cats have such a beautiful relationship to space. I’ve never seen an animal so small able to take up half the length of a couch simply by sitting in the least efficient spot possible
rb if you, like me, are the rare breed of internet user who always closes browser tabs that you dont need. like sorry your computer runs like shit maybe its because you have 50 fucking tabs open, cant relate
Since, in true Celtic fashion, I’m gonna start saying “it’s too hot” today, here’s the perfect poll…
Reblog & put your answers in the tags because I’m curious and need to know I’m not suffering alone
daily reminders
- no human being is 100% happy 100% of the time
- being a person is extraordinarily difficult even in the best of times
- this is not the best of times
- someone is grateful you exist (don't argue, it's true)
- a bad day does not predict a bad existence
- it's gonna be okay
Reminder that BetterHelp doesn't give a fuck about their patients and is actually a fucking terrible way to get therapy.
Please find other alternatives for BH because they're ATROCIOUS.
"I want," the man said to the art robot, and then described an image in some detail. "Certainly," said the art robot. A printout came out of its chest. "Thank y- Hey! What's this?" "A list of artists who make images of the kind you describe, and who are accepting commissions."
This is a horror story to a techbro and a feel-good comedy to anyone with a sense of human decency.
the point of my masculinity and male positivity posts are to underline that masculinity and manhood are seen as a threat or in direct opposition to queerness, and that often times in order to be seen as queer you have to be partially or wholly feminine or gender neutral, or express your manhood in a feminine or gender neutral way in order to no longer be threatening, invasive, or a problem.
it is very difficult to exist in queer spaces as a hyper masculine person & a man. you're made to feel like you need to walk a tight rope feeling like you're inherently out of place, as if you existing and being masculine or a man in queer spaces makes others uncomfortable inherently.. just know that when i make positivity posts it is to remind us all that masculinity/manhood and queerness are not opposites and that you do not have to be a feminine man or masc person to be viewed/seen/heard as queer.
chasing men, masculine people, and masculinity out of queer spaces isn't helping anyone currently and won't help anyone down the line. please accept masc enbies, butches, bears, and masculine trans men with the same kindness, love, and passion that you do neutral and feminine people. that's the point when i make these kinds of posts. thank u
This is 100% thanks to the “No kink at Pride” people. Because?
They didn’t want these men at Pride. This is a leather daddy. (A rather covered-up leather daddy, because this addition doesn’t do anyone any good if it’s flagged into invisibility, but best believe that dude has hella abs under there, and a 50/50 chance of heavy tattooing.)
Here’s another. Again on the modest side for the sake of not triggering the automod thing, but you can see the interplay of queerness and masculinity—particularly a kind of forward, unashamed sexual explicitness, if you take a look at their crotches. That’s a kind of…for lack of a better term, mating display. “I have this and want to use it, or at least know there are men here fantasizing about me using it.” It’s akin to a woman wearing a plunge neck. You’re supposed to look, and if you’re a dude, he’d like you to like it.
These dudes (well, most of these dudes)? They’re bears. (I said “most” because the guy in the sunhat is technically a cub. He’s too young to be a bear.) The furriness and the beards and the age and the bellies ARE THE POINT. The name “bear” is an affectionate one. Literally “I’m big and hairy!” In the 00s there was a stereotype(?) that bears were also super-cuddly. I don’t know how true it is, but I can confirm every bear I’ve ever met gives amazing hugs. They will readjust your spine, your touch starvation, and your entire outlook on life.
None of this touches on the rather large queer kink communities around “men in uniform.” Military, police, construction, I can’t tell you how many strip nights I’ve been to at a local gay bar with a guy dressed as a sexy firefighter getting absolutely swamped with dollar bills and lap dance requests.
You aren’t seeing these men because they’ve been forced out of spaces THEY CREATED. One of the best things you can do is to help bring them back.
They’re not threatening, they’re not disgusting, they’re not somehow dangerous just by virtue of being open about their sexuality and sexual desire. They’re just human beings who human slightly differently than you.
But more importantly?
They’re family. And don’t you forget it.
