fuckyeah autostraddle

things i read on autostraddle that i loved

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What If Today Was the Day You Joined A+?

If “oh yeah I should probably join A+” has crossed your mind at some point and you’ve not taken action on it, today’s your day!

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A+ Roundtable: Internalized Homophobia and Other Endearing Forms of Low-Key Self-Hatred

Unpacking internalized homophobia (and lesbophobia, and biphobia, and transphobia, and misogyny, and MORE) is hard, but for you we did our best!

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Total ’90s Lesbian Trivia Quiz

Test your ’90s lesbian/bisexual pop culture knowledge right here, right now.

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Midterm Elections Kicked Off in Texas Yesterday; Here Are All the Queer Women Who Kicked Ass

Queer women of color dominated the Texas primary elections!

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The landfill, called Hercules 009 Landfill site, was named one of the most hazardous waste sites in the US by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1984. At the southeastern border of the site sits Altama Elementary School, where I attended school from 1992 to 1998. My two older sisters and younger brother are also Altama alumni, and my maternal grandmother worked in the school’s cafeteria for more than a decade. We never heard about toxaphene waste traveling through a drainage ditch from the landfill onto our school grounds. Turns out that my formative years were spent playing in contaminated soil. Hercules 009 is just one of four Superfund sites in Brunswick. The federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 established the Superfund program, which calls for the cleanup of the most toxic waste sites in the country. Superfund sites are potentially harmful to humans, animals, and the environment. During the mid-1990s, toxaphene waste was removed from the back of Altama, and the EPA website currently states, “Site contamination does not currently threaten people living and working near the site.” Although conditions are reportedly safe, project manager Daniel Parshley from the Glynn Environmental Coalition (GEC), a local environmental nonprofit, says the soil at the school has never been appropriately tested for contaminants. GEC is involved in community organizing, advocacy, and providing technical assistance to Superfund sites to assure “a clean environment and healthy economy for citizens of Coastal Georgia.” In 2005, the EPA Office of Inspector General found that the method being used by the EPA, Hercules, and the GA Environmental Protection Division (EPD) to analyze the amount of toxaphene in the soil at Altama was erroneous and inadequate. This flawed method has also been used at Hercules’ other Superfund site in Brunswick.

Neesha,  My Old Elementary School Is a Toxic Waste Site and Other Environmental Nightmares

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But like, imagine watching The L Word pre-Discourse, and having only seen a handful of queer female characters prior to this entire show chock-full of them, and it’s this very very cool show with all these hot girls who don’t give a shit about men! And you’re a woman in her early 20s which means you’ve recently experienced college, which was full of men who emotionally tortured women for sport and sexual benefits. And the men you and your friends have dated have been on the whole, low-key monsters! So you’re like, wow!! Maybe life doesn’t have to be like this! I could have my life ruined by a woman instead!!!!!! At least she’ll be emotionally available!!! And then you realize that the reason you feel that way about a life of women is not because all women should feel that way but because YOU’RE GAY.

Riese, Watching “The L Word” For The First Time: A Gentle Guide

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Queer black people, please stay with us. Please learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served. Please know you are allowed to be full and loved in a way that does not destroy you. Please grow and continue to be your best selves. Please reach out and understand that you are worth every good thing. You deserve to be here and you deserve community that loves you, especially in a ways that help you become a better person. You deserve to live. You deserve good love. We are here and we are waiting to love you full if you are ready. I don’t remember this every day and that is okay. I learn to let the good love leak in a little more as much as I can. It’s okay if you cannot do this all at once. We are not meant to do this all at once. But if you have space to let yourself love a little more, be loved a little more, stay present a little longer, please do it. The steps are small but they keep you growing, they keep you going and any movement forward is better than none at all. I love you very much.

Alexis - Black History Month Roundtable: Imagining Our Bright, Bold Black Queer Futures

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8 Books to Read If You Loved Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her Body and Other Parties”

Here are eight queer short story collections that embody the same kind of creepy, “bodies as horror,” fabulist, dark fairy tale feel that Machado’s book does.

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via Black History Month Roundtable: What Does Queering Black History Mean To You?

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I’ve learned to love in a way that means listening to myself as much as I listen to the person I love, that love comes and goes and grows and shrinks, sometimes permanently, but sometimes not. That you can never hold someone — or yourself — up with only love to stand on. That it’s as much about building something together and choosing to nourish it as it is about a thunderclap. Not that we’re without thunderclaps. When I first saw their picture, I fell in love with their mouth—with the perfect bow of their top lip, with the tiny sneer that poked at the corner of it. Our first kiss felt inevitable, a magnetic draw we wouldn’t resist, up against a pool table during a perfect night in a neon-washed cowboy bar. The first time we slept together it felt like we fit, and we knew one another, our bodies and our wants, already. I woke up in the morning and knew I had to find ways to keep them around. We spent the whole day together, doing nothing, and I knew this was good. Love is also full of knowing and unknowing—the former which only makes you love someone more, deeper it goes; the latter which surprises you and lets you know you still have more to learn. To hold in the softest part of your palm.

Raquel,  Monday Roundtable: How We Knew We Were In Love

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Making a home out of other people is dangerous. Any kid who grew up in a home where there was more shouting than laughter is aware of this. And I’m 30 now, with an ex-husband and an ex-partner; there are too many people who I once thought would be in my life forever who aren’t anymore. Of course, they thought I’d be their person, too. Home is a feeling I deeply crave, and it’s a feeling I’m scared to get close to. Doesn’t mean I don’t want it, though, whatever the hell it is.

Jeanna Kadlec, Wherever West Is

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I too have had my sense of my sexuality shift over the years: from asexual, to pansexual, to primarily lesbian, to “open to some sort of physical intimacy from certain kinds of guys given very specific circumstances.” Each shift brought about its own terrifying identity crisis, especially when I had just spent years coming to terms with my earlier understanding of my sexuality, going through the process of coming out to myself and others, and even ending or changing relationships. It was like a core part of my identity was broken. Who was I really? Was I wrong about myself? Was I living a lie? Is everything I know wrong? Is my life over? There’s such tremendous pressure to know, sometimes, to always be certain about our identity, that the answer is permanent, that to change it is to admit we were faking it on some level. If this sounds like you: you, and I, we’re not wrong. We were not living lies, we are not fakes. Our lives are not over, even if certain assumptions or expectations change. We are still ourselves, even if our understanding of who that is was different five years ago, or will be different five years from now, or even if we don’t know who we are just yet. Sexual fludity can come about for so many reasons — trauma, change of circumstance, growing older — or maybe it’s inherent in us that there’s nothing really inherent about us at all. We’re still ourselves underneath.

Tiara via You Need Help: When You Might Be In Love With Your Roommate | Autostraddle (via autostraddle)

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Hardly anybody really knows what they’re doing most of the time — it’s so often trial and error, some degree of experimentation, changing tastes and changing minds. Sometimes we think that if something is good it must be smooth sailing and if it’s awkward something is wrong — but that’s not always the case. Conversations like these are hard! And weird! Especially if they’re new! Cut yourself some slack — it sounds like you’re doing the best you can. Embrace the awkward, embrace the anxiety — you’re embarking on new territory here, not just with the relationship but with your understanding of yourselves. Things don’t have to be smooth sailing to be good. We are all just beings of trial and error, shifts and changes.

Tiara via You Need Help: When You Might Be In Love With Your Roommate | Autostraddle

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I know what it’s like, to feel protective of a community that means everything to you, to want to claim that the space where you finally feel understood is perfect. But listen, we live in a racist homophobic transphobic fatphobic classist fucked up patriarchal society. To think we can run away to the woods – a place that is touted as “America’s Playground” but in actuality is only accessible to those with the right color skin, the right amount of money, the right physical shape – and somehow escape the oppressions that are wound tightly into the fabric of American life and have a utopian community where everyone feels safe is ignorant at best, toxic at worst. Most of the language we use to describe our “playground,” which truthfully is stolen land from Native American tribes, is racist: talking about “bagging peaks” or “conquering mountains” is as much part of the problem as anything else. It’s not about just one bad man or a couple of jerks, it’s about the entire culture. We all have work to do.

Vanessa,  Why I Got Off the Pacific Crest Trail After 454 Miles Instead of Walking All the Way to Canada

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Vivek Shreya, who released Part-Time Woman as a solo project in 2017, collaborated with her sibling Shamik Bilgi to release a new album called Angry. “Veins” expresses, over a driving low-fi dance beat, frustration with biphobia in queer community, but is also a treatise on the difficulty of embracing visibility: “They think they know love/ but they don’t know about/ what they don’t see on TV/ or the movies.” For bisexual folks, who are often marginalized our outright misrepresented in mainstream representations of LGBTQ community, it’s a welcome acknowledgment of bi folks’ reality. “Love is Not Love” explicitly addresses trans desire and the co-opting of “love” by LGB folks who, in reality, aren’t comfortable with trans desire or relationships (see: TERFs). “You want me to step up to the mic/ and say “love wins” or “love is love”/ …love doesn’t keep my sisters safe/ so love alone won’t set us free.” It’s a radical political statement; especially when directed at the “hate won’t fight hate” crowd, who seem to willfully misunderstand what it’s like to be hated. Feeling as though we’re worthy of love is incredibly important for trans women in particular, but our political priorities have always been more practical — safe, discrimination-free housing, jobs, education, and health care, primarily — and of course “love is love” is usually just a benign platitude. Props to Shreya for creating such a beautiful call-out.

Abeni Jones, Your New Favorite Music By Queer and Trans Artists To Check Out This Month

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“One Day at a Time” Brings Even More Heart and Humor and Gayness to Season 2

One Day at a Time is the most generous, compassionate, loving family sitcom on television. Carmen reviews the season, plus a bonus interview with her mom!

Last year, I joked to a friend that One Day at a Time is the most feminist show on television, but this year I’m willing to make that claim seriously. They approach every issue on their docket with an intersectional lens, without ever losing the mother/daughter relationships and the intimacies between Latina women that are at its core. Their jokes find the delicate place between being specific to our community, the ways that we poke fun, but also the ways that we love, and still being catchy to a broader audience. They aren’t afraid to tackle race, or class, or gender, sexuality, ability, or aging with an ever-present grace and care. I would be hard pressed to find an expectation of mine that they haven’t not only reached, but passed with flying colors.

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My years of emulating this figure, of being devoted to an inattentive lover, taught me to expect one, to see love as something one gives, forever, unconditionally, without any regard for one’s own life or needs. Years later, I’m still unraveling how to love and be loved differently — how to be genuinely present for the people in my life who love me, and how to love myself enough to demand a lover who is present, who reciprocates, who is there for me like my God never was. Christianity can be an amazing, affirming, validating community for many people, but for me it was a bad religion – in bending to my knees for an absent lover, I unconsciously expected love to be both unconditional and unrequited.

Abeni Jones,  Bad Religion