When you grow up having to navigate the world with two minds, you can at least (hopefully) bask in the absurdity of it all. It also helps numb the pain.

Growing up differently and gay oftentimes made us feel alienated, lonely, and the black sheep of our families. To figure out who we really were and to learn to navigate the world in a healthy way we were forced to do a form of work that not many straight people are confronted with. The stuff that bothers straight men I know seriously makes me laugh. You can tell they've had to never do the work to search deep within themselves to find meaning and to move past unacceptance. I seriously look at being gay as a gift now. I wouldn't change it for all the money in the world because I'm proud and grateful to be who I am. I've honestly become the systemic change in my family because I've never had to follow the cookie cutter mold and I'm not afraid to speak up and voice important opinions.

The amount of self reflection one has to go through for being gay in this world is insane.

I still in my early 20s but I've changed so much backwards thinking in my family just by being myself and challenging some of their opinions. Also when straight men talk about being lonely I always just laugh and tell them I do feel lonely but I've been lonely since I was like 12 or so, atp I don't even feel lonely I've learnt how to keep myself company due to years of introspection.

Rules matter less than people think. We've already broken the grow up get married to a nice girl and have children rules that most of the world goes along with, so we tend to be more questioning when it comes to other rules

You can live your life however you want - not to societal expectations. Your partner is someone you likely truly get and gets you because they're also a guy - no mystery or gender related differences. No external expectations of marriage, or having babies / kids etc. Also no PMS, no biological clock ticking and putting deadlines in your life. And also added bonus, if you're similar size then you can share your clothes.

DavidtheMalcolm • 23h ago Oppression doesn't make us all better people. Like the narrative that feminism pushes hard is that oppression makes us kinder, nicer, more empathic than straight white men... and sometimes that's true. Sometimes there's great examples of that. But so many of us are just broken trash people who no sane person would want in their life.

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying. And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic.

I’m so viscerally disgusted by 95% of the things that I have to do to promote this movie. To operate in these hallowed halls of capitalism and not feel absolutely insane, it requires some kind of taking the red pill. Or privilege-tinted sunglasses.

“‘The Matrix’ is very in conversation with trans themes that my work is also interested in: this feeling of unreality that can be a potent metaphor for being trans in the world or figuring out that you’re trans,” they continue

I’m very suspicious of any externalized representation of transness,” Schoenbrun confesses. “Trans experience is something that’s classically represented by Hollywood as this very external force, when actually it is so internal.

Back to “The Matrix” and feeling not quite right in the world: that is a much more potent, relatable way of talking about how it feels to be trans but not quite understand it yet. As opposed to, ‘I looked in the mirror and wanted beautiful lashes and locks.’”

“I worked really hard to make this film weird, like a provocation,” Schoenbrun says. “I’m structuring my life in a way where I can keep my values and my gaze outside of a system. I describe it sometimes as angry sex between art and commerce.”

“To be trans is not just a thing I was born with, but a political ideology and a decision to exist in a certain way that’s non-normative and challenging the hegemonic structures of power,” Schoenbrun continues. “I want to stay a person who I like. Too much power and too much collaboration with a system of power, I start to get hives.”

“Everyone has a Maddy. Most queer people have someone who’s shepherded them through the discovery of their own queerness.”

the story is pulled from Mago’s perspective into 3 subsequent perspectives over the years: Lena, the best friend; Joseph, the ex-husband and father; and finally Monstrilio himself. It is a stylistic choice that (mostly) works and allows us to see how these events radiate outward across many lives.

M’s perspective being saved for last is not just because it is the best section of the novel and wraps up all the disparate elements into a tight punch of a finale, but because M’s feeling and needs are constantly being pushed aside to fit the ideas of what the other character’s think they need (this is most evident in the surgery aspect). This makes for an excellent look at the way the push and pull of families affects everyone, especially the younger ones caught up in it, and is made more ominous and chilling through the lens of horror.

On one hand we have the fact that M is quite literally a monster created out of a dead child’s lung, yet despite his form he is no less a part of the family or loved like a child. But in later portions of the novel he transforms into a human form which helps him disguise who he is inside. And what he hungers for cannot be hidden. Hunger is a quite a dynamic symbol here, being both his literal hunger but also as an investigation into sexuality.

it does all sort of touch on the idea that queer sexuality is often othered or seen as unnatural despite being very normal and natural, especially to the person having those emotions.

Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known — across time and space — that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions.

And so Haigh, in rather overt terms, slowly begins to recontextualize Adam’s sexuality as more of a conduit for his despondency than a root cause, leveraging a personal story about the consequences of keeping pain out into a primordial one about the catharsis of letting it in

“All of Us Strangers” does too, and it never shies away from how hard it can be to start again, especially once Harry begins to struggle with his own advice