* writing with the intent to finish it because I have a lot of projects otherwise that I’m planning to continue working on eventually, and this list would be a mile long.

Blood of the Covenant (Or, Finding a Home): Currently ongoing, this fic is a product of my Owl House spiral. I wanted to write my own “Hunter gets adopted into the Owl House” fic because I couldn’t stop reading them. A good chunk of this is an exploration of the impact of abuse, but it’s also a look into finding love through found family because honestly, I just want to get this kid a hug. I’ve recently been reworking the plot of this a bit just because I’d really like to finish it before season 2B premieres, but we’ll see how likely that is. Darker than the source material, so read with a bit of caution if you’re an Owl House fan.

[REDACTED]: Okay, so this isn’t a writing project per se, but I’m the primary writer, so I’m going to include it anyway. Redacting the title just because I haven’t formally announced it yet. ANYWAY, this is a game where you return to your hometown, a small town in the mountains, populated by a community of hybrid shapeshifters. The town has become increasingly rundown over the years, the environmental magic surrounding it having become harder to access. Upon your return, you deepen your relationships in the town and learn more about what has happened in the years since you’ve been gone. You also help to rebuild the town by solving picross puzzles, completing runes that help to restore the town’s magic. Basically, it’s a story-driven picross game with dating sim elements (dating is optional, but building relationships is a core mechanic).

Thief’s Promise: This is a piece of novel-length interactive fiction that I’m working on that will hopefully be published eventually although I’ll admit it’s pretty slow going. I recently completely blew up my outline because it just wasn’t working, but the very general concept is that you play as a leader of a band of thieves in late-late-late stage capitalism (we’re talking SPACE capitalism here) and find yourself caught up in a revolution. Anyway, lots of thievery, corporate espionage, and political intrigue in a sci-fi setting. Optional romance here, too, because I’m physically incapable of writing games without queer romance.

The End As We Know It: This barely counts as an *active* project since it’s so early on, but I literally think about this story daily, so I’m including it anyway. A mysterious billboard appears along a highway in the Midwest. Around the time this billboard appears, people begin to gradually notice an uptick in the number of deaths, especially through freak accidents. And then they uncover an even more disturbing pattern -- The exponential trend in deaths maps perfectly to the extinction of humanity right as the countdown hits 0. Anyway, this is horror obviously, mostly written to be an outlet for my existential anxiety. Currently looks like it’ll be a short story, but only time will tell.

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I loveee talking about all my projects, even though I don’t post about them a ton on here, so if you’re curious about any of them, feel free to shoot me a message!!!

I’m tagging a few people who I think might be interested, but also anyone feel free to give this a go and tag me! ANYWAY, tagging @arielmagicesi @siamusotima-aranea @swordofsun @fishteapot if you’re interested

#writing #this took me ages to write because i was so bitter about tumblr deleting my entire post that i didn't want to write it again lolol #but i lovee posts like this!! #anyway i consistently have more projects going on at once than i'm capable of keeping up with #it's a wild life

[qqueenofhades]

I want to hear about gay knights. Please.

Ahaha. So this is me finally getting, post-holiday, to the subject that was immediately clamoured for, when I volunteered to discuss the historical accuracy of gay knights if someone requested it. It reminds me somewhat of when my venerable colleague @oldshrewsburyian​ volunteered to discuss lesbian nuns, and was immediately deluged by requests to do just that. In my opinion, gay knights and lesbian nuns are the mlm/wlw solidarity of the Middle Ages, even if the tedious constructionists would like to remind us that we can’t exactly use those terms for them. It also forces us to consider the construction of modern heterosexuality, our erroneous notions of it as hegemonically transhistorical, and the fact that behaviour we would consider “queer” (and therefore implicitly outside mainstream society) was not just mainstream, but central, valorized, and crucial to constructions of medieval manhood, if not without existential anxieties of its own. Because medieval societies were often organized around the chivalric class, i.e. the king and his knights, his ability to make war, and the cultural prestige and homosocial bonds of his retinue, if you were a knight, you were (increasingly as the medieval era went on) probably a person of some status. You had a consequential role to play in this world, and your identity was the subject of legal, literary, cultural, social, religious, and other influences. And a lot of that was also, let’s face it, what the 21st century would consider Kinda Gay.

The central bond in society, the glue that made it work, was the relationships between soldiers, battlefield brotherhoods, and the intense, self-sacrifical love for the other that is familiar to anyone who has ever watched a war movie, and dates back (in explicitly gay form, at least) to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Medieval society had a careful and contested interaction with this ideal and this kind of relationship between men. Because they needed it for the successful prosecution of military ventures, they held it up as the best kind of love, to which the love of a woman could never entirely aspire, but that also ran the risk of the possibility of it turning (homo)sexual. Same-sex sexual activity was well-known in the Middle Ages, the end, full stop. The use of penitentials, or confessors’ handbooks, as sources for views or practices of queer sexual behaviour has been criticised (you will swiftly find that almost EVERYTHING used as a source for queer history is criticised, shockingly), but there remains the fact that Burchard of Worms’ 11th-century Decretum, a vast compilation of canon law, mentions same-sex behaviour among its list of sins, but assigns it a comparatively light penance. (I don’t have the actual passage handy, but it’s a certain amount of days of fasting on bread and water.) It assigns much heavier penalties for Burchard’s main concern, which was sorcery and the practice of un-Christian beliefs, rituals, or other persistent holdovers from paganism. This is not to say that homosexuality was accepted, per se, but it was known about, it must have happened enough for priests to list in their handbooks of sins, and it wasn’t The End of The World. Frankly, I am tired of having to argue that queer people existed and engaged in queer activity in the Middle Ages (not directed at you, but in general). Of course they did. Obviously they did. Moving on!

Anyway. Returning to gay knights specifically, the fact remained that if you encouraged two dudes to love each other beyond all other bonds, they might, you know, actually bang. This was worrisome, especially in the twelfth century, as explored by Matthew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’ and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179-214 and 273-86. I have written a couple papers (in the ever-tedious process of one day being turned into journal articles) on the subject of the Extremely Queer Richard the Lionheart, some material of which can be found in my tag for him. Richard’s queerness has been argued over for a long time, we all throw rotten banana peels at John Gillingham who took it upon himself to deny, ignore, or minimize all the evidence, but anyway. Richard was a very masculine and powerful man and formidably talented soldier who could not be reduced to the stereotype of the effeminate, weak, or impotent sodomite, and the fact that he was a prince, a duke, and a king was probably why he was repeatedly able to get away with it. But he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t the only one. He was very much part of his culture and time, even if he kept running into ecclesiastical reprisals for it. It happened. If you want a published discussion that covers some of my points (though not all of them), there is William E. Burgwinkle, ‘The Curious Case of Richard the Lionheart’, in Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 73–85. Also on the overall topic, Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 

Peter the Chanter, a Parisian cleric, also wrote De vitio sodomitico, a chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum, fulminating against “men with men, women with women [masculi cum masculis […] mulieres cum mulieribus]” which apparently happened far too often for his liking in twelfth-century Paris (along with cross-dressing and other genderqueer behaviour; the Latin version of this can be found in ‘Verbum Abbreviatum: De vitio sodomitico’ in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: 1855), vol. 205, pp. 333–35). Moving into the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, this bond only grew in importance, and involved a new kind of anxiety. Richard Zeikowitz’s book, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), explores this discourse in detail, and points out that the intensely homoerotic element of chivalry was deeply embedded in medieval culture – and that this was something that was not queer, i.e. unusual, to them. It is modern audiences who see this behaviour as somehow contravening our expected stereotypes of medieval knights as Ultra Manly No Homo Men. When we label this “medieval queerness,” we are also making a judgment about our own expectations, and the way in which we ourselves have normalized one narrow and rigid view of masculinity.

