And bisexual. and pansexual. and multisexual.... @and-bisexual - Tumblr Blog

The thing about gay sailors in the Victorian era is that England and America had totally different takes on it. In the british navy they could, and did, literally kill men for having consensual relationships with other men. But in the US navy, even tho John Adams literally copied England's naval regulations when making America's version, he chose to leave out every proscription against sodomy. And no one knows why!!! England was like hmm yes the death penalty and America was like i dont really see how thats my business. And like gay American sailors could still be charged with things like "uncleanliness" or "indecency" (charges that were vague enough to cover a lot of different things) but bc it wasnt specifically forbidden in the regulations "the commanding officers [were given] wide discretion to prosecute, punish, or ignore."*

And by and large US officers seem to have ignored it. We literally have the records of every flogging (the most extreme form of punishment allowed during these specific years) onboard a naval vessel for the years of 1846-1848 and almost all of the cases that involved homosexual activity "unambiguously refer to male/male homosexual activity involving attempted assaults on children, not consensual couplings between adults."* There are also multiple recorded instances throughout the Victorian Era of an American sailor coming forward with a charge of sexual assault and pulling in other sailors or even officers as witnesses who tell their captain yeah i totally saw them and didn't say anything until this sailor told me it was nonconsensual. There are even records recorded by naval recruitment officers of men with extremely explicit gay tattoos being allowed to join the navy. Why did the US navy not care enough to even include it in the regulations while the British navy literally hanged men for it??? Were we so hard up for sailors that John Adams was like bitch we need every gay sailor we can get????

And weirdly enough this was true on American Whaling ships too! In the recorded cases where homosexual activity led to sailors being disciplined (in some cases punishment so mild as just being dropped off their ship at the next port) it was usually in situations where rape was involved and/or there was a high degree of ship disruption related to it (guys getting into a public knife fight for example). Idk I just think thats so interesting especially when America and England were so similar to be so different in this particular area is fascinating

*quotes from Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail by William Benemann

bigmickswingin

Adams is also the right to legal counsel and innocent until proven guilty guy.

being against arbitrary prosecution seems to have been a Thing for that guy

although its not unexpected that [tumblr] finds talking about gay sailors way more fun. anyway, here's an Adams quote taken way out of context as a little treat:

"The shortest road to men’s hearts is down their throats."

(which could mean nothing)

madnessfromthemountains

Adams was probably somewhere on the gay spectrum himself. He’s literally a distant cousin of my dad’s family which was FULL of the gay!

and-bisexual

* Bi+ spectrum

* what part of them was full of the gay was it their throats? please someone take my phone away from me I'm too tired to be posting

infiniteglitterfall

fun fact: wifi stands for wireless fireless

infiniteglitterfall

this is because it is guaranteed not to burst into flames while you're gaming.

if your wifi bursts into flames while you are gaming, first, please grab your computer and stop, drop, and roll.

if that does not put out the fire, please throw your computer in the first available direction and vacate the premises in a calm, controlled manner. do not panic. simply proceed to the nearest exit and do not be on fire.

second (or third, as applicable) call the fire department.

DO NOT USE WIFI CALLING TO DO THIS. DO NOT.

that's it! you are now safe from your malfunctioning wireless fireless. you may be able to call your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to request a repair and a full or partial refund. Good luck!

infiniteglitterfall

do not call them over the fucking wifi though

infiniteglitterfall

this post was brought to you by me reading the following headline

It’s almost certainly not what you think.

this is silly clickbait! everyone knows it's wireless fireless.

also, please enjoy your semi-annual reminder that "wireless fireless was invented by a woman."

in fact, the story is even better than that.

Hedy Lamarr, and this is true, was not only a famous Hollywood film star: one of her hobbies was electrical engineering.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born Jewish, in Austria, in 1914. Do I even have to say that she ended up fleeing the Nazis?

