#so to me it probably describes my gender experience. but in the sense that if you asked me what I am I'd tell you I'm a man | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

davidtennantgenderenvy · 3 months

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My Two Cents On The “ Is David Tennant Queer” Drama

As some of you know, I spent a solid third of the past year working on a movie-length video essay about David Tennant. This video essay features an eight minute section titled “Gender, Vulnerability, and Why David Tennant Is A Queer Icon”, which does not speculate on David’s own sexuality, but discusses the queer coding and subversion of gender norms in plenty of his roles and his importance as an ally to the LGBT community. At the same time, I was also coming to terms with my own identity as nonbinary and bisexual, and it ended up playing a crucial role in me finally working up the courage to come out to my parents. Characters like Crowley and the Doctor, both in terms of how they present themselves and how and who they love, have been absolutely instrumental in me developing my queer identity, and my comments section was full of people who had had similar experiences, who’d realized they were trans, nonbinary, gay, etc thanks to David and his characters. And as a result, I won’t deny that if David himself were to be queer, it would mean a lot to me.

Do I think David is queer? It’s certainly possible. I see a lot of how I express my queerness in how david chooses to express himself, most prominently through his frequent queer coding of characters who don’t necessarily have to be played as such. This can especially be seen through his Shakespeare characters, such as Richard, Hamlet, and some would argue Benedick as well. When I was 15 I played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, who I chose to play as a closeted young gay man harboring an unrequited crush on Romeo. I think I saw this role subconsciously as an outlet for my own repressed queerness, both of gender and sexuality, as I had experienced an unrequited crush on my female best friend the previous year which I was still in denial about. I’ve described my gender identity as “a girl with a chaotic tortured gay man inside of her that needs to be let out every once in a while”, which has never been more true than with Mercutio- a character who I might add, I took a great deal of inspiration from David when playing! In terms of using roles as an outlet for one’s queerness, I could absolutelt see this being true with David, especially when it comes to Crowley, who seems to have had an impact on David’s style, behavior, etc in a rather similar way to how he’s impacted me. I don’t want to act like David wearing pink docs means he must be gay, I think people should be allowed to wear whatever they want regardless of sexuality, but taken in conjunction with so many other things about him, it does make one wonder, and the fact that a seemingly straight man has been so many people’s queer awakening is a bit puzzling to say the least. I won’t pretend that these “signs” (if you interpret them that way), haven’t been increasing somewhat in the past year, and if I got to share my own coming out journey with the man who inspired it, I would be absolutely thrilled. I also can’t specifically think of an instance where David has SAID he is straight, as opposed to Taylor swift, who has.

With all of that said, where I personally draw the line is when mere speculation crosses into interfering with the subject’s personal relationships and the sense that one is OWED something. I believe that what matters to David more than anything is being a husband and a father. I believe he adores Georgia and his children and would not do anything in the world that he believes would jeopardize his family. As happy as I would be for David if he were to come out (probably as bi) I realize that that would put so much unwanted attention on his marriage and family and I think that’s the last thing he wants. I don’t think it’s IMPOSSIBLE that he and Michael Sheen are having a passionate love affair behind everyone’s backs, but I absolutely don’t consider it my place to insist that they are, because as much as I may feel like I do, I don’t know these people! And besides, if David were cheating on Georgia, he really would not be the person I thought he was.

So many queer people see themselves in David and his characters, and that is beautiful. And I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with having theories that David might be queer himself. However, it must be acknowledged that these theories are THEORIES, and they should not be used to invalidate people’s real life relationships- after all, it’s totally possible to be bi/pan and also be in a loving and healthy heterosexual relationship like David and Georgia at least seem to be in! If David were in fact “one of us”, I would welcome him with the openest of open arms, but unless and until he himself decides to proclaim himself that way, I will not expect anything of him other than to be the incredible artist and person we know and love.

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archivomeow · 1 month

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here are some harmful aro stereotypes 💚🤍🩶🖤

there are probably so many more stereotypes, but those are the ones that i see more often! also i already posted same post about bisexuality, so check it out —> here.

aros are heartless — most people think that, because they assume aromantics do not love, they love. they can love their family, their friends, their pet or even themselves (this one is specifically for my afamilial & aplatonic folks). there is so much more complexity to love than romantic love and anyone who puts romantic love above all else is lame. like im sorry, but romantic love isn’t somehow better from self-love or love to your friends or family.

aro and ace are the same — this is also about asexuality, but aro ≠ ace. i see some people use the term asexual to describe both the aro & ace experience and to me it makes no sense since they’re completely different things. aro & ace can co-exist and one person can be on both spectrums, but that doesn’t mean all people are the same, not all aros are ace, not all aces are aro. so what is aro & ace? both are a spectrum. if you are aromantic you do not feel romantic attraction OR feel it under certain circumstances only (ex. when you know someone well, when someone likes you you like them back or until someone likes you back you like them). if you’re asexual that means you do not feel sexual attraction OR only feel it under certain circumstances.

aros can’t date — aros can in fact date, some people on the arospec experience attraction (rarely or under certain circumstances) so it makes sense they can date. there are also aros that do not experience romantic attraction, some date even though they do not experience the same feeling. they can like the person, care for them deeply and affectionately, but it is simply not romantic love, but they can chose to date the person. not all aros are loveless or romance repulsed.

i can ship xyz, aros can date — this is targeted tbh, i keep seeing people bring this up in Yelena Belova discourse about her aromanticism, while it is true aros can date, some chose not to, some are simply not interested in it and if a character in canon is showing no interest in romance or is repulsed by it, they don’t need to be fixed, they don’t need to be put in a relationship, they can just exist in peace. i especially dislike allos shipping aro/ace characters because they just see them as allo at that point, like im sorry, but they don’t give a shit about aros if they can’t listen to them explaining why you shouldn’t ship a specific aro character.

aros aren’t valid — bs. just bs. they are valid, whether you’re a man, a woman, a gender outside of the binary, whether you’re asexual as well or not, whether you want to date or not, you are valid as long as the definition applies to you!!! honestly here’s how i can explain being aro: if you are straight you are only attracted to opposite gender, so you don’t like same-sex, so just like you don’t like same-sex, aro’s don’t like same-sex & opposite gender.

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doubleca5t · 2 years

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Bored tumblr radfem here to take the bait- What kind of gender feelings were you having? Magical ineffable girly feelings about wanting to wear spinny dresses and play with dolls? You know what gender feelings I was having as a young woman- Feeling afraid of the men sexually assaulting me. Wanting to be seen as a whole human being with interests and ambitions. Alienation as a gnc lesbian which made me want to chop my tits off. Those are the gender feelings I had. Very curious to hear about yours

Ok to answer your question, the gender feelings I was getting from since I was a little kid were along the lines of:

"I wish I could have been born a girl, I don't really like being a boy that much"

"women's clothes are so much better than than men's clothes, I wish I was a girl so I could wear them"

"My female friends kind of act like I'm 'one of the girls' but my male friends never treat me like I'm 'one of the guys'. I like this arrangement. I don't want to fit in with the boys."

"I wish my face was more androgynous and I wasn't as tall, that way I could dress up as a girl and everyone would be totally convinced"

"I can't stand romance stories. Unless it's a romance between two girls. Those rule. Really wish there were more of them 😔"

"I love women but I don't really relate to how cishet men talk about women. For some reason I *really* relate to how lesbians and bisexual women talk about women though."

I think you get the idea.

With that out of the way, there's kind of a second question underlying your initial question which is "what the fuck do you think is so fun about being a woman? being a woman is fucking terrible." And I think that question is worth answering as well since it's probably something a lot of people are legitimately curious about.

The short answer is that, in my experience, "womanhood" as a concept is broad and varried enough that different people are going to get different things out of it, and while all women are oppressed and traumatized by patriarchy, the way they process that trauma is VERY far from uniform.

I know lots of cis women who've been through similar things to what this anon has described, but they haven't come out of it with nearly the same perspective. They recognize that just because *they* can never be comfortable with the role that society prescribed to them, that doesn't mean that no one else can or should be comfortable with that role. They recognize that you can take joy in the aesthetics and performance of a lot of things that are stereotypically feminine while still asserting your value as a person and refusing to put up with patriarchal bullshit. And perhaps most importantly, they recognize that the notion that someone can choose their gender is not contradictory to the idea that people should not be forced into a rigidly defined gender role. There are a lot of trans men who want to look like femboys or dress like flamboyant glam-rockers. There are a lot of trans women who don't give a shit about fashion or makeup and just want to be comfortable, or aspire to look like a capital d Dyke.

And like.... Idk isn't there something freeing about that? The idea that you can be whatever gender you want in whatever way you want, patriarchy be damned. That seems like the kind of world I want to live in.

So yeah anon, I understand why you view womanhood the way you do. For someone with your experiences, it makes a lot of sense. But I don't think your perspective has to be mutually exclusive to mine. I want to live in a world where women aren't forced to present a certain way from birth, don't live in constant fear of abuse and assault by men, and aren't belittled and marginalized at every turn. I just happen to also think that the idea of biologically determined gender is just as much bullshit as the idea of systemically enforced gender roles.

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drdemonprince · 5 days

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Any chance you'd expand on the hank hill trans guy post? (Sorry, best indicator I could come up with.) The concept interests me as I decidedly know my maleness, yet don't feel impeded by for the most part, any male gendered norms/boxes. I am fairly masculine, though I rarely use those kinds terms to describe myself. I have found I often do stray outside of what society pushed for me when I transitioned, yet I again do not feel it has taken from my right to maleness whatsoever. I am just me, who happens to be male. I have had friends try and suggest I am NB adjacent but I do not feel this way whatsoever. I feel more people are outliers to gender expectation than we care to admit and it's disappointing the way cis-people deny that. Hope this wasn't too long winded, I value your writing and perspective, and wanted to hear more of your thoughts on this.

