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stellarbisexual · 6 years

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Unsung Reddie fics

Hey, y’all! There’s sooooo much content for Reddie that a lot of fics slip under the radar and don’t get nearly the amount of love I think they deserve. I try to rec them individually whenever I read them, but I thought I’d start a post as a centralized place to keep them. Not a comprehensive list by far, but I wanted to get this started. I’ll keep adding periodically, so feel free to bookmark/whatever.

UNSUNG REDDIE FIC RECS

heaven isn’t too far away by @reddieforlove

AU. I am an Absolute Sucker for any fic where one person has mental or emotional blocks around sex and turns to the other person to lovingly guide them through it. And this does it so, so, so fucking well. According to the author, it was deeply personal for them to write, and it shows--and frankly, it was deeply personal for me to read, and it really affected me. It’s also joyful and super fucking hot and just wonderful.

with or without you by @bitchin-eds (aka alliegaga on AO3 - you changed your name!)

AU. WIP. Eddie and Bev co-host a radio show where Eddie gives advice to call-in listeners. Eddie is a recovering alcoholic and Richie is an escort, though it’s not the focus of this fic, at least not so far, which is pretty refreshing and interesting. We drop into this story with a Richie and Eddie With History, and I CANNOT GET ENOUGH. Everything this author writes is SUPER emotionally effective, but this is probably my favorite. The inner life of the characters is written super well. Bonus Bev/Eddie friendship <3

all i wanna do is go home with you (but i know i’m out of my mind) by wishie

Flawless, classic Reddie realizing their feelings for each other fic. Eddie POV. Just... wonderful. Excerpt:

“Love you,” Richie says sleepily, and Eddie pauses, a little more awake, because Richie hasn’t said that to him since they were seven at least.

“Love you too?” Eddie says cautiously. Richie beams.

“Cute, cute, cute,” he says, reaching out and pulling Eddie into his arms. “So cute. Did you know my best friend Eddie is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen? So cute. Even though he’s mean and pushes me off the bed.” He buries his nose in the top of Eddie’s head. “Love him to death.”

Eddie’s eyes are wide, searching for something, anything, through the darkness. Darkness. He’s thankful it’s dark. His cheeks are hot and he thinks he just might die and it’ll be all Richie’s fault.

In Over Your Chest is Way Too Deep by @speakslowtellmelove

That Surfing AU. WIP. Seriously, I think speakslow writes the best Richie; everything out of his mouth just crackles, and all their stories would be worth it for how he’s written alone, but everything else is so wonderfully spot-on too. On top of that, this is just a Delightful slow burn UST situation that makes my heart and my loins go pitter-patter. Plus, sexy beachy times. (I love a golden, confident Eddie.)

Lipstick by @trash-the-tozier (aka littleboxesofstars on AO3)

AU. I tend to love everything by this author, so check out their other work, too! While Richie’s trying to convince his parents he Isn’t Gay, he just happens to spot an in-drag Eddie across the street and, thinking he’s actually a girl, stops him and asks him to do him a favor by posing as his girlfriend. You start this one expecting all the cliches, but the author avoids every single one and writes something genuine, effective, and honoring both characters as multidimensional humans. Really unexpected and well done. +side Stenbrough

stop calling, stop calling (i don’t wanna talk anymore) by ironicallyinternational

Awesomely in character Richie, and Eddie’s confession of feelings is one of the best I’ve read in the fandom.

Eddie Chronicles by @nb-richie (shipit)

Angsty as hell Eddie character study, heed the warnings. Gorgeously written.

Telephone by @themightychipmunk

AU. Based on one of the storylines in the film New York, I Love You. Richie is a composer for anime films, and Eddie is the assistant to the director--who often calls him to give notes on the director (Ben)’s behalf. God, I love a neurotic Richie and a (mostly) calm, collected Eds.

youth by oakshields

I’ll just rec this by copying and pasting one of my favorite parts: Richie had shut him up by grabbing the boys smaller face in his hands, bringing his lips in so close Eddie was convinced Richie was going to kiss him. His lips had parted, just slightly, in shock (or anticipation) and oh shit what the fuck, what the - Richie blew the smoke from his lungs right into Eddie's face, right through his parted lips. Eddie had coughed from the shock of it and Richie had laughed, this crazy and beautiful sound and ran his thumb over Eddie's cheekbone before letting go.

