Queer Stuff

Such a good performance of Venus. Especially how she changes up the last chorus. The whole idea of a celestial ball where you call up each planet to perform is something I'd love to try in real life or draw in art. The culture did her so dirty tbh, she was getting fucked on by women while performing Heavy Metal Lover for the Born This Way Ball back in the early 2010s, when nobody in the mainstream even knew what a ball was.

Speaking of. This is my desired aesthetic, the church and sci-fi and then the leather, which is a frequent fav of hers. It's in the Judas and Alejandro music videos too, the latter of which I used to watch over and over on my grandmother's TV.

I trust this guy with my life. Also he has an archive of hanky code and non-fetish leather gear. I adore the aesthetics, feel and look of leather, and it has a lot of aesthetic overlap with my other communities of interest.
"According to Gabi Delgado-López of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, the duo who adopted an aesthetic of black leather and military paraphernalia in the early 1980s was inspired by the male homosexual sado-masochistic scene and is not meant to represent 'machismo ideology' but part of a 'role.'"
The website gallery is down :(. So, Internet Archive it is!
"I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it." I want this, both on the giving and receiving end. Obvious penetration imagery here, which appeals to me too.
I re-read this book every couple of months, and every time I find something new. I was assigned Lorde by my lesbian high school history teacher, who knew I was 1. bisexual and 2. of Black Caribbean descent. (Don't get too excited, it's just a quarter and I'm not Grenadian like Lorde is). I did my final project on a few poems by her and also read Zami for the first time. Her relationship with Muriel was eerily similar to what I was dealing with at the time--my first lesbian relationship and first serious relationship overall. "Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful." I find this notion common in queer relationships as a whole. We think that access to the forbidden and desired will fix everything. That there's really greener grass. That's not always how it goes. As she says, you can't free yourself from the problems of the dominant society by being part of a sub or counterculture.