Yeah, well so many things all get conflated by gender labels, and it's all so personal, you know? Masculinity does not have to mean maleness, and a person's gender identity might be a reflection of some innate quality they experience themselves as having, or a general summary of their tendencies, or their desired presentation, or their sense of affinity with other people, or an interpersonal tool, or something they just go along with because it was given to them by society, or any other number of things.

I think my recent substack piece on detransition goes into this pretty well, and I have an upcoming piece of what @pastimperfection calls "bilateral dysphoria" that comes out next week that delves into it too.

I think I mostly saw taking on a male identity as a means to an end more than any kind of innate reflection of who I was, though I did feel an affinity with effeminate men for a lot of reasons. I think I also discounted how much I have in common with my fellow nonbinary people of all stripes, because that identity became so strongly associated with being an annoying type of queer person that everybody else just wrote off as ultimately being their assigned gender at birth anyway no matter how much they protested. it doesn't help that 'nonbinary' is a catchall term for literally thousands if not millions of very distinct experiences and desires.

transitioning gave me control over how i was perceived, finally, but hormones are a throttle that only go in one very specific direction, and you don't really have all that much control over which changes kick in at which times and what people will make of you once you do start registering to them as some identity other than what you were first saddled with. it's an incredible gift to be able to toggle that throttle. but it's limited, not because medical transition isn't incredible and needed for so many, but because there is no escaping the goddamned binary cissexist logic that influences everything about how people treat you, how you navigate institutions, who finds you desirable and what they want out of you, and so much else.

if you're able to cast a lot of the external societal bullshit aside and feel strong in your maleness, maybe you're stronger than me or maybe our orientation to these things is just different, i don't know. i was never all that sensitive to feedback that i was doing the whole being-a-woman-thing all that wrong. i reveled in violating those rules to an extent. succeeding at being a woman despite my best attempts was what felt super dysphoric. and now i guess im succeeding at being a man, insofar as im always read as one, and it feels just as uncomfortable and objectifying and false. i thought that with manhood i could probably just grit my teeth and deal with it, but i'm finding that i can't.

ive always been very open that for me, gender is a thing I Do, and i guess to those who know me well it wouldnt be surprising to hear that i have gotten tired of Doing Being a Man and dont feel like playing that particular gendered game anymore. I tend to get bored of things! and find the flaws in things. and find my comfort in being fault-finding and contrarian and not being a joiner. and thats okay. i learned a lot along the way. not having to try any more is a huge relief. i can just do whatever. and know actively that people will more often than not be wrong in what they make of me.

maybe it was natural feeling for you to decidely 'know' your maleness without a care for masculine standards because that is the right identity for you! and maybe i only feel secure in the "not knowing" realm and in letting go of what people think of me or finding any kind of tidy categorization for it because that's the right spot for me. for now. until i find a new interesting way to be unhappy and striving for more and different again. :) that's just part of being alive, for me.

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overtaken-stream · 1 month

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α!Gagamaru Gin x Gn! β!Reader headcanon

Omegaverse is my guilty pleasure don't @ me.

Warnings: Gagamaru is a bit weird, Silly even(he's insane)

There is always that distinctive scent lingering on you, the smell that you try to explain but your vague ability stops you from pointing it out precisely. It must be strong if your nose can pick it out. So misty, cold, and incredibly familiar. No matter how many times you wash the school uniform and scrub your skin red, it comes back the next day, at what time you can never point it out, however, it's evident that it's from school.

Gin is all-natural through and through (except when it comes to his hair), and the perfumes often irritate his sensitive nose, same with sweet-smelling shampoos and body wash, he believes that they are artificial smells that stain people's true character, he has also found that those who use fake odors have many insecurities to hide, be it their second gender or their natural aroma is an unfavored one in society, it does not bother him, but he has never favored deceit. Gin believes that his smell is quite pleasant, probably influenced by all the time he and his family spent hiking when he was a pup. It reminds him of the scent of rain, petrichor was what the doctor called it when he presented. A compliment that his brain only remembered because of the correct adjective used to describe his recently discovered asset.

He remembers it all too well, the overwhelming mix of raw and false fragrances in his middle school class, packed in a classroom with no windows open. He couldn't help the scrunched nose showing on his face every day, trying to find clean air to breathe without the biological chemicals burning off his nose, for the first time in his life, Gin could clearly express his emotion all thanks to newly flowered instincts and his personal preference. It was a shame it had to be distaste. As a pup, he dreamed of having long limbs to hike with, cross the rivers, and climb on rocks without his father helping him, but if this is what it's like to be a grown-up, smelling all the smelly smells that smell bad or good, he would rather be a pup forever.

His keen hearing and eyesight are no match for his sense of smell, but now he could pick out his parent's residual odor on the school campus, hours after they've left.

Maybe it was his bias that made him favor Betas more than Omegas and Alphas, the natural and soft undertones in a society full of suffocating chemicals were liberating for Gin.

His nose was able to smell the uplifting aroma that you contained, weaker than ever hidden behind countless scents. It stayed like that between you and Gin, him enjoying your smell from the other side of the classroom while you took notes and never glanced in his direction, your nose is weaker than others, never truly being able to sense the intense pheromones swirling around.

His communication is not the best, however, he does not care enough to improve it anymore. Some view his nonchalant attitude and simple words as a negative trait. He wonders what you will think of it.

With a bag tossed over your shoulder, you stroll the chilly hallways, getting closer and closer to your destination. But just as you are about to grab ahold of the handle to open the door to the classroom, it harshly unlocks itself. An unexpected occurrence makes you softly jump on your feet before even noticing the figure standing on the other side, staring down at you with a curious tint in his round eyes, he casts a shadow on you.

``Oh I'm sorry, I didn't expect anyone...`` He says.

``It's okay...`` There is not a lot to say about him, even if you are his classmate, you don't know much about him and are not planning on knowing. As you make room for him to pass, you can feel his shoulder press against yours before he finally frees the entrance and walks away from the class. It was a confusing experience, but nothing to note of.

Gin figures that his favorite activity is scenting, his mother and his father were the first people he tried to scent, and kept their scent on him as an eleven-year-old pup up til the last year of middle school.

He is aware that leaving his pheromones on your clothes isn't the best strategy, but neither is leaving his scent on your skin while knowing nothing of you. He hopes that maybe he can change that, perhaps you will recognize that the cold smell comes from him.

Gin is a person who listens to his instincts, it's a skill needed for his beloved hobbies, however lately as you come to school without his scent, the active feeling of annoyance is hard to miss, he wants nothing but to drag you into his bed and cover you with himself, until your nose smells nothing but him on you the whole week, til someone can't differentiate Gagmaru from you. Gin wants nothing but to become one with you in those mornings. It's a shame he can only touch a part of you "accidentally" for it.

He wonders if his scent ever comforts you.

Gin will always find a way to scent you no matter what, so you might as well stop trying to clean it and start seeking him out since he is the only one whose scent matches with the one clinging to you.

The nonchalant alpha has never taken any bait thrown his way, so when his classmates start looking judgemental of his actions, Gin never remembers their words, he has already answered them once and Gagamarus don't like repeating themselves.

Maybe that's how you got to the bottom of your situation, rumors and rude words about him flying through the school until they finally got mingled with your name. So that's all he had to do to make you approach him? Hmh.

You speak so calmly when he left no roundabout way for you and made you go straight to the point.

You ask him to stop scenting you?

He likes you, maybe even loves you.

You don't believe in love at sight?

That's okay, he'll make you believe it.

The next day he puts his plan to work and brings only the best snacks for you to enjoy during lunch. Try to be nice after all, it's his first time courting someone.

#gin gagamaru #anime #anime x reader #bllk #blue lock #blue lock x reader #blue lock gagamaru #Gin gagamaru x reader #gagamaru x reader #gagamaru gin #bllk x reader #Bllk omegaverse #omegaverse #omega!reader #bllk x you #bllk x gender neutral reader #gn reader

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coexistentialism · 1 month

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I asked my therapist a while ago if she feels that it does seem like it's a lot more difficult for me to figure out my alters and figure out my system and switches than it looks like for other systems - that is, I've always felt like it's extremely difficult for me to understand any of this stuff - my alters, my switches, my inner world, my system, etc., and I've always felt like it seemed like it wasn't as difficult for other systems as it feels like it is for me.

She said that she agreed with me, but mentioned that not all systems are autistic and that she felt a big part of it was because of me being autistic. And it got me thinking.

Not everything described will fit every single person perfectly. Even if you read one of these descriptions and find that might things fit you, but other things don't, or that some things fit you in different categories, choose whichever describes your experiences MOST.

For example, if everything described in "extremely difficult" relates to you, but things described in "neutral" also fit you, choose whichever relates more/most. This also means that if ALMOST EVERYTHING match your experiences in one section, but a few others don't match, STILL CHOOSE THAT ONE!

If your experience has changed over time, answer with how you first started out learning about your CDD!

Extremely Difficult: (All of these things describe my personal experiences)

You basically never "have a sense of self" - you probably don't even know what I mean by that. You probably feel called out by me saying that (lmfao).

"Who's fronting?" is a question you basically never have an answer to. You might not even really understand what that means or how to even answer that question.