(And fleeing her hyper-controlling Austrian arms dealer husband, who, unsurprisingly, had turned out to be a fascist. He was so controlling that in order to leave him, she had to hire a maid, drug her, and steal the maid's uniform.)

She got on a boat to America in 1937.

Eliezer Meir, whose family had fled to Canada from the pogrom-filled Russian Empire in the 1880s, was also on that boat.

At a time when many careers were barred to Jews, Meir had managed to start a chain of movie theaters and a production company. He became Louis B. Mayer, one of the M's in MGM Pictures.

Kiesler was already a famous actress in Germany and Czechoslovakia when they met. He promised her a job if she learned English. And she became Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr famously quipped, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

She balanced her lucrative career in "standing still and looking stupid" with a vast number of inventive side projects. Among, probably, many other things, she invented:

a tablet that would add cola flavoring to fizzy soda-water

new, faster airplane wings

an improved stoplight

a shower chair

a fluorescent dog collar

When she met the incredibly early electronic musician George Antheil, she saw a chance to help fight Hitler by combining her knowledge of munitions with his experience making keyboards talk to each other.

Together, they worked on her idea for a wireless communication system to prevent enemy forces from jamming the radio signals guiding the Allies’ torpedoes.

She called the invention “frequency hopping,” since the system caused radio waves from the transmitter and receiver to change to a new one simultaneously. Hopping between various frequencies made it impossible to find and redirect incoming signals.

They got a patent for it, and donated the patent to the U.S. Navy.

Sadly, the Navy dismissed Lamarr’s contribution at the time, telling her she’d be more useful selling war bonds in exchange for kisses. No wonder she once wrote, "My face has been my misfortune."

Wanting to help in any way she could, she agreed. And she raised 25 million dollars. (Which is the equivalent of 509 million dollars in 2025. Seven million of that - or $142,585,541 today - was in just one night. So basically, the Navy can eat shit.)

Antheil had a pretty good theory about why the Navy rejected it:

“They said that the mechanism we proposed was ‘too bulky to be incorporated in the average torpedo.’ . . . I know (or I think I know) why they said that. . . . The reverend and brass-hatted gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words ‘player piano.’ ‘My God!’ I can see [them] saying. ‘We can’t put a player piano into a torpedo!”

But eventually, someone must have recognized the power of her invention. Because years later, when the Navy needed a way to encode messages about detected submarines, it turned to frequency hopping. It used the technology again during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Now, "frequency hopping" is called "spread spectrum technology." It's used not only in wifi, but also in broadband and GPS technologies.

So, happy Jewish Heritage Month! Please think of this while you enjoy your magical wireless devices of all types!

And yes: your wireless fireless actually does work by rapidly changing the frequency of a radio wave.

In fact, radio frequencies are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just like visible light.

That's why we can hear music or read websites at about the same time that they're being broadcast to us. Because radio photons travel at the speed of light.

They're just much lower on the spectrum than the wavelengths we can see.

There's a tiny antenna in your cell phone and your wireless router. Those antennae pick up the radio signals and translate them into electrical signals that the rest of your hardware can understand, and turn into data for you. (And vice versa -- when you hit like or reblog, your hardware sends electrical signals to the antenna to send out as radio signals.)

Now guess why I'm telling you this.

infiniteglitterfall

It's because, if wifi is made of radio waves, and radio waves are made of light our human eyes can't see...

WIFI ABSOLUTELY COULD START FIRES!!!!!!!

I know. I didn't expect this to come full circle either. I honestly did not.

.......

It is designed to be fireless though.

