personally I would love a poll for hot vintage actors/celebrities who played with gender and androgyny or were outright trans/nonbinary, but I'm not sure how many there are or how much time you have to dedicate to the polls so I'll throw it out there for any followers who want to start their own poll

I thought about doing this, but it would be an impossible poll to run fairly for a couple of reasons. (I'm going to be using the word "queer" here as a catch-all term for trans/nb/gender-nonconforming presentation, in the hope that we all understand I'm using it in the reclaimed sense.)

For one thing, being queer was so heavily silenced, punished, and/or criminalized we can't say with any certainty which hotties were trans/nb/questioning. It's possible many of these hot vintage performers would have come out if it had been safe to do so, but we can't tell from this distance. I would hate to exclude anyone just because they don't read as queer "enough" to my eyes, when for them they were just busy surviving.

The other thing is that even as recently as the vintage era of these polls, queerness sat a little differently than it does today. Just as modern historians can't project current systems of gender on figures from the past, I would feel uncomfortable assuming that someone might be trans/nonbinary/gender nonconforming just because they would be read that way today. There's been a lot of cultural shift over the last 100 years where certain things that used to be considered very radical and genderqueer are now utterly normal (ie, women wearing pants) and other things that now read as queer would not have raised an eyebrow then (ie, the oft-quoted article from 1918 that posits that pink is a boys' color, or the entirety of the classic Wings).

In a way, this is freeing—watching vintage movies shows many different ways of framing gender and sexuality, and while some of it is the kind of dated binary we expect, some of it is like light pouring through a window. There are many different ways of framing a gender! The whole concept of gender is moveable and transient! Queerness is as much a part of human nature as love, and teeth, and bones, and touch! But because it was a different era, and because the secrecy prevalent at the time doesn't fully let us know who was or wasn't part of the community, we can't really say for sure (without a lot of extra research, and lots of very careful framing) who was doing things with gender we would today translate as trans, nonbinary, or queer.

Hope this makes sense!

everyone say thank you to lesbians (sources under cut)

Top left- https://pin.it/5iyhNKU

Top middle- https://pin.it/4pIL96u

Top right-https://pin.it/7IiN9A1

Middle left- https://pin.it/Rv3QMcC

Middle middle-https://pin.it/i1q3FGS

Middle right- https://pin.it/49C0URm

Bottom left-https://pin.it/79K8WG5

Bottom middle-https://pin.it/DF1yhzT

Bottom right-https://pin.it/41Ssfi9

pride month feels like it's kinda sucked but check out my silly outfits

(ID: logo Die Freundin, subtitle Kleinode und Fundstücke, subtitle 2 i.e. assorted curios)

thanks to the Forum Queeres Archiv München i have recently come across an archive of the 1920s-1930s german magazine “Die Freundin” (i.e. “Girlfriend”), a publication aimed primarily at lesbians, transvestites*, people invested in supporting the human rights of homosexuals, and presumably anyone who was willing to wait 6 full weeks to collect a complete short story with minimal girl-on-girl smut. wikipedia calls it the “first ever lesbian magazine” and i dont have the means to prove them wrong on that.

since i have had the magazine’s beautifully calligraphed logo in my personal blog’s header for quite a while now, i will use this blog to show off snippets of whatever i find worth sharing while perusing this almost 100 year old publication. this is not an attempt at serious academic research. in my infinite mercy i will do my best to provide translations of the texts, purely so the pitiable anglophone might get a glance at what kind of gay shit was happening in Berlin, Germany from 1927-1933 (technically Die Freundin was published from 1924-1933, but the archive i have access to only starts at 1927 so thats what youre getting). this is not a formal read-along and i will adhere to no schedule whatsoever. every post will be tagged with the number of the issue i took it from.

German speakers (or those with access to someone willing to translate) can read along here (link goes to Forum Queeres Archiv München)

IF YOU FIND SOMETHING FUNNY OR NOTABLE ON YOUR OWN DIVE INTO THE MAGAZINE, SUBMIT IT IN A POST TO THIS BLOG

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* depending on the context, this was used to refer to recreational cross-dressers, trans women, trans men, or other kinds of gender-divergent people. if that bothers you, youre probably not going to like most of the content of the magazine since it’s almost 100 years old and was not curated to match the taste of internet-using queers in the 2020s.

Sylvia Rivera during the filming of "The Transexual Menace" (1996)

photo by Mariette Pathy Allen [website] [instagram]

Fell and falling

Inspired by being in love <3

drive-in movie night ✨

patreon // check more of my work on instagram // buy prints here

Tove Jansson (right), creator of Moomin, and her life partner Tuulikki Pietilä (left), an accomplished Finnish artist

Lloyd Yearwood, Photograph of a drag club in Harlem, 1960s

As someone who's new to vintage movies, please let your followers give me vintage lgbtq+ movie recommendations (because I've seen there are old movies like that around) 👀🙏

Sure! If anyone wants to drop vintage lgbtq+ movies in the replies, go ahead. (As admin, I'm barred from recs until the tournament is over.) As I've discussed before, old movies worked with different norms, languages, and presentations than we expect today, for good or for bad—so while you probably won't find movies that frame queerness the same way a modern movie would, you will still find many vintage movies that play with gender and sexuality, some of which today read (or were intended all along to be!) very queer indeed.

gay little mood board that's somewhat inspired by gene and finny from a separate peace :]. sources beneath the cut

Top left- https://pin.it/m41pjW5

Top middle- https://pin.it/4cDOl8D

Top right- https://pin.it/7xnhkVi

Middle left- https://pin.it/7v71jo1

Middle middle- https://pin.it/2UsHPKZ

Middle right- https://pin.it/53Z3cRj

Bottom left- https://pin.it/2GO4Sni

Bottom middle- https://pin.it/7fz4fEz

Bottom right- https://pin.it/55v1Prc

and these are the tintypes. I'm a little bit obsessed with the person in the first one

a gay liberationist play on the hanky code from mainely gay, march 1978

Pride on Christopher street, 1990, NYC.

photo & caption by Mariette Pathy Allen [website] [instagram]