wow totally did not know I needed to do a vulnerable sector check like the church to clean a kitchen hahaha at least I am not a terror cat hahahaha can do my kitchens on my own time lol they are attached to a preskool so I guess they have their guard up just thankful I was always into being a good legal citizen lol or I could not even scrub a floor hahaha
ugh nuked the roof of my mouth on chicken tenders fucken things going to hell for eating them and not a tofu thing lmao karma is like immediate or ahead of its time they say fucken wings
fucken bitch did it to me from beyond the grave I bet FUCK HER !!!
I am an ironically non-masonic fully recovered MK ULTRA MIND CONTROL ASSET in charge of his own reasoning and sexuality and a split recurrence/clone of the LGBTQA PRINCE Michael Jackson - specifically health issues and legal issues and kind of subset of different issues but categorically the same with a different outcome kind of a weird causal reality of such now nowhere near the talent in singing he had but an idealistically same talent in graphical art and other things its almost like there was (a) or a few clones of his imprint at that time its tough to explain but I found out this early on in my 20's when I went to get my penis checked for a sex disease or whatever and he said oh you got Vitiligo and I was like no shit eh same issue as MJ including mass sleep issues sex crimes issues abusive upbringing etc etc it goes on and on the similarities there could be others I am unsure that were cloned or birthed by him but its all so crazy that I cant even fathom it cause I am so unique and introverted and totally different its tough to explain its just I can see him in my talent but also moreso in my difficulties and not solely out of talent like just karmic shit I have to deal with that is unexplainable like thousands of people looking at stuff I created creates an effect of sorts on my sleep and sexuality and other things...MJ was never in control of his future or his sexuality which was contractually insane under blood and death oath and he violated this and also caused the entire dimension to collapse and restart after his death because they did not know how powerful he actually was as an indigo elitist -my penis was never an issue it was pretty minor like my penis is nothing to worry about just a lot of weird issues that he shares with me so I have no idea if I am a download from his solar system or like celebrity birthing clone or who knows but at least my penis is ok these days lol I strongly believe he was framed and was asexual but liked to be around twinks I have a deep understanding of how the police framed him cause they tried to do it with me as well and there is no standing up or recovering from all that sadly enough which is why I stand up to all these perverted sexmason fucks that frame the vulnerable and hide behind a badge that implies they are *never wrong* and somehow infallible
Messolonghi, Greece. April 1826. For a year, the city had been dying slowly. Ottoman and Egyptian forces—over 30,000 soldiers—had surrounded the small port town, choking it, starving it, waiting for surrender. Inside the walls, 10,500 people were eating cats, rats, seaweed. Anything. Children were dying of starvation. The sick were dying of disease. And everyone knew what came next. The Ottomans had made their terms clear: surrender and convert to Islam, or be sold into slavery. The Greeks refused both. On the night of April 10, 1826, the city's defenders made a desperate plan. They would break through the siege under cover of darkness. The fighters would lead. The women and children would follow. They would run for the mountains and hope enough survived. Among those fighters was someone the Ottomans wouldn't have expected: a young woman named Eleni Staikou, dressed in men's clothing, carrying weapons alongside her father Zaharakis Staikos. Eleni wasn't playing at being a soldier. She'd grown up in a family of resistance fighters. Her father was a chieftain—a local leader respected for his courage. When the siege began, Eleni didn't hide behind the men. She learned to fight. So when the exodus came, she disguised herself as a male fighter. She strapped on an ornate embroidered vest—men's formal wear—over her shirt. She tied her blonde hair back. She picked up weapons. And when midnight came, she ran into hell alongside 7,000 others. The plan failed almost immediately. The Ottomans were waiting. They'd suspected the breakout and positioned troops along every escape route. As the Greeks poured out of the city gates, Ottoman forces opened fire from all sides. The night turned into chaos. Muzzle flashes lit up the darkness. Screams echoed across the marshlands. People ran in every direction, desperate, disoriented, doomed. Some were cut down by gunfire. Some were caught by cavalry. Some made it to the marshes and drowned in the mud. Some chose