every time you claim bisexual is the exclusive attraction to men and women you owe me, personally, 75 dollars

The whole “you have to earn a living” rhetoric is really toxic. Have we considered that maybe, in 2015, basic needs like housing, food, and medicine don’t really need to be “earned” but should, in any reasonably industrialized country, be guaranteed?

Some of my favourite linguistic developments

‘Is that a thing?’ for ‘does that exist?’

Deliberate omission of grammar to show e.g. defeatedness, bewilderment, fury. As seen in Tumblr’s ‘what is this I don’t even’.

‘Because [noun]’. As in ‘we couldn’t have our picnic in the meadow because wasps.’

Use of kerning to indicate strong bewilderment, i.e. double-spaced letters usually denoting ‘what is happening?’ This one is really interesting because it doesn’t really translate well to speech. It’s something people have come up with that uses the medium of text over the internet as a new way of communicating instead of just a transcript of speech or a quicker way to send postal letters.

Just the general playing around with sentence structure and still being able to be understood. One of my favourites of these is the ‘subject: *verbs* / object: *is verb*’ couplet, as in:

Beekeeper: *keeps bees* Bees: *is keep*

or

Me: *holds puppy* Puppy: *is hold*

I just love how this all develops organically with no deciding body, and how we all understand and adapt to it.

.

Biphobic XOJane Article Takedown

Oh my god though the actual article (here) is so much worse than I could even imagine I’m going to just have to do a full post about its fuckery. Even the tagline is just:

Author: Did u know that I have the ability to perfectly arbitrate what does and does not constitute same gender attraction? : )

Me: *desperately shoving social capital into my purse* I need to leave right now immediately.

But I did not leave immediately because I am just that masochistic.

The author then goes off on a rant about how she totally knows this super fake queer lady u guys. Her “proof” that her friend is faking it? Well u see this horrible faker lady:

(oh and the author also implies that dating trans men would somehow be less het than dating cis men so good job being a misgendering asshat lol)

Then after this scathing teardown she finishes up with:

??? ITS A LITTLE LATE FOR THAT FRIEND

Y’ALL JUST SPENT SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS TEARING DOWN THIS WOMAN AND SHITTING ON HER IDENTITY. U SAW HER USE ONE HASHTAG ON AN INSTAGRAM PHOTO AND DECIDED IT WAS SO THOROUGHLY UR BUSINESS THAT U WROTE A DAMN ARTICLE ABOUT HOW FAKE SHE IS.

Biphobes really think they’re being slick. Like they really think we can’t see this shit.

The author concludes her friend is being “a huge asshole.” Why? Because she only feel comfortable discussing her queer identity with people she feels safe around and the author doesn’t think she’s in danger. Not only does she think she is allowed to decide what sexuality her friend is permitted to have, she thinks she can magically divine how well her family, friend, coworkers, authority figures would respond to her coming out. Utilising this powers, she concludes her friend is cowardly.

U heard that right. Being in the closet is a “shitty, lazy excuse not to be brave.”

Then she gets on some straight-passing privilege shit which is already bullshit and inherently transphobic and victim blaming but in this case it’s like even flimsier than usual.

I don’t even know where to start on this paragraph. It’s like trying to make a “ur fave is problematic” post for Donald Trump. It’s just overwhelming. People who are in the closet are literally responsible for homophobia? The real reason for bi erasure is bi women not constantly coming out to homophobes? 

And just the fact, just the fact that you would talk about “who is being given the burden of queer liberation” here? You realise studies have again and again found that bi and mga women are the most vulnerable to abuse, rape, health problems, and discrimination within the LGB community? Bisexual ladies are not lounging on pool chairs sipping cocktails and hobnobbing with the cishets while u Toil Thanklessly In The Discourse Mines. The community has problems with some groups doing all the work and other groups reaping the benefits, but its not what ur talking about here. You realise that queer trans women of color have done basically all of the work in the entire history of this movement and that white cis people have reaped the benefits and taken all of the credit, right? Like, that is an actual problem.

How unceasingly magnanimous of you. I was afraid there for a moment, that I would fail to meet ur standards of Who Is And Is Not An Acceptable Queer. Thanks friend, really. That means so fucking much after you spent half an article explicitly shitting on my identity. Please take ur respectability politics elsewhere. I’m not interested in being told I’m “one of the good ones.”

This paragraph is so surreal I feel like I’m reading a series of hastily pasted together dril tweets with randomly inserted discourse buzzwords. No, that’s not true. That’s too unkind. Dril would never tell me to “push at the limits of what straight can be.” Dril would never demand I identify as “heteroflexible.”

The crowning jewel to this is probably the author’s concern that straight folks might be “damaged and insulted” by people identifying as queer.

