Neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim

‘dont say gay if youre bi’ lmao lets all leave the house! lets all go outside and get a big gulp of fresh air is what im thinking

trying to present simple concepts that work best with a casual/unplanned atmosphere in a polished illustration

283,000 likes………giant meteor strike the earth rn holy shit. oh my god.

"maybe it's not your pussy" is such a funny phrase and also correct. People wonder why chores are so hard and it's like, friends we used to have a whole intergenerational team on this and now Grandma is locked in a beige box. Cooking is hard.

Queerness can be about lust, love, or both, but by that same token, kink, leather, and BDSM aren’t exclusively about sex; to a large extent, they’re about community building. While mainstream depictions of BDSM might lead one to imagine it’s nothing but a way for straight couples to reignite sexual passions with spanking and some handcuffs, queer kink lifestyles and the leather community often go beyond sexual intimacy; they are built upon traditions of service, informed risk-aware consent, and chosen family. At the advent of the AIDS crisis, leathermen and leatherdykes were some of the first to take up the responsibility of caring for ailing LGBTQ+ people, throwing parties and BDSM events to raise funds for medical bills, acting as their nurses, and often being among the only people willing to provide human touch and affection to those the world at large treated as lepers. In recent years, the leather community has been recognized by the city of San Francisco for their place at the forefront of AIDS support and safe sex advocacy as well as their unique cultural history.

The “Mother of Pride” herself, Brenda Howard, was a proud member of the LGBTQ+ kink scene, and notably wore a button reading “Bi, Poly, Switch — I’m not greedy. I know what I want.” In the 70s and 80s, lesbian S/M groups like Lesbian Sex Mafia and Samois (whose founders include leather scholars and writers like Gayle Rubin and Patrick Califia) were among the earliest proponents of inclusive and sex-positive feminism. These groups gave queer women a sense of community and sexual empowerment they had been denied from the world at large. To exclude queer leather culture from Pride, therefore, would be to ignore the contributions of communities that were integral in uplifting some of the most marginalized subsets of the LGBTQ+ community.

Anyway, leathermen, leatherdykes, and kinky queers belong at Pride. Always have and always will.

For many years I have heard comments from some in the LGBTQ community about those in the leather/kink community. Many accuse those in the leather/kink community of falling directly into the stereotypical boxes that many cishet people like to try to put queers into. Basically, they think the kinksters are all nasty, perverted, sexually promiscuous, morally bankrupt sluts. To these people, the leather kinksters validate everything the heteros think about queers, and they do so by acting like sexual deviants with no decency or control over their sexual desires.

Usually, the ones making these comments are usually the more “respectable gays”; the gays who try to follow societal norms as closely as possible in order to pass in a culture that greatly values heteronormativity. They graduate from university. They find great jobs. They get married. They buy houses.

They wear Santa hats and take photos with their husband/wife and dog, and print them on the front of holiday postcards that they mail out to everyone in their address book. They have/adopt children. They then bring those children to gay pride marches all over the world, and brand those in the leather/kink community sluts for walking around in jockstraps and harnesses in front of their family.

Obviously there are other types of queers who fall somewhere along this spectrum. Wearing a Santa hat and taking a family photo does not automatically brand someone a “queer sell-out”. Queers are allowed to do such things and still be very much so queer. However, these two extremes represent the opposing sides of many arguments I’ve witnessed in the past few years, especially when they concern whether or not leather people should be allowed at pride events.

How awkward and problematic is it for people to try and police an event such as pride that was started as a rebellion in the first place? And what is it with these queers that are so heavily driven by their need to be accepted that they seem to have forgotten what it truly means to embrace their queer identity?

Many attribute this distaste for leather culture in the queer community to “progress” – marriage equality and civil acceptance seemed to have taken its toll on the hyper-sexualized queer expression of the leather and kink communities.

“Many factors, like gentrification and the fight for marriage equality, have contributed to the rise in homonormality,” said Jeremiah Moss, a writer who journals the evolution of New York City in his blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. “This is a very American melting pot phenomenon: If you assimilate, if you give up what makes you different, you can have rights.”

It seems like those groups of people in our society who are most discriminated against always face this reality at some point: In order to progress, you must sell your soul in some way. In order to move closer toward actual acceptance, you must give up another aspect of your identity. In order to win, you must lose something. In the end, being accepted ends up having absolutely nothing to do with acceptance at all. It’s simply just allowing yourself to be converted.

