please, please create fat characters who are good.
who are strong, who are fast, who are desirable, who are hard workers, who aren’t obsessed with food, who aren’t stupid, who aren’t villains, who get a happy ending.
create fat characters who are as amazing as the fat people you know and love in real life. representation in media does matter.
Have y'all read the webcomic I did with my partner “Dead City”?
The story follows Mikael (left) and JP (right) in a post-apocalyptic Toronto. After being alone for some time, the two happen upon each other, survive together, and fall for one another. Complete with a happy ending.
JP is a big guy and he’s seen as handsome, smart and hardworking. And while he does likes to cook (because I like to cook), there’s more to him than just that one quality.
Michelle and I really wanted to give him a lot of the spotlight. I have so much art of him here on tumblr to show off how cute he is and how much I love him and want to tell the world about him!
I think the only person I’ve met in real life with 100% career satisfaction was this gal I knew who was a presenter at a children’s science museum and delivered every line like she was running a WWE match. Every time you passed the room where she was giving a presentation, you’d hear something like “WHO’S READY FOR CEPHALOPODS?!?” and the kids would go absolutely nuts cheering.
thinking about middle aged gay love is like. we have a future and we have time
my mother divorced my father when i was 7. it wasn’t because she was gay, though she did discover this later (another reminder that it’s okay to find out who you are at 40, at 50, etc, and also for who you are to change) but because she had thought he was the great love of her life and he turned out to be a shitty person.
my mother married my ma when i was 11. i think they do have a great love. i think they love each other the way you can when you’re middle aged – having seen the world, being able to see each other’s flaws, knowing themselves. they see each other in full, and they love each other and the world for it.
they dance on the street to buskers (very embarrassing when you’re twelve; very cute when you look back on it as an adult). i shit you not – they pass me their purses and dance on the sidewalk, laughing. i thought was something that only happened in movies.
my ma makes my mother eggs every morning because my mother can’t cook for shit. my mother presses my ma’s work blazers for her because my ma still can’t figure out how to work the new iron.
when it was warm, high-school me would wake up on the weekends and wander downstairs to find them sitting in the backyard in the sun, drinking coffee together and splitting the newspaper in a surgical, exact process since they’d worked out who wanted which sections years ago.
my mother is happier than she’s ever been. my ma, too. there is a future out there for every gay person who’s always known they’re gay, like my ma, and for everyone who figures it out later, like my mother. there’s time.
they’re growing old together. i cannot express to you how much they are leading happy lives, loving each other, with a huge family surrounding them. i cannot express to you how much they have this beautiful future that they are living and will live.
i want you to know, if you don’t have any older gays in your life: they’re out there. and they’re living these full, happy lives.
sometimes i look to my moms and i think, i want a life like yours. and looking at them makes me believe i will get it.
THAT FABRIC IS NOT CALLING TO YOU! LEAVE IT ALONE!
boy it’s me the textiles speaking to you inside your head. you need the yarn. you need thread. your soul hungers to participate in the act of creation. you must feed it. you must buy so many beads.
One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play’s dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It’s one of my favourites for two reasons:
It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn’t catch you.