Leather daddies, imho, are fucking around with hypergender performance as much as drag queens. It's two sides of the same coin. Leather daddies literally have beauty pageants.
Also, there's a solid 50% chance that when you talk to those masc-looking leather daddies and bears are just much femme sissies as more femme presenting gay men.
Sincerely, a genderqueer amab bear who dresses like a dad half the time
Your local leather historian here to add a little bit of context to the "this is the fault of the no kink at pride" thing.
The leather community has existed formally (in the United States) since the mid 50s. The Satyr Motorcycle Club was founded in San Francisco in 1954, it is still around today making it the oldest continously run gay organization in the country. This is 15 years before Stonewall. The first gay leather bar, the gold coast, opened in 1958 in Chicago. 11 years before Stonewall. Informally the leather community has existed since the end of wwii when men who had spent years wearing leather, riding motorcycles, and having gay sex came back home and kept doing those things.
Gay men have been arguing about whether or not the leather community belongs at pride since 1970. Since the inception of pride, or more accurately, "Gay Freedom Day." Because the leather community has heavt ties to the SM community. (Whether or not the Leather community is a sub community in the larger SM community, or there's just a lot of overlap is a conversation leathermen have always been having) but there has always been push back because of the tie to radical sex and because of accusations that leathermen are trying to "act straight"
In an essay in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice Leatherman Michale Bronski recalls hearing a lesbian tell a gay man "“Give me a break. You think that someone wearing chaps, a black leather jacket, a motorcycle cap, handcuffs on his belt, two different color hankies, and 36 inch high black boots looks Straight!”*
Which brings us to their presentation of masculinity. If you'll excuse me for becoming An Academic(tm) for a moment, if you look at these communities, Leathermen and Bears, what you find is that popular theories of masculinitu don't work when describing these men, at least not when they're in the spaces that the audence that their gender performance is for also exist. Queer masculinity is a performance for queer people, framing it in the lense of heterosexuality does not do anyone any good and erases the nuances of what is happening.
The leather communities are some of the oldest queer communities in America. To push them out of the queer community or suggest that they're toxic, or somehow harming the community as a whole is to ignore history completely, and engage with an argument that's half a century old.
In 1982 leathermen founded AIDS Emergency Fund in San Francisco. Consistently through the first decade of the AIDS Crisis leathermen (and other radical sex communities) were promoting safer sex, and hosting all kinds of fundraisers to raise money for PWAs and reseach (a lot of leather beauty pagents popped up just for the purpose of rasing money.) All this while they were being told BY OTHER GAY MEN they were the ones killing everyone, they and their weird gross sex were the problem (never mind that a lot of what the leathermen were doing was already safer than monogamous anal sex)
Leathermen are your family, we're part of your community and have every right to be here, even if you don't understand our masculinity.
❤️🖤💙🤍💙🖤
*none of this even begins touching the surface of the discourse leather lesbians and feminists have been having since the 70s. It's tied to TERF rhetoric and the anti-porn movement.
Historic note on bears: the origin of the community is shouded in myth, but certainly by the late 70s the beginnings of the community were there. The AIDS Crisis shot the community to popularity. Because AIDS will cause incredible weight loss, the eorticization of fat bodies was the eroticiaztion of safe bodies. If you read porn written by bears in the 80s and early 90s you'll notice the use of condoms where in other erotica that is lacking.
Wow everyone is going through it. Hold my hand
reblog to hold the hand of the person you reblogged from
i love bisexuality and being bisexual and loving people bisexually and my bisexuality having an effect on my gender and also being bisexual. i love it
- Ollie Schminkey, My Father.
Happy Pride! Hunger Pangs Give Away
(Image ID in alt)
It’s giveaway time! Thanks to the generosity of my patrons and payhip supporters helping me out with my recent spate of ER bills, I will be giving away 5 copies of the eBook and 5 copies of the audiobook. (listen to a sample here)
If you’re new here, Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites (Phangs) is the first novel of my queer, polyamorous, paranormal, slow-burn romance series featuring a deaf, disabled werewolf, a neurodivergent, mad scientist vampire and all other manner of creatures that go bump in the night. You can read more about it here.
