I’ve started seeing a lot of posts lately that question why so many mlm still fixate on fetishization, given that in the grand scheme of things it’s not really a pressing issue. The implicit message of these posts often seems to be that mlm have a victim complex and want to make it seem like we’re being oppressed by women– or at least, want to compare homophobia from women to misogyny and lesbophobia.

I get the sentiment of these posts, I really do, there’s definitely truth to it. At a certain point, it’s important for mlm to step back and consider the scope of this problem, and whether the criticisms we make (particular criticisms that target women) are actually appropriate. There are a lot of people who take the discourse way too far, and start attacking women or acting as though mlm fetishization is comparable to misogynistic exploitation, especially of wlw.

But disregarding these grotesque outgrowths of the discourse for a second– why is it that so many of us still care? I think there’s more to the answer to this question than just “men are self-centered.”

I have no statistics to back this up, but anecdotally, a lot of the mlm on Tumblr that I have met (I’d say the majority even) are trans. And I think trans mlm often have a unique relationship to straight fetishism of mlm, because for many that was their first opportunity to really connect with the identity of man-who-loves-men.

This is not to say that all trans men used to consort with fetishists or that cis men never get their first exposure to m/m content through things like yaoi. But for a demographic of mlm that generally doesn’t have access to mlm-designated spaces during the process of self-identification, a “woman-friendly” space that fixates on men loving men is often the best there is. We’ve certainly had plenty of people come to this blog and share their story of something similar.

So, why do we still care? Why do trans mlm in particular still care so much? I think the answer is kind of obvious by this point: because in spite of this being many people’s first exposure to m/m, it’s still damaging. It still warps your self-concept and your ideas about what intimacy between men should look like, and what you’ll become by accepting your identity as a mlm– an object, a scandal, and definitely not a full-fledged human being. And especially for those who grew up with this medium as /the only outlet for exploration/, that cuts deep. Assuming a thoughtful, responsible person is the subject here, it’s important to keep talking about it because it doesn’t have to be that way.

The goal of this discourse isn’t to point fingers. It’s not to dish dirt on straight women. It’s not antagonism. The goal of fetishization discourse should be twofold: not only identifying a particular iteration of homophobia, but encouraging alternatives. Encouraging people to think about what harmful ideas about mlm they carry while they’re creating content. Encouraging people to present mlm as human beings in the content they produce. Encouraging our humanization, not just for the sake of our personal self-actualization but to actually shift the tide of how mlm are conceptualized in media. To make it so that young mlm, especially trans mlm, don’t have to settle for burning themselves in order to light their own way. To help young wlw come to terms with their identities without having to push their sga onto proxies that present dangerous homophobic stereotypes.

There are so many constructive, lofty goals to be achieved by continuing to speak about mlm fetishization. And obviously, that’s not the only manifestation of homophobia towards mlm, nor is it even close to the worst. But I think it’s important not to lose sight of why this stirred up so much conversation in the first place. It’s not about shitting on straight women. It’s not about self-pity. It’s about uncovering the tools to identify and /correct/ these problems. And if you’re not doing that, it’s probably worth rethinking your purpose for staying in the discourse.

homoeroticism, excessive hedonism and crime tend to go hand in hand in modernist literature, which is pretty uncomfortable to actually unpack but as an aesthetic it’s tight as fuck

man like. being lgbt kind of ruins time with relatives in a very specific way that cishets will never truly experience. like family time can be rough tm but theres a special brand of discomfort that lgbt people face and it’s kinda wild

It’s the specific feeling of “these people’s love is entirely conditional, and I know exactly what the conditions are, and one day I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and come out and none of these people will love me anymore”. It’s not a feeling cishet ppl experience for obvious reasons.