WIRELESS FIRELESS.

hellativity

ok yall know how we piss on the poor on this website. i saw this post a couple weeks ago and bc it contained so much cool true information about hedy lamarr i did not bother to fact check (or sanity check) any part of it. or click the link. i just put the info in my brain. today i told my friends that wifi stands for wireless fireless and they were like gwen i dont think thats true. and i had to come back and find the post. i have been crying laughing for like 10 minutes. anyway did you know wifi stands for wireless fireless. this is because it is guaranteed not to burst into flames while you're gaming.

infiniteglitterfall

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS STORY. THIS IS GONNA BE ONE OF MY PERSONAL FAVORITE THINGS I'VE EVER ACCOMPLISHED.

bobdylanyaoi

onethousandfrogs

Funniest justification for gay sex thank you Marlon Brando

estrogenesis-eeveeangelion

fake people pleasers when marlon brando arrives

yourdailyqueer

Putsata Reang

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual

DOB: Born 1974

Ethnicity: Cambodian

Nationality: American

Occupation: Journalist, writer

Note: She wrote in a 2016 "Modern Love" column for the New York Times, "I’m gay, or a version of it. I came out to my mother in my 20s as gay because there is no word in our Khmer language for bisexual."

pipis-envy

Calling a canon bisexual woman a lesbian becuase she has a female love interest or is in a wlw relationship is bisexual erasure and biphobic!!!!

pipis-envy

Same thing goes for bisexual men and mlm relationships!!!!!

pipis-envy

REBLOG THIS VERSION TOO YOU COWARDS

toenail-soup-deactivated2020091

Same thing for bisexual people in m/f relationships that people call straight.

the-bi-library

Download and read online link to those books is in the next tweet in the link. I highly recommend bisexuals to read the magazines!

discworldwitches

Ultimately, bisexuality as a form of sexuality or identity had to be refused in the present tense. That is to say that bisexuality always had to be somewhere else–in the embryo, the sphere of human prehistory–or something else–either really heterosexual or homosexual. It could never be a stable sexual identity in the here and now otherwise the epistemological integrity of the very categories of man, woman, heterosexual and homosexual would be thrown into doubt (Angelides, 2001).

-steven angelides, historicizing bisexuality

wheeloffortune-design

CONTROVERSIAL OPINION ABOUT BISEXUALITY

that purple in the middle is not the right saturation, it doesn't fit with the other two colors and it drives me crazy.

deus-ex-aquila

all right, I think I got this, I've got dual citizenship and I have another flag we can borrow from:

step 1

step 2

step 3

varangianviper

wheeloffortune-design

This is true bi/ace solidarity.

xthehatchick

holy shit

posi-pan

hey how is everything? sorry to bother, I know your tumblr is focused on pansexuality, but…could you tell me the historical context of polysexuality, and what is the difference between it and omni, pan and bi? I've recently identified myself as a poly, and I'd like to know a little more…but unfortunately it's not a very well-known identity, so it's hard to open up to someone like that…mainly because a lot of people invalidate it. Anyway, I would be grateful if you could tell me!

Hi! Everything’s good, thanks for asking. I hope you’re well. This isn’t a bother at all! It’s occurred to me that aside from pansexual, I have sourced posts on the histories of omnisexual, multisexual, and mspec lesbians/gays, but I don’t have one for polysexual. So this is the perfect opportunity to make one! 🤓

Like omnisexual, polysexual has a similar history to pansexual. It has been a sexual identity label since at least the ‘60s, has been used to indicate things like universal appeal, and has been historically and is currently included in the bisexual community.

Polysexual used since at least the ‘60s:

— The Homosexuals: As Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities (1964) states, “people are not only bisexual but polysexual in the sense that they are biologically capable of being sexually roused by either sex.”

— Utopia U.S.A. (1972) states “we want the right to sexual self-determination. Young people must have the unhindered right to be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, polysexual, or non-sexual.”

— Greg Turner in an issue of The Gay Liberator (1976) discusses sexual identity, sharing the different labels they’ve used over the years, including polysexual.

— An article about Gay Comix in an issue of the Bay Area Reporter (1986) states, “We use the work of homosexuals, heterosexuals, asexuals, polysexuals, ambisexuals, multisexuals, omnisexuals, and forget-about-it-sexuals.”