Despite this, you/your alters may have strong senses of selves; may have distinct sets of traits that may seem covert at first but may become very obvious to those who may realize their different alters; you may each have different names, genders, sexualities, personalities, etc.

Or, you may NOT have very distinct sets of traits and may generally share the same sense of identity/self. You may not have very strong/distinct/overt differences in personality, behaviors, traits, etc.

You may feel that multiple of these descriptions may match how you feel.

You're probably more likely to have high dissociative barriers within your system/between alters.

Your dissociative amnesia may be very severe, though you may be incredibly unaware of it. This, too, is evidence of your dissociative amnesia and high dissociative barriers, and I am probably still calling you out lmfao.

More likely to not have an inner world, but not necessarily.

More likely not have been completely, or mostly, unaware of your system, your alters, and/or yourselves as your own indivdiual alters most, or all, of your life.

May or may not be polyfragmented (or suspect that you may be).

If you're like me, you may just essentially seem like a "Singlet." You may just use one name, but the question of "which alter specifically is fronting?" is something that I feel like I will never have an answer to, even in the future.

Neutral:

You might know who is fronting a lot of the time, but you still struggle sometimes. You might have one "main" host who is fronting most or all of the time, and you might really only struggle with knowing who is who every so often. It may have been a bit difficult figuring out your alters at first, but you probably didn't spend years upon years upon years trying to understand where "you" "end" and a different alter begins. Your alters probably have at least some decent senses of selves to be able to be aware that they even exist, even if it might still be hard to know who is fronting sometimes.

Not That Difficult/Not Difficult At All:

Most/all of you/your alters and such have a very strong sense of self - you probably have your own individual names, ages, genders, sexualities, etc. and feel as if you are your own distinct individuals. You almost always know who is fronting and there may only be rare episodes where you may be more stressed and, as a result, may struggle to know who is fronting, but you mostly know who is fronting most of the time.

You may have lower dissociative barriers, although not always!

You may have less dissociative amnesia than another system, but not always!

You may or may not have a vivid inner world.

You may or may not be polyfragmented.

#my posts #actuallydid #actuallyosdd #osdd system #partial did #did system

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tenpintsof-sundrop · 6 months

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FNAF Movie Requests - CLOSED

Requests CLOSED as of November 16th, 2023.

(Requests are now closed, and I am keeping this request form up in case I have need for this again.)

So, I highly resisted the urge to fall into the fanfiction hole with the Five Nights At Freddy's Movie characters, but here I am lmao. Josh Hutcherson is so wonderfully sat, wet, and pathetic and I can't help myself.

I have tweaked my prompt list for this fandom, and you don't have to use these prompts when requesting fics, but please keep in mind that I am more likely to write and complete a request if it is simplistic and can be written in a shorter fic. I aim to keep request fics under two thousand words (around three thousand words at most).

Characters I write for: Mike Schmidt, Vanessa Monroe (Afton), and William Afton (Steve Raglan). (I may also write platonic fics with animatronic characters if people want to see that?)

Note: I will be writing for the movie version of the characters, but because I am a fan of the games, I am not against making references to the games and playing around with the canonicity. I care much more about the themes of the games than any solid sense of canon.

Requests can be sent to my ask box here or to my ask box over on my writing blog @sundrop-writes - I am probably not going to get to requests right away because unfortunately I am feeling sick right now, but I wanted to post this request form to help me get inspired. Please read all the rules/guidelines below before sending in a request.

(More information below the cut - please read it before requesting.)

(Also - warning, this prompt list technically does have some mild spoilers for the movie.)

I will accept requests for poly ships. (Character x reader x character.) I love requests like this - I think for this fandom, the only one that really works is Vanessa x Reader x Mike (which is one that I would really love to do), but under certain circumstances, with the right request, I might write Mike x Reader x William.

In your request, please specify if the reader character is female, male, or gender neutral. When I write gender neutral fics, I do not describe what kind of genitals they have in any way, so I don’t write ‘GN AFAB’ reader fics. If you want the reader character to have a vagina, that would be a fem reader in my fics.

EDIT: Typically, I don't write for reader characters that have specific traits - like a specific race, height, described as having specific looks, etc. but my one exception to this rule is that I love writing plus sized/fat reader fics. I love spreading love for fat bodies, especially through fics, and I love making people feel good about their fatness through the gaze of a fictional character. So feel free to send in requests for a plus sized reader character, it's one of my favourite things to write!

I will write smut, angst, or fluff, but I mostly prefer writing smut or angst. When requesting smut, please specify if you want the characters to be dominant or submissive. In your request, write ‘sub!reader’ or ‘dom!reader’ or something like this to let me know. I am a big fan of writing submissive men, so know I don’t shy away from that, but I will write any dynamic as long as it’s properly communicated to me.

I will for a lot of dark topics and different kinks. In general, the list of things that I won’t write is a lot shorter than the list of that I will. So if you’re wondering if a request is okay with me or not, just ask!

Just for reference, my big no-nos are: virgin!reader, sexually inexperienced!reader, or innocent!reader - I am okay with doing a ‘faux’ innocent reader or writing about the canon character being a virgin and having their first sexual experience with the reader. I am okay with writing about sexual cocercion, sexual blackmail, or dubcon.

Also, I don’t write fics about miscarriages, safeword use, or extreme choking kink. While I don’t write about miscarriage, I am okay with writing about pregnancy (and it’s something I enjoy writing about).

Smut Prompts/Ideas:

The canon character is a virgin (ex: virgin!Mike)

“Just the tip.”

Stuck and Fucked/Situational Bondage

Hate Fucking

There Was Only One Bed

Caught Masturbating

“Can you teach me how to do (blank)?” (ex: “Can you teach me how to give someone an orgasm?” “Can you teach me how to perform oral?”)

Late Night Semi-Public Sex (bathroom sex, kitchen counter sex, etc.) where they shove a hand over your mouth to keep you quiet (or purposefully try to make you scream)

Overstimulation

Breeding Kink (or Faux Breeding Kink with a Strap-On)

Extreme Dirty Talk

Phone Sex

Underwear Stealing

Them taking dirty pictures of you

Unknown surveillance/Perv!Canon Character/Them getting off to you doing something mundane

Dumbification Kink/Objectification

Daddy Kink or Mommy Kink (their reaction to being called Daddy or Mommy for their first time)

Them masturbating to the thought of you

(There is more kinks that I enjoy writing, but this is just all that I thought to add to this list)

Angst Prompts/Ideas:

(You should definitely send in some of these, I love writing angst but people don’t request it as often. I will even write hurt/comfort just to write the angst part, so you can send in a hurt/comfort request if you prefer.)

They break up with you to keep you away from danger (this one would work really well with Vanessa)

Attending to their injuries after a fight (or, them attending to your injuries after a fight)

You are attacked (verbally or physically) and they step in to save you

Their reaction to you being killed/your death (bonus angst: you died before they got to confess their feelings to you)

One of you has been brainwashed and completely forgets the other

(Directly inspired by the movie) - you are in a coma and they confess their feelings for you thinking that you can't hear them

They save you from a near-death experience (or you save them)

They find out you are alive after thinking you had died

Being reunited after years, but you didn’t part on good terms

“Who did this to you?”

Unrequited Love (they see you with someone else, they think that you’ll never love them back, etc.)

(For hurt/comfort, I can do any of these with a sappy ending!)

Fluff Ideas/Prompts:

They confess their love for you

Your first kiss together

They surprise you with a cute date

(I am really stalled for ideas for this list, I suck at writing pure fluff lmao)

(Again, you don’t have to use these prompts, I just think that these are good examples of things that will fit the 1k-2k mark.)

#sundrop speaks #mike schmidt x reader #mike schmidt #vanessa monroe #vanessa monroe x reader #vanessa afton x reader #william afton #william afton x reader #fnaf movie #fnaf movie fanfiction

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possibilistfanfiction · 1 year

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can i say i absolutely love how you write ava being casually nonbinary so much. there are no fucking words to describe how much i fucking love your in depth exploration of butch beatrice, especially as an asian genderqueer sapphic who relates a lot to beatrice, your fics about it is definitely some of my top fav fics in the fandom, and like lowkey inspiring to me in my own journey to better accepting my queerness and exploring what it means for me, but also on the other end of the spectrum, i just love the casual simplicity (not sure if that’s the word i’m looking for) you write ava being nonbinary with

ava’s nonbinary, and it’s just a simple everyday fact of life just like the grass is green and the sun goes up and down everyday, there’s no need to dwell on it because ava doesn’t need to dwell on it and maybe her relationship or feelings about gender will change or get more complicated in the future or they won’t change one bit, but that doesn’t matter because it’s not the future right now and they’ll cross that bridge when it comes to it

[lil teeny bit of nb ava for the culture]

'hey,' ava says, trailing a hand up and down the inside of your forearm, 'do you... do you care?'

you have absolutely no idea what she's talking about; you care about a lot of things, and, more and more, there are plenty of things you also let fall to the wayside: sometimes they just are.

'do i care about what?'

ava sighs, scoots a little away from you on the couch, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. 'that i — i don't feel like i have a gender, or whatever. like, i'm a girl, i guess? but only because that's what people thought, and told me. but i don't feel like anything else. i mean, first of all, the gender binary is a tool of colonial oppression and white supremacy, especially when employed by the church —'

'— yes, that's true —'

'— but also, i have a literal divine battery pack keeping me alive, allegedly —'

'— the halo definitely is keeping you alive, we know that —'

'— and i've been to, like, realms and stuff. met a few gods; fought a few demons. fell in love with you.' she smiles softly. 'so it's just... limiting, to me. it feels limiting, to be one thing.'