Shed Your Skin and Expose Your Bones by @namingtheruins (inoubliable on AO3)

Honestly, I would rec this author’s entire oeuvre, as it doesn’t get nearly enough love and it’s always motherfucking consistent.

This one takes a simple premise - Richie takes Eddie’s virginity - and makes it impossibly sweet and hot and hits you right in the fucking feels. Richie is sweet and concerned, and Eddie is inexperienced yet bold and demanding, and I am here. for. it.

only love could ever hit this hard by @reddieforlove

I fucking love a bottom Richie, and this is exceptionally well done.

Careful Creature Made Friends with Time by @namingtheruins (inoubliable on AO3)

AU. Selkie!Eddie. Gorgeously written, like a fairytale. Just lovely.

Scorpion Grasses by @pimpedoutgreenears

Mostly canon compliant, follows the Losers through the end of high school and Eddie and Sonia moving to NY. This fic fucking GUTTED me, especially the last chapter, which focuses on all the Losers anticipating forgetting each other and Eddie PREPARING to forget everyone. I was a bucket of tears the whole time I read it. This will break your heart, and if you relate to Eddie’s relationship with his mother (like I do), it will kill you, be forewarned. Super, super effective.

takes one to know one by @trash-the-tozier (littleboxesofstars on AO3)

Another perfect, classic Reddie realizing their feelings fic. Canon divergent, in that Richie joins the Losers later than in book/movie canon.

*Aged up-30s/40s-Reddie* recs

Lovesong by the wonderful @waxagentwrites - a sprawling, novel-length WIP that spans decades. The latest section of the series (Seven Nation Army) takes place with all the Losers around 40 and receiving the dreaded phone calls from Mike. Canon divergent and what that means for the canon major character deaths is still TBD, but there’s PTSD/Pennywise stuff all up in here. Even if that’s not your jam, this is beyond worth it for the amazing characterization, writing, and breathtaking aged up established Reddie, who are soulmates and intensely in love and just can’t get enough of each other.

*Seriously, this is my #1 Reddie fic by far - it hits every emotional note, and it is an Event whenever it updates. I drop anything and everything to read it. It’s that good.

Reunion by @richie-trashbrak (whyyyy can’t I tag you) :(

Slightly canon divergent. Richie returns to reunite with the Losers and face It again. Eddie’s closeted and in an unhappy marriage to Myra.

give the past a slip by brodayhey

Canon divergent. Gets me right in the feels. On his way to a live show for his popular podcast, Richie stumbles into a person from his past (Eddie), and they remember each other. Excerpt: Richie bent his head to kiss Eddie again. Eddie walked him forward, so that his back hit the wall. It was cold through his tee shirt. They kissed fiercely, Eddie biting on his lips, hard. The remember me was felt, not said.

Fight Club by @namingtheruins (aka inoubliable on AO3) - part of a much larger, wonderful series Skin&Earth - this is *canon compliant*, and as their tag says, you know what that means. Get ready to cry.

#fic recs #unsung reddie #reddie #stephen king's it #it 2017 #it 1990

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thelgbtarchives · 7 years

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Rosie the LGBT Riveter

Mathew Scott

Newsweek Global, 6/20/2014, Vol. 162 Issue 24

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/20/rosie-lgbt-riveter-254508.html

This article discusses LGBT people in the United States during WWII, specifically lesbians and woman-loving women in the women’s workforce and gay men/men-loving men in the military, with some mentions of gender identity. While it is not written in first person or directly by an LGBT+ person, it speaks to and has interviews from LGBT+ people.

Bev Hickok remembers the deafening noise, the ceaseless mechanical hammer blows of women riveting airplanes together. She remembers how everyone smoked on breaks and that all the women wore pants. But mostly she remembers the friends, the women who invited her to sit with them at lunch her first day on the assembly line at Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, California, in 1942.