Polysexual used to indicate things like universal appeal:

— An After Dark article (1974) on David Bowie describes him as having an “outrageous polysexual image”.

— Lou Reed is said to have a “polysexual image” in Circus (1974).

— August Darnell is described as having a “deliberately polysexual style” in New York Magazine (1982).

— Elvis is said to have an “ambiguous polysexual appeal” in E: Reflections on the Birth of the Elvis Faith (1995).

— In Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness (1998) “My Insatiable One” by Suede is described as having “polysexual intrigue”.

Polysexual included in the bisexual community historically:

— In “Bisexual Liberation” (1994), Liz Highleyman describes pansexual, polysexual, and omnisexual as “newer labels with less baggage” than queer.

— In Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions edited by Naomi S. Tucker (1995), Sunfrog states the bi movement is “breaking down border once again” in the “promising existence” of “new terms and identities”, such as “omnisexual, pansexual, and polysexual”, indicating an “expanding consciousness” regarding sexuality, and “the limitations of language and the existing terms” do not encompass the full scope of our sexualities.

— An LGBT conference is discussed in Bi Women Quarterly (1999), where the term bisexual and alternatives such as polysexual are talked about a bi writer caucus.

— Anne Killpack’s editorial in Anything That Moves (1999) states, “whether you call yourself bisexual, polysexual, multisexual, pansexual, me-sexual or refuse to be labeled altogether, if you are like me and find people attractive regardless of their sex or gender, then we need you.”

Polysexual included in the bisexual community currently:

— BiNetUSA: “Getting Bi+ (Pan/Fluid/Omni/Poly/Queer/Unlabeled).”

— BiPhoria: “If you're attracted to people of more than one gender, if bisexual or other related words like omnisexual, polysexual or pansexual seem the best fit for how you feel about other people: welcome aboard.”

— Bisexual Research Project: “We are a group of researchers, educators, and activists working to better understand the bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, plurisexual, queer, fluid, and unlabeled experience.”

— Bisexual Resource Center: “When we use the word “bi+,” we include anyone who experiences or has experienced physical, emotional, sexual, and/or romantic attraction to people of more than one gender. We welcome our pansexual, queer, heteroflexible, polysexual, and label-free siblings under our umbrella!”

— GLAAD: “What does it mean to be bisexual? Some people who have the capacity to be attracted to people of any gender choose other words to describe their sexual orientation such as: bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, omnisexual, fluid, or queer. Some people prefer to avoid any label at all.”

Now the differences. Generally speaking (meaning these are basic definitions, not universal representations of every nuanced, personal experience), the easiest way to understand the difference is that bi can mean anything from two to all, ply means multiple but not all, and pan and omni only ever mean all. I discuss this more in my FAQ.

All of these sources (and more!) can be found on my omni/ply timeline page (which includes timelines, lists of inclusive groups/orgs, and representation). I hope this helps and can serve as a jumping off point for learning about polysexual history! 😊🧡

meatmandean

obsessed with the power he holds over straight men

meatmandean

Update

shellermelle

another update, if anyone’s interested

sheepstiel

adding this one

deathbyotpin123

What if Jensen was stuck in Supernatural for 15 years because the universe knew he was too powerful so he had to be contained? But now he’s free and the straight men are no longer safe.

hermywolf

it just keeps going there’s so many

verypissedoffdee

He’s taking over as the next Ryan Reynolds in the grey area of sexuality for dudebros

threi

AHAHSHH

vergess

Being inescapably trapped in 15 seasons of SPN fandom was, in retrospect, absolutely worth it to watch a bunch of grown straight men beat-for-beat recreate the Princess Jensen memes of queer teen a decade ago.

This is a reboot I can respect.

and-bisexual

CAN WE.

