I made a zine! It’s about butch lesbians, with 6 illustrations, and folds out into a collage of old photos & drawings. Seeing the lack of visibility and representation butches have is really sad and lately I’ve been focusing my art on creating something warm and positive for us ❤️

If you want to get a physical copy, message me here or on my instagram @ rejka (they’re £5 + shipping)

[Text ID: Why put the transperson in gay lesbian transperson pride?

As members of sexually-defined minorities (lesbians, gays, or transpersons), we are all familiar with the effects of prejudice and ignorance on our lives and jobs. We need to unite to seek civil rights and dignity for all of us.

burden of guilt, and the trauma of coming out. My experiences as a transexual were similar with many of the most difficult passages in a gay person's life.

There have been transexuals for as long as there have been people. Accounts of people who reject the role assignment to them

Gays however, usually become fairly comfortable with their gender identity and come to feel whole in body and soul. A healthy homosexual does not seek sex reassignment surgery. Does that mean that gays and transexuals really have nothing in common?

While internally we may differ, we are united by common oppression. Solutions to the problems of one group will substantially assist the other. My work with the AGC /End ID]

Minnesota’s Giant Rainbow and Leather Pride Flags

June 28, 1998. Both flags measured approximately 50 feet wide and 75 feet long.

Friendly reminder that the leather flag predates almost every other flag. We owe this community to leather daddies and kinksters

In the era of corporate sanitization never forget it was leather daddies and S&M folks who protected some of the earliest pride parades.

That’s Mr. Dyke To You

from an article titled "apathy hinders gay liberation movement" published in vol 2 issue 11 of Modern Pink Magazine, Nov 1990

Making Out: The Book of Lesbian Sex and Sexuality, photography by Laurence Jaugey-Paget (via dykedeviance)

I haven't seen this circulating here on Tumblr, so I decided to make my own post.

last saturday, in Porto, there was a pride parade going down the street and this old man was standing there, by his front door, waving the portuguese flag. most people on the parade probably thought the same: old person waving the national flag? he's probably protesting against the parade, he's a nationalist of some sort.

then the old man called for that person to come near him. the whole parade stopped. everyone just.. stopped moving. they didn't know what to expect, and most expected the worst. and that person decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and approached the old man. and then... they traded flags, he hugged the person and then he waved the pride flag happily. everyone cheered him.

such a wholesome moment. 🥹❤️🌈

“Official, public, out-and-out proud gay identity has no tolerance for shame, solitude, secretiveness, and no patience for those who choose to wallow either in an abject state of emotional isolation or in the compensatory, manic joys of a solitary queer fantasy life.

Nowadays, proud gay men do not ground their identity in their loneliness, lovelessness, hopelessness, isolation, and sentimentality. Quite the opposite. We fashion a gay self (to the extent that we do) by proudly affirming a common, collective gay identity, claiming this gay identity openly, visibly, unashamedly, and communally, constructing on that basis a shared culture and society–full of opportunities for emotional and erotic expression–and thereby attaining to a healthy gay sexuality, defined by our eroticization of other gay men as gay, and ultimately crowned by the successful achievement of a relationship. And, by the way, we don’t want to be reminded that ‘twas not ever thus.

…“No gay man could possibly regret the trade” of pre-Stonewall gay abjection for post-Stonewall gay pride, [scholar D.A. Miller] acknowledges. No gay man “could do anything but be grateful for it–if, that is, it actually were a trade” (26; italics added). The problem, it turns out, is that instead of winding up in triumphant possession of a gay pride and freedom that we can wholeheartedly call our own, we have constructed a gay identity that actively represses both the pathos and the pleasure of those residual queer affects that we prefer to think we have liberated ourselves from and that we claim have simply vanished from our consciousness. Instead of transcending the secret shame and solitary pleasures of our sentimentality, as we would like to think, we have assiduously closeted them.”

David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay

Who were the lesbian blood sisters?

In the 80s, the AIDS crisis was devastating the world of GLBT people - as the acronym read at the time. Gay men were banned from donating blood, which was desperately needed by patients dying from AIDS. The fear around HIV was so great that doctors and nurses refused to even enter the rooms of AIDS patients. These patients were often abandoned by their families in their dying days. There was a crisis was in the GLBT community, and so lesbians stepped in.

Lesbians organized blood drives in order to give blood to AIDS patients who desperately needed it. These blood drives attracted dozens, if not hundreds of lesbians at a time who all donated their blood. They called themselves the Blood Sisters, and they organized regular blood drives for at least 4 years. HIV patients needed frequent blood transfusions due to anemia induced from the virus, and so lesbians provided this blood.

In addition to blood drives, lesbians also took place as physical caretakers for gay men with AIDS, who were often abandoned by their families and even nursing staff who refused to go into their rooms. Lesbians held hands, fed, and took care of them.

In order to honor the efforts of lesbians during the AIDS crisis, the GLBT acronym was changed to LGBT, with lesbians deliberately at the front. Lesbians were a crucial part of the fight against AIDS, and this change would immortalize it in our community.

Why the tiger has become a transgender symbol in Japan

Gay Breakfast Pin Club writes:

Toransu is clearly a loan word from English ("trans") that has been adapted to Japanese pronunciation (adding vowels/vowel epenthesis helps you avoid unpronounceable consonant clusters).

See also: MishimaKitan

The pin is available here.

#LwiththeT

with pride month approaching and my old archival links post being broken into several annoying sections. here are some useful starting places on lgbt history.