"Evidently they took one look at me and said, 'There's another one,'" says Hickok, now 94. They apparently recognized her as one of their own -- a lesbian.

World War II has long been viewed by historians as an important moment in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history in America. During the war years, millions of young men left their homes and small towns for the military, living in a same-sex environment where they were exposed to a greater variety and volume of people than they had previously known. Women also left their homes, to work in factories and live in same-sex settings under similar conditions. Some homosexuals were not necessarily declaring they were gay or lesbian, says John D'Emilio, a history and gender and women's studies professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "But it creates a space where it's safer and easier to find other people like you and in which there's also -- both in military and homefront -- more tolerance, because it's the war and we're all working together."

It was a watershed moment in LGBT history, but public historian Donna Graves says most people and places that talk about World War II do not acknowledge it. "There's a national D-Day museum in New Orleans -- they don't touch this," she says.

Since the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park was established in Richmond, California, earlier this century, Graves has been pushing for the inclusion of LGBT stories. In March the park finally announced a campaign to collect some of those stories for a 2015 traveling exhibit. While recent decades have seen the inclusion of LGBT history in specialized courses and venues, what the Rosie the Riveter park is doing is "pioneering" says Graves, the project's lead historian and an exhibit consultant. "It's one thing for a local entity to document their history, and it's another when a federal agency decides this is really an important story to tell."

Both D'Emilio and Graves view the Rosie LGBT campaign as part of a recent trend within the federal government to openly recognize LGBT people. This can be seen in attempts by the National Historic Landmarks Program and the National Register of Historic Places to acknowledge buildings and landmarks significant to LGBT history. Two cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are conducting studies to document such places of historic importance.

That much of this effort is happening in San Francisco -- long a gay mecca -- is not surprising. The Rosie the Riveter park, located across the bay in Richmond, was founded on the idea that the stories of American civilians on the World War II homefront are complex. From the beginning, a variety of stories have been included, not all of them happy ones: Japanese internment, African-American segregation and Native American hardship. "We want to explode the myth that it's just the white middle-class woman suddenly taking a job in the factory, that Rosie was so much more," says Elizabeth Tucker, lead park ranger at the Rosie the Riveter park.

Tucker, 47, who has long been interested in the issue, only recently discovered that not a single LGBT story was in the Rosie the Riveter collection. Author Therese Ambrosi Smith found this absence a "glaring omission" and was instrumental in helping launch the LGBT campaign. Smith is donating the proceeds from her novel Wax, which tells the story of lesbian characters in the Richmond shipyards, and $1,000 toward an LGBT exhibit. More money poured into the Rosie the Riveter Trust, the nonprofit that supports the park, and the future exhibit was announced. In acknowledgement of the severe prejudice members of the LGBT community faced during World War II, an anonymous tip line was established.

Bev Hickok's friends made the first call, nominating her.

Arrested for Touching

Hickok was an unlikely "Rosie," a woman working for the war effort. Her mother dressed her in white dresses and gloves, and she belonged to a sorority at the University of California, Berkeley. The people she knew then didn't work in factories. They attended dances where they were expected to find suitable husbands, a ritual Hickok detested so much she paid a fine to her sorority to get out of them.

It was at Berkeley that Hickok first started to recognize that she was more interested in women than men. And it was at Douglas Aircraft that she admitted to herself she was a lesbian.

She initially became a Rosie because it was a way to stay on her own after she finished graduate school in Los Angeles. Her parents weren't pleased, but war work was an acceptable reason for her not to return home. She did the job for two years, in part because it was a world in which gender roles were more flexible. For the first time in her life, she was encouraged to wear pants. She met her first gay couple. She lived with a girlfriend.

But the openness was limited; she had to remain guarded in the outside world. "I found that I had to be secret," says Hickok, a thoughtful woman with a sharp wit. "It was exciting in a way -- this was a secret society."

