When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, it was a time of great jubilation for the tens of thousands of people incarcerated in them. But an often forgotten fact of this time is that prisoners who happened to be wearing the pink triangle (the Nazis’ way of marking and identifying homosexuals) were forced to serve out the rest of their sentence. This was due to a part of German law simply known as “Paragraph 175” which criminalized homosexuality. The law wasn’t repealed until 1969.
coldbitterness submits:
The Martin Freeman interview with racist and homophobic comments is here. (Mod note: I added highlights below)
“When I moved up here this woman I know said, ‘Ooh! There are a lot of whiteys up there’, and I said, ‘I love white people; I’ve no problem with them at all.”
The idea was that I was going to complain because there weren’t enough blues dances out here; not enough ragga around. But I’m not bothered by it.
“Multiculturalism hasn’t and doesn’t help, because rightly or wrongly it polarises people so much,” he continues.
“Racism is one thing ? and I don’t agree with that in any form ? but noticing that there are differences is normal and fine and to be encouraged.
“We’ve reached a state now where it’s, ‘You shouldn’t notice. Why are you noticing he’s got a bomb and has a beard and is Muslim and wants to kill your family?”
“There is no country in the world like this. If all of a sudden all the traffic wardens in Ghana were Welsh, they’d really notice and might not love it? We give ourselves a hard time in this country in a sort of mea culpa way. But if we were that racist, people wouldn’t come. Very simple.”
(Later in the article)
He hasn’t always been a mod purist. “I did have a hip-hop period,” he admits. “I dressed a bit like that in 1990, but after a while I thought, ‘Nah, back to the white Levi’s.’
“I really liked hip-hop until the gangsta rap took over. I come from a time when not every rap record was ‘nigga’ this and ‘nigga’ that; an earlier socially and morally conscious hip-hop sensibility, when it was, ‘Don’t call people nigga’.”
“But now it’s nigga, nigga, nigga, and it’s not funny or interesting politically, artistically or socially. I really don’t like it.”
At this point the conversation switches to the youth of today.
(Later still)
“Talking of which… ‘The funny thing about the acting business is that there are more poofs in it than you can have hot dinners thrown at you,’” he says.
“But no one is out. It’s not so bad here, but in Hollywood ? Jesus Christ. Why don’t they just admit it? No one cares if they’re gay or not. I certainly don’t.
In this so-called liberal industry, no one has the guts to come out because of “the box office”, but someone has to be the first in the firing line.
“Without the suffragettes a lot of women would have thought, ‘Why should we have the vote?’ And I think that the same argument exists today. People should stand up and be counted.”
People were praising his comments about how closeted gay actors should come out (because allegedly it shows how accepting he is?) but as a straight man he really should not be 1. using homophobic slurs or 2. trying to dictate how and when LGBT people come out.
People also tried to claim that because it’s the Daily Mail it must be out of context, but there is no other context for statements like “We’ve reached a state now where it’s, ‘You shouldn’t notice. Why are you noticing he’s got a bomb and has a beard and is Muslim and wants to kill your family?’”
Mod note: That wasn’t Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism/writing by any means, but REGARDLESS, what a fucking mess. Seriously, wtf?
I tried to like you, Marty. I tried.
But what the fuck is this shit? Why are you okay with tossing “nigga” around like it’s 1843, and telling Black folks what’s okay to do in/with their own culture? How hard is it to censor yourself on something that has nothing to do with you?
Really. Would it really have been so hard to just say, “I used to like hip-hop until it got a little too intense for my taste.” Is it seriously necessary to go to those extremes? I mean, that’s five fucking times in 2 sentences.
FIVE FUCKING TIMES
And “multiculturalism doesn’t help”… doesn’t help who? The people whose culture is dominant worldwide? No shit. I guess when you’re part of that culture, it’s easy to believe that it doesn’t work. After all, you’re not part of the culture that has to assimilate and give up trying to connect to where they come from. You’re part of the culture that invades and takes over and wrecks everybody’s shit and wonders why they’re mad later on.
I tried, man. I tried.
But fuck this guy.
I will still enjoy the characters he plays, but the next person who crosses my dash talking about how the actor is such a great guy is getting blocked.
And THIS is why I don’t like this fucker.
I’m coming to love Sherlock less and less as the days go by and this is part of the reason.
One of those guys who seem really nice until they actually talk.
This as well as the interview where he calls Lucy Liu flat out ugly as well as his character being EXACTLY THE SAME as in Sherlock and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made me really uncomfortable with him in The Hobbit. Which is such a huge shame because I love that film and the whole LotR package but this guy is just such a fuckin’ douchebag. :/
Seven posters with contrasting images:
- [Pride parade] “This party is so gay.” / [Bored partygoers] “This party is so boring.”
- [Flower] This is a pansy. / [Young man sitting on the front steps] This is a boy who’s having a bad day.
- [Dog] This is a bitch. / [Young woman crossing her arms] This is a girl who speaks her mind.
- [Garden tool] This is a hoe. / [Young woman leaning forward] This is a girl who likes your boyfriend.