PLEASE

do a fundraiser

To find every single such comment in the entire Internets

And explain to them that they are officially and totally bisexual?

girlgerard

sorry i need to map this out in my head

girlgerard

frank posted a filtered picture of gerard on instagram. he decided said picture was so cool he was going to use an app to combine it with a picture of a darkthrone shoot. brief break to post a pride flag and #LoveWins the entire dash to shambles. he then edits the same picture onto another album cover using his own hands on his own phone. he now has at least four versions of the same picture of gerard saved in his photos. he does this all for the public to see. while wearing gerard’s scarf.

girlgerard

this raises so many questions. were they hanging out together like in the airport. did frank stop and see a pride flag and say ‘wait, my friend gerard way, i have to post this online’. did gerard concur. were they sitting in the hotel giggling their asses off while frank edits photos of gerard to look like black metal covers. or was he By His Fucking Self pride posting and making fan cams of his frontman. this entire situation is mind bogglingly hilarious

pensivelyplayfulme

The bisexual gaze is being attracted to women with “weird” hair and Hozier send tweet

skeletonislandtheme

gonna invent the bisexual gaze in film. it’s when big strong action dudes are doing big strong action dude things but it’s shot like they’re Bond girls, and women are filmed as if they’re wearing suits and/or suits of armor even when they’re not. alternately it’s when i gaze at a character and say “that one’s bisexual now.”

queendomcosplay

After trying to decide if The Mummy was filmed with the male gaze or female gaze, I’ve come to the conclusion that it was filmed under the Bisexual Gaze. Here’s a list of other films with the Bisexual Gaze:

Jurassic Park

Venom

Every Barbie Film

Night at the museum, but specifically every scene with Jebediah and Octavius

The 2005 Pride and Prejudice

Pirates of the Caribbean

Les Miserables

Newsies

The Hannibal TV Show

Good Omens

Basically, if you look at a film and think “oh my god everyone is attractive why and the film has a bunch of just…super obviously implied queerness, congrats, that’s the Bisexual Gaze baby! Feel free to add to the list

norrington-hell

i would like to add some animated films to this list

Atlantis: The Lost Empire

The Road to El Dorado

Treasure Planet

The Book of Life

stevetwisp

from the episode “the one where bob comes out as bi”

#joke #but also he is bi

micro-usb-deactivated20230625

They left the most important part out of the tweet

secondbeatsongs

and-bisexual

What? He's bi?

(Fun fact, no seriously though, anytime you hear someone was goth or glam rock, just assume they're bi until proven otherwise. I swear this works 85% of the time.)

See?

pansyfemme

i hate the concept of ‘straight passing’ people bc none of you can seem to acknowledge that theres mspec people who arent straight passing

pansyfemme

this is a personal thing bc- as i have explained many times, i have a mother and a father, and neither of them are straight. My father is a short, thin man who paints his nails, has a high voice, wears bowler hats and vests daily, and reviews theatre for a living. My mother (although she is now more feminine presenting) has short, curly hair (which she had shaved for a time) a deep voice, wears mostly overalls and work pants and used to be an organic farmer/painter. As you can imagine- my father, when he is not accompinied by my mother, is seen as a gay man. He is routinly hit on by men, asked about his ‘husband’ and gets profusly apologized to when he mentions his wife. My mother was reffered to by my aunt as an ‘ex lesbian’ (paraphrased) when she married my father. The fact that my parents have both been identifying as bisexual from the very start means very very little to those who make assumptions. However- when I say that I have two bi parents- its still assumed that they’ve “given up” their bisexuality- that they are the same as two heterosexual parents. I can tell you for a fact that the way I was raised was not by heterosexual parents. My dad bringing me to drag shows as a small child and my mother teaching me feminism and how to dress for myself as young as i could verbalise was not in vain. My parents are not ‘straight passing’. However- ‘straight passing’ is used for any m/f relationship between two queer people. It’s fucked, really. It’s not ‘straight passing’- you just think that bi people are straight.

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And bisexual. and pansexual. and multisexual....