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johannestevans · 3 months

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Come see me in Leeds this Friday!

Good morning, good morning!

Remember you can sign up to get this update directly as an email. Anything that I can't promote or post as per Patreon's more stringent guidelines will always still be in my regular email newsletters.

First things first, in the aftermath of the piece I submitted to Trans_Muted late last year, I'm going to be at an event at The Bookish Type, a queer bookshop, in Leeds this Friday evening! Tickets are sold out online, but there will be more tickets available on the door at the £0-£5 range depending on how much people can afford.

It's going to be a Q&A and discussion sort of night, with some readings as well - as well as me, there'll be Dalton Harrison, the founder of StandFast Productions, a collective for ex-offenders to share art and stories; there's Loren Lepton, who does all sorts of rocking art across different disciplines and has published poetry in Trans_Muted; and of course there's Dorian Rose, the founder of Trans_Muted!

Here's the piece I'll be discussing and potentially reading from:

Questions You Wish You Could Ask A Gay Transgender Man — A tongue-in-cheek take on cisgender people’s frequently asked questions.

Read here in Trans_Muted!

Also On Medium / / On Patreon.

There will be books and such forth available from us, as well as the fact that the Bookish Type is an excellent queer-run bookshop that will have all manner of wonders for you to peruse as ever.

Great news for those who enjoyed my Minotaur talk a while back - Romancing the Gothic have invited me back to do another talk as part of a charity event toward the end of March!

On March 16th 2024, Goths for Breakfast is going to centre a variety of talks about gothic literature to raise money for hungry kids, and mine is going to be a presentation and dive into Crimson Peak (2015, dir. Guillermo Del Toro) and its appeal as a modern gothic romance, with a bit of examination about people's hunger for ~problematic~ themes in the age of BookTok, book bans, and rising puritan values and opposition to nuance. Title is yet to drop, but in the meantime, go sign up for Romancing the Gothic and check out their other events!

My plan is to write more non-fiction in the next few months as honestly, I need the money - I'm settling well into the new place but I'm getting used to balancing all my bills against furnishing everything, and I'm currently in need of some dental care. I've talked about it at length here, and there's two polls here and here at the moment about particular essays or non-fiction people would be most eager to see and read, but please let me know if there's anything you'd really like me to write about!

I have a few media recs this week - I already mentioned that I've been playing Dragon Quest XI and I'm now replaying Final Fantasy XV again, but onto some movie recs! A few of these fucking rock, and I definitely plan to write a bit more about them at length.

The Holdovers (2023, dir. Alexander Payne) - This one was good, not a new favourite of mine or anything, but it's well-paced and has a lot of well-done slice-of-life and character study, which I know people who like my work will undoubtedly appreciate! It's a loving and sensitive film - I found it to be a bit bland for my taste, but for being this sort of film it's not at all too saccharine, and it definitely might be worth a watch if you like nasty old men or nasty young men! I'll be honest, though, none of the men in this are particularly to my taste - I did love Da'Vine Joy Randolph's performance though, she really makes the whole film.

Demon (2015, dir. Marcin Wrona) - This film has been criticised a lot by genre horror fans because they're upset that it doesn't meet genre horror conventions: it doesn't. This is a real fucking horror film delving into the reality of living on haunted, bloodied land, and it's a modern retelling of The Dybbuk - gentiles at a wedding become haunted by the ghost of a dead Jewish bride, and horrors unfold for them. This film is beautiful, and I don't think I've ever seen a film that depicts gentiles grappling so much with the violence that's been done by them and their community to Jewish people, and then making the decision to turn away from it. The haunting of the pogroms in this film is visceral, and it feels all the more salient at the moment given the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the historical-to-now experiences of Palestinians in the face of that colonial violence.

Minyan (2020, dir. Eric Steel) - This is a super gorgeous film as well - I've watched a lot of coming-of-age flicks about young queer men coming to terms with their sexuality, particularly set in the 80s, but I've never seen one that has such a loving depiction of a man's developing sexual identity at the same time as his developing religious one and the relationship he has with his Judaism and with worship and religion, and other queer men in his community and how many there are once he knows how to look for and find them. I really love the undercurrent of his relationship with James Baldwin's work, especially a contrast at one point of a fellow young Russian Jew saying he's going to join the IDF, and then immediately jump to work from Baldwin. I would recommend Baldwin's short open letter on Zionism, antisemitism, and Palestinian liberation from '79 in The Nation, which you can read here.

New Works Published

Serial Update: Powder and Feathers

Chapter Fifty-Four: Colm has a painful discussion with his granddaughter; Jean-Pierre bonds with his niece.

It seems to Aimé Deverell that there is very little point to life, except for what pleasures can be enjoyed before the grave. Life is short - thank God - but at least there's enough in the world to dull the senses in the meantime.

That philosophy shatters like glass when he meets Jean-Pierre, an angel.

