5. Age 12. I realize, like really realize, that I like (like, like like) both boys and girls. I declare myself a riot grrrl and a punk. I cut my hair hella short; start wearing combat boots, army surplus coats, chains. I want to be Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. I still get told I look like a boy. I also get called a dyke for the first time.
6. It’s the early ‘90s. Queerness and androgyny are somewhat accepted for celebrities, but not for regular people, at least not in my mid-sized southeastern Wisconsin town. If you’re at all gender non-conforming or non-heterosexual, you get called a dyke or a fag or a freak or all three, interchangeably.
7. No one believes bisexuality exists. If you say you’re bi, everyone assumes you’re just a homo too scared to fully come out, or you’re a hetero trying to be ‘different.’ Or you’re just an indecisive, greedy slut.
8. Anytime I get a crush on a girl, I write in my journal: Oh, I like girls so much, I must really be gay. Anytime I get a crush on a boy, I write in my journal: Ugggh, boys are so cute, I must really be straight.
9. I start cutting myself. I start smoking. I start writing zines and slam poetry and I start trying suicide.
10. I get called a dyke and a fag and a freak. I throw my lot in with the other misfits. The kids two, three, four years older, and the handful of others my age who get it. The other queer kids, zine-writers, alterna-girls and boys, kids with green hair or shaved heads and nose rings. Theater geeks and Rocky Horror reenactors, bedroom magicians, thriftstore shoppers, delicate cutters, graffiti artists, amateur arsonists, seasoned shoplifters. Riot grrrls and indie rockers, grungy dirtbag skaters, punks and goths and industrial kids, hippies and hardcore hip-hoppers and suburban Rastafarians and all the kids who don’t fit into any one subculture but just love all of it as long as it’s outside the mainstream.
11. Is anyone in the mainstream? RENT will ask, just a couple years later.
—Jessie Lynn McMains, from Reckless Chants #26: I: Forever New (Protection from Binaries, Pt. 2), October 2022
We went to watch Wings Of Desire by Wim Wenders at our local independent cinema since they’re doing a retrospective of his work.
I never had the opportunity to watch it before so I was very happy being able to watch it on the big silver screen (appropriate saying since this film was shot 90% in black and white).
I just wanted to share a quote that I found very interesting (lots of interesting things and thought processes going on in that film but I won’t bombard you with blah-blah).
It’s a quote about borders and it’s even more relevant when you take into account that the film was shot in Berlin in 1987, 2 years before the Berlin Wall was torn down.
“Are there still borders? More than ever! Every street has its borderline. Between each plot, there's a strip of no-man's-land disguised as a hedge or a ditch. Whoever dares, will fall into booby traps or be hit by laser rays. The trout are really torpedoes.
Every home owner, or even every tenant nails his name plate on the door, like a coat of arms and studies the morning paper as if he were a world leader.
Germany has crumbled into as many small states as there are individuals. And these small states are mobile. Everyone carries his own state with him, and demands a toll when another wants to enter. A fly caught in amber, or a leather bottle. So much for the border.
But one can only enter each state with a password. The German soul of today can only be conquered and governed by one who arrives at each small state with the password. Fortunately, no one is currently in a position to do this.
So... everyone migrates, and waves his one-man-state flag in all earthly directions. Their children already shake their rattles and drag their filth around them in circles.”
I just find it very interesting how state borders and personal borders are mentioned here. How we become estranged from each other and ourselves. And how at the same time, in the digital era, our whole lives may be accessed by anyone or any institution having the right access to your data.
"All my teenage years, I had bottled up anger and grief and promised myself I'd never cry but when I sat down with her hands in my hand and looked her in the eye, all the anger turned into tears. I sobbed for hours and she sat there, rubbing my back. That's when I saw. Growing up is also tearing down walls, it's also letting go of the anger."
This thing, your mouth, its place. It’s what you do when you’re trying not to give yourself away. Not in the way that you do all the time, those empty, greedy grabs for you. I mean the truth of you. The weird, perfect shape of your heart. The one on the outside of your chest.
Once I was scrolling thru naruto fics and saw the tag "buisnessman!Kakashi" and all I could think about was Kakashi being a child businessman, owning all the konoha adults at doing business while wearing an oversized suit and tie. That idea is so fucking funny to me.