- [Cigarette butt] This is a fag. / [Young man] This is a guy who annoys you.
- [Three young women] These are girls. / [Three male football players] These are athletes who lost a game.
- [Queen of hearts and queen of spades] This is a pair of queens. / [Husbands leaning their foreheads together] This is a couple who’ve been together for 20 years.
The text at the bottom of each reads:
“Sexist and homophobic words are violent and they’re everybody’s problem. Realize words have an impact — even if you don’t see it. Challenge sexist and homophobic language. Choose different words. Change the subject. Support people who are being harassed. Use humor to change minds. Violent words support violence. Everybody has a backbone. Use yours.”
(source: Backbone Zone, a project of the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault (MECASA), which gets funding from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which gets its money from TAXES. Social services work, including this work, DESERVES its funding. Please vote for candidates who agree.)
the most valuable lesson I’ve learned this year is that I need this feature in my real life
no.
that’s fucking discriminating.
what discrimination looks like in a typical day of my life (and I have it pretty easy):
- feeling like I can’t be out to most of my straight friends because they would treat me differently
- sitting around listening to my straight family members make jokes and snide comments about queer people and knowing that I will never be able to be fully open with them about who I am
- going to a school where I am surrounded by thousands of straight people who campaigned so obsessively for Mitt Romney this year that I sometimes felt uncomfortable and threatened and hated on my own campus where I spent almost all of my life
- trying to undo the damage of thirteen years of Christian education where my straight teachers and mentors explicitly told us that it was unacceptable to be anything but straight and my straight classmates made sure that was enforced
- having to put up with straight ~allies~ who are ignorant and self-congratulatory and appropriative and who often think that fetishizing queer people/sex/culture counts as activism but who actually do not give a shit about me
what it does not look like:
- a tumblr post by a half-serious queer kid who does not want to deal with that shit anymore
not to be an asshole but, like, I don’t feel sorry for straight people who are alienated by queer people who are bitter toward them. if it pisses you off that much that queer people don’t want to be around you, you’re probably exactly the kind of entitled straight person that makes me want to start an all-queer moon colony. keep walking.
#ask me how much i care about hurting straight people’s feeligs #AWWW I’M SORRY QUEER PEOPLE DON’T LIKE YOU GOOD THING YOU CAN FALL BACK ON EVERYTHING ELSE IN LIFE
#’you being tired of discrimination counts as discrimination’ #that’s a cute false equivalency friend did your mom pick it out for you
(Source: empressfab)
Was she going to slap you because you never in any way made him gay in the actual books, taking zero risks/doing absolutely nothing for gay characters in literature, and only announcing your “authorial intent” afterwards for a cheap shot at looking like an ~ally~
^^^
Gay people are just normal people. We are not told about any of the Hogwarts professors love lives, other than Snape, and it would be completely out of character for Dumbledore to walk around telling everyone about his sexuality.
Did you want her to make him dress in glittery platform boots, a crop top, and decorate his office in rainbow flags to make it more obvious for you? Would that be enough of a stereotype to appease you people? Or what? Please tell me. I’d like to know how you think a gay character is supposed to be portrayed.
And did you miss the Grindelwald chapters in the ‘actual books’? Or was that also not obvious enough for you? Did Dumbledore need to whisper “always” wistfully in order for you to connect that he had romantic feelings for Grindelwald? Maybe you are American and need them to gaze longingly into each others eyes with awkward close ups of their fingers almost grazing each other that Hollywood thinks means ‘true love’.
It didn’t fit into his relationship to Harry to ever say “I’m gay”, and so it was not stated explicitly (you might have noticed the book was told from Harry Potter’s perspective).
The point is though, that he is a homosexual, well respected, powerful, and very loved wizard- and his sexuality doesn’t matter because no one else thinks it matters. a.k.a. no one cares that he loves men, and that is wonderful.
Amen.
I like reblogging this every time it shows up on my dash because seriously.
No, to so much of that response.
First, how appropriately PATRONIZING to say “you people” to a queer person being upset by a lack of representation of queer characters.
Just because some people inferred that Dumbledore is gay from the chapters about his friendship (yeah, remember they used the word friendship a LOT? Not relationship) doesn’t mean that he’s a gay character. It adds a whole new level of homophobia when, even in a fictional, magical world, the gay character is forced into the closet and doesn’t feel safe enough to come out.
You see, the majority of the major characters have romantic subplots, but somehow that escapes Dumbledore’s character.
He doesn’t need to be a stereotype to be gay, but being so doesn’t matter in terms of representation if it isn’t in ANY WAY REPRESENTED, and it isn’t. Stating it outside of the world of the book doesn’t change that it was never an identity or trait in the book itself.
It could have been mentioned at a number of points in the book, even off-handedly in discussing a relationship, a romantic one, with Grindelwald. But it wasn’t.
So, it isn’t that no one cares because he’s so well-respected, especially since it takes minimal time for people to lose respect and think he’s gone senile, but because he isn’t out to the wizarding world.
