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Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 13
Ryoko Kui
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The Other A in LGBTQIA+: An Introduction to the Aromantic Community, in Our Own Words
Aurea Aurea
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minsuni commented on crybabybea's review of Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
At times idyllic and supremely dramatized, often vibrant and jubilant, Marsha is a biography that refuses the usual tragedy-centered framing of historical queer and trans figures, but sometimes replaces tragedy with sainthood.
Marsha was often called Saint Marsha for her radical community care and protection, and as such, Marsha toes the line of hagiography. For some reason though, I can't bring myself to totally hate it.
Marsha is someone who is often defined by her suffering, often pushed into the role of martyrdom. Her legacy is about her activism, yes, but also the life that inevitably led her to activism: her poverty, her struggle, her death. In Marsha, Tourmaline is determined instead to center Marsha's joy.
There are plenty of books that focus on the systemic injustice dealt to trans people, that focus on oppression and violence and the more horrifying statistics and history of queer and trans people. So, much like Marsha's insistence on choosing radical joy and hope in the face of violence, Tourmaline carries that legacy through her own writing.
As much as Marsha is frequently defined by Stonewall and her struggle, it's important not to swing the pendulum too far into the corporatized smiling saint of pride-month inclusion, detached from the sex work, poverty, violence, and survival that made up so much of her life. It's a careful line to walk, to allow someone's life the freedom to be characterized as effervescent and liberated when they faced so much violence and pain.
Tourmaline's framing shines when it leans into more modern radical movements. Particularly, the passages that focused on Marsha's disabilities and placed her within the modern conversation of disability justice and crip care were incredibly expansive in how they painted Marsha's impact as so much larger than we usually see.
However, there are moments where Tourmaline's focus on joy slides into liberalism in a way that sometimes felt disproportionate to Marsha's (and by extension, STAR's) radical legacy. The writing style dips into juvenility, and unfortunately, repeatedly felt like reading a storytime picture book about Marsha rather than a biography that reckons with her flawed and oftentimes painful life.
If anything is sanitized, it's usually due to the flowery writing and saintly elevation favored by Tourmaline that paints every modern reformist change as a radical victory and every moment in Marsha's life as profound and beatific. This framing risks domesticating Marsha's more radical politics, and risks turning her into a figure who can only signify grace, resilience, and radiance.
The real Marsha is more politically valuable than the beatified Marsha precisely because her life does not reduce cleanly into either martyrdom or bliss, revolutionary icon or saint, victim or liberated ancestor. To trust the contradictions is to honor the reality of STAR's politics: radical, survivalist, messy, and yes, joyful.
It is radical and revolutionary to choose care when systems of oppression are built upon isolation and competition, to choose self-expression when those systems insist upon conformity and assimilation. The choice to center joy is not foolish, it is definitively political. It is a response to a historical record that often preserves people through death, scandal, and spectacle. But joy and self-expression are not the full picture of revolution, and not the full picture of Marsha's life.
The problem is not that Tourmaline centers Marsha's joy, but rather that joy can become an interpretive frame that dissolves contradiction, ugliness, pain, anger, addiction, psychosis, survival sex, interpersonal harm, and anti-state radicalism into flower crowns and novena candles.
Truthfully, Marsha is a biography that I found lacking. And yet, I want to forgive it for all of its lack, because it was charged with the sincerely herculean task to be at once an introduction to trans history, a celebration of life, a devotional reclamation and a political biography.
It must serve to introduce, celebrate, correct, mourn, politicize, archive, and inspire all at once. It is a burden uniquely placed on trans historical memory under conditions of scarcity and erasure. Ultimately, Tourmaline handled it with care, and her love for Marsha is overwhelmingly apparent, even to a fault.
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minsuni commented on robyn00's review of Florence Adler Swims Forever
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Florence Adler Swims Forever
Rachel Beanland
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"If you talk like that to her again, Babs," said the golden twin, "I'll destroy you. Beg her forgiveness."
Fighting and insulting your sister but then immediately getting defensive when someone else talks badly to them is such a sibling thing to do 😭
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In a relatively short span, those who had been at the forefront of initiating the movement found themselves forcefully marginalized.
It's so sad to see that the very people who were responsible for the riot that gave strength to queer people to fight for their rights, the people who gave way to the queer rights movement were also the people being pushed back and silenced purely for being black trans people.
Queer people were so desperate to be heard and, at this point, to have the nondiscrimination bill passed, that they flat out excluded gender non-conforming and trans people, while trying to gain a wider support. And considering this was not the first time this had happened, with black trans people having already had been denied presence and refused their voices to be heard at previous gay liberation dance parties. While one good thing came out of this - the creation of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) by Marsha and Sylvia - black trans people kept being discriminated even by queer people.