Donna Gottschalk’s “Brave, Beautiful Outlaws” is opening at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art on Aug. 29. While Ms. Gottschalk doesn’t identify as a documentary photographer or a photojournalist, she has been making pictures since she was 17. Photos selected from her 50-year personal archive will be made public for the first time.
Her work documents her closeness with her working class family and her involvement with the radical lesbian, sometimes separatist, communities in the late ’60s and ’70s.
The photos are tinged with mourning and mystery. She’s been holding their memory for decades, “fiercely protective” and unwilling to “subject them to scrutiny, judgment and abuse” from the outside world.
”Understand, people didn’t care about them or my pictures of them back in the day,” she said. “These people were all very dear to me, and they were beautiful. These pictures are the only memorial some of these people will ever have.”
I started using semicolons when I saw some master writers use them expertly. I HATED how my writing sounded with either super long contrived sentences mixed with abrupt split sentences. Semi-colons were the savior I had to level-up to know how to use; em dashes too.
The thing with telling “cliche” stories, but with representation, is… these stories aren’t cliche for us.
Picture this. The people at the table next to you have been getting chocolate cake as a dessert for YEARS. After every meal, they get a chocolate cake. Now, it’s been years, and the people at that table can barely stand chocolate anymore. They want maybe a cheesecake. Or lemon mousse.
But your table? Has NEVER had chocolate cake. Mousse is also good, but you are SO hungry for that chocolate cake, cause you never had it before, and it’s brand new for you, and you’ve been watching the other table eat it for YEARS.
That’s what’s like getting a “cliche” story that’s representative. Has it been done a million times before? Yes. Has it ever been done for US? Well… no. Maybe it’s the 500th chocolate cake in existence, but all the other chocolate cakes weren’t meant for us (girls/PoC/queer folk/disabled folk/etc)
So it being cliche is not a bad thing. You may not want chocolate cake anymore. But we want our slice too.
if you want to live to die in a different battle then you have to stay clean
This also suggests that orcs have some of the best healers and physicians in the world, and they will even make any resulting scars look badass as hell, free of charge.
yes!! I was actually gonna do a continuation of this post regarding that
Somewhat tangential brainstorm since this tag stood out to me:
#how are u supposed to fight if youre very dead
Necromancy, obviously, but there are at least two ways of looking at it:
1) Necromancy is great because you can keep fighting after you die, and thus would be encouraged among orcish society.
2) Necromancy is not good enough because you’re literally a brain-dead zombie, and where’s the fun in that?
A possible middle route would be reanimating shamed and disgraced orcs, since they never did anything worthwhile in life so maybe they can do something worthwhile in death and freeing up other able-bodied orcs for war. Obviously, such undead orcs would be used very carefully or limited to fully-scrubbed skeletons because of the disease risks.
If necromancy was acceptable, then orcs would have some of the best necromancers in the world, and if retaining enough self-awareness to continue being an honorable warrior was a concern, then orcish necromancy would have a lot of useful techniques for creating intelligent or semi-sapient undead. Even unintelligent orcish-made undead would some measure of innate understanding of martial honor.
I imagine that this would be a topic of considerable debate and controversy among orcs and really would depend on which orcish society you ask.
you are so right
1) This SERIOUSLY reminds me of Vikings.
2) Orcs who died dishonorably being burned instead of buried, to kill whatever germs killed them. Reanimated skeletons are charred black. They are used for harvesting crops, which doesn’t require too much ability to think (if it looks like this pick it if it looks like that leave it there). As they walk the fields, their blackened bones flake and leave behind black bone dust, fertilizing the crops. Their job is done when the skeleton disintegrates. They have fed the clan, and regained their honor.
Big Gay Dracula Does a Shitpost 