Case study since I wrote this post?

Bad Buddy 

also you know what

you know what really fucking pisses me off about the whole “GASP ADULTS WRITING ABOUT KIDS” discourse

you know what really fucking pisses me off?

hi. i grew up in the bible belt of the midwest. as a young queer slowly coming to terms with being Super Not Straight, I grew up a town where there was one grocery store and eleven churches. on nice sunny days, before real summer heat set in, the chances of well-dressed smiling proselytizing boys with free copies of their holy books showing up at your door approached 100 percent. in my high school, there were to my knowledge about four queer kids, myself included in that number, and one of them was terrified to come out or even be seen with other boys because he grew up in the kind of household where you would absofuckinglutely be thrown out for being gay.

i did not have a queer childhood. this was just as the proliferation of the internet was starting to become a thing, but your best bet to get on a computer would be to go to the local library. the librarian, btw, was a devout christian and was part of the baptist church across the street. so the idea of using free resources to reach out or research what the fuck it meant to be queer was literally not an option.

i did not get queer literature. i did not get queer media. i subsisted on fandom, because it was the only type of content i knew that talked about being queer, that was positive about it, and was often created by adults who would point you to resources to help. this was before scarleteen and teen vogue and other sites.

fandom was my queer community, because i had zero alternatives. society gave me no alternatives.

and now I am looking at all these fearmongering puritanical moralizing shitheels go on and on about how any adult who writes about younger people is a predatory pedo

I did not get a fucking queer childhood. And if I want to sit down and write or read a story about queer teens who get a better shot, who do find love and feel comfortable experimenting with their sexuality instead of treating it like a potential death sentence,

you do not get to sit there and tell me what a fucking terrible human I am. I was a fucking kid too, and these are my stories too. they, in fact, are the stories fucking owed to me by a world that taught me to be afraid. and that part of my history as a human did not get erased when i passed some arbitrary milestone of time.

Society already stole the upbringing I should have had and locked me in a fucking closet until i was in my mid 20s, and you puritanical myopic shits have the fucking audacity to say me reaching back to try and remember something better makes me a pedophile, you dogwhistling dumbfucks.

you are literally on the same side as the people who made my best friend afraid his dad would beat him to death for coming out. that is where you stand. you use the same tactics and the same scripts. “oh if you are interested in these things…… that means you’re Wrong and will probably go to Hell :( why do you want to be such a bad person when you can be Straight And Pure?”

fuck off

I think this is the part that hurts the most: it’s mostly people who did get a queer childhood trying to shut down those of us who didn’t from talking about it.

All of this. And, well, hurling accusations of “You’re a pedophile and/or trying to indoctrinate children into your filthy Queer Lifestyle” is 100% the exact same thing that homophobes have been saying for ages.

Well said, tyramir. 

“Allowing” people to write about problematic or illegal stuff is not the same as allowing them to do that stuff in real life to real people. It’s not in the same ball park; it’s not even the same game. Anyone who thinks it is has a problem telling fiction apart from reality. 

There is no proof whatsoever that the existence of “problematic” activities in fictional forms encourages those activities in real life. Nor does the connection “stand to reason”. If it did, someone would have come up with a half-way valid argument by now. Gut instinct is not realiable. It has led humanity astray too many times before. 

I’d point out that if you’re actually going to be trying to deal with these problems in fiction, then surely the place to start is with the big, for-profit cultural producers.  You know, the big publishing firms (the vast majority of the fiction with incest content I’ve read in my lifetime has been commercially published); the television production firms; the motion picture production companies; the video game production companies; the big music production firms; the animators; the commercial art producers and so on.  The ones which have the reach, the money, the majority of the audience - the ones which set the tone for cultural production throughout pretty much the entire Western world. 

Now, I’ve been keeping an eye on this whole pro-and-anti-censorship debate for most of the past two years.  Y’know what I haven’t heard anything about?  I haven’t heard anything about anyone going after the commercial cultural producers.  I haven’t heard anything about anyone raising Cain because the commercial cultural producers aren’t listening to them about this sort of thing.  (I’d expect by now if this were happening, we’d at least be seeing articles in the media-fandom press - sites like The Mary Sue, or Kotaku would be talking about it, surely).

