Avatar of the mlem

Gay, He/They, MotCoJCoLDS --- #1 Doorkeay fan --- I post about Gay stuff, Church stuff, and various media I consume. I'm designing a TTRPG that I see as the illegitimate child of Balatro and Never Stop Blowing Up. --- @watching-from-the-shrubbery is my sideblog with more reblogs of my various obsessions --- pfp is from @potato-lord-but-not's picrew

[shrubseph]

Okay I'm going to be gone for two years so just make sure to take care of each other, water the queue, and don't burn down the blog while I'm gone. Forward all my mail to the mossy stump in the woods and if there's an emergency call the woodpecker in my attic.

[shrubseph]

Happy pride

[staff]

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

[yesterdaysprint]

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York, December 26, 1946

[fredersen]

um. guys. not to ruin anyone’s christmas or anything but a goblin army is approaching from the west

[coogerlion2]

They are come seeking the christ child and are here to worship him

[crystalcrossing-remade-deactiva]

shit man tomorrow is christmas eve i swear yesterday was June 2010

[allegedly-human]

As is tradition in tumblr culture the locals unearth the corpse of a long deceased figure and drag it across the streets merrily, laughing at what is preserved of the person’s words. This custom, seen as morbid in other cultures, is instead done gleefully and with an unmatched enthusiasm

[brothermouse-skeleton]

In our defense, that corpse is hella relatable

[revoltingchild]

[mxlabradorite]

I will reblog this every Christmas season I’m on tumblr.

[drunkygoesonadventures]

It’s beginning to look a lot like shit scram

[midnight-spectrum-again]

Oh my god

[this-too-too-sullied-flesh]

i discovered this configuration recently

[maezanilla]

Don’t forget…

[nerdygaymormon]

Do you think the church is going to make a big change about queer people, the way they did about polygamy or black people? And if so, when do you think that change will happen?

Regarding polygamy, the rest of the United States opposed polygamy. While the majority of the church supported polygamy, it became too difficult to continue in opposition to the nation.

For a long time, the United States was split in regards to Black people and their rights, but the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's transformed the country. US laws protecting the rights of racial & ethnic minorities didn't exempt religious institutions and put the LDS Church in a difficult place. Also, the shift in popular opinion about race-based restrictions that took place in the nation were also reflected in the church membership. While I don't know of polling from that time, it seems many, probably most, wanted the church to change as it had become embarrassing to belong to a church with such race-based restrictions.

Regarding queer people, the United States is still split but has definitely moved to be favorable towards gay people while not so for trans individuals. While laws in favor of queer rights now exist, they usually include carve outs for religious institutions.

Based on the first two examples, it seems if the nation is against the LDS Church then eventually it will make a major change to something they had once considered fundamental. But as long as the LDS Church is part of a broader cultural coalition fighting against gay and trans rights, I think it's very unlikely the church will voluntarily make major changes. Some of the changes the church has made regarding gay members were done because 20+ years of research disproved the theories put forth by church leaders for why people are gay or whether it is a choice or if gay people can change to be straight.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a conservative institution and unlikely to take the lead, but as the nation continues to shift and those opinions are also reflected in the membership, eventually the church may make changes. With a growing percentage of membership located outside of the United States, it could be that international attitudes also will affect if and when the church changes but in the countries where most of the membership lives the majority favor legalized gay marriage and other rights.

—————————

The last polling I can find about the attitude of Latter-day Saints in the United States on LGBTQ topics is from 2021 by the PRRI.

46% of Latter-day Saints support letting same-sex couples marry legally. In 2011, only 23% approved, so that marks a doubling of support. Nationwide about 70% of people say they support gay marriage.

84% of Latter-day Saints support nondiscrimination laws for LGBTQ people, that's up from 72% in 2015 (2015 was the year of the Utah compromise and may be why support is so high). 79% support of Americans support nondiscrimination.

Only 44% of Mormons think small business owners should be allowed to refuse products or services to gay and lesbian people if doing so violates their religious beliefs. That's up from 38% in 2015 but well behind the national average of 66% which oppose allowing such discrimination.

The Pew Research Center's polling shows support for gay marriage in the United States is at 63% in 2023, which may reflect different polling methods from PRRI and also may reflect the massive Republican effort to rollback LGBTQ rights.

In the nations where most Mormons live, gay marriage is generally supported

US support is 63% in 2023 (Pew Research Center) Mexico support is 63% in 2023 (Pew Research Center) Brazil support is 52% in 2023 (Pew Research Center) Philippines support is 22% in 2018 (SWS) Peru is 36% in 2024 (Ipsos) Chile is 77% in 2024 (Cadem) Argentina is 67% in 2023 (Pew Research Center) Guatamala is 23% in 2017 (AmericasBarometer) Ecuador is 23% in 2019 (AmericasBarometer) Nigeria is 2% in 2023 (Pew Research Center)

[wowotter]

[jevilscythe]

[thorn-1n-the-flesh]

one of my favorite things about being LDS is that we absolutely can and do beat the “you’re not feeling the spirit or any kind of manifestation of god’s presence during your worship service, you’re just being manipulated by beautiful and moving music/art/architecture” allegations

like, my guy, the dude leading our Sunday meeting is my totally average neighbor down the street who owns an HVAC business. i’m in testimony meeting and for the last 5 minutes some old guy had been talking about World War II for some reason? the silence is being sporadically punctuated by a toddler shrieking for cheerios 2 rows behind me. the walls have carpet on them

idk man, the peace and inspiration I feel at church seems pretty authentic. even downright miraculous, considering the circumstances

[star-anise]

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.

[star-anise]

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.”

[simonalkenmayer]

This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.

[theroguefeminist]

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

[ryttu3k]

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.

[tormentedpenguin86]

11

[herpsandbirds]

Them Eat Crab.

[bedupolker]

every maryland friend group looks like this

[helsex]

Hi. Angel on your shoulder here. It's totally ok to kill that guy

[nephis-bow-and-aroace]

tags via @lingering-sunrise

[markrosewater]

I this hypothetical situation in which I the player am destroyed but haven't lost the game. Is this finally the chance Floral Spuzzem has been waiting for to take control of all of my play actions?

Floral Spuzzem is only empowered to make decisions about what artifact it destroys. Ask for more, and it starts having panic attacks.