suicide over capture—women jumped into wells with their children rather than face what the Ottomans would do to them. Of the 7,000 who attempted escape that night, only about 1,000 survived. Eleni and her father were not among them. They made it farther than most—through the initial ambush, past the first line of soldiers, into the countryside beyond. For hours, maybe days, they evaded capture. But eventually, the Ottomans caught them. Zaharakis was identified as a fighter and taken as a prisoner of war. Eleni's disguise was discovered. And when Ottoman soldiers realized they'd captured a young, blonde, beautiful woman who'd been fighting alongside the men, they saw profit. The slave trade was booming. Greek women—especially young, attractive ones—were valuable commodities in Ottoman markets. They'd be examined, appraised, sold to the highest bidder. The pretty ones fetched premium prices. Eleni knew exactly what awaited her. She'd heard the stories. She'd watched other women dragged away during previous raids. She knew that if she reached the slave markets intact, she'd spend the rest of her life as property—passed from owner to owner, used however they pleased, with no possibility of freedom. She had hours, maybe a day, before they'd transport her to market. She looked around at what was available to her. And she found a fork. What happened next is part of local tradition, passed down through generations, preserved in family memory and eventually recorded in museum exhibits. Eleni took the fork and deliberately, systematically, destroyed her right eye. Not in a moment of panic. Not in despair. In cold, calculated defiance. She understood the economics of slavery. Beauty had value. Damaged goods did not. A woman missing an eye—her face scarred and ruined—wouldn't bring premium price. Might not sell at all. The pain must have been unimaginable. The determination required to continue even more so. But Eleni didn't flinch. She removed her own eye to remove herself from the market. The Ottoman soldiers were reportedly stunned. They'd expected tears, pleas, submission. Instead, they got a woman who'd literally disfigured herself rather than let them profit from her body. She'd turned herself from valuable merchandise into damaged property. And in doing so, she'd reclaimed the one thing they'd tried to take: agency over her own fate. The Ottomans still held her captive. But they couldn't sell her. And eventually, when political circumstances shifted and prisoners were exchanged, Eleni was released. She returned to Messolonghi when the city was liberated in 1829—three years after the exodus, still blind in one eye, still alive. She settled in Vrachori (modern Agrinio) in 1832, after Greek independence was finally secured. She married. She lived a normal life. She grew old. And every day for the rest of her life, when people looked at her scarred face, they saw proof of what she'd done. She didn't hide it. The missing eye was her story—permanent, visible, impossible to ignore. Eleni Staikou lived to be elderly, dying on July 18, 1887—one day after her brother Sotirios died. She was 61 years past that night in 1826 when she'd made the worst and bravest decision of her life. Before she died, she made one request: that her embroidered vest—the one she'd worn during the exodus, the one she'd fought in disguised as a man—be passed down through the family. And that every girl born into the family be named Eleni in her honor. Her descendants kept that promise. The vest passed from generation to generation, eventually reaching her great-granddaughter, also named Eleni Staikou. In 2018, the family donated it to the Exodus Museum in Messolonghi, where it remains today—a physical artifact of the night 7,000 people tried to escape death. There's a photograph of elderly Eleni, taken around 1885. She's looking directly at the camera, her face stern, weathered, missing the right eye. It's a shocking image—not because of the disfigurement, but because of what it represents. That missing eye is resistance made visible. It's proof that there are worse things than pain. That freedom matters more than beauty. That some people would rather damage themselves than let their enemies win. The Exodus of Messolonghi is one of the most famous events of the Greek War of Independence. It's been painted by famous artists, written about in history books, commemorated every year in Greece. The heroism of the defenders is legendary. But most of those histories focus on the men who fought. The generals who planned. The soldiers who died with weapons in their hands. They rarely mention the women who made different kinds of sacrifices. Eleni Staikou's story isn't widely known outside Greece. Her name doesn't appear in most English-language histories of the war. There are no grand monuments to her courage. But her embroidered vest sits in a museum in Messolonghi. Her photograph exists, unflinching, showing exactly what she did. And her story has been passed down through generations as proof that resistance takes many forms. Sometimes resistance is fighting with weapons. Sometimes it's running toward freedom. And sometimes—when all other options are gone—resistance is taking control of your own body in the only way left available. Eleni couldn't control whether the Ottomans captured her. She couldn't prevent them from trying to sell her. She couldn't change the economics of slavery or the brutality of war. But she could deny them profit. She could make herself unsellable. She could choose pain over powerlessness. And she did. Two centuries later, that choice still echoes. Because Eleni Staikou proved something important: that even in the worst circumstances, even when captured and bound and facing the unthinkable, human beings still have agency. The Ottomans took her freedom. They couldn't take her will. They captured her body. She kept her soul. They tried to make her property. She made herself unbreakable. With a fork and courage most people can't imagine, a young Greek woman turned herself into something the slave traders couldn't use. And in doing so, she became something they couldn't ignore: living proof that some people would rather destroy themselves than submit. That's not martyrdom. That's not self-harm for its own sake. That's war. And that's what freedom costs when the only weapon you have left is your own body. Eleni Staikou died in 1887 as a free woman in an independent Greece—the country she'd fought for, the freedom she'd paid for, the dignity she'd refused to surrender even when it meant taking a fork to her own face. Her grave is in Agrinio. Her vest is in a museum. Her photograph still exists, showing that missing eye and the story it tells. And every girl in her family, for generations, has carried her name forward—a reminder that women in history didn't just survive, they resisted, and sometimes they did it in ways that still take our breath away.
On this day, 17 December 1933, sexual contact between men was re-criminalised in the USSR, after it had been decriminalised in 1922 in the wake of the 1917 revolution (content note for physical and sexual violence). Authorities claimed that homosexuality was the result of bourgeois Western and German fascist influence, and the official Soviet newspaper Pravda published an article which ended with the slogan: “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear!” From the beginning of 1934, gay men began to be arrested in large numbers in major Russian cities and sent to the gulags. One prisoner, Valery Klimov, wrote about the treatment gay detainees received: "there were about 10 occasions when gays were murdered before my eyes. One was beaten to death in a prison in Sverdlovsk. There were 100 men in our cell; three or four raped him every day and then chucked him under the bunks. It was bestial, a nightmare. Once 10 of them raped him and then jumped on his head. I nearly went mad there; my hair turned grey. That's how people lose their sanity; many never recover even after they leave.” While lesbianism was never prohibited, and some masculine lesbians were valued in the military, many lesbians did still suffer persecution such as termination of studies or jobs, bullying, threats to remove custody of their children or being committed to psychiatric facilities. This is one of hundreds of stories featured in our book, Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion, available with global shipping: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/be-gay-do-crime-everyday-acts-of-queer-resistance-and-rebellion Pictured: Left, drag ball in Russia, 1920s, right, prisoners in a gulag, 1955
She was the punchline with running mascara and a felony husband—until she did something no televangelist had ever done: she hugged a dying gay man on live TV. In the 1980s, Tammy Faye Bakker was everywhere. Four-foot-eleven in heels. False eyelashes so thick they looked like they'd been glued on with hope and prayer. Makeup so heavy it streaked down her face every time she cried—which was constantly. She and her husband Jim broadcast from Heritage USA, their Christian theme park in South Carolina. They sold salvation like a product. Sequins and smiles. Donate now and God will bless you. The money poured in. $120 million a year at their peak. To most people, Tammy Faye was a joke. The crying lady with the weird voice. The televangelist's overdressed wife. Then everything fell apart. In 1987, the world learned that Jim Bakker had paid $265,000 in hush money to cover up a sexual encounter with a church secretary. Investigators started digging. They found fraud. Conspiracy. Millions of dollars diverted from ministry to mansions, air-conditioned doghouses, gold-plated bathroom fixtures. Jim went to prison for 45 years. Everyone expected Tammy Faye to disappear. To hide. To fade into obscurity like so many other disgraced televangelists' wives had done. Tammy Faye stuck around. She kept showing up. Kept doing interviews. Kept being herself—tears, mascara, and all. But something shifted. Instead of preaching prosperity, Tammy Faye started talking about the people her church had cast out. On November 15, 1985—just two months after President Reagan finally said the word "AIDS" out loud—Tammy Faye did something no televangelist had ever done. She invited Steve Pieters onto her show. Steve was a gay Christian minister. He was dying of AIDS. Doctors had given him eight months to live two years earlier. He'd survived longer than anyone expected, but his body was wrecked. Legally blind for a time. Paralyzed on one side. Covered in Kaposi sarcoma lesions. In 1985, people with AIDS were untouchable. Literally. Healthcare workers refused to enter their rooms. Families abandoned them. Churches turned them away. Fear ruled everything. Tammy Faye sat down with Steve for 24 minutes on live television. Twenty million viewers across dozens of countries. She asked him about being gay. About his faith. About what it felt like to be dying while the church that was supposed to love everyone wouldn't even come near him. And then she said something that made her fellow evangelists lose their minds: "How sad that we as Christians—who are supposed to be able to love everyone—are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care." She was crying. The mascara was running. But she meant every word. Jerry Falwell, backstage, was furious. Conservative Christians were horrified. A televangelist sympathizing with a gay man? On Christian television? This was betrayal. But to the people watching who had AIDS, who were gay, who'd been told by churches that God hated them—Tammy Faye became something else entirely. She became an ally when they had almost none. Steve Pieters got thousands of letters after that interview. People whose theology changed. People who came out. People who decided maybe they weren't beyond God's love after all. "I've heard from so many people throughout the years," Steve said decades later. "People who were transformed by that interview." Steve is still alive today. He's 70 now. He wasn't supposed to see 33. Tammy Faye never sought credit for that moment. She didn't try to become a progressive hero. She just kept being herself—unapologetically emotional, deeply flawed, genuinely compassionate. She divorced Jim in 1992 while he was in prison. She married Roe Messner, a contractor who'd worked on Heritage USA. He went to prison too, for bankruptcy fraud. Scandal clung to her like that thick makeup she never took off. But the gay community didn't abandon her. When she lost everything—the empire, the money, the reputation—it was gay men who supported her. Who showed up for her. Who remembered what she'd done when everyone else was afraid. "When we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue," she said near the end of her life. "And I will always love them for that." In 2004, she appeared on VH1's The Surreal Life, living in a Los Angeles house with a porn star, a rapper, and several actors. She was 61. She was still herself—big hair, big lashes, big heart. In 1996, doctors diagnosed her with colon cancer. It went into remission. Then it came back. Spread to her lungs. In July 2007, Tammy Faye was dying. She weighed 65 pounds. Her body was failing. Larry King asked her to come on his show. One last interview. She showed up in full makeup. "I believe eyes are the soul," she once said. "I truly do." She wanted to be seen. Even at the end. Especially at the end. She died two days later. July 20, 2007. She was 65 years old. For years, people dismissed Tammy Faye Bakker as a joke. The crying lady. The mascara disaster. The televangelist's ridiculous wife. But she did something almost no one in her world had the courage to do: she chose compassion over conformity. She sat down with a dying gay man when her entire church said he deserved his death. She cried for people others wouldn't touch. She used a platform built on judgment to preach something more radical: empathy. She wasn't perfect. Her empire was built on questionable fundraising. Her husband was a fraud. She married another man who went to prison. But when the AIDS crisis was killing thousands, when churches were turning people away, when even presidents wouldn't say the word "AIDS" out loud—a tiny woman with running mascara and a high-pitched voice said, "We should love them." In 1985, that was revolutionary. Tammy Faye Bakker became a gay icon not because she tried to be one, but because she saw people everyone else refused to see. She showed up. She cried. Her mascara ran. And she loved people her world said weren't worth loving. That's not camp. That's courage.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)