Author: Madeira Darling

Madeira Darling is a snarky mystic, devout Satanist, serious Marxist, laughing dominatrix, and writer from San Fransisco where they live with their boyfriend in a house full of altars to their various demons.

Hey Tumblr’s Writing Community

teratomarty:

thepeacockangel:

Do you guys have any tips on writing in ways that sound like they’ve been translated from other languages?

I’m writing something that needs to sound like it was translated into English from first or second century Coptic (and was originally in Greek or Aramaic)

Translations are not tidy! Use ellipses for parts of the text that were lost, have alternate possible translations in brackets (i.e. “she raised the hammer [sword, pestle]…”). A lot of early writing was more like shorthand or notes-to-self rather than proper joined-up conceptualison, so feel free to dispense with articles, prepositions, and the like. If there’s a concept you really want to get across, write up a paragraph explaining it, print it out, run it through a paper shredder, and then paste it back together any old how.

Thank you, it’s supposed to be an additional Nag Hammadi manuscript

Pennywise didn’t even kill a gay man, homophobes attacked him without being under Penny’s influence and then Penny ate him. That’s what he does. He eats people. It don’t matter if theyre gay or not lol. What you want him to do, say “oh no this free meal is a gay dude I can’t eat him bc thatd be Extra problematic :o(” I’m a gay dude and the gay penny jokes are funny who cares. I love gay villains and monsters

iwilleatyourenglish:

skarchomp:

skarchomp:

WHAT I WANT IS FOR IDIOTS LIKE YOU TO STOP LITERALLY TAKING THE OLDEST FUCKING HOMOPHOBIC TRICKS IN THE BOOK AND PLAY IT OFF AS CUTE HOW FUCKING HARD IS THIS TO UNDERSTAND YOU ABSOLUTE MORONS

PENNYWISE’S “PROBLEMATIC FREE MEAL” WAS INSPIRED BY A REAL-LIFE HATE CRIME YOU FUCKING DICKHEAD

this is long but stick with me, because we need to remember Charlie Howard.

Charlie Howard moved to Bangor, Maine during the early 80s. he was proudly gay and discriminated against because of it.

he was kicked out of a club for dancing with a man and assaulted by a woman in a supermarket, who yelled slurs at him. his kitten was found strangled on his porch.

on July 7th, 1984, as Charlie left a potluck with a friend, a car full of teenagers–3 boys, 2 girls–pulled up beside them. Charlie was chased down by the boys, brutally beaten, and called slurs. he had severe asthma and began having an attack. the boys dangled him over a bridge and, when he begged for his life because he couldn’t swim, they pried his hands off of the railing and threw him over. his friend fled to pull a fire alarm, but, by the time authorities got there, it was too late: Charlie had drowned. he was 23.

the murderers left the crime scene to attend a party, where they bragged about what they had done. they were minors and all the boys served under two years. the girls faced no chargges for not reporting the crime and helping the murderers leave the scene. the memorial in honor of Charlie that now stands beside the bridge has been defaced with homophobic slurs on numerous occasions. he’s dead and people still want to spit on his ghost.

Stephen King says that this crime is what woke him up to the violence faced by LGBT+ people. as a straight man, he had had the privilege of not having to think about this issue and says that this complacency and ignorance is what led to Charlie’s murder.

King included a fictionalized version of the murder in IT. in the novel, a gay man named Adrian is brutally beaten and thrown off a bridge as his boyfriend watches. he barely survives the fall and Pennywise is waiting for him at the bottom, drawn by the fear, suffering, and hatred. It crushes the still living Adrian’s ribs and bites him while taunting Adrien’s boyfriend, before dragging Adrian into the sewers.

It revels in the event and uses an image that is explicitly linked to the hate crime to torment Adrian’s boyfriend. this moment is there to make a clear statement: the homophobic murder of an innocent gay men is an act of pure, depraved evil. the embodiment of evil literally kills Adrian to conclude the hate crime.

Pennywise/It is also fueled by acts of racism, antisemitism, sexual violence, domestic abuse, and child abuse. he is monstrous in every sense, and often meant to represent the real bigotry and violence faced by children and marginalized people.

tl;dr: Stephen King was so horrified by the brutal murder of Charlie Howard, an innocent gay man, that he included a recreation of the hate crime in his book and added Pennywise to comment on the pure evil of homophobia and Charlie’s murder.

Also I Am SO Careful

With my phrasing when I’m writing about politics so as to make sure I’m not misconstrued.  I see a lot of even pretty decent people who definitely didn’t say anything actually bad getting dog piled not even for using “politically incorrect” terminology, but just like phrasing things in an unclear or even just a slightly unfashionable way and it’s just like “I don’t think this is how we win” you know what I mean?

And like I’ve found that basically, you can say nearly anything in nearly any space if you know how to phrase it for your audience and get a good or at least not a bad response and it’s just… ridiculous to me that that’s how politics works.

The fact that fashionable terminology within LGBTQ circles changes back and fourth and like which identities are fashionable shifts from era to era suggests to me that sometimes changes in terminology have less to do with political progress than with fashion and a sort of weird semi-magical belief that if we found the perfect terminology material circumstances would change.

A few years ago queer was the THING TO BE and identifying as lesbian or bisexual was unfashionable… and before that identifying as a lesbian was THE THING TO DO and it’s just like… IDK it feels like a substitute for actual liberation like if we said our right words the straight/cis folks would leave us alone, but like as much as I understand the theoretical shifts that have lead to the linguistic shifts… it doesn’t work that way.

If You Are A Leftist

Liberals and others are going to attack you, not just from points of view they know you find abhorrent, but from within.

Especially in the US.  COINTELPRO was and remains intensely effective.  If you are a leftist, do you really think capitalism isn’t clever enough to figure out that attacking head-on isn’t the way to destroy our organizations?

They know what issues we worry about.  They know to accuse us of misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia, ableism, even liberalism because they know that that’s shit that can actually divide us, that those accusations will actually stick and matter within our communities.  Tarring effective organizers with those labels works, because those labels are actually things we abhor and accusations of those kinds are very difficult to refute. 

Which is not to say that those issues or accusations should be ignored, just that the guilt on accusation and the “no one is redeemable” purity politics I see happening a lot are not a way to win.