'i don't think binary gender makes sense to me either,' you say, allow yourself to admit. ava probably has figured it out, even if you haven't been able to say it: you wear a binder some days, and you don't feel anything against she/her pronouns but there's masculinity and androgyny you crave, that you're just starting to feel steady and free enough to explore. 'i feel it differently than you — for me, being a woman is a particular experience that matters, but not in the way people want women to be. i don't know, it's a work in progress.' she squeezes your hand with a gentle smile. 'but, ava, i only care insomuch as you're the love of my life, and i want you to feel seen and cared for, just for who you are. i want to know you, whoever that is.'

she swallows and rests her head on your chest; the documentary about mushrooms she had put on in the background plays quietly. 'thank you.' she turns so her nose is pressed against your sternum, hugging you tight. 'i just know it's taken you a long time to, like, be okay with your own sexuality, and i didn't want to throw you for a loop if you were feeling really comfy with, you know.'

'being a lesbian?' you ask, try to keep the laugh out of your voice. 'i certainly don't want that to ever exclude gender expansive people, even if it's a word i like.'

'well, of course,' ava says, her breath warm through your t-shirt. 'you're you; you're the best there is.'

'i don't know about that.'

'nah, it's true. i do know. i'm the beatrice expert. god says so too, direct message. hotter jesus, remember?'

you do laugh, this time, and rub comfortingly up and down her spine, still your hand over the faint, warm hum of the halo. 'no matter what pronouns you use, or what name feels right, or what your gender expression is, i love you. i'm queer, which is expansive and abundant.' you have to swallow because, maybe for the first time ever, you believe the words wholeheartedly. your friends and your therapist and books and music and shows that you love have said them; you have said them, before, but not quite like this. the grace you want to give to ava is far beyond the grace you have ever allowed of yourself. 'queerness is infinite. and so is my love for you.'

ava sniffles and then wipes her nose with the back of her hand, props herself up on an elbow and kisses you. 'the same goes for you, you know that, right?'

'yes,' you say. 'i — i hold it close, often.'

she pauses, holds your jaw in her palm, and then kisses you. you kiss her back, with your eyes closed, with tears pressing at them that won't fall, not this time.

ava doesn't hesitate a few days later when she introduces herself to a few of your friends and says that they can use any pronouns; she tries on one of your binders one afternoon and then frowns and laughs and says, god, i love my boobs but then quietly makes sure to massage your shoulders every evening after that. she tries on any clothes she wants, picks out a suit one day that she whistles at when she sees herself in the mirror, and then laughs. there's quiet nights and loud brunches and your friends who consistently use different pronouns for ava without batting an eye, and it makes her smile even as she dumps salsa that will be way too hot on her chilaquiles and then has to eat them trying to hide a grimace. you don't know how to have that much freedom, not yet, but ava holds your hand and leads you along, always.

you're figuring it out, the loosening of limits you'd set so tight within yourself; ava's figuring it out too: how to be, and how to become when, of course, there's still cruelty — but there's infinite abundance too. you turn back to the documentary — all the fungi that weaves its ways in and out of the world, for longer than you can imagine. all the fish in the sea; all the stars in the sky — a steadfastness and a wonder and a joy, to exist beyond. to become.

#who knows maybe this will spiral too lmao #anyway i love them & what i love MOST is being queer!!!!! it's the fucking b e s t :)#butch bea 🥺🫡#shes a baby in this but u know it's Happening she is Realizing Things #but idk i feel like in rly lovely partnerships friends or romantic like ur queerness makes the other persons queerness like...#have room to grow too?#idk. but they're like that lol #avatrice #avatrice fic #prompts

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nothorses · 2 months

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same anon coming back to the degendering conversation.

i see your point about degendering as defensible, and misgendering as openly hateful. but i think the bigot can escalate further, switching back to degendering as part of dehumanization. "it", "that thing", and so on. i did make an oversimplification, but it was because your posts made me understand what the difference in feeling between types of transphobia i have experienced was, and i got very eager to share!

i am genderqueer, androgynous, and visibly varsex. i have gotten deliberately misgendered both as my original legal gender and its opposite. i have also been aggressively degendered. and actually the underlying insults were the opposite than in my example. the misgendering tried to cast me as delusional, and the degendering as an abject other, a monster.

but i do think what you described shows traces of these two angles of attack. "slipping", because they haven't actually unlearned as much as they like to think.

but i think it isn't useful to sort this kind of more 'abstract' or high concept transphobia based on target identities. these are frameworks and weapons picked by the wielders, often without consistent logic, and can be used against anyone. the unique experiences are in my opinion more practical and specific, like in most parts of the world nonbinary people having no right legal gender marker to pick. so that's how exorsexism is a thing and imo your discussion doesn't threaten to invalidate it.

thank you for the good conversation. hopefully i managed to express my thoughts somewhat coherently...

That makes sense! Yeah, I def didn't think about "it/its" degendering in that context, and I feel like that specific way of degendering trans folks has different (but overlapping) sort of intention - I don't get the same kind of dehumanization from "they/them", personally.

That said, I totally agree that the usefulness in differentiating these different types of transphobia is more in why people utilize them than it is the group of people they are attempting to target.

To use one example: I think "transphobia targeting transmasculinity" is probably a more accurate definition of "transandrophobia" than "transphobia targeting transmascs", in a lot of ways, because the people weaponizing transphobia against transmasculinity care less about hurting people who are transmasculine, and more about a fight against the concept of transmasculinity itself. They aren't trying to reveal everyone who is transmasculine in order to oppress them, they are trying to force transmasculine people to repress and hide that part of themselves in order to conform.

And I think that's true for transphobia generally, and queerphobia, and a lot of other forms of oppression. Which is also why bigotry itself tends to be fairly undiscerning; the people calling you a "faggot" on the street aren't going to correct themselves and apologize if you tell them you're straight, actually. They don't care whether you are a faggot, they're punishing the presence of faggotry as a concept.

Anyway, I'm kinda rambling here; I think we're on the same page, too, I'm just enjoying seeing & exploring new ideas and connections!

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genderqueerdykes · 8 months

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first of all thank you for this blog it's literally fixing my brain lmao.

had a question tho! I don't feel strongly about my gender personally. i understand how important labels are to people who use em, and i'd never take that away from anyone. (not as if i even could, lol) I just feel like anything i pick is going to end up being a performance. I'd rather just be me, i guess, separate from that variable.

i was trying to explain this to one of my friends, and their instinct was to say that i'm probably agender. I know what they meant, but it felt kinda weird to tell someone "yeah I don't like boxes" just for them to go "oh! well here's the box for people who don't like boxes." I don't wanna have to perform agenderism either!

…am i making any kind of sense? idk maybe i'm overthinking this. any advice?

I get what you're saying, that's making sense to me.

You are perfectly right to say that you just want want to be put into any box at all, even if that one seems like it fits you, you have asserted that you just do not want to use terms to define your gender regardless of what they are. I think that's an important boundary to establish and it's very frustrating to immediately have it overstepped

I think the way you described your gender makes sense. You do not want to have to feel like you have any kind of expectations to conform to. You do not want to be seen as something you are not. That makes total sense. You would rather be experienced than assumed. I hope you are able to find a way to express that so that you do not have to be unnecessarily labeled again. I understand how frustrating that would be. I would say when possible double down and assert "Yeah, that's a similar experience but that's just not for me. know what I'm about."

Hopefully people will learn to accept that you are the authority on your experience. Good luck, take care -K

#asks #answers #unlabeled

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osinthewhite · 11 months

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i feel like s4e12 of House MD was supposed to be about House's bisexuality. Hear me out. So, the episode's secondary story is about House having a big problem with Wilson's relationship with Amber. He's obviously jealous and seems to care about Wilson, which is especially visible at the beginning of the episode when he goes to Amber's apartment and tells her to leave Wilson because House thinks she's only with him to get back her job and she's going to hurt him (kinda like Wilson did with Stacy in s2). Later, House follows Wilson and Amber to a restaurant, comes to a realization that Amber is extremely similar to him and walks out of the building like he's scared or shocked by this discovery.

I found this kind of odd and maybe out of character for him? If they wanted to paint a picture of a heterosexual narcissist i think they would turn this situation into a joke - House would make fun of Wilson for being attracted to a female version of House and it would probably just stay as a running joke for a couple of episodes. But that doesn't happen. House seriously looks disturbed and just walks out, runs away like he usually does in emotional situations. Next comes the "13 is bisexual" thing. I found it completely out of the blue. I get that the show is old and the understanding of bisexuality changed but still her conversation with Foreman was just weird and her sexuality didn't seem to me like a natural part of it.

At first, I just thought "Okay it's there, maybe they just didn't know how to bring it up more naturally, it's still fine". But then the "Why not date you?" scene happened. To me, this scene just confirms that 1) House is jealous of Wilson and 2) he doesn't want to believe that Wilson might be attracted to someone like him. And the whole "Well, if you'd looked at me with those flashing eyes before I was involved..." kinda says it as well. I get that it was supposed to be a joke from Wilson but to me, it highlights the fact House has some deep personal motives not to want his friend to be with anyone, let alone Amber.

By the end of the episode, House brings up 13's bisexuality again and accepts Amber as Wilson's girlfriend. The second one is described as a big sacrifice from House. Wilson even says that House knows he "could end up losing a friend".

The fact that the show deliberately mixed House's jealousy over Wilson with 13's outing to me suggests that the viewer should try connecting one with the other. On one hand, you have a male character obsessing over his friend's new relationship, desperately trying to stop it, while knowing that the girlfriend is just his "female proxy" and on the other hand, you have a character who's out of the blue outed as bisexual.

