As an aroace person who was insulated from the discourse: in a strange way, thinking about what happened actually makes me happy. Wait, no, don’t block me yet, that’s not what I meant. It’s like this:
For a full fucking decade, a huge chunk of the online LGBT community (or rather, the LG community; mspec and trans people were in our corner from the beginning) did its level best to completely destroy our culture. The places where we thought we could be safe turned on us. We were called rapists, homophobes, pedophiles, incels. We were sent death threats, rape threats, suicide bait. We were compared to historical dictators. We had our positivity tags spammed with gore. We were kicked out of irl spaces, betrayed by close friends, left orphaned and alone in a world that already hated us. A lot of us deactivated. Many of us almost certainly died. Those who stayed lost pieces of ourselves that we’ll never get back.
And yet we’re still here. We’re still here, we still exist, we’re still fighting and celebrating and just existing. We still eat garlic bread and wave our flags and make headcanons and live our authentic aspec lives. We’re still fighting against amatonormativity and allonormativity and socially inforced sexuality and monosexism and platonormativity and rape culture. We’re still here, we’re still queer. We survived the attempts to destroy us. We’re. Still. Here.