It’s quite normal for humans to want to make things easier for themselves. Struggling gives us an edge, and makes us resilient and strong in the face of adversity, but no one wants to struggle forever do they? At some point, don’t we want to gain access to all the things that others have? Sure we do, but at what cost?

Recently, while walking around London with my partner, we talked about some of the old queer spaces in cities like New York and London that have since been converted into luxury flats and apartment buildings. And the ones that haven’t been closed and bought out are heavily straight-washed.

How many of us have seen groups of cishet women coming into a gay establishment for a bachelorette party and rolled our eyes so far back into our heads at the thought of having our space completely taken over that we’ve almost passed out? Everyone wants to vogue. Everyone wants to watch Drag Race while snapping their fingers and saying “Werk, queen!” Queer culture is either being completely eradicated or heavily gentrified and commercialized, and all in the name of progress. “Progress is good, but the other part of me wishes it was all still underground”, my partner said.

Is this to say that I feel progress is a bad thing? Not at all. I believe that there is a balance between making progress and sacrificing important aspects of your identity. Leather/kink culture, though not without its faults, is at the core of queer culture. Being a slut in public is at the very core of what being queer stands for – daring to expose the truths and desires that others keep concealed, and refusing to live in shame and silence for the sake of being “normal”. To deny those in the leather/kink community that right is participating in the policing and ultimate destruction of queer culture.

(Image description: mspec, polysexual, bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, and abrosexual pride flags with the words "multi gender attracted and magical" in white text with a black shadow.)

I just remembered my second Pride, where I made different flag themed daisy chain bracelets/necklaces to hand out. I need folks to understand something:

They were free.

They were fucking free.

They were maybe ¢60 of acrylic yarn each at the most, and the whole ziploc bag of them took 2 hours max.

Three people gave me sad eyes until I took their money.

Someone who was clearly the mom friend of their group made me take a $5 and gave a 10 minute pep talk.

At least four more people insisted on getting change to pay for the, once again, free bracelets.

In spite of all these shenanigans, the absolute best was this one person who I can only describe as, “queer surfer dude who looks like a boyfriend who looks like a girlfriend.” I can remember nothing of the outfit, only the impeccable vibes. I did the same thing I did with everyone else, explaining the bracelets were free, and they nodded along as they took the last 6 strand rainbow bracelet. As soon as they had it on their wrist, they pointed at something over my shoulder and, like a fool, I looked.

Next thing I know, they’re running off cackling, yelling, “YOU’LL NEVER CATCH ME!” and I’m holding a fucking $20. I had to stop at least two people from chasing them, cause they thought the person stole something, and then they tried to give me money cause they thought it was funny seeing me flail over people being Too Nice.

That was the year I got reverse-robbed at Pride. I hope everyone out there is having a good time and, in particular, that queer surfer dude is out there still causing benevolent chaos.

After thinking about it for 15 minutes, I now know where the fuck my gremlin tendencies come from. I was always a little shit, and I always tried to be helpful, but this? This was when 19-year-old me realized that chaotic and good are not mutually exclusive.

The world has not known peace since.

Alright, time to bust out this outfit for the summer.

I've survived my first day on Tumblr

Achievements:

Oh boy oh boy you're gonna get a Rare achievement for this one

Containment Breach

I've been inundated with over 120 new followers in the last 5 hours. I haven't been able to even check if I have any pornbots. I'm tired and need to go to bed. I'll clean up this mess tomorrow.

This is cool to look at, though. I'm studying some data-science adjacent fields so things like this are fascinating to me.

I've been told I should submit this to world-heritage-posts. Just to make it clear what happened to me, here's a screenshot of my notifications activity in the last 24 hours.

For additional context, I've only been here 4 days.

At his point, I've been here 5 days and this post has 85k+ notes. My notifications have recovered to the point that sometimes they're empty so I'd say the breach has been recontained and now I just need to deal with the cleanup process.

I figure it might be interesting to show just what this experience has been like.

This is my notification history over the last week. I joined Tumblr Saturday June 17th, 2023 around 12pm so the actual data starts half way through the chart. My follower count has grown at a roughly equal pace.

Overall, I enjoyed the whole thing once the shock died down. I was just surprised this was the post that would gain any traction at all. I expected the chicken posts would be the first ones to reach triple digits and only several months later. But I've enjoyed reading peoples' reactions and chatting with folks here.

I'll close out by sharing some other achievements I've gotten since:

And with this, I'm going to call this chapter of the Saga of Containment Breach closed

You are going to have a 100k notes post in your first week here. You are really speedrunning Tumblr.