A lot of queer people go through the experience of seeing our crush date an opposite-gender version of ourselves or hearing that "if only you were a boy/girl" line. It might just as well be projection but I think that's what's happening here.

House is bisexual and he likes Wilson. As long as Wilson dates women who don't resemble him it's easy for House to accept that his friend is something unreachable. But when he starts dating Amber it hits too close to home, she's too much like him. The story makes more sense if House is jealous romantically and the show tries to push us in that direction by outing 13 as bi.

I lost my train of thought while writing this like 6 times but i hope what I wrote makes even a little bit of sense. Anyway happy pride month

#dr house #house md #hilson #james wilson #greg house #i need help #i feel like i used all my mental illness superpowers to write this #why is every show from early 2000's so gay?

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gay-otlc · 1 year

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hi honest sincere question how can a man be a lesbian? can amab men be lesbians?

Hi! Thanks for asking respectfully. I am going to answer your question in significantly more detail than you probably wanted. Be warned.

The main reason I think men can be lesbians is: I think people can use whatever words they think most accurately describe their identity and/or experience. These words might not necessarily be words that they are, but still words that they use to describe themselves.

Lesbian does have a lot of feminine connotations, and can cause dysphoria for many men, so men who use both terms have often put a lot of thought into it. I might not understand their reasons, but I'm sure they have their reasons.

You don't need to understand to be respectful, but if you're curious, here is an explanation of why some men choose to identify as lesbians. This got so long that I'm dividing it with subtitles. I'm so sorry if you didn't want to read all this.

Lesbian Trans Men

Men who identify as lesbians tend to be trans men. Of course, wanting to use the label lesbian is a minority of trans men who like women! Definitely don't assume all trans mlw are comfortable being called a lesbian, or call a trans man a lesbian without permission.

At least for me, labels describe how I feel in the present but also the way I have experienced gender and attraction throughout my life. Right now I'm a man who's attracted to women, but at lunch today I was talking about how it felt in middle school to be a "girl" who liked girls, and I used the word lesbian to communicate that.

Trans men who have spent a very long time identifying as a lesbian and being a part of the lesbian community, often decades, might continue using the label lesbian after transitioning. If a trans man feels like he spent his life as a lesbian rather than a straight man, the former might feel most accurate to describe his experience.

Trans men might also identify as lesbian due to being in the closet. Internally, I feel more like a straight man, but that's not really how I'm seen by the rest of the world. I'm out to a few close friends offline, but pretty much all my other classmates or teachers or relatives or acquaintances think of me as a woman.

If I called myself straight, that would most likely be interpreted as me being a straight woman. I'm open about liking women, though, which means I would either have to be out as lesbian or bi. I definitely shouldn't call myself bi, because I'm not attracted to multiple genders. So, I go with lesbian. It's not the perfect label, but it gets the point across. (The point being "I think women are hot.")

Male =/= Solely, Always, Exclusively Male

Men who are lesbians are not always exclusively men. Multigender people exist! I'm one of them. If someone is bigender with those genders being a man and a woman, and they're attracted to women, I don't think it really makes sense to say that they can't be a lesbian.

I'm assuming you (anon) support nonbinary lesbians, since that's the general trend I've noticed among those who are trans-inclusive but don't understand male lesbians. Some nonbinary people will also identify as men. If nonbinary people can be lesbians, nonbinary men can be lesbians.

A genderfluid person might sometimes be a man and sometimes be another gender(s) that are more commonly included in lesbianism, and like women, and use both labels.

This could apply to anyone regardless of assigned gender, so those are some examples of how a man assigned male at birth could be a lesbian.

AMAB Male Lesbians

As for whether men who were AMAB can be lesbians... yes, but I want to clarify that not just any cis man should go "lol I'm a lesbian" because it's funny. Someone would need to put thought into why the feel like lesbian is the best label for them.

In the case of a man who was AMAB, they would probably feel like lesbian is a good descriptor due to having a complex relationship with their gender. Being genderqueer and being an AMAB man or AFAB woman are not mutually exclusive.

Gender Non Conformity

There's a type of identity that I believe is referred to as a cusp identity, or something like that? It is where someone might blur the line or exist in the grey area between two different identities with an overlap in a lot of experiences.

There might be someone who is on the cusp right between being a trans woman and an extremely gender nonconforming man. They might not be sure which one they fall into, or feel like they exist right in the middle. This person might identify simultaneously as or right between "lesbian trans woman" and "feminine presenting cishet man."

There are also some people who identify with their assigned gender, but pursue medical transition in a way typically associated with a different gender. I have a friend who identifies fully as a cis woman, but thinks she might want to get bottom surgery. It's a type of gender nonconformity, you know?

I don't know anyone who's had this experience in reverse, but it's definitely possible. I'm sure there's a cis man out there somewhere who has or wants to medically transition to "female." And I think it would make sense if this hypothetical person wanted to identify as a lesbian.

Trans Women

Just to be clear, I am NOT saying trans women are men. They aren't. (Unless they're multigender, which is cool.) But monogender trans women aren't men, and definitely should not be misgendered.

Similar to how a straight trans man might be closeted and call himself a lesbian, a lesbian trans woman might be closeted and call herself a man. Again, this lesbian trans woman wouldn't be a man. However, a she might refer to herself as a man to stay safe, or just because she's not comfortable being out yet, but might also refer to herself as a lesbian online or around a few people she's close with. She's not actually a lesbian man, but using both labels would still be enough to get cancelled by those violently against male lesbians.

Some trans women might also still be eggs (not yet realize they're trans). I know that prior to coming out as trans, some gay trans people have said something like "I'm a man, but I want to be in a lesbian relationship" or "I'm a girl and I love reading mlm fanfiction, I like to imagine myself as one of the characters." A trans woman just beginning to explore gender could identify or want to identify with being a lesbian, while still not fully realizing she's not a man. Again- not actually a man, but someone who might use both labels.

Arguments Against Lesbian Men

Now, I know there are a lot of reasons this is controversial, and some of them are even in good faith. However, they are still misguided.

"It's Misgendering Trans Men"

Many people are opposed to trans men being lesbians because they're trans men and would feel dysphoric if called a lesbian, or are an ally and don't want trans men to be misgendered.

That's a very understandable concern, but see my earlier note about not calling a trans man a lesbian without permission.

Trans men aren't a monolith, and everyone's comfortable with different things. Some trans men are comfortable wearing dresses and some trans men are comfortable being called "sis" or "queen" or something, but many aren't, and that's all okay!

I think people just need to be clear that even though some trans men are okay with this, it doesn't apply to all trans men.

"Cishet Men Will Pretend To Be Lesbians"

Another reason people are against male lesbians is because they're concerned cis straight men will call themselves lesbians for no reason other than they think it's funny, or they want to make lesbians uncomfortable. Which I agree; that's shitty, and they shouldn't do that.

But I feel like most of the time, they do make it pretty clear they don't genuinely identify as a lesbian. People with complex or contradicting identities generally understand that their labels don't make a lot of sense at first glance, so they tend to offer a short explanation. They have no obligation to go on and on defending their right to exist, but a sentence or two is good and most people are totally willing to provide that.

I've had friends ask about me being both a trans man and a lesbian, and I've given a short explanation, and it works! Because they aren't assholes! The main one that comes to mind happened shortly after I told my best friend I was changing my name, and it went something like this.

Me, after seeing a pretty girl: Oh my god, I'm so gay for her. Friend: Do you still identify as gay? I thought you might want to be called straight now, since you're a trans guy. Me: I'm, like, both a man and a woman? So lesbian and straight man are both fine with me. Friend: Okay, cool. Let me know if you decide you don't want to be called lesbian anymore since I don't want to make you feel dysphoric.

And then that was it! It wasn't a big deal. With just a short conversation, I established that I was a lesbian man because I'm bigender and not because I'm just saying it for the lols.

I do understand the desire to stop cishet men from making lesbian jokes, but the thing is, there's no reliable way to do so that won't also end up harming some queer people. I mean, TERFs argue that trans women can't be lesbians because then what's to stop a straight man from invading the lesbian community by falsely claiming he's a trans woman, you know? But just because some people might abuse other queer peoples' genuine identity, doesn't mean no one can use that identity.

"They're Invading Lesbian Spaces"

Those against male lesbians are trying to stop men from invading lesbian spaces. While I agree that lesbian spaces should be for lesbians, and I think it's wrong for people to attend an all-lesbian support group or something if they know they're not a lesbian, I also know I can't stop them.

What are we supposed to do, go around forcing everyone there to prove they are a Real Actual Lesbian? Who decides what a Real Actual Lesbian is? How do we verify if people are telling the truth on the questions asked to prove Real Actual Lesbian? Keeping 100% of non lesbians out of lesbian spaces just isn't a feasible goal and it's not fair to make everyone prove their identity like that.

If someone in a lesbian safe space is causing any harm to others, they should be kicked out, but this applies even if they are a Real Actual Lesbian. Lesbians are perfectly capable of hurting other lesbians and being a lesbian doesn't give them a free pass to get out of consequences.

Male Lesbians Are Rapists

An extension of the "invading lesbian spaces" arguments is that lesbian men are forcing or pressuring lesbians to date or sleep with men.

However, lesbian men don't necessarily expect or even want other lesbians to be attracted to them. Lesbians don't have to be attracted to every other lesbian in the world! Sometimes, people don't find another person attractive, and that's fine. Sometimes, people are not attracted to a certain gender, and someone of that gender being a lesbian won't change that.

