Your relatives have to sleep sometime, right? Plan for that by programming up a selection of delightful, hilarious, educational and affirming films you can stream through library systems and various platforms. Use your best judgement about your safety based on what you know about the people around you-what they will notice, how much surveillance there is-and pick some the items you feel pretty certain will fly under their radar while you’re there, (very quietly) queer, and fabulous. In the meantime, here are some ideas for things you might do to mark Pride and keep yourself safe at the same time (please do this, we need you alive and well to dance again another day).
Next year, I sincerely hope we’ll be back to the loud-and-proud version. This year, all of us are going to have to #celebratepridequietly-but some more than others. It’s incredibly soothing to the soul to feel like you can be fully yourself, even for a day. Pride gives many of us queer folks an opportunity to see our experiences reflected, validated, and shown to be as beautiful as we are. Any which way, some of us are finding ourselves stuffed back into the closet right now and for a while to come.
Maybe you know it’s just not safe for you to openly celebrate Pride at home this year (or… any year). Miyagawa Chōshun (1683-1753) - scenes from ‘A Rare and Important Nanshoku Shunga Handscroll.Perhaps you, young lesbian, gay, bi, queer, or trans person, are currently living with your relatives, in a restricted-movement quarantine situation-together every day, all day, all the time. Not all Japanese art is cherry blossoms, surging waves, and exotic birds, there is a whole world of shunga or erotica filed away among Japan’s beautiful canvases, silks, and scrolls kept by museums and in private collections. Shunga’s popularity really started during the Edo Period 1603-1868 when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate. This rise in popularity stemmed largely from the dominant male population which had massively increased as a result of the high number of samurai/retainers required to guard provincial lords and their estates and maintain law and order, and through the surge in agricultural laborers required to produce the food to feed this large population. To get an idea of what we’re talking about, the city of Edo-the former name for Tokyo-had a population of one million by 1721. This made Edo the largest city on the planet. But what’s more staggering is that seventy percent (70%) of the city’s population were male. This meant a lot of horny blokes looking for good wank material.Īpparently, the word shunga means “ pictures of spring”-spring being a euphemism for erotica probably as in the English equivalent “the joys of spring.” (If you can’t figure that out, I’m not going to explain it for you.) Though shunga was predominantly used by men, it was very popular with the ladies, too. It was also considered very lucky or at least a bringer of good fortune to those who carried a shunga scroll on their person. When it came to sex, the Japanese have always been far more liberated than most other countries. Indeed, homosexuality and lesbianism have a long history in Japan going way back to ancient times-long before people started documenting such pleasures. In fact, gay sex was AOK in Japan up until 1872 when sodomy was briefly outlawed.