Communicating trauma through art is fine, as long as you don’t remind the Christian fundies that their beliefs and practices are a prime source of religious trauma for lots of people.
I just think it’s impressive that the church so successfully rebranded the guy kissing his best friend and having his “beloved disciple” leaning on him at dinner while feeding that best friend food as being anti-LGBTQ.
“What goes into your mouth does not defile you” indeed.
This is the same guy who extracannonically was allegedly saying things like:
when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female […] then you will enter [the kingdom].
Gospel of Thomas saying 22
A sentiment that seems to have been loosely around when Paul was writing in Galatians about how there was no male or female.
Nonbelievers cede too much of the historical Jesus to the church IMO. The canonical Jesus is a total tool, but the Jesus between the lines and in early apocrypha is pretty lit, strongly denouncing religious orthodoxy at the time and telling people not to bother praying or sacrificing and especially not giving money to the church, to just be true to themselves and not do what they hate, “everything is permissible,” etc. The church spins the whole thing with what’s clearly a significant layer of propaganda on top of what was there before with “secret explanations” and shit, and they ended up getting away with it for millennia.
Literally the Jewish version of the Jesus story from the medieval ages has Judas and Jesus fucking, the Mar Saba letter is talking about claims in the first few centuries he was gay and has a secret version of a gospel where he’s shacked up for a week in a bedroom with a dude covered by nothing but a sheet, and scholars today are like “no, that unmarried guy in his 30s kissing and feeding his best friend wasn’t gay because the Greek in the church’s propaganda is the platonic version of the word beloved.” It’s like the ultimate “and they were roommates” shit.
Yeah, looking through history with a modern lens can be dangerous but refusing to consider it can also make you miss a lot, and the fact is that this was a nonviolent resistance movement against an occupying power and the hypocrisy of the religious leadership. In this movement people were called to live in common as equals and provide whatever aid they can to anyone in need. Like, they lived in their own time and culture and all that, but I’ve met these people before, this is a punk house. In many cultures like this that I’ve seen documentation of and in my own, such movements are disproportionately queer.
Any Christian that finds this offense clearly doesn’t understand what their religion entails. This doesn’t say anything that the Bible already doesn’t and if they don’t like that then maybe it’s a problem with their religion…
The two core principles of Conservatism, of which Christian Fundamentalism is a part:
I get to do what I want.
You have to do what I say.
In the Religious Conservative’s mind, free speech means they get to say whatever they want about whomever they want (I get to do what I want). At the same time, free speech limitations suddenly apply when you have anything critical to say about their religion (you have to do what I say).
Sorry about the rant it’s not aimed at you specifically but at society. I hate that all of lesbian art is so often assumed to be romantic or images of women going at it. Like that’s part of it, but it’s also poetry and music and a lot of self portraits in a variety of media and comics like Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For.
Our community has built a lot of its art in the pursuit of identity and self. And a lot of it involves trying to avoid our eroticism being consumed by the men who fetishize our love.
Lesbian art is this teenager pouring her pain onto a canvas. It is as high a form of lesbian art as I’ve had the privilege to see.
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