I'm not attracted to nonbinary people, and there are plenty of nonbinary lesbians, and I'm not attracted to them. Which is fine! Them being lesbians doesn't mean I have to be attracted to them, and me not being attracted to them doesn't make them not lesbians. Accepting someone as their identity doesn't mean you have to find them attractive.

I might be attracted to a lesbian and ask her out, and she might respond "Sorry, I'm not attracted to men and since you're bigender I wouldn't be comfortable sleeping with you."

What I would not say: "But I'm a lesbian! You accepted me into your lesbian safe space, which means you have to sleep with me. Checkmate."

What I would say: "I understand, have a nice day."

In the above scenario, if someone in that situation refused to accept that the lesbian woman wasn't attracted to them, that would be shitty no matter what. It would be shitty if that person was a male lesbian, and it would be shitty if that person was a cis woman. Because it is shitty to not respect people's boundaries.

This isn't something only lesbian men are capable of doing. Most lesbian men are perfectly respectful people who would not rape anyone, and if they do? They're shitty, but they're not shitty because they're a lesbian man. They're shitty because they're a rapist.

Claiming that someone would lie about their gender identity to rape people is entry-level transphobia. You cannot believe "male lesbians are just lying so they can rape lesbians" and then call yourself a trans ally. They are mutually exclusive.

Political Lesbianism

Finally, this argument is derived from TERF rhetoric. If you're not familiar with political lesbianism, it's a radical feminist ideology that can be summarized by "don't date or fuck men." Being a lesbian was a feminist choice that wasn't necessarily about attraction to women, but about not being involved with men. This sounds quite a lot like the common lesbian definition used against male lesbians; "non men loving non men." A major component of TERFism is trying to keep men (or those they believe to be men) away from women's/lesbian spaces, and including trans women doesn't change the fact that the ideologies stem from the exact same place. There have been anti male lesbian posts that genuinely sound exactly like a TERF wrote them, which is pretty telling. If you're violently against any men ever being lesbians, odds are you've been drinking the TERF juice, and you probably need to unpack that.

Conclusion

This is ridiculously long and I have been writing it for the last two and a half hours. I am very thankful and also kind of apologetic to anyone who just read every single word I vomited out.

Basically, even if you disagree with someone using both "man" and "lesbian" to label themself, I would recommend leaving them alone. They're describing their identity in the way that works best for them, and they're not hurting anyone. You don't need to like their identity, and you definitely don't need to understand it, but you do need to be respectful. It costs $0 to not be an asshole.

If you're considering telling a lesbian man their identity is invalid, take my advice and simply... don't do that. There are so many other things you could do with your time.

The queer community has a lot of problems. The world in general has even more problems. In the grand scheme of things, someone identifying as a male lesbian literally does not matter.

That's finally all, thanks for reading.

#anon i am so fucking sorry you did NOT sign up for this monster of an essay #rip #also to clarify most of the time when i said you i wasn't talking to anon specifically #just a general you #i know it's confusing so yeah wanted to make sure that was clear #lesbian trans men #lesbian men #male lesbian #multigender lesbian #idk what other things i should tag #lesbian #pride tag #okay i will shut up now

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theoreticallysensible · 10 months

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Okay so my first post is going to be about the link between capitalism and existential angst, which is the most on brand thing possible for me, so if you like this there’ll be much more of it and if not… sorry. 😅

I’ve always had a proclivity for angsty existentialism. Multiple times a housemate has found me sprawled on a sofa moping about the meaning of life which sounds really pretentious but idk I feel like on some level that’s just being a student. And it’s that material side of it that’s got me curious recently like - were these anxieties just a result of the kind of individualistic, listless existence a student inhabits? There’s probably a reason the stereotypes of angst are people with enough wealth to avoid work but not enough respect or expectations to have a solid idea about what they should be doing: Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Søren Kierkegaard, etc.

In the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre calls out Kierkegaard specifically as a prime example of bourgeoise alienation, the result of which was literally creating existentialist philosophy - the idea that we have to create meaning for ourselves by force of will and taking a leap of faith. Lefebvre claims that existential angst is always a result of some sort of alienation. When Marx formulated alienation as the psychological suffering we experience when we are separation from ourselves, each other, the products of our labour, and nature, he was thinking about the way the working class are made to suffer under capitalism, but Lefebvre expands the theory beyond this. He describes how alienation is always relative and present in all types of society for all people within it. Alienation is not just a result of individualism and exploitation - it also presents itself when we feel too far from someone we love, and when we are mystified by the natural world. Crucially, we are alienated when we become detached from the fact that we are dependent on others for our survival, something common to all the bourgeoisie.

Acknowledging this dependency would make us aware of the injustice of how these responsibilities are distributed (according to class, gender, race, etc.), and getting past the separation would require a radical change in lifestyle involving the rejection of the serving of the individual self so integral to bourgeoise morality. It’s hard! But with the lines between proletariat and bourgeoisie becoming more and more blurred with the expansion of the middle class, recognising this particularly bourgeoise suffering is important, I think, if we want to articulate a reason more people can get behind to resist capitalism.

People suffer when they’re separated from people, when their material existence feels so isolated and insignificant that they have to rely on spirituality to give them any sense of grounding, but are unable to be confident in their beliefs so can only ever relate to religion through anxiety (both my best friends speak of religion in this way, and before I read Lefebvre I was tempted to join them because it sounded better than the nihilism I was struggling with). Seriously, read any Kierkegaard and you will know he was not a happy guy. He wrote book called The Concept of Anxiety, and Fear and Trembling for God’s sake. He’s not okay! 🥺 But poor Søren might have been okay if he’d been a bit less self obsessed, acknowledged the value of *inter*subjectivity rather than pure responsibility, and actually married his fianceé rather than worrying about his independent morality, which was really just arrogance. I sound mean but I love him really. He’s very entertaining and *painfully* relatable.

But this is why I find Simone de Beauvoir to be the absolute best of the existentialist canon, because she recognises the need for recognition and connection, even for the powerful. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she writes about how even tyrants suffer in hierarchical societies because they can never know authentic respect, since people always see their power and the threat implicit in it rather than their whole humanity. This doesn’t mean that we should never violently resist tyranny, because individualism is hard to overcome, even when it’s self-sabotaging, but awareness of this could get more people on the side of equality. This idea is apparently supported empirically in The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, but I haven’t read that one yet. I like to put it in Spinozist terms: the satisfaction of one desire can be excessive when it blinds us to our other needs and presents us from feeling other forms of joy.

On how it can be overcome though, I think Judith Butler offers an interesting frame for thinking about it. Though they’re best known for their work on the social construction of gender, my favourite book of theirs is Giving An Account of Oneself, where they write about how our mental life is a product of all our previous experiences, especially with other people. This seems obvious on some level, but it really undermines individualism. In particular, it deconstructs the distinction between attacking parts of yourself and attacking other people. If our internal and external lives are so interlinked, is it really surprising if attacking ourselves isolates us? Recognising that other people are in some sense present within us is conducive to greater intimacy, and though this can be uncomfortable if we dislike part of them, that doesn’t make it less true, and recognising this can make us more compassionate with everything within us. Self-hatred and hatred of others are intimately connected, and they reinforce each other.

I like to think of the relationship between different parts of myself in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic unconscious, where our minds are made up of interlocking parts from the larger social context. I think differ though in wanting to negotiate and find equilibrium between them rather than experimenting by letting certain parts go to extremes to make change though. I like the way Jacques Derrida writes about it in The Politics of Friendship, where to recognise the other in oneself, and so recognise the misalignment within ourselves, requires us to be a friend to oneself, which makes friendship so central that it undercuts any potential narcissism because by loving oneself as an other we learn to love others better (as well ourselves).

This doesn’t address the concrete politics of the situation though. The aspect missing is that we have to think of ourselves as inextricably linked to our social and political systems, part of a historical process, and our feelings about those systems are a very real part of that process, and if we want to be true to ourselves we have to act on those feelings rather than repress them. I’m still working out what that means for myself, and as Lefebvre notes it’s this final hurdle that most people fail at, but we can all try.

That kind of went all over the place, but hopefully it’s understandable and valuable, and if not it was helpful for me to articulate all these ideas that have been swirling around in my head for the past year or so. 😅

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une-sanz-pluis · 2 months

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What do you think about the homosexual rumors of Henry V?

I'm generally in favour of them and do my best to perpetuate them, cf. this tag on my personal blog. But, I (sometimes) try to be a ~serious history blogger so I will endeavour to give you a more considered answer.

As a ~serious history blogger, I'd say it's probably more accurate to speak about speculation of Henry V's sexuality than "homosexual rumours". To me, "rumours" implies things contemporaneously said and recorded about Henry V and, while I would argue that there are things that may allude to his being in some way queer, there is just no evidence that explicitly, irrefutably does that or evidence that raises the possibility of his queerness in a way that has to be addressed by historians, even if they end up denying the possibility of queerness or can't definitively say whether he was or wasn't queer. This doesn't mean there is no possible way Henry V could be queer, only that it's one of those things that we don't and can't know for certain.