What do I hear?  I hear about pro-censorship types attacking fan fiction writers.  I hear about all these efforts being aimed at fan writers, fan artists - isolated people, usually women or members of marginalised groups, who don’t have a multi-billion dollar corporation backing them, and who don’t have the resources to fight off an internet mob.  I hear about death threats, I hear about suicide baiting, I hear about abuse threats, and I hear about people being hounded off the internet for the “crime” of not agreeing with pro-censorship mobs and posting “forbidden” content in certain fandoms and certain ‘ships.  I hear about people demanding abused people display their abuse in public in order to “justify” their writing, and being judged on whether they were abused “enough” to “justify” what they’ve written.  I hear about pro-censorship types abusing people, bullying people, and essentially behaving as though this were all a means for them to gain power over people and demand other people behave in a manner which benefits the pro-censorship types personally.

Y’know, just like abusers do.

(Guess what we’re also starting to see articles in the media-fandom press about?  Here’s a clue… it isn’t about the righteousness of the pro-censorship cause)

Forgive me, therefore, if I’m just a teeny bit cynical about how much the pro-censorship types care about their so-called “cause” of preventing child abuse.  Maybe I’d start believing your words, if you started acting as though they meant something. 

writer: this is one of my male characters! he cares about his guy friends and loves them deeply.

tumblr: oh! so he’s gay!

writer: uh…no, he’s attracted to women.

tumblr: ….so he’s bi!

writer: uhh…no…….he loves his guy friends but he’s not romantically/sexually attracted to them.

tumblr: ….so you’re homophobic.

writer:

Healthy male friendships are almost as rare in mainstream fiction as gay male relationships, and maybe more rare in fanfiction. Let men be wonderful friends without pushing a romantic relationship, just like men and women should be able to be wonderful friends without the pressure of a romantic relationship.

*AGGRESSIVELY SLAMS REBLOG UNTIL I DIE*

This is literally the reason men are so terrified of being open about loving each other platonically, because they don’t want people to assume they’re gay just because they can be supportive of their fucking friends

I literally got anon hate about my response to this post, and I just want to say that I’m sorry…

for not reblogging it sooner.

Psyche bitch, this is a good post.

PREACH

This is like a direct response to half of Tumblr.

Not all relationships have to be romantic. Being close to someone doesn’t mean you are in love with them. Platonic friendships can be just as strong and wonderful as romantic ones.

Hey as a gay dude, I am beyond SICK and TIRED of mutuals I like reblogging this piece of crap post.

This post is thinly veiled homophobic propaganda, the OP is a homophobic conservative christian, and all of you are regurgitating this message uncritically.

Here’s the evidence, I’m just going to copy some of that below.

[Image reads: “Gay Christian is NOT an oxymoron.”

Comment: “Depends on what you mean by gay Christian. There are Christians that struggle with same sex attraction and there are false converts living unashamed and unrepentant in sin.”]

Reblogged 21 July, 2018.

[Ask reads: “Do you believe homosexuals who give themselves to Christ will go to heaven? I️ know it’s a big topic but I️ don’t see homosexuality as being a bigger sin than any other. All sins are equal in my eyes and we all sin everyday knowingly. So what does this mean for homosexuals?

Reply: “There is no sin that disqualifies someone from the grace of God. If someone confesses with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believes in their heart that God raised him from the dead… they will be saved. Being gay doesn’t change that… however, the Christian life is one of perpetual repentance where you constantly turn from away from yourself and your sinful desires and constantly turn to Jesus. Being gay doesn’t change that either.“]

Reblogged 3 December 2017

—

You get the idea.

Then there’s just. SO many post. Deriding gay ships. All of these STINK of homophobia. And blaming toxic masculinity on gay men and slash shippers.

But y’all eat it up. Because your insatiable need to get back at “yaoi/slash fangirls” makes you blind to the way this kind of rhetoric hurts gay guys.

This one really rustled my jimmies:

[Comment 1 reads:  #CS Lewis destroyed fujoshi I cannot believe

Comment 2:  I can’t believe a Christian writer in 19-freakin’-60 was forward and progressive thinking enough to discuss the toxicity of assuming men can’t form emotional connections with someone they aren’t dicking.]

Nevermind that C.S. Lewis was absolutely not “forward and progressive” by today’s standards: he firmly believed that homosexuality was a sin and that any love between people of the same sex is lesser/false, like most people at the time. His homophobia doesn’t show in his writing as much as his sexism and racism, though, lmao.

Can you tell that I don’t like C.S. Lewis very much?

But people are praising his Straight™ discomfort at two male friends being perceived as a couple as “““woke”““, ignoring the fact that gay couples can be just as much friends as two straight men (friendship and romantic love are not mutually exclusive, people!!!), and that being mistaken for a gay man shouldn’t make you so disgusted, because it’s not a bad thing.

The “CS Lewis destroyed fujoshi” comment is extremely revealing. You people don’t actually care about real life gay men. You just want to bash girls who like fictional gay ships.