Read on Medium / / Read on Ao3 / / Read on WorldAnvil

Erotic Short: Wine Barrel

The angel Jean-Pierre lets himself get caught by the all-too-friendly Dionysus.

Rated E, trans M/everyone at a party. Featuring object insertion, inflation with a womb filled up with wine, unsafe alcohol consumption, lactation, milking, public humiliation, voyeurism, transformation, very drunk sex, sadomasochism, free use, objectification, begging, multiple orgasms, overstimulation.

Read on Medium / / Read on Patreon / / Read on SubscribeStar / / Read on Ao3

Erotic Short: Window Trap

Jean-Pierre makes an unwise decision, and gets caught amongst the wrong crowd.

Rated E, 3.9k, trans M angel gangbanged by Greek gods, mostly by Hermes (Aetos Talaria). Doros is also here — Doros and Jean-Pierre both being characters in Powder and Feathers.

Dubious to non consent here after some pure hubris, with a gangbang, large insertions, come inflation, deepthroating, spitroasting, predicament bondage with Jean-Pierre stuck in a wall, humiliation, degradation, dirty talk, masochism, stomach bulges.

Read on Medium / / Read on SubscribeStar / / Read on Ao3

Non-Fiction: My Top 6 Films of 2023

2023 had a few knock-out hits as far as the cinema goes — obviously, people were very excited about the respective releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer, but my top films of the year were a bit different.

One thing I do think unites a lot of these — and a trend I hope to see from more films in the next few years — is a trend toward more earnestness and sincerity in scripts and plot lines, and I’m hoping that trend continues!

Read on Medium / / Read on Patreon/ / Read on Tumblr

Woe, Boypussy Be Upon Ye: Transing Characters in Fanfic & Fanart

What’s the deal with envisioning your blorbos as transgender?

Read on Medium in Prism & Pen / / Read on Patreon/ / Read on Tumblr

Erotic TweetFic: Building Stamina

A new addition to a band of mercenaries struggles to keep pace with them - but no worries. They've another role in mind for him.

Read on Twitter

#musings #original fiction #trans author #writers on tumblr

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newstfionline · 7 years

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In the era of Donald Trump, Germans debate a military buildup

By Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, March 5, 2017

SESTOKAI, Lithuania--A vermilion-colored locomotive slowed to a halt, its freight cars obscured in the blinding snow. A German captain ordered his troops to unload the train’s cargo. “Jawohl!”--”Yes, sir!”--a soldier said, before directing out the first of 20 tanks bearing the Iron Cross of the Bundeswehr, Germany’s army.

Evocative of old war films, the scene is nevertheless a sign of new times. Seven and a half decades after the Nazis invaded this Baltic nation, the Germans are back in Lithuania--this time as one of the allies.

As the Trump administration ratchets up the pressure on allied nations to shoulder more of their own defense, no country is more in the crosshairs than Germany. If it meets the goals Washington is pushing for, Germany--the region’s economic powerhouse--would be on the fast track to again become Western Europe’s biggest military power.

Any renaissance of German might has long been resisted first and foremost by the Germans--a nation that largely rejected militarism in the aftermath of the Nazi horror. Yet a rethinking of German power is quickly emerging as one of the most significant twists of President Trump’s transatlantic policy.

Since the November election in the United States, the Germans--caught between Trump’s America and Vladimir Putin’s Russia--are feeling less and less secure. Coupled with Trump’s push to have allies step up, the Germans are debating a military buildup in a manner rarely witnessed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Perhaps nowhere is the prospect of a new future playing out more than here in Lithuania--where nearly 500 German troops, including a Bavarian combat battalion, arrived in recent weeks for an open-ended deployment near the Russian frontier. The NATO deployment marks what analysts describe as Germany’s most ambitious military operation near the Russian border since the end of the Cold War. It arrived with a formidable show of German force--including 20 Marder armored infantry fighting vehicles, six Leopard battle tanks and 12 Fuchs and Boxer armored personnel carriers.

“Maybe, with respect to the United States, you need to be careful what you wish for,” said Lt. Col. Torsten Stephan, military spokesman for the German troops in Lithuania. “Mr. Trump says that NATO may be obsolete, and that we need to be more independent. Well, maybe we will.”

The German-led deployment--also involving a smaller number of troops from Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway--is designed to send a muscular message from Europe to Putin: Back off.

Yet on a continent facing the prospect of a new Cold War, the deployment is also offering a window into the risks of renewed German strength--as well as the Russian strategy for repelling it by dwelling on Germany’s dark past. In the 21st-century world of hybrid warfare, the first proverbial salvos have been fired.

Recently, coordinated emails were sent to Lithuanian police, media and top politicians, falsely claiming that the new German troops had gang-raped a local 15-year-old girl. The Lithuanian government quickly disproved the allegations--but not before a few local outlets and social-media users had spread the false accounts. Officials are investigating whether the Russians were behind it.

“But if you ask me personally, I think that yes, that’s the biggest probability,” said Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis.

