Reflex Blue

stevesbootyshorts:

aggressively queer steve rogers thou

steve rogers getting in fights even before he knew what it meant when the other kids called him ‘queer’ and ‘fairy’ and getting in even more fights once he finds out.

steve stepping out with boys and girls and not giving a single flying fuck who knows it. steve hanging out with drag queens and trans women and strange fey artists in all the wrong parts of town.

steve kissing bucky like a challenge and bucky kissing him back like a victory.

bucky’s parents no longer speak to them and their apartment has more holes than walls but steve proudly introduces bucky as his fella and no one in their neighbourhood blinks because everyone’s always known about that rogers boy.

the priest gave up long ago.

steve rogers getting his face smashed in and his arm broken in a police raid and grinning at bucky through the blood. “I had them on the ropes”

steve rogers lying on his enlistment forms to hide his sickness and multiple applications but also to hide his arrest record. steve outing himself to everyone once they’ve given him the serum. philips is horrified and carter smirks and steve just sticks his chin out, stubborn as ever and really, what can they do about it now?

steve rogers kissing bucky in front of the howling commandos for the first time right before a mission “for luck”. the howlies teasing them mercilessly. bucky getting called “mrs. rogers” more than his actual name.

steve rogers waking up in the 21st century and being absolutely fucking furious that his queerness has been utterly erased from the history books. sees articles and think-pieces and documentaries and not a single one says steve rogers was queer. sees biographies discrediting the howlies accounts of steve and bucky’s relationship.

steve rogers growling all this out at the first press conference after the battle of new york, glaring at the reporters and the cameras and fury just puts his face in his hands because god, rogers was supposed to be the easy one. steve cussing out republicans and racists and homophobes. steve refusing to do official interviews but always answering random people on the street armed with nothing other than their camera phone and the guts to approach Captain America.

steve rogers embracing the word bisexual with pride. steve crying when he talks about bucky for the first time after the ice to a fifteen year old blogger in starbucks. steve rogers attending rallies and protests and die-ins and his arrest record has its first entry in seventy years.

aggressively queer steve rogers.

metapianycist:

in this NPR article about the 1920s supreme court ruling in favor of forced sterilization of people deemed “feeble minded”, there is this sentence:

“There was this idea that we were being drowned in a tide of feeblemindedness — that basically unintelligent people were taking over, reproducing more quickly than the intelligent people […]”

this idea still exists. it’s the premise of the comedy movie Idiocracy.

now that I know things about the history of american eugenics, I find it CHILLING AS FUCK that Idiocracy was one of my college adviser’s favorite movies. i have known about american eugenics for a while, but i didn’t put it together how fucked up it was that my adviser praised Idiocracy and showed it to a philosophy class until the NPR article so succinctly described the idea behind forced sterilization as “feeble-minded people are taking over by reproducing more quickly than intelligent people!”

casual eugenic ideas like this still exist and are extremely popular in otherwise “liberal” academic circles. it might be phrased as “st*pid people shouldn’t breed” but the idea is the exact same.

Feeble-minded was historically used to describe many people with what we now call developmental disabilities. It was not simply a term to describe less than average intelligence. 

Efforts to control/prevent the reproduction of developmentally disabled adults is still a topic of controversy. In many places, adults with these disabilities must seek parental permission to date or marry, and there is wide debate over their capacity to consent in the context of relationships and sexuality.