Even with family that Accepts You tm, theres always this level of “I can only talk about being gay so much before it gets Uncomfortable. I cant actually talk about dating bc someone will look like they ate a raw lemon whole eventually until I’m told I’m oversharing and then conversation will turn to Perfect Cousin with her Perfect Husband and When Are We Going To See Babies? Are they trying? How often? And just….its annoying that it still has to be Rough tm when u do come out and for the most part ur still loved an accepted, but u cant actually talk about it too much, even in the sense of Finding Someone or Boo Evil Politics bc ppl will STILL get visibly uncomfortable

On vacation, my cousin (now the baby trans) called my great aunt a rat for misgendering us, and it made our parents distinctly uncomfortable because at the end of the day, they still see her as a loving person with a few flaws rather than the family bigot. Even when the rest of our family accepts us, we can’t have peace and comfort, not really.

We regret to inform you the writer who

Might not be a good person.

Sweet generalization.

It’s not about whether a character is trans or gay. Gay characters make sense. People have been gay for millennia. Trans however. Not the case. In a high fantasy setting, how in the balls are they going to perform surgery where they change the sex of the character??? It makes no sense at all. They’d have to explain it. And remember, this is high fantasy, Game of Thrones is also in that category. This is a time where they would reach into your body with an object strikingly similar to a salad tossing spoon to yank out a small piece of arrowhead. Pretty sure they hadn’t figured out a surgery as complex as a sex change…

The people complaining that there aren’t enough gay/trans people in stuff like this are just as bad if not moreso than the people who complain about gay/trans people being in stuff like this.

Create your own fantasy world filled with nothing but gay/trans people. Make it so that being heterosexual is the minority. All the power to you. Good luck trying to create it.

You don’t have to have surgery to be transgender. Lots of transgender people don’t. Transgender people, people who identify with the gender not corresponding with their birth sex, have existed before the surgery. And the existence of and recognition of a third sex or dual sex existed in pre-modern times in lots of places are the world. So, for one, your “how in the balls are they going to perform surgery“ question doesn’t actually matter. They don’t need to in order for transgender people to exist. But if they did want to include transgender people who undergo physical changes to reflect their gender/sexual identity, in a HIGH FANTASY world, there’s actually a really easy answer to that:

*ahem*

“How are you going to make someone trans in a fantasy setting full of magic spells, potions, and artifacts?”

shout out to the elixir of sex shift for covering more than just a gender binary.

also lets not forget that in ye old days (aka time of the ancient greeks (aka the bc years)) that people drank the urine of pregnant mares to feminize themselves. like, trans people find a way ;)

…the fucking Sumerians had trans people, brosky.

Sumerians.

They didn’t even have fucking iron, but they had trans women.

dude lemme find you a fucking. girdle of sex change from 1st edition

woah what’s that?? the first edition efreet cover???

OH HEY ITS A FUCKING GIRDLE OF SEX CHANGE AND THERES ALSO A POSSIBILITY IT REMOVES ALL SEX CHARACTERISTICS FROM THE WEARER

it’s on page 145 of the dmg 1st ed. want an easier-to-read screenshot of a pdf??

tldr fuck you

it’s pride month welcome back to “tldr fuck you” anyways dnd says trans & nb rights

Really especially boggled by the sentiment that the show that had an old woman kept perma-young (really perma-alive??) by a fancy necklace poop out a shadow man specifically homicide can’t somehow… Have trans people who successfully physically transition??

Stop doing this 👏👏👏

Pride is for us, not for cishet consumption 👏

If seeing people being themselves makes them homophobic then they were ALWAYS homophobic 👏

You can’t uplift the nice palatable ‘normal’ members of the community and leave the rest behind 👏

If they’ll only treat you well when you conform then they don’t actually respect you 👏

Stop blaming queer people for our own oppression 👏

Stop telling us we’re too loud or too queer or too sexual or we talk about it too much, just let us be ourselves 👏

Stop acting like it’s okay for people to judge ALL of us by the actions of one person as if that isn’t their own bigotry coming out 👏

Homophobes don’t need an excuse 👏

And they will turn on you nice respectable gays the second you step a single toe out of line so STOP enabling them 👏

Billy Porter Talks Auditions Before ‘Pose’ | Drama Actor Roundtable

We mourn. We remember.  We stand with the LGBTQ community against hate and violence.