Fun fact: I’m also japanese, and I see you people hating on fujoshi without having a single clue about how using “fujoshi” as an insult is misogynistic and homophobic, and that the slash/BL fandom in Japan is famous for being a safe haven for queer japanese women. Like. The stereotype for a fujoshi in Japan is a lesbian. Y’all are trashing japanese lesbians because they like gay ships.

—

Anyway.

I know many of you live in Tumblrland where slash shipping is the norm, but outside your little slash fandom bubble, being okay with two men being a couple is uncommon. My gay friends are asked all the time by their families to introduce their SO as their “friend” when family or kids go visit them. And that’s when they’re not beaten up or kicked out of the house when they come out.

There is also not a shortage of platonic male friendships in media. Have you forgotten that “buddy film” is an entire genre of cinema???

We’re more likely to get queerbaiting in the form of two “straight male friends” than an actual gay couple on screen, and even queerbaited friends are rare compared to “no homo’d” straight male friends.

And the “shippers reading gay romance in interactions that aren’t explicit romantic” thing that OP and other asshats on Tumblr love complaining about? That’s just a mixture of queer readings of media + picking up on subtle signals of queerness, which is like. A staple of queer/LGBTQ+ culture.

I don’t know if younger people/people who aren’t in the queer dating scene in a homophobic country realize how different the gay love language is. It HAS to be subtle and easy to be read as platonic, because if we get caught, we can end up killed. The signals we use are very often the same ones that shippers pick up on: lingering eye contact, casual displays of affection, hinting disinterest in the opposite sex, etc.

They’re also the same signals that academics use when applying queer theory to a piece of media. Especially since explicitly depicting homosexuality in literature and on film has been discouraged, if not forbidden, for a large chunk of the history of these media, and the only way to convey it was subtext. Here’s a video on that. I highly suggest you watch it. What slash/femslash shippers are doing is basically an unsophisticated version of that. “Baby’s first queer reading”.

If reading queerness in fictional relationships that aren’t explicitly gay makes you uncomfortable, maybe think on the fact that we all take it for granted that the M/F leads of a story are going to end up together, even if there was no set-up for the romance. Gay pairings often have the same or more romantic subtext as straight ones; we just have less payoff, less representation, and more haters. Reflect on that double-standard.

Also, I shouldn’t have to say this, but while it IS annoying when people assume you and your friend are a couple in real life, interpreting fictional characters as queer doesn’t hurt anyone. They’re fictional. They don’t have feelings. And people IRL are much more likely to assume you and an opposite-gender friend are a straight couple, because of heteronormativity.

The toxic masculinity that prevents male friends from showing more platonic affection to each other is the EXACT SAME toxic masculinity that makes them think that being mistaken for a gay man is a horrible thing. Blaming gay couples for that is homophobic. Blaming gay ships for that is misdirection.

“Gay couples are destroying male friendships” is an ancient homophobic argument, and I would appreciate it if you guys stopped recycling it. Thank you.

👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Finally. I can reblog.

this is really gross? like you couldn’t stop being homophobic for actual people ? you had to like a gay fictional pairing?

Not even remotely true.

But even if it were, does it ultimately matter what stops a homophobe from being homophobic, as long as they…yanno…stop being that way?

As @discoursecatharsis said, I’m sorry us older millennials grew up in a far more homophobic culture where no one talked about being queer except as a joke or a tragedy, if it were even talked about at all. For a lot of folks, fandom was the only safe outlet to explore this stuff. Anime was still a growing new thing and one of the few places in media where being gay wasn’t always a punchline so OFC all the baby gays still pretending to be cis and/or het glomped onto it.

Was it perfect? No. Even back then, I was distinctly sick of the uke/seme dynamics being forced into every pairing no matter how ill-fitting. But at least yaoi didn’t bury their gays or censor romantic attraction, so we took it and ran with it.

We grew up–society changed and we too updated our ideals of what being gay meant. More importantly, more people we knew came out. My cousin’s been gay my whole life so I had that but my friends didn’t start coming out till they’d left the little hick conservative town we grew up in. I grew up in driving distance of San Francisco. If my Californians were that fucking scared in a state that considered gay bashing a hate crime in the 2000s, how do you think the rest of the country was doing?

I mean, Twitter OP has a bi flag RIGHT FUCKING THERE.

Think, for God’s sake. 🤦

I can think, can you?

Dont come at me with that bullshit that “things were worse” when there were people who knew what was right.

I’m a queer person and I hate to think that someone got over their homophobia over fictional characters vs having human compassion. and if that works you up and gets you mad, then that’s genuinely very sad.

