was anybody gonna tell me that wikipedia has its own catgirlsona or was i just supposed to stumble upon her myself

Jewish + Celtic henna inspired work for @wyrmzier ! It was so much fun to do

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

every time i see discourse about pedohysteria amidst a trans genocide i think about that news article from 2016 about the mexican immigrant who voted for trump because trump said he’d get rid of all the “bad hombres” from mexico, only to be deported himself because it turns out what trump was really saying was that he wanted to deport all mexicans, not just “the bad ones”

not just him, but there were many other examples too, like white conservatives who have mexican immigrant friends and family or people in the community important to them who were mexican immigrants, and they voted for trump because they thought trump was just getting rid of “criminals”, and then they regret it when their families and communities get torn apart by deportations of their spouses, their friends, their favourite restaurant owners, etc.

anyways, i hope young queers, trans people esp, understand that when conservatives talk about “pedophiles” and “groomers”, they’re not talking about actual child abusers, they’re talking about all queer people. they’re talking about all trans people. it’s why in florida, they’re categorizing “drag” as a child sex crime, and making sex crimes against children punishable by death. they’re trying to execute every single trans person, and that’s just the rhetoric they’re using

so stop buying into the pedohysteria. it’s easy to think “well, i’m not a pedophile, so i’ll be safe” when you don’t realize that in the eyes of conservatives, every single queer person is a pedophile and deserves death, and contributing to their rhetoric by trying to figure out which trans woman is a pedophile is just accelerating your own march to the gallows

When I was in school, the argument – and in fact the standard belief – was that no gay person, ever, could be a teacher, because all gay people were pedophiles and groomers. It was for the “safety of children.” Lesbians and gay men couldn’t be allowed in locker rooms with “normal” people because we would ogle and assault them. Every gay, every lesbian, every trans person, every bi person (pan didn’t really exist as a term then) had the assumption of being a sex offender just waiting for an opportunity.

Literally everything they say about trans people now, they said about gay people 30 years ago.

There are people right now in government trying to outlaw gay marriage again, saying that Pete Buttigieg – the human equivalent of a Wonder Bread pb&j sandwich, as wholesome in image as they come – shouldn’t be allowed to raise his children because he’s abusing his children by raising them. People on Twitter have started openly calling for rounding up and executing anyone who ever helped a minor access HRT - parents, doctors, nurses, the receptionist who checked us in for my daughter’s appointments - and while those are only random people online, that isn’t a thing you saw happening frequently just a couple of years ago. Louder voices have started calling for mentally ill people – starting with trans and gay people – to lose our rights to vote.

Do I think queer people are being rounded up right now? No. Do I see the rhetoric escalating? Yes. Is it aimed at all of us? Oh yes.

Groomer, pedo, degenerate, freak: they mean all of us. There are no exceptions. If you think there are, you’re fooling yourself.

Join, or Die.

cant put my finger on it, but Taylor Swift feels like walking racial microaggression

I just learned this recently apparently her new boyfriend is like a steaming pile of shit too??? Like racist antisemtic the whole damn sha-bang He's the dude who did a nazi salute for "saTiRE"

having aromantic feelings in this denny’s tonight bc i had to go on a blocking spree yet again.

I just think like… people don’t know shit about what it’s like to be aromantic. aphobes complain about the Fandomization Of Pride and say shit like “asexuality is basically a fandom thing; if your community is entirely online and based around tumblr tags and headcanons, you cant possibly compare it to actual real life gay experiences”

and like. i have some bad fucking news for you about gay people who live in super homophobic backwater small towns. I’ve known plenty of gay people who were completely closeted irl and whos entire interaction with queerness was online communities, especially gay shipping. that doesn’t mean there aren’t other gay people in those homophobic little towns, its just often too dangerous to look for them. there are definitely other aro people in my backwater little town! I just can’t find them. I’m not saying this is the best way to interact with the queer community! or even a good way! for instance, nobody gives a shit about gay vs aro or bi vs pan irl! this drama is all internet shit! but being terminally online is certainly not a problem unique to aspec people.

honestly, as someone who’s trans, bisexual and aromantic, the thing that’s actually made my life the most difficult for cishets to swallow is the aromantic part. my backwater town is fairly liberal, so they can be chill about the gay thing, they can even tolerate the trans thing, but not getting married???? what do you mean you can’t be like the sweater-wearing chaste gay dads in the commercials? what do you mean you don’t want to date but you still want to have sex???????

nothing about my identity is palatable. nothing about me is relatable or marketable. my life, my future, my happiness, looks completely alien to your average cishet. the first time I told someone irl that I was aromantic, the immediate reaction was “oh my god I’m so sorry” as if I just said I had cancer.