England then had two queer kings in the 14th century, Edward II and Richard II, both of whom ended up deposed. These were for other political reasons, but their queerness was not irrelevant to assessments of their character and the reactions of their contemporaries. Sylvia Federico (‘Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England’, Medium Aevum 79 (2010), 25–46) has studied the corpus of queer-coded historical writing around Richard, and noted that while the Lancastrian propaganda postdating the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399 obviously had an intent to cast his predecessor in as unfit a light as possible, the accusations of queerness started during Richard’s reign, “well before any real practical design on the throne […] and well before the famous lapse into tyranny that characterized the reign’s last few years. In poems and chronicles produced from the mid-1380s to the early 1390s, and in language that is highly charged with homophobic references, Richard II is marked as unfit to rule”. E. Amanda McVitty (‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77) examined how the treason trials of high-status individuals centred on a symbolic deconstruction of his chivalric manhood, demoting and exiling him from the intricate homosocial networks that governed the creation and performance of medieval masculinity.

This appears to have been a fairly extensive phenomenon, and one not confined to the geopolitical space of England. Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst (‘Kings and Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of Medieval History 43 (2017), 298–319) traced the use of ‘discursive sodomy’ as a rhetorical tool employed against five late medieval monarchs, including Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward II, John II and Henry IV of Castile, and Magnus Eriksson of Sweden. In all cases, the ruler in question was viewed as emotionally and possibly sexually dependent on another man, subject to his evil counsels and treacherous wiles, and this reflected a communal anxiety that the body of the king himself – and thus the body politic – had been unacceptably queered. Nonetheless, as a divinely anointed figure and the head of state, the accusations of gender displacement or suspected sodomy could not be placed directly on the king, and were instead deflected onto the favourites themselves, generally characterised as greedy, grasping men of ignoble birth, who subverted both social and sexual order by their domination of the supposedly passive king. 

None of this polemic produced by hostile sources can be read as direct confirmation of the private and physical actions of the kings behind closed doors, but in a sense, this is immaterial. The intimate lives of presumably heterosexual individuals are constructed on the same standards of evidence and to much greater certainty.  In other words, queerness and queer/gay favourites could not have functioned as a textual metaphor or charged accusation if there was not some understanding of it as a lived behaviour. After all, if the practice did not physically exist or was not considered as a potential reality, there could have been no anxieties around the possibility of its improper prosecution.

This leads us nicely into the deeply vexed question of adelphopoiesis, or the “brother-making” ceremony argued by some, including John Boswell, as a medieval form of gay marriage. (Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994, published the landmark Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality in 1980, and among other things, controversially argued that the medieval Catholic church was a vehicle for social acceptance of gay people.) Boswell’s critics have fiercely attacked this stance, claiming that the ceremony was only intended to join two men together in a celibate sibling-like relationship. A Straight Historian who participated in a modern version of the ceremony in 1985 actually argued that since she had no sexual inclinations or motives in taking part, clearly it was never used for that purpose by medieval men either. (Pause for sighing.) 

The problem is: we can’t argue intentions or private actions either way. We can understand what the idealized and legal designation for the ceremony was intended to be, but we cannot then outrageously claim that every historical individual who took part in it did so for the party line reason. Maybe medieval men who joined together in brother-making ceremonies did live a celibate and saintly life (this would not be surprising). It seems ludicrous to argue, however, that none of them were romantically in love with each other, or that they never ever ever had sex, because surprise, formulaic documents and institutional guidelines cannot tell us anything about the actions of real individuals making complex choices. Even if this was not always a homosexual institution (and once again with the dangerous practice of equivocating queerness with explicitly practiced and “provable” sexual behaviour), it was beyond all reasonable doubt a homoromantic one, and one sanctioned and organised according to well-known medieval conventions, desires (for two men to live together and love each other above all) and anxieties (that they might then have sex).

