If You Aren’t Cisgender Heteroromantic Heterosexual, You Belong In The Queer Community. I’m Sick

Thanks, this is exactly what I needed today, it’s been a very fun day and you provided the cherry on top. It’s super sweet and your writing is gorgeous.

Hiya, can I get why are you in a tree for Kai and Irene please? Thanks.

“Why are you in a tree?” Li Ming asked, looking up at Irene and Kai perched on a thick tree branch.

“Why aren’t you in a tree?” Kai replied, Irene had a book in her hands and Kai had been reading it over her shoulder. They’d moved apart slightly when they’d heard Li Ming coming. Kai’s arms had been around her middle with his cheek on her shoulder before hand.

“Are you stuck?” He frowned.

“No, but Irene may be.” Kai replied, poking Irene in the side. She slid her bookmark in between the pages and turned to him with a sniff.

“I am more than capable of getting out of a tree.” She replied, then she looked down at Li Ming. “Is there something that you needed off one of us, Lord Li Ming?”

“His majesty Ao Shun is looking for prince Kai. I will let him know that he’s stuck up a tree.” Li Ming said, before bowing, and disappearing back into the large orchard that was over looked by one of the more luxurious palaces that Irene had seen.

“I suppose that I should see what that is about.” Kai sighed. Irene slipped the book into her bag. “But I will come and find you once we are done?”

“I’ll probably have to start getting ready for tonight soon.” Irene said. “But I will see you then.” Kai smiled before leaning in to kiss her.

“I will see you there, you’re going to be the most beautiful woman there, I already know it.” Irene rolled her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you will be, you don’t need make up or fine dresses to look beautiful. You just need a good book and your eyes light up.”

“You are too kind.” She replied.

“No, I’m not. It’s like… like watching the sunrise. Watching you light up is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen and I could sit and watch you read all day.”

“Sadly we have duties. You should see to your uncle before he sends Li Ming back out here.” Kai slipped one arm underneath her thighs and the other around her shoulders. Irene laced her fingers around the back of his neck and shut her eyes as Kai jumped down from the tree.

There was a rush of air against her face and then they landed and Kai set her on her feet. She opened her eyes again. “I will see you soon.” She said softly. “Don’t keep me waiting tonight, you’re my dance partner after all.”

“I get a dance?”

“You’ll get two if you ask nicely.”

Reblog to make a white gay big mad

Yess! These all sound dead brill would love to read or write this.

18th Century Manners

I love Regency Romance, don’t get me wrong, it’s one of my all-time favourite genres, but I really feel like there are not enough people who appreciate the non-romance shenanigans that the rigid code of politeness in force in Approximate-Regency-Period England allows. Where are the stories about:

1. Someone accidentally wanders into the wrong social group without realizing it, Certain Things are never openly discussed, ergo two discreetly gay dudes have been effectively members of a smuggling operation for like 4 years without anyone noticing the misunderstanding. A Discreet Communication Carried For A Friend is a  Discreet Communication Carried For A Friend, after all. 

2. Elderly matriarch of large and successful family is discovered on her death to be the widow of the wrong Sir Henry, at no point did anyone notice because It’s Rude To Pry, entire family has been slavishly obeying the whims of a completely unrelated stranger for 30 years purely because she turned up and announced that she was Eccentric Uncle Henry’s widow. 

3. Trans dude makes his first foray out in male attire, meets a bunch of Lively Young Gentlemen while out drinking, they’re friends now, his entire made-up-on-the-spot backstory is accepted without question, nobody questions him for the next 50 years because he’s Lord So-and-so’s Dear Chum and therefore is just presumed to have been vetted at some point. Once or twice a Fellow Chum finds out, is mildly shocked, and then Never Speaks Of It Again Because One Does Not. 

4. Being a werewolf is HELL when it takes 2-3 hours to get dressed to socially acceptable standards and all the best parties are on full moon nights so people can see to drive home. 

5. Angry ex shows up to be poisonously sweet at a party, it is Literally Unthinkable to be so rude as to tell them to leave. 

6. All your friends are 100% down to help each other cover up a scandal. So far your friends-group has concealed 1 lesbian affair, 2 het affairs, smuggling, extortion, and 2 murders. 

7. Being an obnoxious old lady is super fun when everyone else is too polite to Sass You Back. You eventually find a stroppy young woman who drops even sicker burns than you do and adopt her as your heir. 

Remus and Lily had the best friendship and nothing can change my mind

I’m really enjoying learning about your ocs, they’re super cool! That last line is so great, I love it!

Evangeline’s London

The street was slick from the rain that had awoken her in the early hours of the morning. Filthy puddles collected at the edge of the road, the surface streaked rainbow from the oil dripping off the cabs as they splashed through them.

The smog swirled around her as she walked along, it never really faded, except for maybe in the summer, when the sun managed to break through the clouds and warm the city. But in the dead of winter, most days were dark, and they stayed dark all throughout the day, even at noon when the sun should have been shining through.

She brushed past people, the people were as gloomy as the city was, all dressed in heavy coats of dark colours, all greys and browns and blacks. Her dark green coat was the only colour as she cut through them. Other than the whispers between people and the squeaking wheels of the cabs, there was no sound on the streets. There wasn’t open conversation, people did not talk to each other as they walked, they murmured apologies if they bumped into people, and then continued on, heads down.

Most of the people wore something to cover their mouths, no one wanted to breathe in the foul-smelling smog, it made people cough and wheeze. Evangeline had wound her scarf around her face, over her mouth and nose, and she wasn’t the only one to do that, a lot of the other people did it too. When it got too hot for her to wear a scarf then she’d wear a veil, the scarf did a better job of filtering out the smell and taste of the air, but it was uncomfortable.

It wasn’t a short walk to work, nearly an hour, weaving through the people and hurrying across the busy roads, everyone always seemed to have a place to be, somewhere that they were going to, and not all of them had regard for others, and Evangeline found herself jostled, she was stronger than she looked though and she didn’t stumble as she simply carried on walking, knocking them out of her way.

She didn’t like the trains, didn’t like the heaving crowds that poured in and out of the underground stations. And besides, she didn’t mind walking to work, she could stop off for breakfast and coffee at the small café not too far from the office, ducking in for a quick cup of black coffee and whatever pastries that they had available for the day.

London didn’t stop. It didn’t ever stop. There was always something being done, and there was always a job to do. There were always crimes for her to investigate and solve, criminals to chase down and to stop. London was a city that was full of life, teeming with it. It was like there was a wheel, turning, pushing London on and on, no matter what horrific story was splashed on the front page of the newspaper: ‘Man murdered in Covent Garden, police searching for masked man’, according to the man selling them on the corner of the street at least.

It was a dark and dreary city, all greys and browns and blacks, and it was so alive.

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

Nico being happy is just so wonderful! It’s like my baby you are alright now go spread your wings and be gay somewhere.

Solangelo is good for the soul,, happy pride month i love all yall fellow lgbters

This is super gorgeous!

And, you think, one day— soon—you’ll be able to kiss him under the sun, too.

~~~

Soft boys on a late-night rendezvous, eighth year. (click image for better quality!)

Fact: Today (September 23rd) is bisexuality awareness day. Be aware of bisexuals. They are dangerous.