#6-12-16

[loz-pop]

Year ago today was such a funny crazy day, Luke compared now ? Time flies when you're havin' fun cheesy as that sounds !!

[celestial-roar]

[kleenexwoman]

Active shooter training, or “what to do if someone opens up with an AR-15.” If you’re a member/ally of the LGBT community near to Southeastern Michigan, please consider taking this course. I will be there. It is free. 

[kleenexwoman]

Looks like the way to make myself feel safer and less scared and grief-stricken is activisting, or at least making serious plans to activist. 

Taking active shooter response class in July, i.e. what to do to protect ppl when someone shoots up a place you’re in, and if you’re in the metro Detroit area hit me up if you’re interested, it’s free 

Creating team of LGBT superheroes with a friend. I have tentatively named them the Rainbow Avengers. I mean, look, it’s helping me feel better and if we get it published it’ll probably make other ppl feel better, you know? Queer ppl are worth protecting with superstrength.

IF YOU’RE A TRANS FRIEND I WILL BE YOUR CIS MEAT SHIELD IF YOU FEEL UNSAFE GOING OUT IN PUBLIC PLACES.  

...it’s the sort of thing hapless creative people do to activist. Activate? Act? What’s the verb tense of being an activist? Taking action? I dunno. But I want to do something again. I burned myself out a little at Affirmations and had to take a break, but now it’s clear that my break is over and I need to find things I can do that won’t burn me out trying to do them better than I’m really capable of. I know I’m good at keeping people company, holding a microphone without stage fright, and making up stories, so I’m trying to do that. 

[kleenexwoman]

I sort of wish I’d gone to the Pulse memorial dance party at Menjo’s. 

It would have been insanely easy to pick up other girls and it probably would have been some of the best casual anything I’d ever had. 

[kleenexwoman]

I always thought I was safe because my family, friends, and employers accepted my sexuality. It was barely ever a question; I didn’t let it be a question. I made it clear that I wasn’t ashamed and didn’t think it needed to be a secret, or even an awkward conversation; I skipped the “There’s something I need to tell you...” and directly to “Happy Passover! This is my girlfriend and we brought wine.” I know I’m lucky, but it’s worked amazingly well for me. Even people who usually have some stupid damn issue with gay people seem to like me. 

So, I thought I was safe. How could anyone hate me? I charmed ex-lesbians who were certain I was going to Hell, I charmed hate-slinging pastors who really just wanted to drink coffee and ogle college girls, I charmed conservative Christian moms who weren’t sure if Barack was a Nazi or a Commie. They thought I was sweet, and we argued, but not about my sexuality. (Except for the Slutty Polar Bear, but she didn’t believe in dinosaurs either. It was hopeless.) If I ever met a true-blue homophobe, I’d just make small talk with them about country music or military science fiction or whatever it is those people like, and they’d at least see me as a person. 

Well, I was dumb. I’ve never felt less safe in my life. 

[kleenexwoman]

i’m very sad and there’s a long and crazy rant under the cut in which i try to understand why homophobia exists so much

i refuse to believe that censorship and violence can ever be just tools. censorship is literally how you keep gay people from existing. fighting for freedom of speech and freedom of expression is and always has been crucial to gay liberation. 

because sex between two people who can’t reproduce doesn’t make kids. and yes, a lot of queer people do have kids one way or the other, but having a society in which 

a) queer people are accepted enough that there is no queer culture that is discrete from mainstream culture; people marry or have sex with who they want on a wide spectrum of acceptable genders 

or 

b) queer people are forced, coerced, or brainwashed into unwanted sexual or reproductive roles as a matter of cultural duty or custom, meaning that queerness be stigmatized 

are the two ways queer people have children, and 

the first has existed very little and in very few places in our history, because for most of it we have all had the understanding that WE NEED TO BREED, which means that the second has been the case as a matter of larger social necessity 

immediate note: i do not claim that forcing people into sexual or reproductive activity they do not want is ever a good thing by any tactic. i also don’t think that everyone having a ton of children all over the place is inherently a good thing or that history would have been better if we didn’t or whatever. 

