There is a difference… The arts dont lead our souls toward eternal damnation! Not necessarily anyway… while the other option is, studs, loving each other’s masculine bodies. Which is wrong!.. I could describe it for you so you know what to avoid.
Damn. I’d never considered that all my straightness could be due to a lack of nerve
Pussy.
I have thought that of straight people, they just lack the nerve to be gay. Its a choice to be straight but not gay obvi
“Anything can be a sex toy if you’re brave enough.”
Abe Lincoln
Interesting how the meaning of “go into the arts” changed. As far as I can tell, today that phrase is specifically about doing some kinds of art for a living (possibly in the sense of “bachelor of arts”, which is about an entirely different kind of “art”).
I think you’re misunderstanding it. He absolutely initially meant “go into the arts” as a career, that would likely result in a lifetime of poverty. It’s part of a joke about disappointing your parents, which is a personal issue for him and a reoccurring theme in his writing. He then transitions into offering advice about the personal value of making art for the sake of it.
He was a transgressive, sarcastic writer. He isn’t speaking poorly of homosexuality, or artists, merely referencing each group’s lack of status in society at that time. His message is to be true to yourself, do things that make you happy, even if they result in social ostracization.
This was one of the replies to the post, and it just made me smile, so I thought I’d include it :)
Is tumblr still alive and well, then?
More so than X :)
I don’t understand the “If you really want to hurt your parents” part of this. As a parent myself why would I be hurt if my child went into the arts? I think it’s cool AF that my kid with a Chem E degree plays piano and guitar!
Yeah they mean as a primary job guaranteeing a lifetime of borrowing money and tumultuous events.
I’m reading Slaughterhouse Five for the first time this week, and clearly the man was tortured by something. Was it the endless injustices of the world, a love lost, the horrors of war? Plenty of folks grew up being told by our nanny that gays should all be thrown off roofs, were beaten for acting too femme or swish, were told eternal pain was the price. So it goes.
Maybe Kurt was one of the vast multitude of folks so deep in the closet no one would ever know or have guessed. The unsung millions of queer folks who had that crush they couldn’t act on, the midnight fantasies held close, the whispered confession of love that was rejected, the true love just out of reach.
Who hung in the balance friendships, job opportunities, family connections, and physical safety and decided that unrequited love was an easier burden to bear.
All that weighing, maybe seeing your love be happy but could never love you back the same way. All that held tight could forge the soul of a poet, and yes, maybe a sardonic and cynical poet. One with a sharp wit who tells his own truths outright on the page but with a mocking tone to help the medicine go down smooth. Easier to put on the motley of a clown and make a sarcastic quip about being gay or a writer than it is to speak deeper truths that have gotten millions of folks ostracized or killed. So it goes.
and clearly the man was tortured by something.
Maybe it was when he was a POW in Dresden, and survived the firebombing inside the basement of a slaughterhouse?
His sister also died of cancer two days after her husband died in a freak train accident. My memory was they didn’t tell his sister that her husband had just died. My memory is also he took in her children after they lost both parents within a two day span. Dude had a lot of trauma in his life.
His parents were ruined by Prohibition and the Depression, they were abusive. He had a particularly bad year starting in May 1944, when he came home on Mother’s Day to find his mother had killed herself. A few months later he’s deployed to Europe. December 1944, he’s captured in the Battle of the Bulge. February 1945, he’s in the firebombing of Dresden. Repatriated May 1945.
His books touch on all of it to some degree. My impression was Dresden was the bit he found most horrifying. More importantly, though, it was the best setup for a sarcastic comment about Slaughterhouse Five.
Nah, pretty sure he would have mentioned that
To be fair to the person who you replied to - I didn’t know that Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden and survived the firebombing until after I had finished the novel. While reading it I just attributed it to his fantastic imagination and assumed it was all metaphor. Then I learned how much of it was not, in fact, metaphor.
Learn a little history.
Vonnegut came out of a time when having a gay kid was one of the worst things a parent could imagine. “I’d rather have a daughter who was a whore than a son who was gay” was a common expression.
He could have just as easily wrote ‘bank robber’ but saying ‘gay’ made the line much edgier.
I am well aware of said history. That’s why I wrote what I wrote
I think it’s much, much more likely that a closeted gay man of the time would studiously avoid all mentions of homosexuality in any context.
Go figure the context is important
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s really funny when you read books from back in the day when ‘gay’ meant ‘rowdy.’
“The cowboys rode into town, got drunk and got gay with the citizens.”
That line can have two wildly different meanings.
When you’re with the Flintstones Have a yabba-dabba-doo time A dabba-doo time We’ll have a gay old time
I always thought that Barney walked a little funny…
Brokeback Mountain was just about two rough and rowdy cowpokes. Nothing to see here
por que no los dos?
