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.

Tashi Duncan is exactly what we have been missing from our screens; a selfish, messy, calculated woman who wields her intelligence and sensuality as weapons. She’s a cheater, a woman unable to see beyond her own needs, who refuses to lie even when she could save someone the heartbreak of the truth — “unlikeable” by all standards. When her golden retriever malewife of a partner Art tells her he loves her, she simply looks over and purrs “I know” in response. It is coolly dismissive and self-assured in a way that we do not usually get to see Black women behave onscreen.

Tashi Duncan is too formidable a character to be pushed around, least of all by white stans who don’t know what it means to strive beyond the approval of men. The story underneath all the tennis is about Tashi’s heartbreak, the mourning over the loss of her career and the identity it gave her and how she forges ahead anyway.

in every charged moment we see between Patrick and Art, Guadagnino makes it clear that the center of their connection is Tashi. Even the now infamous churros scene revolves almost entirely around Tashi. Patrick says that he likes seeing Art riled up, that he enjoys seeing him willing to connive and fight for something — even if that thing is his girlfriend. Even their lust for one another is moderated by her, unleashed by her. They would have stayed perfectly content meandering in suggestion if she had not forced them to confront their attraction for one another tongue-first in that bedroom scene.

Tashi Duncan is a woman so in control of herself that even in her greatest moment of heartbreak — sitting alone under a tree with an injury that has ruined her chance at doing the only thing she knows how to do — does not allow herself to break. Zendaya’s portrayal of her is glorious here. You watch the hurt, pain, grief, anger, and then finally resolute determination pass over her face as she makes her choice. She will not mope. That moment makes the woman we meet years later, who tells her husband that her love is absolutely conditional on his success as a player.

Tashi Duncan is utterly unique, a manifestation of a particular kind of female rage that makes her hard to forget or even fully hate. It’s what makes the boys so obsessed with her.