rocky horror is the worst and is also transmisogynistic can we please finally get over this shit movie
ok but like the writer is transgender nonbinary and the language used in the play was the preferred language by trans people of that time can we not deny parts of our history because we’ve evolved since then thanks
So fucking much this.
PS, youth of today: you’ll be saying the same damn thing about art from this time before too long, for good or for ill. Terminology will, in fact, change. Definitions will, in fact, shift. It always does, they always do.
PPS, it is pretty much impossible to overstate how life-alteringly important this movie was to kids who didn’t conform to standard expectations of gender and sexuality, back in the day. Especially when back in the day was the mid-to-late 1980s, when the only queers you saw on TV were neutered AIDS tragedies, Bowie was playing straight, and even Elton John was married to a woman, and midnight showing of RHPS were pretty much the only place that felt like home. It was mental life raft for a lot of people.
I was one of them.
rocky horror was a lifeline.
y’all have NO IDEA how isolated we were before the internet, before mobile phones. imagine never having an unsupervised conversation with your friends. literally never. you were at school, or you were on the landline in the same room with your parents. imagine never having access to reading material that wasn’t mainstream-published. imagine never seeing a video that wasn’t network tv or hollywood. imagine every single bit of information you had access to being thoroughly filtered and vetted by the majority-mainstream. imagine all this under ronald reagan and margaret thatcher and the ussr and a divided germany, the cold war still threatening to go nuclear and violent religious extremists rising in the middle east, a bunch of dirty little wars festering in central and south america, china gutting mongolia, north korea defiantly starving to death…
it felt like the literal end of the world, and you were completely fucking alone.
and then there was this cultural phenomenon. this unapologetically senseless movie, morbid and silly and full of genderweird and catchy songs and cheesy tropes. the places that did the midnight showings were financially unimportant, out of the way, under the radar, and it was safe to be weird there. you could convince your parents to let you go because you’d go in a group, and since it was at a theater or college cultural center they knew you wouldn’t be drinking and doing drugs and having sex (Just Say No!) and you were technically under adult supervision – but the theater employees were generally college students and didn’t give a fuck as long as you didn’t wreck the place or get arrested.
you could dress up, you could be loud, you could play with gender, you could camp it up and let your hair down. you could be free. and for just one night of the week, you could forget that it was the end of the world.
too lazy; didn’t read: you’re talking out your ass and you need to clench up.
i went to a very open and sexually liberal performing arts highschool in the aughts like twenty years later, and RHPS was still a wonderful thing to experience as a teenager sorting out gender and sexuality issues. i was surrounded by girls trading yaoi comics and boys trading yuri comics and theater kids that had every line of RENT memorized. and i saw RHPS in ninth grade, i think, and made sure to go to showings nearly every year thereafter, at older friend’s parties and at college media screenings and outdoor park showings and in independent theaters. i still go when i can. i think everyone over fourteen or fifteen should. it’s a piece of history and it’s a very vibrantly alive and relevant cultural tradition, and the atmosphere is so weird and so welcoming, and the movie is so profoundly silly. it’s absurd to me that anyone could say we’re done with it.
Bolded, above. I was in uni just as the internet became a way to connect. It was still so new, not yet a part of our lives as fully as it is now.
RHPS was freedom. It was your neighbour’s roommate in gold hot pants and no apologies, being able to kiss your girlfriend in the middle of a crowd and not be attacked, it was corsets on DMABs and three-piece suits on DFABs, and everyfuckingthing was queered. Right there, on stage, in living colour.
It was amazing.
Don’t sneer at the old guard, kidlets. Every generation forges the media it needs at the time.
Always reblog this. Especially now at the 40th anniversary.
Reminder: I grew up in *Manhattan.* My parents, in the grand scheme of things, were pretty liberal and open and accepting.
I still desperately needed RHPS as my place to be weird and discover myself.
It was important, and that importance should not be discounted.
With a large chin, a prominent slightly arched nose and delicate lips, the “face” of England’s King Richard III was unveiled on Tuesday, a day after researchers confirmed his remains had finally been found after 500 years.
A team of university archaeologists and scientists announced on Monday that a skeleton discovered last September underneath a council parking lot in Leicester was indeed that of Richard, the last English king to die in battle, in 1485.
Devotees of Richard, who have long campaigned to restore his reputation, proudly revealed a 3D reconstruction of the long-lost monarch’s head on Tuesday, introducing him to reporters as “His Grace Richard Plantagenet, King of England and France, Lord of Ireland”.
“Anne Bonny and Mary Read were pirates, as renowned for their ruthlessness as for their gender, and during their short careers challenged the sailors’ adage that a woman’s presence on shipboard invites bad luck.”
I’m not entirely sure that the statue really needed to have a tit out.
How dare women try to have nipples.
Actually I’ve seen this before and I can tell you— it’s because these women were bad ass pirates and when they killed someone they’d expose one or both breasts so that when their victim died, (s)he knew that they were killed by a woman.
ACTUALLY Anne Bonny purposely wore loose fitting clothes and displayed her breasts openly at all times during battle – mainly because men were distracted by them, and she took pleasure in killing said men while they were too busy staring at her breasts. Mary Read dressed mainly as a man (after posing as her deceased brother, Mark, for the entirety of her childhood) and both ladies cross-dressed from time to time, hopping between ships. They were known as the ‘fierce hell cats’ due to their ferocious tempers, and were key elements to Captain ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham’s crew – they were the only two known female pirates in the Golden Age of Caribbean piracy. IN FACT, when the ship was captured by the British Navy, Anne and Mary were the ONLY TWO pirates who fought while the males of the crew hid – they were all tried to be hung as pirates but Bonny and Read were both pregnant and were pardoned.
Calico Jack was a lover to Bonny, and as he was to be hung, Bonny’s final words to him were, “Had you fought like a man, you need not be hung like a dog.” Bonny and Read were possibly two of the most badass fucking pirates and they were FEMALE. The more you know.
And on top of all that, exposed breasts have a long and storied history of symbolism in art. They mean all sorts of things. The sculptor may have chosen to expose her left breast specifically to denote her courage–her heart is exposed–or to evoke comparison to Amazon warriors, who cut off their right breasts.
I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were. Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together. And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.
On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.
They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.
The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.
Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.
(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)
There’s a lot of bigoted historian dragging on my dash these days and it makes me happy.
Once again, more proof that we queers have ALWAYS been here, and it’s a CHOSEN narrative to erase them.
my favorite thing about march 15th is that all of classics tumblr gathers together and puts aside any differences we may have and makes tons of jokes about the ides of march, almost as if we were a group of senators working together to stab caesar 23 times in the theater of pompey,
on this day, we appreciate julius caesar who, as he fell to the ground after being stabbed 23 times, held his toga in a such a way as not to indecently expose himself
Plume de Lynx 