You’re the one calling a clearly bi person (the flag in the icon is very visible) gross when you know nothing about them aside from one out-of-context tweet. Being queer didn’t stop you from acting like a judgmental asshole.

And human compassion is the prerequisite for any kind of anti-homophobic revelation. Fiction is just one vehicle of exposure to different concepts. For it to work as it does, there HAS to be a capacity for compassion already. So from one queer person to another: put your human compassion to use and stop judging your fellow LGBTQ+ people for what kickstarted the fight against their conditioning.

A lot of people can’t “get over homophobia with real people” because they don’t know any real people who are queer, LGBT, MOGAI, etc. Or at least, they don’t know that they know any. They have two sources of information about queer people:

I am THRILLED to hear someone got over homophobia without having to drag some poor queer person through months of questions and awkward misunderstandings and random stabs of bigotry because they didn’t realize what they were doing or saying was hurtful.

It WAS different, though.  This is disjointed and messy, but hear me out.

I was born in 1977. I’m an 80′s kid. I grew up in the second largest city in Oklahoma. It’s a pretty liberal city, but still, it’s Oklahoma, and, again, this was the 80s.  AIDS was burning through my elders’ generation like a wildfire; hospices were full; sodomy was a crime people were still imprisoned for; there was no explicit representation in entertainment, and precious little implicit. People. Hated. Us.  Even more openly than they do now.

Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998. He was only half a year younger than me. More heinous things had happened, and still do happen, but that? That one made the local news, and even as we shuddered and wept about it, it was the first time I or any of my colleagues had ever seen an act of homophobic violence publicly condemned in mainstream media of any kind. One of his murderers still tried a “gay panic” defense, and we had to see that, which hurt.

Things were pretty bad.

I was raised by agnostic/atheist people, my father was from L.A. out of liberal Boston stock. My mother was Oklahoman by way of Texas and Louisiana, from a moderately conservative family (they weren’t pricks about it, they didn’t let their -isms show around anyone but other family).

So I honestly had about as liberal an upbringing as you can expect anyone born and raised here to have.

I still heard, from family and from adults around me, awful gay jokes.  There was no internet, so there was no googling for LGBT resources.  I found the local LGBT teen outreach program by finding a slip of paper tucked into a library book, and I didn’t know when I called the number, or even when I showed up the first time to a meeting, whether it would be legit or run by anti-gay bigots looking for a captive audience and possibly some kids to blackmail or out to their parents. I didn’t even have a concept of “transgender” until I was in my later teens, and wasn’t comfortable with the idea until much later which, oops, SURPRISE, I’M NOT CIS!

I knew a lot of kids whose parents didn’t let them read anything that wasn’t pre-approved.  Many of them did not read well anyway, and didn’t have an interest in books (which is not a bad thing, some people just don’t and that’s fine as long as they aren’t trying to keep others from reading).  Many had their television viewing restricted, and there was zero representation anyway. People had fits when a prime time show had their hetero main character become a single mother via IIRC artificial insemination.  SINGLE MOTHERS?  THE WORLD IS FUCKING ENDING.  When Ellen came out, oh my god, people lost it.  You should have heard the things that got said about her in our newspaper, which everyone read because there was no internet to give them other sources for news and the corner store only ever stocked 5 copies of the New York Times that were from 2 days before.

When you are raised in an environment where nothing is there to show you what a better world looks like, you are left to find that world for yourself when you are older.  And even then, you have to go looking for it, and you may not have any idea of how to go about that.

YES, there were people who knew better.  But you don’t get people like that right out of the gate unless they are taught better, usually by family (schools still don’t do enough of this, when I was a kid they still taught that it was morally wrong, and conservative states fight like hell to have even less information, and to be able to label queers as deviants).  Dismissing someone who was confused, possibly even bigoted, but who came to a deeper understanding via fiction? That’s not right. The resources might not have been around them at the right time. Or the resources may have been there, maybe they didn’t care, and for some reason it was fiction that finally broke through that wall for them.

Regardless of the climate now, things may have been very different when/where this happened for them.  And if not?  It’s not less valid.  Yes, things are so much better now (unless you were there, or are willing to listen to and understand people who were, you won’t understand how much). It’s amazing.  Absolutely amazing.  I’m watching She-Ra with my own two eyes and feeling the pain in my heart that the child I was didn’t have this show, because she really needed it and might have grown up to be a better person sooner.  I’m holding hands with my girlfriend in public in Oklagoddamnhoma and nobody hisses or calls the cops. Things are so much better. Not good enough, but better.