Medieval Attitudes to Sexuality

We don't have a lot of evidence of specific individuals engaged in same-sex behaviour in medieval England and what evidence that exists is generally from when people were outed (often in a legalistic sense) or in the form of political smears. In the latter case, we have no idea of these smears had some element of truth in them. Both Edward II and Richard II, for example, were linked explicitly with sodomy by their contemporaries. While today we associate sodomy with a specific sexual act, in the Middle Ages it encompassed a whole host of sexual sins and was often invoked in non-sexual discourses to suggest something was "against nature". In the case of Edward II and Richard II, sodomy was invoked alongside a narrative that they were ruled or lead astray by their unworthy favourites - when as kings, they should have been the ones who did the "ruling". This genre of criticism has been labelled discursive sodomy. We can't and don't know whether they did or did not have a romantic and/or sexual relationship with their favourites or what "sodomy" their accusers imagined or believed they had committed but in the case of Edward II, at least, the appearance of the (untrue) narrative that he was murdered by the insertion of a red-hot poker into his anus not too long after his death heavily implies that not all of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries viewed the allegation of sodomy to be purely political or unlinked to same-sex behaviour. If you're interested in a discussion getting into the specifics of Richard II's sexuality, I'd recommend this post by @shredsandpatches

Another issue with the discussion of medieval sexuality is medieval attitudes to sexuality were very different from our own. Our modern categories of sexual orientation (e.g. heterosexuality, homosexuality etc.) did not exist in the Middle Ages - this doesn't mean that medieval people didn't experience and/or act on sexual attraction in the way these categories describe, just that they didn't have the same ways of conceptualising and categorising sexuality as we do. Some sexuality historians avoid using these terms, viewing them as what W. Mark Ormrod, when discussing Edward II, described as both anachronistic and futile:

anachronistic because medieval attitudes to sexuality were so different from our own, and futile because the nature of the evidence makes it impossible to tell what Edward actually did – let alone what he thought himself to be doing – whether and when he engaged in emotional and physical contact with women or men.

Personally, I don't have issue with using modern sexuality categories in casual settings or as a quick shorthand, but when I'm pretending to be a ~serious history blogger, I try to follow that viewpoint and use the word "queer" because it encompasses a whole range of experiencing sexuality and gender without tying it to specific and modern identities that weren't available to the people I'm discussing

We also have to be careful when discussing medieval sexualities for two more reasons. One: we understand and accept today that an individual's sexuality is determined by how they experience sexual attraction but we rarely, if ever, have access to a medieval person's inner thoughts to know how they experienced sexual attraction and can only go off sexual behaviour, where the evidence unsurprisingly skews heavily towards to relationships between men and women. We know that people can and do have sex in ways that don't "fit" with their sexual orientation for a variety of reasons - they might be closeted, experimenting, figuring out their sexuality or trying to have children - and we need to recognise that this could be the case for at least some medieval people. Two: what we today might view as sexual behaviour, such as kissing or sharing a bed, wasn't necessarily sexual to a medieval eyes, and we need to ground our conclusions in their context.

So, with that lengthy preamble but very basic introduction to medieval sexuality and its problems over, let's move onto Henry V.

Henry V's Sexualities

Discussion of Henry's sexuality have two additional problems. Firstly, Henry's reputed wild youth has often been assumed to have been both sexual and heteronormative - i.e. he had a lot of sex with a lot of women - and this isn't aided by the fact that historical Henry is often conflated with Shakespeare's wild prince Hal, whose wildness is also often generally assumed to be both sexual and heteronormative and who is often depicted as having casual sex with women*. Secondly, Henry's reputation as a great warrior king has meant that, as Katherine J. Lewis notes, his gender is often seen to have been so normative and idealised as to be invisible and in need of little scrutiny and I would argue the same is true for his sexuality (excepting revisionist takes by historians such as Ian Mortimer, who treats Henry's sexuality as monstrously other).

I know that what I'm about to write will have someone wanting to jump in and get all "BUT" and "well, actually" so three disclaimers:

It is very difficult to know for certain whether two men (or two women) actually had sex 600 years ago - and impossible if we don't have explicit evidence (which we rarely do). However, just because we lack evidence does not mean everyone was "straight". The stigma around same-sex behaviour means that we would expect a paucity of evidence, which we have. Additionally, we need to be aware of what Ruth Mazo Karras calls the "double standard of evidence" where men and women are often assumed to be lovers despite a lack of evidence, but the possibility of women and men engaging in same-sex behaviour requires explicit evidence of genital contact.

As I've already said, there is nothing that is clearly suggestive of Henry V engaging in same-sex behaviour. He was not linked explicitly with sodomy, despite the broadness of the term, and nor do we find him depicted as a king unreasonably attached to an unworthy favourite. Firstly, it is reasonable to assume that more queer people existed than what we have evidence for. Secondly, the narrative of queer kings as kings ruled by their favourites is a stereotype, born from discursive sodomy, and it is entirely possible that this allowed for queer kings who didn't (or who weren't made to) embody the tropes of discursive sodomy to go under the radar.

"But we have all these stories about Henry V's wild youth where he was having sex with loads of women and the epic romance with his wife." I will get into this more detail below but we should probably view such claims sceptically. Secondly, the evidence of "sex with lots of women" is actually very limited.

* There are a number of queer readings of Shakespeare's Hal but these are rarely leave academia to end up on stage or screen. There are three retellings of the Henriad that depict a queer Hal: My Own Private Idaho, Tessa Gratton's Lady Hotspur and Allen Bratton's Henry Henry.

Speculation

The arguments that I've seen put forward to suggest that Henry engaged in same-sex behaviour come from three different types of evidence:

Preferring the Company of Men. Henry married late and spent most of his reign on campaign and with men, away from women. His court was also lacking in women.

Sharing a bed with Scrope. Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham was known as Henry's bedfellow which means they were lovers.

Sharing a tomb with Courtenay. A story circulated that Henry's close friend, Richard Courtenay, was buried in the same tomb as him, which suggests they were lovers.

Neither of these are a smoking gun, the first two for fairly obvious reasons, and the third because Courtenay is not in the same tomb as Henry.

Preferring the Company of Men.

It is true that Henry married late but if Henry's sexuality did play any kind of role in the delay, it was in a very minor role. We know that his marriage had been considered since 1395, when John of Gaunt negotiated for his marriage to Marie, the daughter of the Duke of Brittany and when Richard II proposed he marry Michelle de Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France. We also know that he was the subject of multiple marriage negotiations in Henry IV's reign - at first with Isabelle de Valois (daughter of Charles VI, Richard II's widow), Catherine of Pomerania (sister to Erik of Pomerania, King of Norway, Denmark and Sweden), an unnamed daughter of Charles VI, Catherine de Valois, and one of the daughters of the Duke of Burgundy (I don't think a name was ever specified). These never eventuated for various political reasons. The delay in his marriage when Henry became king was likely due to seeing his marriage to a French princess as a necessary part for any long-term peace with France (regardless of how he truly envisioned the form that peace would take). I don't think we can argue that Henry's behaviour here was because of a lack of sexual interest in women, but simply because negotiations fell through and because, in the end, the marriage to Catherine was deemed a vital part of his plans with France.

It is true that Henry's court was primarily a homosocial environment but that was the way courts were "supposed" to be (Richard II, for instance, was heavily criticised for having too many women at court and for combining his household with his first queen's). It is also true that by the time Henry came to the throne, the majority of his female relatives who might be expected to play a role in his court were either dead or living overseas, having made advantageous marriage alliances arranged by Henry's father and grandfather. Ian Mortimer's assertion that Henry barred Joan of Navarre and Margaret Holland, Duchess of Clarence from his court on basis of his dislike of Joan and of Margaret's husband, is simply without foundation, and indeed they played important, visible roles in his reign, both at court and away from court, until Joan's arrest on treason charges and Margaret's widowing. Given the tendency for chroniclers to elide the presence of women, it's also possible that other women were at court but their presence went unrecorded and there are at least four who should probably be considered as influential figures in Henry's reign: Joan de Bohun, Countess of Hereford, Elizabeth of Lancaster, Countess of Huntington, Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland and Philippa de Mohun, Duchess of York.

Sharing a bed with Scrope.

As I mentioned above bed sharing was not seen as a solely sexual act and it often occurred as a gesture of trust, affection and intimacy between men. I also don't believe that chroniclers that often implied sodomy rather than explicitly naming it would casually reference the king having sex with his male best friend. In Scrope's specific case, I'm only aware of his sharing a bed with Henry as being recorded by Monstrelet, which raises the question of how a Burgundian chronicler knew they shared a bed but not one English chronicler knew about it to make mention of it. Likely, Monstrelet was invoking bed-sharing to show the intimacy of their relationship, borrowing from the English narratives that depicted Scrope as a deeply trusted friend of Henry who then callously betrayed him.

Now, there are some things to note. The first is that just because Monstrelet is the only chronicler (afaik) to reference the bed sharing does not mean that Henry and Scrope didn't share a bed (and if Scrope was as close to Henry as the chroniclers imply, there's a good chance they did). The second is that while bed-sharing was not primarily seen as sexual, it doesn't preclude the possibility that sex did occur between two members of the same sex sharing a bed. Thirdly, despite not mentioning the bed-sharing, chroniclers often invoked a highly intimate relationship between Scrope and Henry. Here's Thomas Walsingham on Scrope:

He was so highly regarded by the king that discussions on private or public matters were usually brought to an end by his verdicts. For in all his actions he showed such a restrained gravity and sanctity that the king judged that all his pronouncements should be carried out just as if they were oracles fallen from heaven. If an important embassy had to be sent to France, the king thought that Henry Scrope was the man who had the ability to perform this task.

This, to me, seems to invoke the trope of the unworthy favourite who has an unreasonable hold on the king. Perhaps Scrope was the most unworthy of the late medieval favourites: his betrayal of Henry was an actual betrayal instead of the image of a "loving knight serving his lord with his body and sword" twisted into treason by his enemies.

Sharing a tomb with Courtenay.