Tumblr any%

Disabled people pointing out ableism by the wider queer community is not "ruining the vibes" of pride month

—@mssinenomine

"make it accessible or burn it down" includes Pride

and every other damn thing on earth

i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 100 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken

His ghost is setting those cars on fire actually

I hadn’t really considered “the agnostic demigod of electromagnetism is the reason Musk’s companies fail” before, but I like the concept. 

Let’s help him out. Likes charge, reblogs cast

Waiting for people to fuck up so you can cancel them, gatekeeping, communities self-policing to the point of self-destruction, debating each other's validity, communities infighting over terminology, fighting over the Best way to exist, trying to define what a Bad Community Member is/does, vilifying those people.

Besties I think we fucked up and internalized the surveillance state or the omni-present judgment of god or purity culture or perhaps just maybe all 3

Yeah

kill the cop inside your head

this.

ACAB means when YOU are acting like a cop, YOU are being a bastard.

been stuck with a terrible feeling that one of the episodes in the new black mirror season is gonna end with a title card like "the program you just watched was written by artificial intelligence" and they're going to be so smug about it and we'll all have to talk about it for weeks

oh hey apollo

lol

hey tumblr go eat shit you gormless little sex hating bitch

A big part of the reason I am terrified by anti-adult-content censorship is that for a lot of people, queer people are inherently adult just by existing. Erasing adult content then erases queer people significantly. We're seeing it not just on the internet, but libraries, too. It's overwhelmingly queer stuff getting flagged. They're trying to erase us completely.

when i first started reading fanfic online in the late 90s (before social media and sites like FFN/AO3 were even a glimmer) and fic was hosted on individual fansites this was often the case.

I distinctly remember several site runners/communities that considered ANY LEVEL of queer content an automatic M/NC-17/whatever they used as the highest, most adult rating. Even if all the characters did was hold hands or kiss. And that was IF the content was allowed at all.

this probably sounds like ancient history to some of the younger people around here, but you have no idea how hard people have worked for and fought for this cultural change, and I think the people who have lived this are very, very, very aware of how incredibly easily that ground could be lost.

remember it was queer studies literature the nazis burned first

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.

Reblogging because it’s a damn potato and I want to encourage people to assume potatoes are magical.

w-what if potato is actually lucky

ID text–

Post by “Mike I Guess” @‌mike_i_guess:

“The men in white are the surviving members of the Original San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir. Those in black represent the members lost to AIDs. Remember this when people say the gay community survived the epidemic. We had to start over because we lost a whole generation.” (original post)

also the past was a very different world re: identity and openness

there may be plenty of LGBT boomers (and older people still) who grew up with a “don’t ask; don’t tell” mindset and thus aren’t OutTM to be recognized

Having lost my partner and many friends to this dreaded disease, I carry anger and depression in my heart for the years we were ignored.

Born in the late 40′s. It was dangerous to be anything but what people expected. You never came out. Then starting in the 70′s and 80′s, the devastating disaster of HIV, made slow, painful death and funerals all there was to life. No one cared. We are out here. Not really feeling that the danger has passed.

i hope oceangate gets sued to hell for violating basic safety principles in pursuit of profit, i hope a teenager doesn’t die a horrible death, and i hope the world pays much more attention to the fact that 500 migrants died that same horrible death last week in a completely preventable sinking that was engineered by bureaucratic racism and cruelty. where were their millions of dollars and manpower hours in rescue efforts?

In case, like me, you as an American, have consumed very little news media and had not heard of what OP is referencing there are two stories currently occurring: a dinghy carrying 39 migrants capsized off the coast of Spain, and last week over 300 Pakistani magrants died when a similar thing occurred off the coast of Greece.

The response has been minimal (at least in mainstream American news), and many Human rights orgs have been (rightfully) criticizing the response from both Spain and Greece regarding any rescue operations and the overall handling of migrants in these recent cases and in older ones.

Additional Info / News Readings on this (all in English):

I know it feels like an understatement but you sometimes make more progress by pointing out that conservatives are fucking rude. going out of your way to call someone the wrong name because you don't like them? rude. childish. this isn't fucking kindergarten, Carl. she said her name is Jennifer. Everybody knows her as Jennifer. You are the one making things confusing. Grow up.

"misgendering is violence": invites discourse over the TraNs DeBatE, puts people on the defensive, opens you up to accusations of liberal snowflakery, comes off as a hypothetical thought exercise

"Who the fuck is Jason? I don't know a Jason. Oh her? You mean Jen? You mean fucking Jen? That's Jen, dipshit." : crystal clear. you're making shit more difficult for everyone because you're a rude manchild.