One of the reasons we clamor so stridently for inclusion is to normalize queerness for folks who are not queer.  And with the internet, with fanfiction, even fiction that doesn’t have queer representation can still have that effect through fandom-created queer content. I don’t know if Free! had explicitly queer content; not my fandom.  I do know that literally all the fan content for Free! I saw was queer. Very, very loudly so.

So queer entertainment reaching people? This is the kind of thing we say we want to see.  It’s not right to then tell people this isn’t a good enough reason to clue up. It is.  Any reason is good enough.  This isn’t a test of virtue, babes.  We aren’t weighing our hearts against feathers.  This is, literally, a fight for our lives, and we should not give one tin shit in a teacup why people fall into the trenches with us.  We should welcome them.  Is it sad they didn’t realize it sooner?  Sure.  Yes.  But we don’t throw out allies, especially other queer people, because they hold the “right” beliefs for the “wrong” reasons.  If you talk to other queer people and allies outside of Tumblr, especially in person and especially your elders, you are going to find that there are a lot of reasons people come around, and not all of them are going to be narratives that make you comfortable or that make them look particularly virtuous.  We are a diverse community with many voices, we came here down many roads (some of them shitty ones), and that is what makes us so powerful, so enduring, and so proud.

So y’all who are disgusted that it took fanfiction to break through this person’s walls, I get where you are coming from.  When you’ve had your ass kicked for liking the wrong kind of person, it is frustrating to feel like the suffering and pain many queer folks go through wasn’t enough to get through to someone.  I understand that.  I get that.  I feel you.  It’s lamentable, yes. Christ, the way people are still treated today is a fucking tragedy so it’s not like things are all roses. If harm was ever done to you, that’s horrible and I’m sorry and I will be fighting beside you to keep that from happening to anyone else until my dying day.  But for pity’s sake, “Imaginary gays helped me incorporate the idea of queer people into my worldview in a positive way!” is not gross or bad enough to warrant pushing people away.

We are in this together.

I don’t know how you got here.  You are here, and that’s all I need to know.  Give me your hand, you gorgeous disaster, we have other beautiful people to save.

Fiction teaches people empathy. It’s one of the reasons representation is so important, even for people who are not of the demographic being represented - when you have a viewpoint character and you’re in their head, so to speak, seeing their motivations? They’re “a person” in a way that they may not have been before - PARTICULARLY if you’ve always been surrounded by the idea that People Like Them are Bad (sinners/degenerates/etc).

In this case, seeing gay couples in fiction caused OP to go “these ships are so sweet and loving and normal, why is this wrong or sinful?”  (quoting their post linked above).  That’s an important thing!

Based on OP’s full thread (which I advise reading in the link above) I’m pretty sure they didn’t have any queer people IRL who were out to them.

When I was in Jr. High and High school? Somebody in school coming out would have been unthinkable.

Things changed REALLY FAST. And that’s a good thing!

Two weeks ago, Tulsi Gabbard informally announced her presidential run for 2020. News of the election, which will not happen for another 22 months, is dominating the headlines. Democrats are, rightfully, weighing their candidates on a strict scale by poring over past records, remarks, and affiliations. But some, more than others, are weighed on a far harsher scale — a scale replete with hyperbole and half-truths.

Not 24 hours after Gabbard announced her run, her past homophobic statements have been released in a myriad of heated articles. Rolling Stone is calling for her campaign to be finished before it has even started. Huffington Post is claiming that her bid is “dead on arrival”, and that she appears to have no solid constituency in the Democratic Party. A widely shared article from Paste Magazine accuses her of being devoted to a “perpetuation of extremist, fringe ideology.” A range of late night hosts, such as Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Samantha Bee, have declared that Gabbard has no chance of becoming the Democratic nominee. What was originally a cause for strong concern has evolved into a smear campaign—full of exaggerated claims, faux outrage, and a willful obfuscation of the truth.

A CNN article by Andrew Kaczynski was widely shared on social media shortly after her run. The opening paragraph included this line–

“Her past views and activism in opposition to LGBT rights in the late 90s and early 2000s, which put her out of step with most of the Democratic Party at the time, have come under more intense scrutiny since her announcement.”

This single line, contained in one of the most widely shared articles on Gabbard’s homophobic past, is simply not true. And it contains a sentiment that is either naively accepted or outright ignored by the person who propagates it.

Democrats, widely, did not support same-sex marriage in the 90s and early 2000s. In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)—a federal law that defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman—was supported by 32 Democratic Senators and opposed by only 14 before it was signed into law by Bill Clinton. In the House, DOMA was also supported by a steep majority of Democratic Representatives. Only 40% of Democratic Americans supported same sex marriage in 2004. Hillary Clinton, in 2004, voiced support on the Senate floor for marriage to be between one man and one woman.

