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@darklydragon
Found this little critter from Luttrell Psalter and I just had to do something about it!!
Had a hankering for some very rough hand-drawn animation so I decided to bring this little guy to life. Careful not to startle your local marginalia critter, they're nervously inclined.
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.
ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep
Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.
Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.
Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!
So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.
Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:
Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?
I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.
Stop and think about that for a minute.
Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.
Our Flag Means Death >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I was thinking about waiting until I finish all my slots to put up a big compilation post, but I just love this piece so much I have to put it solo!
Elf video games: 300 hour jrpgs with legions of characters and several novels worth of text. Labrynthine upgrade trees and customization options. The most insufferably unintuitive UI possible. A single turn based battle can take hours. Every character has an ennui stat.
Dwarf video games: Basebuilding strategy FPSs that has a whole wiki page on the flexile vs tensile strengths of different building materials. Dwarven rhythm games have minigames where you have to manage supply lines. Mortals cannot comprehend dwarven grand strategy games.
Halfling video games: What appears on the surface to be a viscerally calming farming sim is actually an extraordinarily complex social combat game about cutthroat HOA politics.
Goblin video games: Wildly unbalanced collectathon gatchas where half the fun is finding new hilariously broken strategies. Zany uberviolent team shooters about bugs. MOBAs so bad it's almost art.
Orc video games: Addictive in-browser flash games with names like "Beast Crush 4" and "Borag Meat Game." The art is always kinda bad but in a charming way. The music always slaps.
Goblin code looks incomprehensible but if you take the time to look through it, you realize it's actually optimized in ways you never thought were even possible. Goblins are responsible for like 75% of every games modding community. Goblins all run Linux.
There is no orc game larger than a gigabyte. There are legends of an orc coder successfully ran DOOM on a raw lamb shank.
My cousin Grob ran DOOM on a lamb shank
does anyone have that one painting with the ghosts standing in the water?
like theyre in the water and they're staring off to the side and there's something so very wrong about it and they're bending over and trailing along like deer in the headlights but you can't see what they're staring at which might make it even scarier
like this
I FUCKING FOUND IT.
beach day beach day
by the way, the artist is olivia steen (website linked above) and apparently, her other works are just as breathtakingly eerie
look at this!!! it's cool as hell!!
I thought the last one was very familiar to me and turns out it’s painted over a photo of john lennon !
and after looking at the first one again it is also, a beatle photo
Not going to lie the first picture like the ghost on the water It kinda is referenced on the one picture where the Beatles are in Miami for the Help! shooting I dont have the picture but it really looks like! Especially the bending ghost resembles Ringo and The other Picture where the ghost is sitting down I also remember so much remember that that picture is Brian Epstein sitting I also don’t have the picture cause I cant fine IT aaaaa HAHAH
Now THIS is some fucking forbidden fandom lore lmao
ETA THIS IS THE ONE!!!!
the unholy trinity of piss-poor caretakers, tag yourself:
tomboy, meaning “this child is clearly queer but let’s hope it goes away”
sensitive, meaning “clearly neurodivergent and often distressed but let’s keep going until they grow numb”
mature, meaning “traumatized but let’s ignore that”
quiet, meaning “has been yelled at or ignored a few too many times and now considers all attempts at communicating with others to be pointless”
self-sufficient, meaning “next to zero trust in parental figures’ ability in various aspects of parenting”
lazy, meaning “depressed, but expected to preform tasks or actions without positive support or knowledge of how to do things”
Shy, meaning “been made fun of directly so many times by every adult in their life they learned that the mocking for silence hurts less than mocking for speaking”
Bratty and doesn’t respond to discipline meaning “doesn’t know how to behave, isn’t being told why misbehavior is wrong or shown proper behavior, so discipline teaches nothing.”
Belligerent and talks back too much meaning “she questioned why she was in trouble and was upset by the lack of a proper answer.”
Aggressive and surly meaning “she was bullied mercilessly and tried to fight back after going to adults didn’t help, but she was the one we saw cussing so we’ll punish only her.”
can we like…get rid of the so-called leather and rubber “pride flags” ? it’s honestly ridiculous and offensive to the lgbtq community. those aren’t pride flags.
The leather pride flag is the second oldest pride flag. It has been at almost every single US pride parade and protest in history.
It’s older then you are, it’s older then I am. The leather community is responsible for pride. Leather daddies were the ones chasing away cops when they tried to arrest us for being queer in public back when Pride Parades were illegal in the US. They are still the ones chasing away cops and corporations from smaller pride events and those that aren’t sanctioned by Wells Fargo. The leather community is essential to the queer community and has a long and rich history.
Please fuck off if you’re not going to learn the actual history of pride.
And don’t fucking out your hate in our tags, asshole.
The leather pride flag represents an expression of self which is inherently queer, and a community which has been around for generations. It is not offensive to the LGBT+ community in any way. I have seen cis gay and bisexual men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with trans men, all of them united by their leather community roots. The leather community is more diverse and nuanced than you perhaps know, but that is no reason for you to shit on a community you don’t understand.
Here is a photograph from 1998, displaying the leather pride flag, the bear gay pride flag, and the rainbow flag. This is our history.
Source.
Here is a photograph from 1987: three queer women entering into the Ms. National Leather Association Contest, or simply gathering as spectators.
Source.
A flyer from 1989, rallying the leather community to march in a Stonewall anniversary protest.
Source.
A photograph from 1988: Tony Deblase, the creator of the leather pride flag, and a gay man, embracing a fellow member of the leather community. Over his shoulder is Judy Tallwing McCarthy, a Native American woman who was part of the leather community from 1959. She co-founded the first lesbian BDSM group in Portland, along with her partner, Sashie Hyatt.
Source. Source.
Just because you don’t know the history, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Be humble, and always assume you have more to learn. Hatred, and outright dismissal of communities you know nothing about, is the most aggressively anti-LGBT thing I can imagine.
The leather community has always included trans people, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. The leather community is global and nuanced. The leather community is where many of us encounter our found families, and our lovers. For you to dismiss that is cold-hearted and ignorant. Just because queer sex is involved, doesn’t make the community dirty or bad.
I’m again fucking begging the baby gays to read/watch/listen to How To Survive A Plague.
Do you have any. Any idea. Any god damn clue. How kink intersects with LGBT and queer community. Queer history. Do you know why the community pushed for, and against, closing the bathhouses during the 80s? Do you know who organized awareness campaigns about HIV, even way back when it was still called GIRD. Do you know who created the safe sex pamphlets, the classes, who pushed for disclosing your health history to partners, who distributed contraceptives and condoms and dental dams at parties and meetings and baths? Do you even know where the safe sex education we have now comes from? Do you know where a bulk of the language about consent came from? Do you have any good god damn idea what the kink communities have done for us, and continue to do for us?
Keep their names out of your mouths because you clearly don’t know what the hell you’re talking about
If there is one thing I could say to young queer folks, especially young queer folks in the U.S. who are coming of age in a world that is more accepting than the one I knew growing up, it’s this:
Don’t be so quick to sanitize your queerness and make it corporate pride daytime TV-friendly. Don’t be so quick to jump on the purity bandwagon. Don’t be so quick to speak on what your community should look like before you’ve actually learned the history of your community, and always be aware that there are things you probably don’t yet know.
These things will not protect you. They never have. And all you’re doing is isolating yourself from community, from support, from the strength we all have when we stand together in a world that would gladly pick us off one by one.
Queerness isn’t as hidden or embattled now (in some places) as it once was, but make no mistake: when our existence was illegal everywhere the people you have this knee-jerk “hide the weirdos” reaction to are the very ones who would’ve had your back against the cops and the gay-bashers.
The people who made me feel safe to come out in my 20s flew the rubber and leather flags alongside the rainbow flag and often the trans flag as well. You don’t get to tell any of them they don’t belong anymore just because you don’t understand.
All of this, and also:
The Leather Pride Flag (1989) was created 12 years after the Gilbert Pride Flag (1977). The next widely-recognized flags were the Rubber and Bear Pride flags in 1995, followed by the Bi Pride flag in 1998, the Trans Pride flag in 1999, and everything else thereafter.
Just for a sense of scope.
IT’S ALMOST HALLOWEEN
Also, no frogs were harmed, the pink one was painted with magical frog paint but they’re all unbelievably pissed off anyway so I guess harm was caused
Instagram / Twitter
This is the best description I’ve heard for this method, I always thought it was bullshit because I never heard a description that actually explained how to do this other than “tap your head 20 times”.
I have anxiety-induced hissing, which sounds/feels different from sound-induced tinnitus (which I have also experience). Sound-based tinnitus actually sounds like you’re “hearing” something in your ears, whilst the hissing I have feels like it’s “inside my head”, if that makes sense. But this technique still helps!!
Here’s a visual I found because I couldn’t understand the instructions well
All of these fine creatures will be available for adoption at @bitchcraftfair-blog on September 19th in Pittsburgh, PA.
SHOP UPDATE!
Tons of new Mandrake and Slug friends have been added to the shop!
All old style mandrakes are 20% off. check it out at https://www.etsy.com/shop/OtherWorldMenagerie
NEW GOOD BOYS have dropped!!!
even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.
The lyric is:
Well maybe I'm the faggot America
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda
I don't know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I've never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don't know what it's like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.
And it's hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren't slurs when I was your age.
I was 17 when this song came out. "Gay" was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn't like. "Pop quiz? That's so gay!" A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. Her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow "nobody saw". The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn't do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be "endorsing homosexuality." My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she "wasn't supportive of Catholic values."
The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard's murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn't finish a play titled "The Lemon Tree" about two girls whose love for each other couldn't survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn't like I was losing anything, right?
I didn't have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society's homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.
(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang's sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn't get radio play here when I was young.)
And yes, "faggot" was worse than "gay". "Gay" just meant, you know, "bad", but "faggot" meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.
So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day's anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn't believe that for once somebody was on my side.
Green Day's image was tough and angry and loud, and it's an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying "maybe I'm the faggot" was them saying Come and get me. You can't scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I'll own it, and I'll use it to lure you into punching range. You're wrong and I can fight you and win.
It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.
PRIDE WORMS These are based on the Worm on a String toys. These worms are 12inches long, not including their string and keychain. Each is made of custom printed fabric and has googly eyes.
PRIDE WORM ON A STRING KEYCHAINS now available in my shop! Get your gay worms! They are $20 each and 12 inches long from snoot to tail. And they all have googly eyes!