The medieval men who took a ‘brother’ would probably not have seen it as a marriage, or as the kind of household formation or social contract implied in a heterosexual union, but as we have also discussed, the definition of marriage in the Middle Ages was under constant contestation anyway.  The church was constantly anxious about knights: their violence, their (oftentimes) lack of religiosity, their proclivity for tournaments, swearing, drinking, and other immoral behaviour, the possibility of them having sexual affairs with each other and/or with women (though Andreas Capellanus, in De amore, wrote an entire spectacularly misogynistic handbook about how to have the right kind of love affair with a woman and dismissed same-sex relationships in one sentence as gross and unworthy, so he was clearly the No Homo Bro Knight of his day). So, as this has gotten long: gay knights were basically one of the central social, religious, and cultural concerns of the entire Middle Ages, due to their position in society, their necessity in a warlike culture, the social influence of chivalry and their tendency to bad behaviour, their perceived influence over the king (who they may also have given their Gay Cooties), their disregard of the church’s teachings, and the ever-present possibility that their love wasn’t celibate. So yes. Gay knights: Hella Historically Accurate.

The end.

#history #medieval history #queer history #gay knights #long post #i have a lot more to say but yes #the old guard meta #for reference #though this post was originally written in december 2019 #anonymous #ask

[purplesurveys]

560

What's your favourite type of bird? I...‘ve never really had a favorite bird. How many friends do you have on Facebook? Good for you, I’m not feeling lazy to check tonight. 629. What was on the last sandwich you ate? This question was also in another recent survey I took haha. Ham and cheese. What sort of music did you listen to when you were in high school? It was punk rock that mostly carried me through high school, but I also listened to some pop rock and alternative rock from time to time. Do you prefer gold or silver jewellery? Silver. I reeeeeeally am not into gold.

Have you ever gotten back together with an ex? Yes. How far away is the closest store to your house and what is it? There’s a 7-11 and a drugstore just across the main gate of our village, but you have to take a u-turn to get there because it’s in the main highway.

What is your favourite Thai dish? Pad thai and green curry. How many contacts do you have in your phone? Too many. There was a time when I used Gab’s number to sign up for some stuff online so her contacts got synced to mine as well, so it doubled the amount of contacts on my phone. When was the last time you made out with somebody? Tuesday night. What month of the year was your mother born? September. Do you have any friends that seem to know all the hot gossip? Kate, but she graduated and she’s working now and not very gossip-y these days :’( Second to her would probs be Angela. Are there any candles in your bedroom, and what scent are they? No, I don’t really spend on candles. What tv show(s) have you been watching currently? Just Friends. I want to continue watching Queer Eye, though. When was the last time you went to a birthday party? I’m not sure about birthday parties per se but the last celebration I went to was the birthday dinner Angela hosted at Frankie’s. How many apps do you have on your phone? Meh, I have quite a lot and now I’m too lazy to count. What pet names do you use with your significant other? I’ll take a pass at this question lol. Do you have to wear a name badge where you work? I don’t work but some college buildings are stricter about IDs than others, yeah. Do you have a dress code or have to wear a uniform where you work? There is no dress code in UP, which is one of the reasons it’s the best (and top) school in the country. What brand is your toaster, if you have one? We don’t have one because we wouldn’t really use it if we got one. Have you ever dated a smoker? If not, would you? I guess I am dating one now. Gab started vaping recently and I hopped on the same train not long after. LOOOOOOOOOOL I am such a CLOWN Are there any movies you've seen so many times? Two for the goshdang Road. And the first Twilight movie. What was the last thing you purchased with cash? Pad thai and this iced drink called choco coffee at a Thai food stall in school. I don’t usually treat myself to that much food but it was my last day of school before the 5-day weekend started, I had just finished a brutal workout in PE, and I just felt like I deserved some kind of reward. Can you hear anything right now? The whirring of the electric fan across me. Is there anybody else in the room you're currently in? Nope, just me. What's the name of the store you usually get your groceries? We don’t have a permanent grocery but my mom would typically go to SM groceries or in a local grocery called Freshto that’s really near our village. Would you rather travel to Japan or Scotland? Japan. Does your house have a porch/balcony? It originally had one, but we refurbished the balcony and turned it into my brother’s room. We still kept a part of the original balcony intact though because it’s where my dog got used to peeing, and we didn’t want him to lose that space. We might’ve lost the balcony but we still have a rooftop if we wanted a view. What's your usual order when you go to a coffee shop? It depends, because the coffee shops I usually go to each have different drinks that I like; like I’d get an iced caramel macchiato in Starbucks, an iced mocha from Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, an iced hazelnut drink from this other local cafe we go to, etc. But I think in general, my security blanket is caramel macchiato. Have you ever seen a theatre show? Not a professionally-produced one. I’ve seen many recitals and amateur productions, though. What was the last movie you saw and who did you watch it with? El Camino. I watched it alone. What is your mother's first name? Abigail. Do you like to dance? Only when I’m super super super tipsy, haha. And even until then it’s still a hit-or-miss if I’ll end up dancing. It’s just not my thing, overall. What's your favourite type of bread? Brioche. Do you receive catalogues and brochures in your mailbox? As far as I know, we don’t.