WON’T SOM1 THINK OF THE HETEROSEUXALS…. THE POOR STRAIGHT FOLKS WHO ARE SO CRUELLY DAMAGED AND INSULTED BY BISEXUALS : (((

This author seems totally oblivious of the fact that she has aligned herself with straight people against queer people. Like, she has proudly taken the cishet side. She has explicitly chosen to defend straightness rather than be associated with icky fake bi girls. And remember, this isn’t a straight woman writing this. The Author identifies as a lesbian. And still hates queer women this much. Amazing.

Anyway so the author encourages queer women to “earn” the right to have their identity in the following ways:

…You… you know it’s still legal to kill a trans woman because she’s trans in the vast majority of the US, right? You do realise racism and transmisogyny is a real problem in our community? That there are homeless queer youth suffering rn? That AIDS still exists? That disabled queer people can’t get married? These things listed aren’t bad things to do, but they are hardly the most important work we have to do. They’re hardly the first priorities. Not to mention “making gayborhoods safer” sounds like it’s gonna involve supporting cops, harming sex workers, and possibly gentrification.

It’s also worth noting that, apparently, the author thinks this is only work that mga women have to do. People who are only attracted to their own gender get automatic VIP passes to queerness, it’s only those disgusting bihets who need to earn their validity through labor. We’re the only ones who have to prove ouselves here.

This is one of the most privileged sentences mine eyes have ever beheld. It is veritably glistening with ignorance.

Anyway, the author finishes up this biphobic screed with a series of reassurances that she is totally not biphobic u guys. She actually dated a bi once. She dated someone who’s dating a bi right now. She thinks if bi women came out more often, her dating life would be more active, and also all biphobia would vanish. But she also wants you to know that unless you are in imminent danger of being physically attacked or are 100% certain you will be ostracized by your family, you HAVE to come out. If you don’t, “fuck you.” 

Also, whatever that is.

This almost mind boggling lack of self awareness is, frankly, almost fascinating. 

This is what biphobes actually believe.

This is what we’re up against.

“Bisexual ladies are not lounging on pool chairs sipping cocktails and hobnobbing with the cishets while u Toil Thanklessly In The Discourse Mines.”

Biphobia is real as hell.

^ READ IT.

biTunes is proud to present a prebiew of their next bi-tastic logo. It just gets more bi from here on out.

theyreallbi

goddamn it someone beat me to it

my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

Younger than 40.

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.

2011

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.

*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.

Please, if you are following me right now, read this. It’s so important to remember this, to understand how much we lost. To understand that, when I was a little kid, the biggest thing about the community was that shared loss. 

There is a lot I want to say and I don’t have the spoons but. Yeah. This is all so, so important. Please read this.

Wow, I’m sitting here biting my tongue so hard trying not to cry cause I’m in a room with my flatmates… I hate that i m so ignorant of all of this…

my eyes change colour depending on my swag levels. they are the darkest brown when my swag levels are at a maximum. i have never seen them change

This is the best brown eyes positivity i’ve seen on this site

gay/bi/pan/queer people are perfectly capable of perpetuating heterosexist shit, holding homophobic beliefs, committing microaggressions, and invalidating others’ identities.

I’m tired of hearing “I’m literally _____” whenever I’m hurt by something someone says. I am also literally a lesbian and I have had many disagreements with other literal lesbians. I need people to stop acting like their sexuality makes them incapable of holding homophobic views and imposing those views on others.

Sandra Bland was stopped Friday by authorities in Waller County, Texas for a traffic violation. In a video of her arrest, while being forcibly held face down, Ms. Bland can clearly be heard saying to the officer, “You just slammed my head into the ground. Do you not even care about that?” As she’s being picked up off the ground and placed into the police vehicle, Ms. Bland can be heard again, this time thanking the person recording the video, saying, “Thank you for recording.” 

Bland was arrested and booked on “assault of a public servant” charges.

A police statement says the following Monday morning Ms. Bland was released on a $5,000 bond, and was subsequently “found dead” by a female jailer who was “worried” about her recreation time. Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith claims this was a case of self-inflicted asphyxiation. An autopsy performed Tuesday showed Bland’s death “has been classified as a suicide, with the cause of death (listed as) hanging,” according to Tricia Bentley, a spokeswoman for the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston.

Hanged. Suicide. A young 28-year old woman who was moving to Texas to begin working her dream job suddenly decided to commit suicide, supposedly because of a small traffic infraction? 

Ms. Bland’s friends and family feel that the police’s story doesn’t add up. For one thing, the odd quickness with which everything seemed to escalate seems off. In a matter of 72 hours Bland went from being pulled over for a minor traffic violation, to being arrested for assaulting a cop, and then to killing herself, according to the police’s story. There’s also the fact that Bland is black, and Waller county has a history of discriminatory law enforcement behavior.

The police are lying again. 

#WhatHappenedToSandyBland #JusticeForSandy #ALLBlackLivesMatter

please don’t steal/change my work or delete my source (via makemefeelsafe)

Cats In Kimonos Are A Thing In Japan

Omg

sugurins

I am in Heaven

problems-of-the-nerdy

I didn't realize how much I needed this post until I saw it