the sanctity of platonic male friendship

i’ve seen a lot of variations on this argument pass my dash ever since that cacw empire article came out, so i’m just gonna say it: it is not harder and better and somehow purer to portray a platonic male friendship on screen than it is to make the relationship romantic. it’s not. the body of popular media is full of guys who love each other and would do anything for each other and then go home to their wives, because well obviously they’re not gay.

“romance is just an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust.” please. please send these easy shorthand gay relationships my way. what universe do you live in that gay people can hook up easily on-screen and the audience reaction is “what a cop-out, they’re just doing it to avoid developing their friendship.”

listen. heterosexual romance is often an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust. this works because there’s an expectation – both on part of the filmmaker and the presumed audience – that heterosexual romance is normal and part of the background radiation of everyday life. and any time someone makes a movie where the male and female leads hook up, without much build-up or development of their relationship, they then strengthen that expectation in a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

gay romance does not have the same cultural history. the default assumption is that same-sex leads will not hook up unless they live in the gay/lesbian genre. platonic male friendship is, in fact, the easy way out. 

it’s absolutely homophobic to say a gay romantic relationship would somehow lessen a bond of friendship. and i mean this in the kindest of ways, because it may not be the same degree of homophobia that leads to gay people being physically attacked, or laws being written to actively restrict people’s rights for the fact of being gay. it’s a low-grade, pervasive homophobia that results when the speaker doesn’t conceptualize gay people as a part of a normal, everyday milieu. that a character being gay has to be narratively justified in some way (as if gay people around the world don’t have to justify their right to exist every single day!); that a gay relationship is somehow “pandering” and “inorganic”, because the normal, natural – straight – audience could never really relate to a gay relationship.

look. we are all shaped by cultural expectations. it doesn’t make someone a bad person if their mental conception of “an intense relationship between two guys” defaults to “friendship” instead of “romance”. but responding to any challenges to that paradigm by extolling the virtues of same-sex friendship and ignoring the long history of gay relationships in media being censored and sanitized and othered? yeah. that’s homophobic.

The first Pride was a riot.

Wall sticker in Marlborough lesbian pub, Brighton.

i’m actually realizing this now

but the original poster said “queer power” and someone erased that and replaced it with “gay power”

real classy

#is this real Well. I’m not exactly an expert at image analysis, but the bottom text in the first one looks much cleaner than the top text while the second one matches better. Also, the creases in the second one on the Q and U seem like the sort of detail that wouldn’t be faked. Finally, this actually matches up significantly better to “queer” politics than “gay” politics; it was always queers who advocated and took the front lines in direct action.

If you put the image in an editor or just view the full size of the first image, it becomes very obvious that the text on the bottom was added later: all of the vertical lines in every letter are pixel perfect straight lines. That is basically impossible with a photo of a poster that is both visibly at an angle, and has paper weathering and other distortion. Look at the verticals of the white text to compare. The only distortion of the text is the jpg artifacts we would expect in that level of contrast. There is no lighting on the pink text either, another highly suspicious trait.

Additionally, if you crop out the pink text in op and run an image search you get the second photo, as well as four or five other photos of the poster, all reading “queer power.”

With the pink text left in, however, the only version of the poster is this exact image, sourcing to op.

I want every single person who ever argued with me on That Queer Post to take a long, hard look at this. I have been told at least dozens of times that “nobody is saying you can’t identify as queer,” that I’m “ignoring history,” that they’re not trying to shift back to gay, etc.

Now, here’s this post, in which queer people are having their art defaced in order to rewrite their identity. Where they’re being forcibly rewritten as gay. Where history is being literally goddamn erased. It’s got three times the notes of That Queer Post, and as far as I can tell, @bifoxstiles is the first one to challenge this narrative. And I’m not gonna hold my breath on y'all to call out OP.

They’re literally stealing our history, rewriting it into a new version that excludes more than half of the community. And nobody’s challenging this. You’re too busy trying to shut down inclusive, egalitarian language.

Shame on every last one of you.

Queer is a slur and not everyone wants to identify as it stop using it as an umbrella term

MOTHERFUCKER don’t you start that here.