“In a hundred years of movies, homosexuality has only rarely been depicted on the screen. When it did appear, it was there as something to laugh at, or something to pity, or even something to fear. These were fleeting images, but they were unforgettable, and they left a lasting legacy. Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people… and gay people what to think about themselves.” (The Celluloid Closet, 1996)

And the category is: Outdress every damn body!

Billy Porter at the 91st Annual Academy Awards.

Glenn Close is LIVING! 

Reblogging just for Glenn!

I don’t know for some reason, (unless you study scripture) but men that wear dresses kinda goes against God’s word.

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.

Deuteronomy 22:5 KJV

Also I find this shocking that some Christians are saying this is ok???

Aren’t we suppose to rebuke these kind of things?

I say this because I care for you all and love you as a sister in Christ. But is by definition not ok.

Thank you that someone said this. When I first saw this..I wasn’t really feeling it but I didn’t wanna say anything due to negetivity

shit, we still got sunday schoolers on this site?

like yall can just say you hate lgbt+ people and go

Fascism is on the rise, refugees are treated like criminals, we have squandered our sacred commission as the custodians of nature, and Billy Porter being fabulous at the Oscars is the hill you want to die on.

What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.

Like someone will offer a very obvious example of - say - two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians - surprise surprise! - say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.

It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.

It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.

I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.

It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian) mentality has got to stop.

You’re absolutely right.

I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.

Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.

That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.

Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.

TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).

Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?

All of this.

I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.

And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.

It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones - even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.

I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.

In certain eras of Victorian England, very close friendships between girls was considered normal, and even encouraged. A lot of the things that were normal within the boundaries of female friends back then now seems pretty much like dating to us, because our conventions have changed. 

Also, there’s the fact that a lot of countries, especially western ones, especially US, have developed such a taboo around intimacy, physical and not. Touch, sharing, hugging, kissing someone’s cheek is often portrayed by American media as something that friends dont do. Well newsflash, they do that a lot, and not in a country with much of a huge cultural difference: in France. 

Basically, you just can’t apply your country’s current etiquette to a non-current and non-your-country-centric thing. 

It’s called the foot-in-the-door method. First, you propose something that is slightly outside of allowable norms: denying gay people wedding cakes on grounds of “religious freedom”. Then, you slowly ramp up how extreme your demands are, coercing the other side to giving a tiny bit of ground each time, until you’ve shifted the entire fucking playing field. Conservatives are also very fond of the door-to-face method, which is demanding something completely outlandish that you know will be refused, and then asking for something less ridiculous by way of compromise, again resulting in a gradual shift in norms until views that were once considered moderate or reasonable become unthinkably liberal by destroying people’s sense of standards. The combination of these methods is called the “foot-in-the-face” method, which sums up where this whole thing is headed quite nicely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique

i am shaking a lot right now and my heart is in my mouth and i’ve been crying on and off and on and off for the past two weeks, and i know that none of you give a fuck about brazil, and that none of you care about politics outside of the ones that directly affect you, but i am terrified. as a bissexual, socialist, umbandista, brazilian woman, i am terrified. and i am begging you to care. 

trigger warning for : swastikas, nazism, racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, torture, rape. 

here’s what is happening in brazil: 

in this year, we hold presidential elections. these elections are the most important in the history of brazil, for a very simple reason: now, that we are on the second round, we either elect a far-right candidate with authoritarian tendencies who flirts with fascism, or we elect a center-left candidate who belongs to the party that was in power for from 2002-2016, before a coup occurred mid 2016. 

one of the candidates is fernando haddad, the man seen on this gif:  

he was the mayor of são paulo, has been called by the new york times a ‘visionary’, was considered the greatest mayor of latin america, as his time as minister of education made over 100 federal, free institutes, ensured that the history of africa was taught in schools. he has a bacharel degree in law, a masters in economy and a phd in philosophy. he is currently a professor at an university. he gave free buses to children in public education, who could not afford it otherwise, lowered the corruption in the state of são paulo, created a better system for women to denounce harrassment and assault, and overall did a lot of good. i’m not going to spend 3 hours finding different sources for this, because you all don’t actually care. 