At some point after October 1953 when the grave of Richard Courtenay, Bishop of Norwich was rediscovered in the chapel of St Edward at Westminster Abbey, a story circulated that Courtenay's remains were found inside Henry's tomb, which led to speculation that that they had been lovers. Obviously, this doesn't prove they had sex but it is a quite unusual gesture, suggesting a great degree of intimacy. This same intimacy is apparent in the small number of double-tomb monuments commemorating two individuals of the same-sex (e.g. Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge), and Jessica Barker notes that while we don't/can't know if the couples were lovers, their joint burial and memorials do mark a "significant moment in in queer history because they present same-sex relationships as analogous to married couples". Courtenay has no memorial in the chapel, much less one that impales his arms with Henry's as is the case with Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, but Henry's gesture of sharing his tomb space with Courtenay is deeply unusual and suggests a great deal of affection and intimacy.

Unfortunately, the story just isn't true. As far as I could find, Henry's tomb has never been opened which means that Courtenay's remains can't have been discovered alongside his. There is also a fair bit about Courtenay's grave that has been made public. Westminster Abbey displays the ring they found in his grave, Lawrence Tanner records the discovery in his memoirs, and a couple of articles about St Edward's chapel published archaeological drawings of Courtenay's grave and remains that show he was buried alone and his tomb is located under the steps of the northern turret of Henry V's chantry chapel.

There is still something very telling about Courtenay's place of burial. St. Edward's chapel was, quite simply, an exclusive burial space. It was where almost every single king and queen of England between Henry III and Henry V were buried and those few burials that didn't belong to monarchs were often quite closely connected to the royal family or from an earlier period. Space was also becoming tight - Henry VI struggled to find a place for his own burial (which never eventuated due to his deposition and murder) and the lack of space was probably why Edward IV chose to be buried at Windsor (and possibly why Henry IV chose to be buried in Canterbury Cathedral). The closest, albeit imperfect, parallel to Courtenay's burial in the chapel was that of John Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury - who had been buried there on Richard II's orders, causing outrage that a man of common blood should be buried amongst kings. Courtenay was of noble descent but not of the highest echelons of society, let alone closely related to the royal family. Why then did Henry order Courtenay's burial in such a prestigious place, risking scandal and outrage?

We can say a little more about Courtenay, too. He seems to have been implicitly trusted by Henry. Walsingham's statement about Scrope, that Henry thought Scrope should head all important embassies to France? Isn't quite correct. Scrope didn't lead any of the principal embassies to Paris - Courtenay did, "perhaps," Jeremy Caton writes, "because he knew the king’s mind better than his colleagues." The Gesta Henrici Quinti, which is was written by a chaplain in Henry's household and largely believed to be part of Henry's propaganda, details the moment of Courtenay's death, "in the presence of the king who, after extreme unction, with his own hands wiped [Courtenay's] feet and closed his eyes". The closest parallel to Henry's handling of Courtenay's corpse that has survived appears to be Richard II's touching of Robert de Vere's corpse when it was returned to England for burial.

Obviously, none of this "proves" that Henry and Courtenay were lovers or that Henry experienced and engaged in same-sex behaviour. But it does suggest the possibility.

I discussed this in more detail on my personal tumblr but without pretending to be ~serious history blogger sometime ago and I keep meaning to write a serious version of that post and one specifically about the account of Henry attending to Courtenay on his deathbed.

The Wild Youth and the Wife

To begin with, sexual attraction does not always operate on a binary. People can be attracted to one gender or they can be attracted to more. Nor does sexual behaviour, as I said above, necessarily indicate how one experiences sexual attraction. So it is entirely possible that Henry could have sex with women and still be sexually attracted to men and vice versa. One does not necessarily preclude the other.

The Wife

I've already written a simply massive post detailing the evidence of his relationship with Catherine de Valois. The reality is that we don't and can't know what their relationship was like. The framing of their marriage as a romance is, simply put, a myth. It was a standard marriage for their class and situation and we should not rely on the stories that Henry fell instantly in love with Catherine upon seeing her portrait or hearing his ambassadors report on their meeting with her. These are tropes out of courtly romances and fairy tales.

If we try to determine anything about their sex life from the surviving evidence of their marriage, we run into trouble. We don't have access to their bedchamber to know when they had sex or what they felt about the sex they did have. The only explicit evidence of their sex life is that it resulted in a son. I don't say this to conclude "and therefore they only had sex the one time" - I would be very, very surprised if that's the case. The point is, however, that the marriage is not proof of Henry's "straightness".

The Wild Youth

I've also written a bit about the story of Henry's "wild youth". Two Latin lives written in the mid-to-late 1430s explicitly invoke Henry's sex life, such as the Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti (translated here by Anne Curry):

an assiduous pursuer of fun, devoted to organ instruments [an intentional double entendre] which relaxed the rein on his modesty, although under the military service of Mars, he seethed youthfully with the flames of Venus too, and tended to be open to other novelties as befitted the age of his untamed youth.

For some historians, this is proof that Henry had a lot of casual sex with women. Others cite two reports by contemporaries (Richard Courtenay himself and the Earl of Ormond) who claim that after his coronation, Henry did not have sex with women after coming to the throne as evidence that it was notable to what came before. Ian Mortimer even speculates that Henry had "an unfortunate experience [that] left him fearing women as sexual beings" that resulted in this turnaround.

However, we have no explicit evidence beyond these two Latin lives that imagined Henry "seeth[ing] youthfully with the flames of Venus" for Henry's youthful indiscretions. There is not the slightest hint of an illegitimate child, nor is there any woman we can link to Henry in a plausible sexual relationship. There are also no surviving criticisms of lecherous behaviour or that his court as Prince of Wales was a hotbed of debauchery - we find similar criticisms for the likes of Edward III, Richard II, Edward IV and Richard III, and for Henry's brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.

This, of course, doesn't prove or mean that Henry didn't have sex with women during this time. It could just be that the evidence doesn't survive. Although some medieval mistresses are incredibly famous, most are unknown - Henry's brothers had five known illegitimate children and we don't know who the mothers were for any of them. It's also possible that Henry's sexual relations with women were on a strictly casual basis, that he was unusually lucky with the highly unreliable forms of birth control or that any illegitimate children that he fathered died young enough that they left no mark on the historical record. It's also possible that if he was having sex, perhaps he wasn't having sex with women. The apparent gap between the comments on Henry’s sex life and the lack of evidence could be read suggestive of something unspeakable – a vice that medieval people considered too horrible to be named. It's also tempting to see a link between the invocation of Venus and Thomas Walsingham's complaint that Richard II's favourites were "knights of Venus rather than of Bellona", a war goddess.

It's also possible that his sex life was simply unremarkable. The comments about Henry's sex life might simply be, as has been suggested, a cover for Henry's conflicts with his father. They may have been a cover for suspicions that he harboured Lollard sympathies.

Henry's Sexualities

As I've outlined, we simply don't know how Henry experienced sexual desire and attraction to know whether he was queer or straight. I can see the possibility that he was queer, that he had romantic and/or sexual relationships with Courtenay or Scrope.

I have also wondered if he experienced little to no sexual attraction or had little interest in sex. If we take the statements that he was abstained from sex between his coronation and his marriage at face value, if we take the lack of concrete evidence for his "seething in the flames of Venus" at face value, it's possible to read him as experiencing sexual attraction in a way similar to asexuality.

My thoughts are, in short: that we don't and can't know but there is the possibility of queerness there.

Sources:

Gesta Henrici Quinti (c. 1417), eds. and trans. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford University Press 1975)

The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, trans. David Preest (The Boydell Press 2005)

The First English Life of Henry V, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Clarendon Press 1911)

The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Enguerrand De Monstrelet, Volume 1 of 2, trans. Thomas Johnes, 1840.

Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst, 'Kings and favourites: politics and sexuality in late medieval Europe', Journal of Medieval History, 43:3 (2017)

Jessica Barker, Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture (The Boydell Press 2020)

Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (University of Pennsylvania Press 2007)

Judith M. Bennett, "Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge", The Lesbian Premodern, eds. Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, Diane Watt (Palgrave 2011)

Jeremy Caton, “The King’s Servants”, Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford University Press 1985)

Anne Curry, Henry V: From Playboy Prince to Warrior King (Penguin Monarchs 2015)

R. G. Davies, “Courtenay, Richard” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

Sylvia Federico, "Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourtheen-Century England", Medium Ævum, vol. 79, no. 1 (2010)

Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (Routledge 2017)

Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Linkenen, “John/Eleanor Rykener Revisited", Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns, eds. Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O'Sullivan, (D. S. Brewer 2016)

Katherine J. Lewis, Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England (Routledge 2013)

Peter McNiven, "Prince Henry and the English Political Crisis of 1412:, History, vol. 65, no. 12 (1980)

Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (The Boydell Press 1987)

E. Amanda McVitty, ‘False knights and true men: contesting chivalric masculinity in English treason trials, 1388–1415′, Journal of Medieval History, 40:4 (2014)

Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press 2015)

Ian Mortimer, 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (Vintage 2010)

W. Mark Ormrod, "The Sexualities of Edward II", The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, eds. Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (York Medieval Press 2009)

Lawrence Tanner, Recollections of a Westminster Antiquary (John Baker 1969)

Tim Tatton-Brown, “The Pavement in the Chapel of St Edward The Confessor, Westminster Abbey”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 153:1 (2000)

#henry v #richard courtenay bishop of norwich #henry scrope lord masham #ask #anon #sex and sexuality #god ok i'm done with this and am taking a break from responding to asks i'm aware that i've got more to answer #but i need to have a life and do stuff for me

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