The people who made this poster? They wanted to identify as queer. How do I know? Because they fucking did. And now you’re supporting someone coming along after the fact and literally stealing their identity from them.

Here’s a better idea: I will continue using “queer” as an umbrella term for groups of people who happily identify as queer, and if you don’t like it you’re cordially invited to never talk to a queer person again.

Stop stealing our identities.

You are welcome to identify as queer if you reclaim it, and many ppl do, but that doesnt change the fact that there are plenty of lgbt ppl who think of it negatively (personally i am not one of these ppl so i cant speak for them, but i respect their wishes and i hope u will too). A better umbrella term to use is LGBT, imo.

That would be a lot more reassuring if you hadn’t shown up specifically to defend taking the word queer out of someone’s mouth and relabeling them as gay.

LGBT is a shit umbrella term. It prioritizes the historically-centered parts of the community over historically-marginalized groups, it completely leaves off swathes of the community, and these days it’s habitually used by the sort of gatekeepers who want to actually throw out sections of the community.

Again: If you don’t want to identify as queer, you don’t have to. But you don’t get to take that word away from any member of the community. If you don’t like it, just walk away and make your own shit.

I never thought I’d have to say this to members of the community, but: We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.

I’m not trying to take it away from people. If you want to reclaim it then good for you, but I’m just saying that not everyone wants to be called queer and using it as an umbrella term to include those who are potentially triggered by it or just dont like it is shitty. Also did u practically just say “Im using this slur as an umbrella term and if ur uncomfortable with it then get over it and walk away” or am i reading that wrong

You literally showed up to defend someone who had taken away a queer person’s words to put gay in their place. Stop pretending otherwise. If people don’t like that word, they’re fine not using it - but they can create their own works, rather than stealing and defacing ones made by queer people to erase us from them.

No. I said that if you’re not comfortable with someone using queer as an identifier, the responsible thing to do is disengage from them and make your own art, your own statements, instead of stealing and relabeling theirs.

If you’re not comfortable with someone else labeling you “queer,” you have zero right to label them “gay” without their consent.

I feel the nuance that people keep missing here is that queer is not only acceptable to reclaim on a personal level, because queer groups exist. Groups that gather under that label exist. It is absolutely an umbrella term for those groups. Honestly people hear “umbrella term” and they lose their shit because they think umbrella terms can only be used to encompass the entire community instead of subsets of it, so that must be what you mean, and how dare you! :/

But, honestly, this isn’t a nuanced discussion – it’s an insistence that if you use queer to refer to more than one person at a time and that person is not your own self, you’re coercively labeling other people who don’t want that label. Except… this is incorrect. It is so incorrect it erases swaths of queer people who have been gathering in groups under the label for the last 100 years. It’s a push to eliminate the label altogether, by reducing it to something you have to keep to yourself.

The only coercive labeling going on in this entire post was the OP who changed the poster (and a little the person insisting on using LGBT). Queer is not a super-private self-identifier only that isn’t allowed to be used for finding community, ffs.

I would add something here, but there’s nothing left. @opalescentlesbian nailed it.

Not Gay as in Happy, But Queer as in Fuck You! Every time I think about the Queer Community this is the phrase that I think of.

Thank you @wetwareproblem for standing up for the rest of us.

“ezra miller is going to be the first lgbt+ person to play a superhero!!”

i mean yes he’s going to be the first to get a solo movie but

oh, and:

all im getting from this post are that the x-men are really gay

Hahah HOW DO PEOPLE NOT KNOW THIS jfc

me, with light in my eyes and kindness in my heart: this character is a lesbian!

someone, twirling their handlebar mustache: ummmm remember that time she made eye contact with a man? checkmate.

the news of a potential Xena Warrior Princess reboot, now with lesbian maintext, is bringing every flavor of homophobe to the table. clearly none of these people watched past season three. i can’t stop hatereading!

there’s something bizarrely funny about straight people watching xena

y'know, if you can get past the part where the homophobia makes you wanna rip your face off

tag yourself im ‘pregnancy is a heterosexual experience’

I’m ‘two straight females who fell in love with each other’

I’m “they were never gay to me.”

I’m “just because a woman is strong and independent doesn’t mean she’s a lesbian”

“Sister spirits”, defs.