the other candidate, is jair bolsonaro, and he is not the “tropical trump”, he is not our version of berlusconi. he is worse.

here’s what he looks like: 

he has praised general carlos alberto brilhante ustra, who is known as the mastermind behind the tortures that occurred during the dictatorship. when he praised him, he did so when voting to impeach our former president dilma rouseff, who was tortured during the dictatorship, and fought for freedom. he has said that “if the crisis gets worse, we’ll shut down the congress” and install a dictatorship. he has said that the dictatorship should have killed more people, and tortured less. that it should have killed 30.000 people. that it should have killed our then president fernando henrique cardoso. he has said that his son would never marry a black woman because he gave him education. he has said that gay people are only gay because they were not beaten as children. he has said that indigenous people are lazy and greedy, that immigrants are the scum of the earth. he has said that women should earn less because they get pregnant. he has said that he would not rape a congresswoman, maria do rosário, because she is not worthy of it. he has said that his daughter is a woman because he got weak and could not produce another man. are you horrified yet? do you understand the problem yet? do you care yet? 

in the beginning of the year, marielle franco, a poor, black, bissexual politician was executed. a street was named after her. here’s what people in his party did: 

he is leading the polls currently, around 54-58% against 42-46%. ever since the first round of elections, last sunday (07/10), over 50 cases of assaults to people against bolsonaro have been reported. 

here are some of them:

here’s a picture. here’s the news report. 

to make things more worrying, the united states, who has knowingly backed up a military coup in 1964, has donated 96 BULLETPROOF MOBILS TO THE BRAZILIAN ARMY. 

here are some cartoons on american newspapers: 

if you want to get informed, if you care enough to do so, here are some sources in english: 

É por isso que dizemos #EleNão #EleNunca // This is why we say #NotHim #NeverHim:

1. “Eu tenho cinco filhos. Foram quatro homens, aí no quinto eu dei uma fraquejada e veio uma mulher.” // “I have 5 kids. There were 4 boys, on the fifth I had a moment of weakness and had a girl.”

2. “O erro da ditadura foi torturar e não matar.” // “The mistake of the dictatorship was to torture and not kill.”

3. “Eu sou favorável à tortura. Tu sabe disso.” // “I’m in favor of torture. You know that.”

4. “Eu não empregaria [mulheres e homens] com o mesmo salario. Mas tem muita mulher que é competente.” // “I would not employ [women and men] with the same salary. But there are many women who are competent.”

5. “Prefiro que um filho meu morra num acidente do que apareça com um bigodudo por aí.” // “I would rather my son die in an accident than show up around here (dating) a mustachioed man.”

6. “Não vou combater nem discriminar, mas, se eu vir dois homems se beijando na rua, vou bater.” // “I am not going to fight it nor discriminate against it, but if I see two men kissing on the street, I am going to beat them.”

7. “Pinochet devia ter matado mais gente.” // “Pinochet (a dictator) should have killed more people.”

8. “Vamos fuzilar a petralhada toda aqui do Acre!” // “We are going to shoot all the PT (Worker’s Party) supporters in Acre!”

If the straight girls in this scenario leave, gay men aren’t going to magically appear. The bar will just be empty, the bartenders will make less money, and if it keeps up like that for long enough, guess what bar won’t exist anymore? Yeah.

No offense hon but we’ve never needed the straights in order to keep our bars existing.

Gay people ain’t there because straight hoes maxed out capacity so thy can’t get in. No gay bar has suffered because straight people didn’t show up.

Straight people at gay bars are like the porn bots in your notes.

LMAO! Imagine thinking that the only way gay establishments will survive is with the patronage of straight people.

Hey guess what! Without straight people, no one would procreate, therefore all humans would die, thus gay people wouldn’t exist, nor would the rest of humanity.

Are you really dumb enough to think that straight people are the only ones who want or have kids? Do us a favor and get your head out of your ass.