Try again, apologists.
Also, “We are not told about any of the Hogwarts professors love lives” err… excuse you, Hagrid and Madame Maxine, Filch and Pince were just good friends? I could also mention Lupin and Tonks here, who have a very prominent love story. Sure Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald is “questionable”, but it’s really not obvious either.
On tumblr, polerin elaborates:
There’s some really nasty shit lurking not too far under the surface of some of the drawings. In some cases, like the ones where they switch clothes, it’s not even too deep.
Making choices of clothing based in femininity/femme-ness on a dood isn’t a context free choice. Doubly so when you are mocking something. It relies on the deep history of cissexism and oppositional sexism in our culture. Even if that’s not the intent of the artist, it is impossible to look at these drawings and not have all the jokes about guys wearing women’s clothing or “acting like a girl” come up. That’s the POINT of these drawings.
And that point pins trans women to the wall as a side effect of (rightly) critiquing the sexism in comics.
Despite the best of intentions, the vibe comes across as really anti-femme, anti-trans women, and ultimately, anti-women. After all, if we’re unable to talk about the mistreatment of women without bringing men into the picture, what does that really say about us? If we’re unable to talk about the mistreatment of women without considering how it effects all women, what does that really say about us?
However. Putting men in women’s clothing and poses can quickly and easily slot into homophobic and transphobic ideas about the “proper” way to do masculinity and the obligation to do so. As said above, even if the artist’s intentions are pure, the image can still provoke bigoted reactions in the audience. Art is not created in a vacuum.
The Hawkeye Initiative is challenging the connection between femininity and sexualization, but it’s like a hydra - while you’re cutting off the “women shouldn’t be considered sex objects” head, the “sexualized men must only be doing it for the gay male gaze” and “men acting like women is unnatural and wrong” heads are coming up behind you.
I wasn’t originally going to reblog or post about this because the original post is by my friend (girlinfourcolors who I think is awesome) and Escher Girls is mentioned, and I don’t want people to think I’m talking about this because I’m jealous or anything (in fact I promoted the HI).
But ultimately, this is something that’s been bothering me lately too, and that means enough to me that I want to say something. I chose to reblog both the above posts because I think they both say important things, but to avoid a conflict of interest (and an endorsement of everything in the posts which could risk a derail), I just snipped the parts that concerned what I wanted to talk about.
First, I want to say, yes I did post some of the stuff that may be also problematic. I was operating by the same “I post all fan art submitted to me” principle I use for the redraws, AND I’m also not immune to feeling pressure to appear to like something that’s popular. :\ I admit that fully.
And I like the Hawkeye Initiative and it’s goals. This is not about every picture, it’s about some of them. Specifically the ones where the only source of humor seems to be that Hawkeye is dressed in a crop top & high heels (this particular one was of a civilian character, not a superheroine), or that he’s kissing Batman, and other posts like those. Such posts make me uncomfortable because I thought the point was to show that Hawkeye (dressed as Hawkeye) in a pose would look ridiculous, not that a man in high heels or a crop top would look funny. Hawkeye in thong battle armor (like women) shows how ridiculous that armor is, but if he’s just in tight pants, a crop top and heels, or kissing another man… the humour is coming from “oh my god a man in women’s clothing” and “oh my god a man being sexual with another man”, and I think that’s pretty problematic. Catwoman kissing Batman isn’t wrong just because Hawkeye looks wrong kissing Batman to some people.
I know I have a platform, so I often am hesitant to blog about these things because I don’t want people to think I’m preaching from the mount, or saying that something is inherently wrong or broken because of an issue in it (which people seem to assume a lot about what I write), and again, I like the Hawkeye Initiative. But I’m also a trans woman, and I’ve gotten literal abuse and threats on my safety because people thought “a man in high heels” or “a man wearing women’s clothing!”, and this sort of humor makes me really uncomfortable. It took my friend speaking up for me to realize I should speak up too.
I’m not telling anybody what to do, but just think about where the source of your humour comes from before you do one of these pictures. That’s all. :)
This is your annual reminder that The Salvation Army threatened to close all of their New York City soup kitchens if they were going to be forced to stop discriminating against their gay employees. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to donate to any charity that would use the hungry as a bargaining chip to get what it wants. There are better charities to donate to. There are charities that donate 100% of their money to the people they’re trying to help, rather than taking some of that money and using it to fight against gay rights (as the Salvation Army does.) There are charities that don’t state on their website that homosexuals are morally obligated to live a life of celibacy. There are charities that accept everyone and help EVERYONE.
For more information on how exactly the Salvation Army is anti-gay and, just in general, horrible, you can click here.
And please, if you’re my friend, or if you know any gay people, or even if you’re just not an asshole, PLEASE stop going bargain-hunting at the Salvation Army. And stop donating your money to them. There are better places for clothes. There are better places to donate.
Also, Salvation Army’s anti-trans policies have literally killed at least one woman.
Please donate to Amnesty International, Goodwill or Doctors Without Borders instead
Important reminder for this time of year!