like. actually. yknow what. yeah I think the aromantic experience is very easy to compare to my experience as a disabled person. its because I’m fundamentally missing something that Typical People consider completely intrinsically tied to their worth and their happiness. what’s the point of life if you can’t get married? whats the point of life if you can’t have a job? “i’m so sorry to hear you’ll never experience the be all end all of human existence; retiring to live comfortably with your aging partner as your grown children take up the mantle of your legacy.”

people don’t know what its like to be aromantic. they think of it as a tumblr tag, or headcanons, because the only time they bother to interact with aromanticism is when they’re complaining about our headcanons. no one can deny that aspec identity in this decade is intrinsically connected to the internet, in the same way that no one can say that gay identity in 1970s and 80s america wasn’t intrinsically connected to gay bars. its because That’s How You Meet People. queer people have always taken whatever was the current way for humans to connect to each other and carved out their own space.

aromanticism is in the stage where its hard to find other people, and no one knows what you are, and if you explain it to them they think you’re sick. we’re in the stage where we don’t get a lot of explicit canon representation, we have to scrape by on aro readings and subtext and coding.

and it IS coding! its coding! I don’t care if aromanticism wasn’t named yet back then! there are plenty of instances of queer coding from before we had words like “trans” or “gay” or “lesbian” or even “queer.” what matters is that someone somewhere was like “this character has the experience of not feeling the socially mandated attraction to the opposite binary gender,” which is a queer experience whether the person feeling it is gay or aromantic. just like bisexuality and lesbianism weren’t separated for a long time because straight society didn’t care if the wlw could also technically like men, lesbianism and aromanticism and asexuality weren’t separated because straight society didn’t care if the woman who wouldn’t get married to a man wanted to kiss girls or not.

this is way longer than I intended it to be and it got kinda rambly and train-of-thought, and I don’t think I really have any particular conclusion here. just aro feelings. idk if this makes sense but I’m tired of trying to edit it to make more sense so I’m just hitting post

not to be problematic but i literally do not give a shit about age gaps when dating vampires. they thirst for your blood. "but it's predatory!!!!" yeah. it is. "they're preying on you!!!" they're vampires. they do that. "it's a power imbalance!!!!!!" what part of vampires are you not getting

they eat people and can turn into bats and crawl around on walls, lizard fashion, and can hypnotize you with your eyes. a) the age gap is not the creepy part and b) the creep factor is kinda the appeal

they don’t age. that’s part of the horror of it actually. would you accept eternal life, if you can never progress? can never grow or change? you’ll live forever, eternal youth, but frozen exactly as you are now. you will never become the person you’re meant to be. you are trapped in the mind of a 17-year-old forever. also ‘theoretically old if you disregard the fact that he’s a vampire’ doesn’t even make the top 20 worst things about edward cullen list. girl he’s mormon. prioritize

I was nodding along with this the whole time until that last sentence, which hit me like a folding chair

absolutely batshit insane to me that omegaverse porn is an effective data poisoning method against gpt-based products. predatory language models getting tripped up by wolf dick was not on my 2023 bingo card but here we are i guess.

i want us all to take a minute and just. contemplate the possibilities.

tone indicators came about because a lot of platforms have strict character limits (twitter, tiktok, tumblr tags, etc) and because any text communication done primarily via phone keyboard will trend towards abbreviations, so a lot of the time adding a quick "/gen" to a sentence might make more sense than a whole "asking genuinely here" clause. it's also appealing to many people because it's a way of clarifying jokes and quips without having to reconfigure the entire joke so it loses it's punch, ex. "blocking you rn /lh" reads differently than "don't take this seriously but I'm blocking you over this." if they don't appeal to you or you can't remember all the abbreviations or you find them otherwise confusing, that's all fine, you can simply not use them, but they aren't pointless nonsense words. I don't know if you know this but sometimes teens invent slang that makes sense to them but not older generations and this is what is regarded as "fine."

the hottest moment in the mcu is when steve and bucky team up to beat the shit out of tony

This stupid exchange between friends has become a cultural icon.

This text thread brought us into a new age

c'mon, we can get this to a million

throws this at you like a elementary kid throwing a bug/frog on the recess supervisor

(click for better quality)

More hobie because I love him

He is my whole world now, if he gets hurt I will cry and scream in the theater

Republicans are regressive, reactionary, and petty. They fear society as it moves forward.

gender inclusive language can quite literally be the difference between life and death for someone, especially in medical settings.

spider-man across the spider-verse posters 🕷️♥️

It shouldn’t be this heartbreaking to be a Jew online.

(in case anyone misses this point, which I think is very important: it takes more than reblogging a “Happy Passover” post to be an actual ally to Jews online. Education is vital)