She isn't sure what would have happened had she been discovered, but she believes the punishment would have been severe, even prison. Back then, you could be arrested for wearing clothing of "the opposite gender," Graves says. You could also be arrested if you were in a bar and dancing or even touching someone of the same sex and police deemed it a homosexual encounter. "People really were living in fear of losing their jobs, their housing -- in the case of someone in military service, of being dishonorably discharged -- and even threats of physical violence," Graves says.

While the abundance of women makes the lesbian tales the easiest to obtain, the LGBT project is also attempting to tell the stories of bisexual, transgender and gay civilians serving on the homefront. Selwyn Jones discovered the danger of being openly gay early on. The war brought Jones, a farm boy from Texas, to Tampa, Florida, where he served as a court reporter on a case that involved the dishonorable discharge of a gay man. Although he was not a civilian at the time, he shared his wartime story with the exhibit because it took place in the U.S. and not overseas. "It certainly was an eye-opener," says Jones, a small bundle of energy whose jeans are held up by black-and-white-checkered suspenders.

A night owl who rarely schedules anything before noon, Jones has lived in San Francisco for decades. At "92 and a half," he has experienced the swing of gay history, ranging from the activist years of San Francisco politician Harvey Milk in the 1970s to the dark years of the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s (a bedroom photo commemorates a lover who died of complications from AIDS). For Jones the story begins during World War II while he was still in the U.S. before shipping overseas. It was then that he heard the word homosexual for the first time. "I was already behaving like one, but I just didn't have that word for it yet," he says. "Being a farm boy from East Texas, I had never read anything."

He was in his early 20 s then, and although he would soon be sent overseas to fight, he was discovering the possibilities, and dangers, of being a gay man in America. After the war, he looked up the man who had been discharged and went to visit him. "I still didn't know many gay men, and I wanted to find out from him what it was all about."

The man took Jones to a bar frequented by both gay and straight men. It was the first time Jones had been to such a place, and the first time he had socialized publicly with an openly gay man.

The Women's Land Army was also a place to discover gay life. The WWII Home Front Oral History Project has collected stories in collaboration with the Rosie the Riveter park. In his story, Jeffrey Dickemann -- known then as Mildred -- describes several encounters with lesbians while spending a summer helping on farms. While one retelling includes the dismissal of a woman known to be a lesbian, others chronicle the relative openness with which some women engaged in same-sex relationships. For Dickemann, as for Hickok and Jones, the period served as an introduction to gay life.

And yet it was not until late in life that Jones and Hickok were able to be completely open about their sexuality, and Dickemann was ready to make the transition to living as a man. Neither Jones nor Hickok ever told their parents about their sexual orientation, and Hickok worried that her employers at the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked as a librarian, would fire her if they found out. Despite the fears and prejudices they once lived with, both believe society is now ready to hear their stories.

In April, at the LGBT campaign kickoff event in Rossmoor, a senior community in Walnut Creek, California, Hickok shared her story. Around 60 people attended, only a handful as old as Hickok, who has mobility difficulties but remains clear-headed and well dressed.

Her sharp wit is also still in place. When talking recently about a gay hairdresser she spent time with while working as a Rosie, she tugged a strand of her short white hair and said, "I could use him now." The hairdresser couldn't understand how Hickok could endure the noisy environment of the aircraft company. But for Hickok it was far better than when she was surrounded by sorority sisters interested only in "dating and marrying a rich man."

Hickok did eventually marry. In 2008, after the California Supreme Court ruled that a law excluding same-sex couples from marriage was unconstitutional -- and before the passage of Proposition 8, which overturned the ruling -- she married her partner, Doreen S. Brand. Hickok has outlived Brand and watched as Americans first fought against and now seem to be largely in favor of same-sex marriages.

In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Prop 8's defenders, once again making it legal for same-sex partners to marry in California. The changes in LGBT rights have been monumental, but Hickok continues to take them in stride, she says, "walking along with it."

#World War II #wwII #u.s history #lgbt history #lgbtq+ history #lesbians #gay men #transgender people #history #thelgbtarchives #lgbtpride #lgbt community

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