Tulsi Gabbard was not out of step with the Democratic Party in 2004. She, instead, took a more aggressive stance on a belief that was already shared by the majority of Democratic politicians and constituents.

Today, Gabbard is an ally of the LGBT community. She has a 100% record in Congress for pro-LGBT legislation, and has co-sponsored a plethora of bills for LGBT rights. In 2011, eight years ago, she wrote of her support for same-sex marriage and her promise to repeal DOMA. In the same year, only 15 Senators openly supported gay marriage. Not only has Gabbard evolved on the issue, she has evolved before most prominent Democrats have. And these facts are being brushed aside by the current media narrative.

Three issues must be addressed—Gabbard’s current support of the LGBT community, the tour in Iraq which caused her to transition her beliefs, and the selective outrage of the left for condemning her teenage views when many other Democratic politicians have evolved at the same, or slower, pace than she has.

An Ally for the LGBT community

Tulsi Gabbard has been endorsed year after year by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest advocate in the country for the LGBT community, and she has a 100% rating from them on the legislature from Congress. She is a member of the Congressional LGBT Caucus, and has advocated for LGBT housing and privacy rights, as well as condemning harassment in schools. She states the following on her campaign website.

“I believe that equal treatment and opportunity are fundamental rights for all Americans. Discrimination on the basis of national origin, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, gender, or race undermines core American principles of respect and individual freedom. We have an obligation to fight against discrimination, whatever the form. I will continue to work with partners at the federal, state, and local level to ensure all individuals are treated equally under the law regardless of race, sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

She has also cosponsored the following bills: HR 197 (Repealing of the Defense of Marriage Act), HR 3185 (The Equality Act), HR 208 (the Equality For All Resolution), HR 1199 (The Safe Schools Improvement Act), HR 549 (Designating June 26th as LGBT Equality Day), HR 1755 (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013), HR 2421 (the Military Spouses Equal Treatment Act), and HR 2839 (the Restore Honor to Service Members Act).

The Transition

Tulsi Gabbard was born in Leloaloa, America Samoa. She was home schooled for most of her childhood, except for the two years she spent at an all-girls academy in the Philippines. While speaking to a small audience in New Hampshire last month, she admitted that she grew up in a ‘conservative household’, which was diverse in their views and faith.“I held views growing up that I no longer hold,” she asserted, when questioned on her same-sex marriage views.

In the video apology she recorded on January 17th, Gabbard explained a little more on how growing up with her father influenced her beliefs. “While many Americans may relate to growing up in a conservative home, my story is a little different because my father was very outspoken,” she stated, “He was an activist who was fighting against gay rights and marriage equality in Hawaii—and at that time, I forcefully defended him. But over the years, I formed my own opinions based on my life experience that changed my views—at a personal level in having aloha, love, for all people, and ensuring that every American, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, is treated equally under the law.”

Her father, Mike Gabbard, was Hawaii’s leading opponent of the gay-rights movement. He worked with The Alliance for Traditional Marriage, a political action committee that opposed pro-LGBT lawmakers and laws. The PAC spent more than $100,000 to pass an amendment in 1998 that gave Hawaii the state legislature power to “reserve marriage for opposite sex couples”. The amendment passed.

In an interview with Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Gabbard admitted to working with her father at the age of seventeen in order to pass the amendment. “Working with my father, Mike Gabbard, and others to pass a constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage, I learned that real leaders are willing to make personal sacrifices for the common good,” she said.

In 2000, Gabbard’s mother, Carol Gabbard, won a seat on the State Board of Education in 2000. But when gay rights activists opposed her bid, Tulsi attacked them back in a press release from The Alliance of Traditional Marriage. “This war of deception and hatred against my mom is being waged by homosexual activists because they know, that if elected, she will not allow them to force their values down the throats of the children in our schools.” she stated. She was nineteen years old at the time.

Gabbard then ran for state legislature in 2002, becoming a state representative for Hawaii at the age of 21. Gabbard, now, explains that she and her father had entirely separate political lives during her time as a state representative. “He was talking potholes and trash and sewage, and I was talking about education and environment and other issues,” she stated to The New Yorker. But she continued to harbor anti-gay beliefs. In 2004, she stated that “the people of Hawaii…have already made overwhelmingly clear our position on this issue,” and that “As Democrats we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”

That same year, Gabbard volunteered to deploy for a 12 month tour to Iraq, after having enlisted in the Hawaii National Guard the year before. She served as a medical-operations specialist on a base in the Sunni Triangle. Her time in Iraq was an eye-opening ordeal for her, and she consistently refers to this time when discussing the big shift in her social values. While observing the oppressive regime of the government she was deployed in, she came to her own revelations on the role of a government as a mediator on social issues, and what that could mean in the United States. In December of 2018, she spoke candidly about the change of heart that presided over her during her time in Iraq.