As Germany grows bolder, outdated imagery is roaring back to life through Russian propaganda. Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the building of a reproduction of the old German Reichstag at a military theme park near Moscow, offering young Russians a chance to reenact the 1945 storming of the structure during the fall of Berlin.

Yet in Lithuania, a former Soviet republic now living in the shadow of Russia’s maw, the Nazi legacy is seen as ancient history. To many here, modern Germany is a bastion of democratic principles and one of the globe’s strongest advocates of human rights, free determination and measured diplomacy. And facing a Russian threat in times of uncertain NATO allegiances, the Lithuanians are clamoring for a more powerful Germany by its side.

“I think U.S. leadership should be maintained, but also, we need leadership in Europe,” Karoblis said. Noting that Britain is in the process of breaking away from the European Union, he called Germany the most likely new guarantor of regional stability.

“Why not Germany? Why not?” he said.

For many Germans, however, there are many reasons--including overspending and fears of sparking a new arms race. According to a poll commissioned by Stern magazine and published this year, 55 percent of Germans are against increasing defense spending in the coming years, while 42 percent are in favor.

The German military has staged several military exercises in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, and its pilots form part of the air police deterring Russian planes buzzing the E.U.’s eastern borders. It has also begun to take on more dangerous missions--deploying troops to the Balkans, Afghanistan and, last year, to Mali. The military also has taken on a logistical support role in the allied fight against the Islamic State.

But the Germans are slated to do much more. In 2014, German officials agreed with other NATO nations to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense within 10 years--up from about 1.2 percent in 2016. Until recently, however, many German officials privately acknowledged that such a goal--which would see Germany leapfrog Britain and France in military spending--was politically untenable.

Since Trump’s victory, however, German politicians, pundits and the media have agonized over the issue, with more and louder voices calling for a stronger military. Last month, the Defense Ministry announced plans to increase Germany’s standing military to nearly 200,000 troops by 2024, up from a historical low of 166,500 in June. After 26 years of cuts, defense spending is going up by 8 percent this year.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for cool heads, but also for increased military spending. Her defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, has been more forceful, saying recently that Germany cannot “duck away” from its military responsibility. Although considered a distant possibility, some outlier voices are mentioning the once-inconceivable: the advent of a German nuclear bomb.

“If Trump sticks to his line, America will leave Europe’s defense to the Europeans to an extent that it hasn’t known since 1945,” Berthold Kohler, publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote in a recent opinion piece. That could mean “higher defense spending, the revival of the draft, the drawing of red lines and the utterly unthinkable for German brains--the question of one’s own nuclear defense capability.”

Germany, along with its regional allies, has begun exploring an increase of military activity through joint European operations--and experts see that, and NATO, as the most likely funnels for German military power. Germany’s deployment in Lithuania, for instance, is part of a broader allied deterrent in Eastern Europe, with the Americans, Canadians and British leading other contingents in Poland, Latvia and Estonia.

In some of Germany’s neighbors--particularly Poland--there remain pockets of opposition to renewed German military might, positions based at least in part on war memories. But old prejudices are dying fast.

Take, for instance, tiny Lithuania--a nation the Nazis overran in 1941, kicking out the occupying Soviets. The Third Reich held on there through 1945, exterminating more than 200,000 Jews. After World War II, Lithuania reverted to Soviet domination before winning independence at the end of the Cold War. Over the past decade, Lithuania hitched its star to the West--joining the E.U. and NATO in 2004, much to the chagrin of the Russians.

Now, Lithuanians’ fear of the bear on their doorstep is surging. Since the de facto invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, Russian politicians have begun speaking ominously about a key warm-water port that they say was wrongly “gifted” to Lithuania after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hackers thought to be linked to the Russians have targeted government servers and national television channels.

In the city of Jonava, about six miles from the barrack housing the new NATO troops, the Nazis killed more than 2,000 Jews in the 1940s. Yet in the oral histories, the German occupation is portrayed in a far better light than the Soviet era that followed.

Nadiezda Grickovaite, 86, the town’s only living resident with vivid memories of the World War II era, said she recalled her mother taking her into the woods “so we didn’t see the shooting of the Jews.” But she said the Soviets were comparatively worse--a history she has passed down in speeches and talks at local schools.

“I don’t feel any bad feelings against the Germans because of the past,” she said. “This was history. We can’t blame them now.”

The new German troops, meanwhile, have received special sensitivity training about the Nazi legacy in Lithuania and to insist on gentle interactions with locals. Jonava’s acting mayor, Eugenijus Sabutis, said the only incident since the troops arrived in late January was an altercation between an American GI and local men over the attentions of a woman.

“I don’t feel part of that history--the history of Germans who were here before,” said Sebastian, a 27-year-old German private stationed in Lithuania who only gave his first name per the German army’s rules for the interview. “What I know is that we are in a kind of new Cold War, and now we are here to help.”

#Germany #German military #Lithuania

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