When a space cares a lot about making sure its members are queer enough to participate, you get a space that aggressively polices the queerness of its members. There's no way around that, it's pretty much tautologically true. Only by paradoxically not actually caring if you're queer or not can a group really accept the full range of what queerness can look like.
Also, a space that has room for a cis straight guy who means well and wants the best for his friends has two crucial things going for it.
1) it has space for people who are learning and might fuck up a bit while they figure things out, and that learning process is probably not so godawful and unpleasant that a guy with other prospects would have to be a fool not to go find some nicer friends. This is nice because it is very difficult to personally embody the entire alphabet at once, and learning how to be good allies to one another is a crucial part of queer solidarity. It's nice for that process not to be painful.
2) it has space for people who aren't yet willing to or comfortable with presenting an externally queer label to continue to exist and soak up the queer vibes and information, which means it's welcoming to actual questioning people rather than the theory of questioning people. Probably it therefore has more interest in actually doing things rather than hierarchy politics.
3) it's probably not a radfem tar pit interested in weaponising you against people they've decided to hate in a social smear war that benefits nobody and nothing but their need for a power trip
Oh it’s even more than that! The cis straight guy is very often a ride home, dad or husband. Or a Bob which I will explain in this essay is a signifier of a healthy ecosystem, like frogs are.
This is a 3 am take so consider this a blanket apology and a readmore but if you hate this post you were warned.
If he’s someone’s ride home, then his presence enables queer people to show up. Note this importance in, say, rural America or where the person might use a wheelchair or need care or can’t drive. Or where the meeting place is generally awkward.
If he’s someone’s dad, his presence enables kids to show up. I know a 5 year old trans kid in real life. I know a nonbinary teen in real life who’s allowed to do a lot on their own, but their parents worry, and if they’re hanging out with adults the parents want to attend and meet the adults. Teenagers are so liminal with this.
If he’s someone’s husband, that’s a perfectly common accessory for a bisexual, nonbinary, or trans person. I think it adds a delightful dimension to queer spaces. I think it’s great that there’s a whole class of sexuality that’s “bi wife energy” or “straight except for loving this person” or “straight since I think nonbinary people are considered a different gender to my own - actually I’m completely lost about whether that’s true but we’ve been married ten years?” or “straight except for the fact that my partner transitioned, and we’re still married, and it’s none of your business.” At this point they’re so common that they’re their own subspecies. I think all spaces should have a slightly bewildered guy in his late forties who owns a set of good screwdrivers. I am bi and have one myself; it is a common pairing. “Why would your husband come to your social thing” idk this is a genuine thing people do sometimes in non-tar-pit spaces. They stop by. It’s almost like birds. You meet this incredible ornate, splendid older queer person and then they introduce their husband Professor Robert “Bob” Kevinsworth, who’s just this extremely straight old big fat Linux geologist in a 90s t-shirt with a trout on it, they’ve been married 45 years. Evolutionary pressures mean that the Bob must be relatively drab in order to camouflage themselves on the nest or something; if you want to attract the flashy half of the couple to your garden, then you have to provide habitat for Bob. idk it’s 3:46 am right now. But it’s like frogs; the presence of Bobs indicates a healthy and established ecosystem, like Grison and Derin indicate. Because frogs, who absorb environmental toxins readily through their skin, are an indicator species for pollution and biodiversity; a Bob means there is going to be less toxicity and more diversity.
[And also it’s none of our business but there are an awful lot of queer Bobs (Bob himself, again, possibly being queer) and it’s really none of our business. Sure, maybe that person looks like a straight grandpa. A lot of people do/did. I have always hated the idea that you can “spot” a queer person by their haircut, clothes or youth (largely because I don’t look very unusual or amazing myself.) the oldest nb person I know is a sort of Bob with a big white beard and grandchildren, and I’m sorry but at their age they are NOT going to be getting a different haircut! Let alone pink Shein dungarees and black circle sunglasses to signify their queerness to gatekeepers. A lot of people seeing them would assume they are cishet. Nope! Just old, fat and unfashionable.)
So a space that doesn’t have room for a cishet guy is a space that has made decisions about children, non-drivers, a large proportion of bi and nonbinary people, straight trans women, dads, and so on.
Which is fine in itself I suppose, but what they’re clearly kinda selecting for is a population of able twentysomethings who can all have sex with each other. and the thing is that there’s often a vibe they feel annoyed by seeing people they don’t want to fuck (children, middle-aged people, unfashionable queer people, people unironically wearing trout t shirts).
So in my admittedly highly limited personal experience, the exclusionary “queer spaces” just tend to be an elaborate drama-production exercise for twentysomethings to date each other, the rituals are intricate etc.
And all the rest of the weird queer people are just. at the seed swap.
Unironically I think this site and queer spaces in general do a lot of good for appearance anxiety. To be a daughter who grew up in the stranglehold of the Aéropostale mid-2000's era, to now wake up in 2023 and throw on some absolute bullshit in the morning and go "yeah, a lesbian somewhere would find this super hot." Affirming. Soul-healing.
Anyway I saw a TERF blog say "there are hardly any gay men on Tumblr, probably because men don't use the internet except to talk about video games and spread misogyny" djshdjdjdjddn
I guess I was being presumptive but I think it's funny that people are reblogging this without the knowledge that the blue and pink are color picked from the stripes labeled "magic" and "sex" on the Gilbert Baker pride flag
people need to realise that a poor little meow meow must be a character who has committed atrocities you cannot poor little meow meow a good guy that’s not how this works
what this post has shown me is that so many of people on this hellsite cannot distinguish between a poor little meow meow and a blorbo from my shows smh
there really aren’t that many of them. if you block a couple whenever you see em, you’ll soon run into an account you’ve already blocked before, and realize they’re all just reblogging eachother endlessly. it’s very insular because no one else wants to interact with them lol
they’re basically all british or american christians lmfao why the fuck would you care what they think
"Does The Way Christians Use Capitalized He/Him For God Count As A Neopronoun" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,
landlords arent bad because theyre “lazy” or “parasites”, theyre bad because they take advantage of poverty and manipulate housing availability for financial gain. you people have GOT to stop framing your critiques of the bourgeoise the same way eugenicists talk about the disabled
I was going to sneakily reply to this with “but they’re also parasites” but
I did some introspection and you’re right. While landlords do suck up value without giving any back, the idea that every individual needs to “contribute something” to capital is an inherently manufactured take.
What should be criticized is the coercive nature of the transaction between rentiers and their tenants; the artificial scarcity employed to maintain the power imbalance between the landed and those without; an ideal world is not one where we retributively attack the gentry but find a way to make them irrelevant.
Framing landlords as “they’re bad bc they’re lazy parasites” actually opens you up to further attacks! Several are in fact not lazy, they sometimes do stuff like act as professional middlepeople (“something is broken, it is their job to find someone else who will fix it”). And so they might say “actually, managing property is quite a bit of work therefore landlords aren’t all useless, just the bad ones, therefore we deserve to exist, ha!”
But that’s not the point! The point is that they manipulate a massively necessary need (housing) for their own gain, raising prices while threatening people with homelessness! That’s what’s bad, not the fact that they’re “lazy”. You could have the most hardworking landlord in the world, and it would still contribute to harm.
impossible, you say? @hexaviolet - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