it’s just what most societies through history seemed to think, or some smart bastards figured out that gay sex =/= no kids, which was counter to THEIR goal of ALL THE KIDS. so, no gay sex--but people are fucking stubborn and they’ll do what they want to. so make them not want to somehow, even if they DO want to. add a conflicting emotion to cancel out the desire. fear is pretty strong, drives people away, add that. 

but people are also inherently loving. sorry. we are. we’re pack animals and we stick together. if you don’t keep us apart by some artificial means, we’ll bond intensely and indiscriminately. (it doesn’t mean we’re not violent. we are also inherently violent. but both of these things can be repressed, removed, relieved.) 

you don’t want anyone else to love them and figure out that they’re not evil, because then they’ll realize that gay people aren’t inherently harmful, which means that gay sex is not inherently harmful. sure, it doesn’t make kids, but...what if those people don’t care about that? where will the children you want come from then? you have to make sure everyone has so many children! can’t miss out on them!

so you keep gay people apart because you REALLY don’t want OTHER GAY PEOPLE to know that OTHER GAY PEOPLE EXIST AND ARE NOT EVIL because otherwise THEY MIGHT HAVE SEX WITH THOSE GAY PEOPLE and that means NO CHILDREN ARE MADE 

ANYWAY 

so we see, you can’t always count on straight parents to sit down and tell their children that it’s okay to be gay. because there’s an old, leftover idea that it’s not, because it doesn’t lead to maximum children. if the people who control the culture are very concerned with having maximum children, they will create a culture where homosexuality is horrible, where it must not be spoken of, where it is embarrassing and nobody should do it. children mustn’t know it exists, especially--adults may express horror and hate, but children mustn’t know it exists before they know that their only option for survival is not to be it. whatever IT is. 

(...what is IT anyway? at some point you stop knowing what IT is, and you only know the symbols. it’s something to do with the things we use to make sure that men and women a lot of babies together, and what happens when those things are put out of order. guys dressing like women, i dunno??? women who do other stuff besides being pregnant? that stuff. it’s bad. i dunno why. 

eventually people figure out, oh, that stuff’s not bad. it’s just not part of the toolkit for making maximum babies. well, that’s fine. we don’t need maximum babies. we just need the right amount of babies and we pretty much trust people to figure that shit out for themselves.) 

so we can’t count on the straights. we have to count on each other to tell each other we exist. 

and if we live in a society where censorship is a tool that is acceptable to use, THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE WILL ONE HUNDRED PERCENT USE IT TO NEVER EVER LET US KNOW WE EXIST. 

ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF SELF EXPRESSION IS THE ONLY WAY GAY PEOPLE CAN FIGHT BACK AGAINST NOT EXISTING, BECAUSE WE CAN’T EVER COUNT ON HOMOPHOBIA NEVER EXISTING. EVER. 

[kleenexwoman]

why tho

is homophobia some kind of shitty, buggy patch evolution slapped onto the human race when it ended up that too many of us had figured out how to not have kids if we didn’t personally want to? i don’t mean birth control, i mean just regarding the proportion it would naturally settle into if everything was equal. like, are just too many people too gay in a complete and total rainbow utopia and we’d end up with like two people at the end of the earth and they’re both gay, i dunno???? 

i literally do not understand why homophobia is such a fucking thing all the time and everywhere unless it serves some kind of purpose in the world and that’s really the thing i can’t understand, i guess 

like, we have freedom of speech because it’s important, but we have social ideas of when to not express yourself without reserve if you need to keep someone’s secret or not call your mom a really horrible name because it keeps people from being horribly angry at the weird stuff you don’t do because you know you shouldn’t do it to keep society from collapsing, but you want to do anyway. 

but what’s the other balance of homophobia? does society benefit in some way at all, ever???? do people think they benefit? who is telling people they do? who is keeping this lie going and what are they getting from it? 

i don’t really expect an answer and i don’t want one. so i’m going to bed.