Set in a pseudo-regency meets fake-Victorian Gaslamp Fantasy world, complete with gothic castles, enchanted forests, and just a smidge of industrial coal dust, Phangs has been described as “like reading the queer, goth love child of Terry Pratchett meets Jane Austen.”
There are two editions of the novel, a high-heat version (Flirting with Fangs) with depictions of sex and kink on the page and a medium-heat edition (Fluff and Fangs) containing elements of kink with the sex scenes swapped out/faded to black. You can read more about the differences in rating here.
If you’d like to win an edition of your choice, type either “ebook please!” or "audiobook please!" into the replies or reblogs. If you'd like to try and win both you can feel free to do so.
The giveaway will run from June 5 - June 8th, 2023.
I’ll select the winners using a randomizer. You don’t need to be following me, nor do you need to spam reblogs. Once you’re in, you’re in. Good luck!
And if you miss this round, no worries; I'll be doing another later in the month.
I keep forgetting I unfollowed the r/polyamory subreddit, and then I'll randomly see Some Bullshit someone screen-capped in a group chat, and I'll be like, ah. Good call on that one.
I just unsubbed because the mods came to the conclusion that polyamory isn't LGBTQIA, which... Correct, it is in fact none of those identities, and therefore polyamory is not queer, which. Hrm.
What In The Goddamn Fuck Is It Then.
It's not always inherently queer, that's true, but I tend to think of it as queer adjacent. Even if everyone involved is straight, they still run the risk of discrimination in the form of losing jobs, losing kids, losing family etc.
I prefer the queer poly subs fwiw. There's less activity but also less drama.
Oh, I'm so glad that I'm not the only one who is going insane from the takes on that subreddit lately! Like the whole "poly isn't queer" discourse just so often drifts into weird gatekeeping, biphobia, and other regressive trains of thought that I thought wouldn't be welcome in the community. And yet.
Also, there has been a few posts about poly families with kids where the comments (and the OP once) were really parroting the whole "child abuse is rampant / won't someone think of the children" shit and acting like it is somehow different than conservatives saying that The Gays adopting kids is grooming.
It's an overwhelmingly cis, straight, heteronormative sub for a place that claims to be so against mono-normativity and pro-relationship anarchy. Which is the other issue I have with the sub, because so many of them are focused on being solo-poly/relationship anarchists they treat other types of ENM as lesser.
They really hate when anyone talks about being in a closed relationship or practicing kitchen table polyamory. I kept seeing the phrase "monogamy plus" whenever they were talking about people in closed relationships and, like, fuck all the way off with that. People are still polyamorous, even if they're not doing polyamory the way you do it. (Don't even get me started on the way they talk about triads being "normalized" and accepted in media and over-represented. The real issue is the total lack of representation full stop.)
The kid thing is also distressing because like... not everyone who is polyam is also child-free. Some people do want to escalate their relationship. Some people do want kids, a house, and commitment ceremonies. That doesn't make them not polyamorous, and it absolutely fucking doesn't make them groomers. Jesus Fuck.
This is actually SO validating for me, personally.
I don't subscribe to polyam subs *anywhere*, bc whenever I mention my preferred type of polyam (polyfidelity, a closed relationship, etc), I get shut down and ignored, SO quickly. I'm not saying any other kind of polyam is bad or invalid, either. I just want to make clear what I expect in MY relationships.
I have my own personal reasons for preferring this kind of relationship (which are not anyone's business unless you're after dating me) and it's no less valid than any other kind of polyam relationship. I kind of believe that half the point of polyam relationships is to do it YOUR way.
💯🙏💛🟨👍
Worst part about this is I've only ever used that yellow square emoji once and it was just to see how it looked. This isn't who I am. However, in retrospect, I suppose it is
Reading through the notes is a surreal experience please keep adding more to fuel my effervescent consumption of non descriptive emojis
drunk, queer, naked, slutty, loud, and completely full of shit truly, the greatest role he has ever portrayed
STAY SAFE!! [ID: the Gilbert Baker pride flag with the words “Happy pride to all those who are unable to celebrate openly and safely. You are loved and seen!” in all-caps black text over it. /end ID]