“Both as an American and as a woman, I saw first-hand the destructive effect of having governments who act as moral arbiters for their people. And that caused me to really deeply reflect, and be introspective on the values and beliefs that I had grown up with.”

In a personal essay she wrote in 2011, eight years ago, she explained this soul-searching further. “I realized that a constitutional amendment defining marriage—even the one I and most Hawaii voters had supported—was anathema to the personal freedom we enjoy in America. And so my positions evolved…I can promise Hawai'i that when I get to Washington I will fight any efforts to undermine our reproductive freedom, and I will fight for the repeal of DOMA.”

On January 17th, Gabbard released a video of her apology. It wasn’t her first apology to the LGBT community (she had also apologized in 2012 to the Hawaii LGBT caucus), and it may not be her last. “I know that LGBTQ+ people still struggle, are still facing discrimination, are still facing abuse and still fear that their hard-won rights are going to be taken away by people who hold views like I used to. That cannot happen, because every single American deserves to be treated equally—by their fellow Americans and under the law… When we deny LGBTQ+ people the basic rights that exist for every American, we are denying their humanity—denying that they are equal. We are also creating a dangerous environment that breeds discrimination and violence… I regret the role I played in causing such pain, and I remain committed to fighting for LGBTQ+ equality.”

Mike Gabbard, Tulsi’s father, has also commented on the extreme anti-gay environment his daughter grew up in. “I’d always known that as a child, Tulsi had been deeply affected by the conflict between myself and the gay community. But after seeing her video the other day, what she said broke my heart. I never realized how much trauma I put her through because of my overly aggressive advocacy for traditional marriage.”

A Dramatic Shift

I am a member of the LGBT community. In 2004, when Gabbard attacked gay rights activists as ‘homosexual extremists’, I was twelve years old in middle school. During this time, I harbored my own homophobic views. When a classmate of mine was rumored to be gay, I joined my peers in making cruel remarks about him. We sang scathing songs about a teacher we suspected to be a lesbian, and laughed at magazine covers that chronicled the struggles of gay couples in California. We considered the gay community to be an extreme fringe group, a faction of sexual outcasts that had nothing in common with us. Very few of us knew of any gay family members, or gay friends. The only exposure I had to them was clips on the news, as a handful of same-sex couples married in San Francisco before their licenses were revoked. It was something that was happening out there.

None of us could put a face on them. None of us knew their fears, woes, and despair. None of us considered what it would be like to be born that way, because we didn’t believe one could be born that way. Our fixation was on their actions rather than their humanity. And thus, we believed that they did not deserve our consideration.

In the progressive lens of 2019, it’s easy for some of us to gloss over what 2004 was like. It is easy for some of us to pretend that we have always been more accepting, informed, and tolerant than we ever truly were. Most people, truly, do not remember how bleak of a time the early 2000s was for the LGBT community. They did not have to walk through it in the skin of a gay person.

In 2004, only one state had legalized gay marriage—Massachusetts. 31% of Americans approved of same sex marriage, while 60% opposed it. (This statistic was nearly reversed by 2017, with 62% of Americans being in favor of gay marriage, and 32% being opposed to it). 60% of Americans, in 2004, were in favor of a Constitutional Amendment that would ban same sex marriage entirely. One year before, in 2003, simply having gay sex was still illegal in 13 states.

While these statistics paint a picture of how same-sex marriage was widely condemned in the early 2000s, the perception of gay people — which numbers can’t back up — was more complicated. It had to do with a lack of awareness of the struggles gay people faced. It had to do with fierce condemnations in church halls and seething taunts in popular music. It had to do with the way my scandalized friends cloistered together when we learned that a boy in our summer camp ‘had two moms’, and how we avoided speaking to him from then on. It had to do with the way my youth group leaders — kind, open minded adults who voted for John Kerry — taught us tolerance and compassion, but remained tight-lipped on LGBT issues. It had to do with the complete lack of gay characters in movies and on TV. It had to do with sitting down and watching Finding Nemo with my friends, and hearing the adults in the kitchen lamenting how ‘that Ellen’ played the voice of Dori.

And I lived in a fairly liberal town, and attended a fairly liberal school.

With a home schooled childhood that was, reportedly, as conservative as the one that Tulsi Gabbard grew up in, her past homophobic views come as no surprise.

