Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said “Look I can give you the names, but you’ll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.” And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)
Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.’ We’re going to get rid of them.”
“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’
“And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps’s name may be second, but mine will be first.’
“Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I’ll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.’
“And he said, ‘Forget the order.’
– The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America
I’ve reblogged this before but it didn’t have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.
This is my most favourite of stories about this time period okay ❤
i don’t mean the prevalence of (over?)sharing broad-brush feelings like sadness and anger and love
i mean the ones there are no words for, the ones you thought you were experiencing alone, that turn out to be universal once someone comes up with a way to depict them in a post
take for instance ‘cursed image’ and ‘blessed image’
it’s not that the feeling that describes is new – i guarantee you as far back as like 1978 i have looked at a picture and felt squirmy and uncertain like it changed my brain in a way i didn’t consent to, even though it wasn’t a picture of a bad or scary thing happening.
but it would never have occurred to me to even show such a picture to someone else and elicit their reaction, let alone that the reaction is a thing humanity shares.
it took tumblr’s unique combination of oversharing, relatability-seeking, and memes to stick the caption ‘cursed image’ on, say, a gas mask full of spaghetti, and suddenly we all discovered we knew EXACTLY what they were talking about.
same with ‘blessed image’ – it can’t just be any old cute or nice picture. a kitty touching someone’s hand is just a pet photo. but this
is a blessed image. i can’t put into words why. but you know it is.
i would also like to bring up ‘a real feeling’, the tumblr outgrowth of the general internet ‘that feel when’ meme
‘that feel’ goes for the obviously relatable, like getting dumped, eating food, watching tv, etc; ‘a real feeling’ goes for the stuff so niche that simply mentioning it is evocative, and that it turns out to be relatable is a huge surprise. i tried to find examples but they’re hard to search because ppl don’t tag them. it’s just like, “a real feeling is when you feed a parking meter in ohio and pretend you’re in new york” or “a real feeling is knowing how to float on your back in a pool but you can’t quite bring yourself to stop paddling a little bit anyway” – little glimpses into someone’s life that turn out to be things you’ve experienced, or can imagine so well that you feel like you have.
a lot of the posts i see going around that credit millennials for inventing some form of communication are wrong – y’all are not more sarcastic than gen x, sorry, you just ain’t – but this one? congratulations, you did this, and it’s very cool.
remember being little and thinking dandelions were fun or a pretty color or something and every adult in an 80 mile radius wouldn’t let you say that without screaming ITS A WEED
also like:
dandelions are edible, easy to grow, and are rich in vitamins a, c, k, beta-carotene, calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium
dandelions can be made into wine, tea, soft drinks, and a coffee substitute
they are used in herbal remedies to treat liver and digestive problems and as a diuretic
they’re good for bees!
they make good companion plants for various herbs and tomatoes; their long taproot helps bring up nutrients in the soil and they release ethylene gas which ripens fruit
dandelions secrete latex which means they can be used to make natural rubber
they make great flower crowns
Why ARE they considered a weed? They’re a good flower? Who decided they were bad? =(
You can also make beautiful jelly from the blossoms!
They’re considered weeds because they were a poor person resource and not having them was a status symbol.
Let’s back up.
In Europe dating back to the 1500’s and even earlier, you could only have immaculate manicured lawns if you had just pots of money and were able to own land. So, rich nobility had swaths of land, and they demonstrated their wealth and power by hiring people to physically cut the grass and keep their gardens and dig weeds out of the turf by hand. It was a demonstration of money and power. It said “I can afford to have eight people employed full time just to dig things that aren’t grass out of my grass. I can afford to have all of this land doing nothing. It’s not producing food. People don’t farm it or live on it. I can afford to just grow grass, and have someone tend to that wholly useless crop.”
Fast forward a few hundred years. Europeans come to America. Many of them are from the poorer classes in Europe. Many have never owned land before, and now all of a sudden they can (because they stole it from the Native Americans but that’s a whole other rant.)
Now, at first you see little cottage gardens like the lower classes in Europe always had around their homes; places where they grew food and herbs and kept chickens or other livestock. Dandelions were welcome here; they were eaten and brewed into wine and used for medicine, just as they’d been for centuries.
But then people start making a little money, and we have the whole phenomenon of people who can demonstrate that they are Moving Up In The World by buying all of their food and medicine, just like the old landed gentry back in the Old Country. So they do. What goes in the place of those cottage gardens? Why, the same thing that went in the place of productive land back in the Earl of Chatsworth’s front lawn; a lawn.
So. Dandelions were a symbol. They were a throwback to the old days. They were a sign that you were somehow less prosperous than your neighbors, or lazier. (A Mortal Sin in America.) But, many Americans work, and can’t afford to hire a gardener just to grub dandelions out of the yard with a trowel all day.
Enter the lawn care industry, which began to market a dizzying array of poisons and fertilizers aimed at making your lawn a sterile moonscape where only grass grew with minimum effort from the homeowner. This continues to this day and is a multibillion dollar industry that has huge negative impacts on the environment and human health, but we can’t seem to shake that old ideal of a manicured lawn.
We pour water on deserts and poison on native wildflowers to attain it. We expose our children to poisons. We poison pollinators and pets. The days where we recognized a well kept lawn as a symbol of aristocratic leisure are gone, but we’ve been successfully fed a lie that some dandelions and chickweed are Bad by the lawn care industry in their ads for decades. They, obviously, want to keep it going because they’re making fat $$$$$$$ off of us.
THAT’S why dandelions are viewed as weeds.
Also yeah dandelions are really good for bees, and beloved by native bees and honeybees alike. So please, leave them blooming!! You can support bees and do your bit to smash capitalistic exploitation of the working class and the environment all in one go!
If you are looking for a great horror (some argue that its actually a love story) book I highly recommend this one. It’s my favorite book of all time. It has a very unconventional format and it’s one of those books that gets better with every read through.
I don’t want to give too much of the story away but the book is about a man doing a documentary on a strange house and strange things within the house.
We will be doing more book recommendations due to high requests, if you have books that you think we should share, please inbox us!
hey followies: if you like the unconventional storytelling in ‘homestuck’ you should give ‘house of leaves’ a look.
it’s not comedy/adventure like homestuck, it’s more an atmospheric weirdness story like the SCP verse or night vale, but the outside-the-box way it’s told will strike a chord. you don’t just sit and read words, you need to work it out. turn the book upside down. go back and reread earlier bits in light of new information. it’s a fun puzzle of a book, and i highly recommend it.
honestly i kind of wish it had been written ten years later, because if the author had been able to do the kind of tricks you can do with web based fiction – like that thing in homestuck where john reaches through the portal and then when you go back suddenly his hand is showing up in random illustrations earlier – ‘house of leaves’ would probably have been ten times as long and even greater. 😀
So the last time I reblogged this, someone reblogged from me with a comment along the lines of “wait till you see them with swords”. So I went to search it up, and… guys. GUYS.
There are actual sparks flying holy shit =O
and at the very end one ballerina comes rolling up like “you have learned well, my padawans”
» 152 icons of Furihata Kouki. » All from the manga and the anime. » Some spoilers from the current arc. » I don’t care that I’ve already uploaded a bunch of KnB icons, this cutie deserves more love. » Free to use, just like or reblog if you’re going to use them. » Examples:
