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this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Not just theater but musical theater the absolute stronghold of the LGBTQIA+... Yeah let's just talk openly about how I believe the vast majority of my coworkers and peers (who probably have backgrounds of religious trauma) are morally defunct and how their ability to feel loved and supported shouldn't be considered protected by society!
I want to grab her by the shoulders and say : For fuck sake honey. No one in your field wanting to touch you with a 9 ft pole isn't their fault. Having someone openly homophobic in a role where getting the gold star of casting has been for the past several years meant actually choosing someone who has actual experience in a similar identity to what they are potraying... It would be suicide for a production. People are going to look to a queer character to project themselves in those situations. Knowing you're just a bigot doing it for self agrandizement, accolades and cash is going to cause fucking boycotts from the very target audience of the show!
Spilling your theocratic dirty laundry on twatter because you can't hold it in can be a "career limiting move" and that's just normal in a pluralistic society.
Concrete proof that these people simply don't live in reality.
She thinks this is oppression.
Religion should have been your first clue.
Oh they live in reality. When reality bites them they feel it. For the most part I respect belief. These people legitimately believe that there is a power which will inevitably maliciously destroy us and that to save other people they must be discouraged in any earthly way possible. They believe that to be a noble thing because the foundation comes from a rock solid belief in the divine and honestly there's not much you can do to shake that belief so what they are doing makes sense from that perspective.
The issue with that being around people with that belief who act on it as though it's their job to dissuade people from what they perceive as that particular danger is miserable. Like okay, you believe that we're gunna burn do so quietly because LGBTQIA folk aren't going to change because even if you believe in God with those tenants it's really hard to believe he is actually benevolent. Most of the LGBTQIA Christians who believe that God hates the only terms under which they can be happy end up killing themselves. That's part of why conversion therapy is considered a human rights issue.
The ones based in bullshit (like religions), I don't.
Alright, so what? What good does treating them petulantly do? If you cannot treat them in a way where they feel understood and cared for they don't change. If you treat someone poorly or like you are superior they are more likely to double down on their belief and spit in your face. Unless your aim is to bash their faces in and straight up use force you have to see the human in them to get started reversing the programing because a lot of religions preach that unbelievers are evil and the first step in any questioning of the whole is to show that no... You aren't evil. You are moral and kind actually.
What's the end goal of disrespect? To be rude to them for fun?
They're prone to do that anyway.
Why do you say "I have to", like is my obligation and my work to deprogram religious nuts?
You don't have to. Only if you want to try and stop them from being religious nuts that's where you start.
It's not your job to interact with them so don't. If they are actively causing you pain where you are you have a right to defend yourself to get them to stop but like any violence there is a line where you cross from self defence to just taking out your anger and trauma on someone else to make yourself feel better. People who do that make the job harder for those of us who want to stop religious trauma from perpetuating.
Respecting religious belief is part of the healing process of religious trauma. It doesn't mean subscribing to belief in religion. It means seeing the actual human beings inside the system that hurt you.
Not if I'm moderating an atheist site and they come to provoke me and to flaunt their ignorance. Whey they come to my place, they will eat shit if they don't behave.
If "the actual human beings" are indoctrinated beyond any chance of redemption, who says I need to keep trying?
Honestly, you probably shouldn't try. You seem like you are in a bad place at present to attempt to do so. If you do attempt your first motive should not be to change someone else but to do so for yourself.
Harboring an active grudge can be embittering. The brain is plastic. You can over many iterations of leaving the emotion and stimuli connection unchecked can reinforce it and strengthen the connection beyond what logic can undo. It can be unhealthy. A lot of traumatized atheists, or those who continually allow themselves to reinforce that religious people are inferior humans in a meaningful way, can be quite harmful in pluralistic spaces because they become blinded to the line between religious people existing and religious oppression in the exact same way a lot of religious people do. When you allow that to happen it means that religion is still controlling you. If it can hammer your emotional buttons whenever it's present and make you feel attacked just for being around it that is power that owns you. The further down that path you travel the harder it is to undo.
The ability to gain distance and a level of neutrality is actual freedom. It makes dealing with religion feel less personal and gives more space to react in a wider range of ways. The righteousness of perceiving yourself as justified in an overreaction is seductive. You want to bite back harder than you were bit...But every time you do you lose a little bit more of your objectivity. There is a freedom in letting go.
The freedom you're advocating is the freedom to continue letting religious people to cause damage without obstacles and without feeling complicit about it.
No. It's the freedom to engage with them without acting like you're an abused dog reacting at every man in a hat.
I am trans. My advocacy has involved engaging with people who hate that I exist and who are primed to think that I am mentally ill, a logistical problem or that I am a moral threat. I have minor religious trauma myself though I know a lot of my fellows who suffer aggregious mental health problems because of religious trauma due to their parents. Some queer people still believe in that Christian God and detangling that trauma takes a lot of gentle work. I have been learning how to engage debate and advocate with religious people on different levels to de-escalate the harm being done as a matter of long term survival plans. Every person requires different tactics. Being scornful or rough can be used as a goad in the tool kit because some people need to be approached in ways they recognize as authoritative but more often then not it's the tool likeliest to lose ground rather than gain it.
Recognizing the values they have is the first step to getting them to recognize you which is the first step to them re-evaluating what they believe. They have to feel understood and seen before there is a chance they will offer that to you. And sometimes they will snap as a fear response to their veiws being changed but will feel bad for that response later when they don't have their back up against the wall. It's a process and some of that processing happens when you aren't around. If you leave on a note where their take away is "fuck that person is an asshole" they aren't going to spend that time reflecting on their own bad actions. They are going to reflect on yours.
They need to discard magical thinking and bad reasoning. The trauma, they can deal with their therapist.
See that's where we differ. I don't give a fuck whatever they believe. I care how they act on it. I care about mitigating the actual damage they do because I have battles that I care about more than attacking them on whether or not they subscribe to belief in supernatural stuff. If their beliefs are actually doing nothing but giving them comfort that's fine. Being right and being good sometimes require you to pick one or the other. Stripping people of the harmless things that give them comfort isn't exactly a bro move... And "Just stop believing" is an incredibly patronizing way to deal with people. It's just not how it works.
Not to mention if you want to stop someone from actively bad aspects of a religion trying to attack their belief directly is where the armor is thickest . They are trained to reject that out of hand. You can batter that shit all day and go no where. I attack the joints. I use whatever nessisary - I quote their scriptures and philosophies back at them, learn the historic timelines of the politics inside their movements, I approach them with kindness, I approach them using their own language because I don't have fucking time to give a shit whether they in their heart of hearts believe in their superstitions because I don't have time. All that really needs doing is they stop hurting us because all the rest doesn't actually mean anything. Like if they are kind and awesome folk who totally stay in their lane but they believe in Sky daddy or crystals ... Okay whatever. No skin off my nose.
People don't actually choose what they believe. They do weigh their evidence and values but at some level it's out of their control. Sometimes it's because somebody else pops it in your brain at a formative time and that's just part of your conception of the world or some other sense of personal evidence draws you to a conclusion. Did you choose to be an atheist or did you arrive at it independently ? Could you just CHOOSE to believe in Zeus or something as a matter of absolute choice? Probably not. Your beliefs formed because of your personal body of evidence drew you to to that conclusion. That's also how some religiois people arrive at their beliefs . This doesn't always cycle in one direction with religious people always becoming atheists. I know people who were atheists who stopped being atheists and started believing in something else. At some point a certain amount of humility is beneficial. The notion that yeah, we're not completely rational creatures and that other people are allowed to believe stuff that you personally don't agree... They just aren't entitled to cause harm because of it and that also includes you does make the world a better place. If your bar is that you cannot be happy or care about people unless they agree entirely with your stance about the supernatural you are essentially gunna be holding your breath until you turn blue. Like - you can...But having zero chill isn't exactly the most attractive social behaviour.
I despise people who decide how to act based on how much other people will like it.
I think we're done here.
I'm not sure that I agree that a queer character can only be played by a queer actor. That is called acting, the entire idea is to be someone you're not. If wr put that rule, then you can also say that straight characters cannot be played by queer or gay actors, not something we want, I'd say.
I think its more a push toward making space for people who have marginalized identites to act. For a long time being openly queer was career suicide. So now that those stories are finally being told, people also want actors writers and producers of those identities involved in the process.
I think its less that straight actors cant play queer characters and more so that there are already plenty of roles for them. Maybe in a more equal future that pressure wont be there but right now it is.
I also think it depends on the role. A side character that happens to be gay? Yeah a straight actor can definetly play that. A lead role in a comming of age tale about discovering your gender identity? Probably best played by someone who has lived experience.
Imo it's the same idea as having black people play black characters instead of white people with black makeup. If everyone was treated as equal then it wouldn't be an issue. However, that's not reality. People are treated differently based on gender, sex, race, age and so forth. Wanting queer characters to be played by queer actors is a way of making sure they have a space to demonstrate their skill, talent, and potentially make a living off it. Same thing with black people playing black characters, or women playing female characters.
There's another element, however, in which good acting can't fully replace personal experience. A queer actor playing a queer character will likely be able to identify with said character much better than a straight actor could, and as such, they would be able to harness their personal experiences and channel them through the character they're playing.
While my latter point doesn't refute your point about straight characters being played by queer actors, the former hopefully explains why it isn't universally applied. I do believe though, that in a just and equal world, things like sex, race, gender and so forth shouldn't be (dis)qualifiers for any given character, it's just that we don't live in that kind of world.
Maybe not, but having it played by a queer-hating religious zealot won't do.
True
To be fair I never said "can only be played by" just that the gold standard has become preferred casting of actors who can apply their personal experiences to the role be it people who come from a specific place or culture (like a queer culture) , have a specific racial background or a disability those roles particularly are earmarked with a growing cultural preference for people because there's some wider cultural issues of stereotyping, typecasting or framing out people who can tell you is something the playwright put in is full of shit. More people are becoming wise to media literacy and can spot things off with an uninformed take on a performance.
There is a silver and bronze standard that are still acceptable. Sometimes you cast someone outside the gold standard for a bunch of reasons. Availability, overwhelming directorial notions that it was an audition above and beyond... but in leftist spaces particularly - like audio drama podcasts as an example the gold standard of preferred applicants is explicitly listed on audition sides.
No, the entire thing about acting is that people can play people other than themselves. If you can't play outside your own experiences, you're not the "gold standard", as you randomly claim, you're a bad actor.
Well you can cast your creative projects as you like.
You do seem to be missing the point and leaving most of my point untouched however. It isn't that a person without the experience can't play the part. It's that when you are not accostomed to seeing people like yourself lifted up it is far more thrilling to see it happen. It's not about the actor. It's about the audience.