Read on Twitter
I don’t want to talk about this article but I feel as though it is enough within my “beat” that I should at least mention like ONE THING which is that “friendship” as a term has evolved dramatically in the western world along over the last ~200 years https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/people-who-prioritize-friendship-over-romance/616779/
The idea that you can extrapolate anything about our current idea of “platonic friendships” from the “romantic friendships” of the 17-1900s is bafflingly ahistorical and I can’t believe we are still pretending the word has always been used the same to mean “no sex” “no homo” etc
I don’t recommend you read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick if you aren’t already inclined to bc she wrote dense af theory and it can be a slog, but at least read SOMETHING about how the homosocial continuum used to be fluid and then was “ruptured” in the late 19th century—
—when “homosexual” was defined as a type of human that meant abnormal and “heterosexual” as normal, so there had to be a solid line between “platonic” and “romantic” or else someone would/could be pathologized as abnormal/deviant
That Atlantic article does what so much stuff about queer continuum stuff now does which is just... pretend we are in the “most” “progressive” moment in history where people are more accepted and self-actualized than ever before! Which is bad history and also false
If you DO want to read some dense theory about this, read EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET which is all about this and extremely good and important. If not, just please stop acting like queerness 1. Is a modern invention 2. Has never been as accepted as it is now 3. Is unusual
(Thread on non-cishet existence being constructed as abnormal 
) https://twitter.com/elizsimins/status/1316441983854940160
) https://twitter.com/elizsimins/status/1316441983854940160
Also if your reaction to this is “but not everything is gay!!! Can’t people just be married without sex and say it’s friendship and they are not queer and not interrogate that at all?” I am fucking BEGGING YOU to read this classic essay by @westcoastnoir https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/wjk45z/straight-girlfriends-queer-women
Also as always please read like literally anything about non-western queer history!!! A couple recs:
Cartographies of Desire / Pflugfelder
Infinite Variety / Menon
Queer Korea / Henry
Women With Mustaches and Men Without Beards / Najmabadi
Cartographies of Desire / Pflugfelder
Infinite Variety / Menon
Queer Korea / Henry
Women With Mustaches and Men Without Beards / Najmabadi
