judy grahn, from another mother tongue: gay words, gay worlds, 1984
[âMAINTAINING SECRECY
The secrecy some Gay couples maintain about their relationship to each other can reach great extremes. I have known women lovers together for fifteen years who pretend to live separately, going one night to the house of one and the next night to the house of the other, each time carrying the gear, suitcases, changes of clothing they will need for the next day, for the sake of fooling a few family members and straight friends. Other Lesbian couples go to even greater lengths to ensure secrecy. One couple has lived together for nine years and also works together in the same office, where they are so fearful of being discovered as lovers and lifetime mates that they pretend not to know each other at all.
When I was working in a laboratory as a medical technician, I had a clear lesson in the secrecy of the closet. Six of us were standing around getting ready to take off our white coats and go home for a day, when one woman told an ugly anti-Gay joke. She was a young aide in training to do minor tests, nowhere near as skilled as the rest of us, and she had recently been married; no one expected her to stay long at her job. The point of her joke was See-how-stupid-and-wrong-faggots-are. It made me sick inside to hear it, but following the rule of appearing heterosexual or else, from years of habit and the desire to stay employed and reasonably accepted among my co-workers, I obediently pretended to laugh.
As I did so my eyes met the sparkling blue eyes of our boss, a man who had worked his way up to become the chief laboratory technician of the hospital. In his fifties, he had never married and was continually teased as "most eligible bachelor.â His eyes flashed into mine now as, mouths guffawing, we acknowledged with a special look that straight people simply had to be indulged, that that was a part of The Life. My eyes flicked from him to his lover Robert, a technician like myself and a friend of mine. Large, broad-shouldered, and with his short hair plastered to his skull, Robert looked as if the word straight was invented just to describe him. He and I were teased in the laboratory for going out together, which we occasionally did as a front. But I knew Robert and our boss had been lovers for several years and owned a business together outside the laboratory, operating it on weekends; I had been there to have dinner with them.
From Robertâs distorted, pretending-to-laugh face, my gaze passed to another technician, Rita. She was beautiful, graceful, smart and gutsy. She had recently led all of us in a strike for better wages. The highly skilled Rita was head of the bacteriology department and a specialist in her work. I had a terrific crush on her at the time, and now to my disgust here she was pretending to howl at the rude joke, and so was her lover Alberta who stood next to her with her coat on, ready to go home. The two Lesbians worked together in the laboratory, owned a house and a couple of horses, having lived together for at least ten years. I closed my mouth and stopped laughing. I was too astonished at what my eyes had registered: Of six people standing in the laboratory laughing at a vicious anti-Gay joke, five were Gayâ everyone except the woman who had told the joke. The walls of the closet are guarded by the dogs of terror, and inside of the closet is a house of mirrors.â]
hi friends i am newly overwhelmed by the “i’m not gonna tell anybody” from crowley after job
like. we the audience know crowley obviously isn’t going to, but in verse?? like?? crowley could get HUGE kudos for tempting an angel. he got that angel!! to LIE!! to OTHER ANGELS!! he could be hell’s HERO. and aziraphale HAS to know this. crowley could be a legend in hell for seeking credit for this.
but he doesn’t.
he keeps aziraphale’s secret, keeps the knowledge of what aziraphale considers his biggest failure to himself. he doesn’t even really react to it, doesn’t tease aziraphale further for “falling.” he dismisses it with an easy “i won’t tell them. you won’t tell them. everything’s okay.”
like
the fact that a demon grants a kind of grace that heaven would NEVER has me crawling facedown on the floor like a slug leaving a trail of tears
And it’s so casual!
He just states it as fact that nobody will know and they won’t. He won’t betray Aziraphale that way and would (probably) do everything in his power to prevent him from falling (if I guess the measurement of falling requires reporting). That’s a powerful gesture, even more grand than saving him from Nazis. It’s the first time, probably, that Aziraphale has been given safety and assurance that he is cared about.
And Crowley did it.
Like it was nothing.
(because, to Crowley, it was the easiest thing in the world to offer him)
My advice when folks are struggling with writing in the third-person omniscient is
to Lemony Snicket it up. Give your omniscient narrator strong opinions
about what’s going on. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that the
third-person omniscient perspective must also use the objective voice;
those are two separate things, and many of the most popular and successful writers who’ve written in the third-person omniscient do not, in fact, use the objective voice.
“Willingness to admit the narrative has a voice” is, I think, a big part of what makes young adult literature so much more engaging than a lot of books marketed at adults, particularly adult men.
“Lemony Snicket it up” is a very good phrase and very good advice
I also favor the Eric Nylund approach, per Mortal Coils, where the Snicketing takes place in footnotes, as if this is a history textbook.
As a trans-masc non-binary person, I saw myself in Allan. Iâm a boy but not a Ken, Iâm Ken-like but not quite.
Allanâs role of being awkward, unsure and a little out of his element but still trying to help the Barbies through the chaos and events caused by the Kens, is how I feel as a trans-masc person who is still trying to advocate for women and discuss the issues they face.
I donât identify as a woman anymore but I still grew up as a girl, I lived as a young woman for 14 years, and people continue to be misogynistic towards me when they think I am oneâ customers will talk to my male coworkers instead of me, when Iâm the person with the answers
I wasnât expecting to see myself, in terms of gender, in the character often described as Kenâs boyfriend, though it is said in a more playful, joking way rather than any attempt at representation. Iâm gay and this version of Allan is definitely queer as well. Yet, thatâs a separate story which has already been written, hereâs an excellent article about that. [LINK]
Allan isnât Ken, and he isnât Barbie either. Allan is simply Allan, an idea with both masc and femme traits. He doesnât fit into anything specific, he just is. Allan can wear Kenâs clothes but also Barbieâs pink jumpsuitâ but when heâs not doing that undercover mission with the Barbies, we only ever see him wearing his own clothes. A set of clothes worn only by him, that iconic striped outfit that is signature to the real Allan doll.
Additionally, notice the horse patch on the front of his shirt, he never changed his clothes unlike the rest of the Kens when they discovered the patriarchy and a new version of masculinity, a toxic and destructive one. Allan only added something to his clothes to âfit inâ or act as if he did, but he hated what the Kens did to Barbieland. He also wasnât brainwashed and never acted upon those destructive abilities that were laid out for him. He couldâve just joined the Kens and broke stuff and drank copious amounts of âbrewskisâ but he didnât.
Allan is different and itâs constantly stated, âthereâs only one Allanâ in this world of Kens (and Barbies).
I will never be Ken nor will I ever be a Barbie again, Iâm not happy in either. Iâve tried both, neither is my style (or title). I wear Kenâs clothes as well as Barbieâs, and sometimes I wear Allanâs.
But, I like Allanâs clothes best, they fit me well.
Obsessed with the fact that Crowley is always careful to say âfor Satanâs sakeâ or âwhere the Heavenâ or âfor Hellâs sakeâ rather than anything that might show deference to Heaven, BUT when Aziraphale starts to reject him at the end of episode 6, heâs so distraught that he slips up and says âoh God.â
And by âobsessed,â I mean Iâm going to jump out a window
In case anyone isnât aware, connections like that are literally called âillegalâ techniques in LEGO parlance.
Illegal building techniques are ones that arenât allowed in official LEGO sets, which always use building techniques designed for and intended by LEGO. The reason theyâre called illegal is because they stress the blocks in a way they werenât intended for, causing various kinds of material failure overtime.
As an example, the blocks in the example above slowly deform over time because, slowly warping until they donât connect very well to other blocks or each other.
• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out – we don’t serve your type.”
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar – fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony
