One thing I always bring up that straight writers obviously don’t understand but every gay person ever can attest to is that queer people stick together. Like, every queer person knows like 15 other ones and those 15 know even more.
Like, having only One in your story completely misses the point of how we organize and stay safe, in addition to completely missing the point on being progressive (ie, having A Single Gay in your story isn’t special anymore and hasn’t been for decades now)
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how marginalized people act bc straight people are allowed to be solitary and they don’t understand any other way of Being
Hijacking this post to talk about something interesting! There’s a lot of criticism in fanfiction circles of yaoi or yuri fanfiction where ‘everybody is gay’, and it’s almost always by folks who haven’t been involved in queer communities. If you’re queer, you really do surround yourself with queer people - so ‘everybody is gay’ in a character’s social circle actually makes perfect sense!
this exhibits itself in other ways too, for example, when there’s one queer sibling there’s usually more - often because one sibling will bring the definitions home and the other will use that to explore their own identity!
Another weird phenomenon I noticed is this happens a lot even before people realize they’re Not Straight ™. Out of my close friends in high school, most of us turned out some form of LGBTQA, and I’ve heard other people say the same is true for them. So people saying it’s “unrealistic” that everyone in the same social circle would gradually discover they’re Not Straight ™- yeah, it is totally reasonable and even likely.
#we know our own #sometimes before we know ourselves (tags via @anneapocalypse )
I have to wonder if maybe THIS is where straight people got the term “catching the gay”… You know?
My mother was so concerned when I moved to CA for college that I would “catch the gay”, and I was just like “???????? pretty sure it’s not something you catch like a cold, mom.” And ignored her.
It wasn’t until I started making friends in the LGBT community and spending time with them and loving them as people that I slowly became aware of the fact that I might not be straight. And after years of talking to LGBT youth and living in a city that embraces that culture, I found myself realizing that I was ALWAYS like this, but never realized it.
It’s like… you could go your ENTIRE life having the choice of eating raisin bran, bran flakes, or plain cheerios for breakfast. And that’s pretty much the only choices you’re offered. But then. THEN! You walk into a supermarket and see an ENTIRE AISLE of a billion cereal choices, and you realize “wait, I…are…are you telling me that I could have had LUCKY CHARMS for breakfast?!”
And OOOOHHHHHH BOI lemme tell you a thing, when you see your buddies eating captain crunch and lucky charms, and you realize you can ALSO have that?
Well, then - if “the gay” is contagious, then you’d better lock me in quarantine.
In my experience it’s actually way more common to have the one (1) straight person in the group then having a token gay.