What colour is the sky right now? Black. Do you share a middle name with any of your siblings? Nope, my parents didn’t do that to us. We obviously all have the same maiden names, though. Have there ever been any bushfires/wildfires in your area? No. Have you ever taken a ride in an ambulance? Nope, never happened. How would you label your sexual orientation? Demisexual, which is under the umbrella of asexuality. When was the last time you took a nap during the day? Just yesterday. What did you have to eat for dinner last night? I skipped dinner last night because of my toothache, so I stuck with the potato chips that my sister had bought that day but never got to finish. Have you ever been a member in a band? Nah, I never really wanted to be in a band. I wanted to learn the drums, but it didn’t mean I also wanted to have a band of my own. Are you double-jointed? I am not. What was the last thing you had to drink? Coffee. Do you currently have any bruises on your body? Not right now, no. Or at least none that I know of. Who was the last message you received from and what did they say? “Impossibleeeeee” from Gab when I told her I saw someone selling AirPods for way cheap. They were selling it for P2,400 or something like $46 lmao it’s ridiculous. What colour are your eyes? Black. Can you cry on command? If so, have you ever used it to your advantage? No I can’t. Do you consider your goals easily achievable or are they pretty grand? They’re pretty grand. What's your favourite kind of accent? You know how Claire Foy speaks in The Crown? That’s my faaaaavorite accent. What time does the sun go down where you live at this time of the year? By this time of the year, the sun sets preeeeeeetty dang early. It’s completely dark by 5:30 PM. Do you prefer beer, wine or spirits? Spirits, def. I hate the first two, especially beer. When was the last time you ate Mexican food? A couple of weeks ago. My mom has loved this Mexican place for ages and so we went there for lunch. Have you ever watched yourself on video? Of course. I think that’s pretty unavoidable by the time you’re 21, lmao. What time did you wake up today? I woke up at 11:30, probably because I took two painkillers the day before. What time will you go to sleep tonight? I have no clue. I still have an entire cup of coffee to finish, so we’ll see how that goes. Do you have separate emails for personal and business? Kinda? I use my personal email for social media stuff, and my school also provides us with our own emails for more academic, serious-y, professional matters, but not necessarily business. Are you the eldest, youngest or a middle child? I’m the eldest. What's your favourite vegetable? Broccoli. What colours are you wearing today? A grey sweater that’s like 4x my size. Do you have a subscription to any streaming services like Netflix? I use Netflix and Spotify but I’m not the one paying for both. Would you rather eat Italian or Indian food? Indian. Are you sitting, standing or lying down right now? I’m sitting up on the couch. Have you ever missed a flight? Nooooo no no my parents would make sure that never happens. Are you someone who always needs a coffee before you can function? No. I can do fine without coffee. Do your neighbours have any pets? Have you ever met them? I’m sure some of them do, but seeing as I don’t really talk to our neighbors, I obviously have never met their pets. When was the last time you washed your hair? This afternoon. What colour is your bedroom door? Brown. Have you ever seen a lunar eclipse? Yeah, I saw the super blue blood moon last year. Pretty fucking wicked. Do you know your significant other's passwords? I know the password to her laptop, but that’s it. What was the last thing you said aloud? “Nope, I’ll do it” I told my sister when she asked if I wanted her to turn off the AC in the living room. Do you know anyone who writes huge essays when they message you? Not really. People tend to type in short, quick messages when they wanna say something long haha. What's your favourite type of salad? Spicy tuna saladddddd.

#survey #surveys