I do not say these things to justify homophobia in the early 2000s. There are some in the LGBT community who will, despite Gabbard’s 100% record on LGBT rights in Congress and her commitment to change, still feel betrayed by her words and actions in the past. Those feelings are valid.

I say this because those in the LGBT community who lived through the early 2000s truly know how far we have come in just a couple short decades. We understand the leap from then to now, and just how significant that distance is.

We watched family members and friends grapple with their own prejudice before learning acceptance. We watched brave advocates speak. We watched as Ellen continued to dance, as Harvey Milk was immortalized in an Oscar nominated film, and as Obama assured LGBT youth in a televised speech that it gets better. We watched as Americans from every corner of the nation came together to mourn those killed in the Pulse nightclub attack. We needed these allies and advocates then, and we still need them today.

These same allies came to our defense last week when they attacked Rep. Gabbard—well meaning allies who believe that even homophobia from the past deserves no place in our highest offices. And as these allies continue to assert that past homophobia is not who we are as a progressive, forward thinking country, something else strikes me.

That this, truly, is not who we are.

We in the LGBT community owe our progress—the progress that allows us to live with an ever-increasing degree of equality and freedom—to the firm belief that people can change; the belief that prejudice is not hardwired in any of us. We owe our progress to acceptance—not only to the increased acceptance of ourselves, but to the acceptance of the good-hearted but ill-informed people who, slowly, have battled their own negative judgments.

We need to allow people to change. We need to firmly, but kindly, educate and allow people to evolve their beliefs. And we need to forgive those who eventually do.

One word encapsulates this commitment more than anything, a word that happens to be Tulsi Gabbard’s personal mantra. Aloha.

Aloha means to embrace love, not hate. It means to approach each other with an open heart. It means to come together with respect, care, love, and a recognition that we are all connected. Aloha teaches us to find common ground, and that we are all neighbors in the country we call home.

Perhaps in 2019, we need less vindication and more aloha. God knows we could use more of it in this divisive time.

Source: https://medium.com/@kathrynrosefisher/im-lgbt-here-s-where-the-media-is-wrong-on-tulsi-gabbard-bb0fde008d16

When people brought up the things the white Christian lady said, the Democrats said it was a smear campaign to target her. When people brought up the things the dark-skinned Hindu lady said, the Democrats said she needed to end her campaign.

Gee, I’m sure there’s a reason for this discrepancy, but what could it possibly be?

Let people change. There is no point to activism and advocacy if we don’t allow, or better yet applaud, change and growth.

Follow up points from the author, who is herself gay, on talking to straight people about her support for Tulsi.

Follow her on twitter @kayrosef.

Remember yall, people change, and purity culture is trash

Sorry to bother you, but, this post has been incorrectly flagged as explicit content by tumblr. I’m reblogging it here in hopes that you (the OP) will see this note and file an appeal. I would file an appeal myself, but apparently ONLY the OP can.

Wow, look at that!

Wild

So much for “allowing written erotica & similar”.

Ya’ll back up and save any writings you want cause the whole written words won’t be targeted thing is bullshit

oh god what is going on now

guys calm down, you can still draw fictional people naked

#just not fucking.#I can live with that.#honestly this is slightly irritating but not ‘THE SKY IS FALLING’

Yyyyyeah except they’ve already:

This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects. 

The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.

ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers. 

Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)

This is a fucking problem, let’s not blow it off.

I know some people are too young (or simply weren’t involved in fandom back then) to remember what went down with livejournal and a couple of other sites “back in the day”, but it all started out as “it’s okay, we’re just removing the nasty porn”, and then “okay well, just make sure you put your porn behind a cut, no, wait jk you need to host it externally, a link is fine, maybe” and pretty much devolved swiftly into “actually sweety, LGBT content is inherently NSFW by default because it might make the kiddies gay if we expose them to it, so y’all need to leave now byyyeeee”.

Like…that happened. And it took nearly a decade for the fandom spaces to recover and stabilize and to get to the point where LGBT content creators could host their content without being told “you’re not welcome here” and I’m just sitting here, watching as youtube demonetizes LGBT content creators, and Facebook flags up LGBT ads as “inappropriate” and now tumblr is going through the queer and gay tags and just mass blanketing it as inappropriate, while actual pornbots and nazis wind up in my recommended feed.

Like I am uncomfortable y’all. I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like “the olden days” where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone.

And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.

So yea, the sky is not falling, but the ice under our feet sure is making worrying sounds.

i went to read a fic and i,

this is my fic i wrote this and it just appeared on my dash with 200000 notes holy shit

BIGOTED BUZZARD

I really didn’t want to make a serious post about this, but the issue is too important to ignore, really. Dorian is gay. This is very clearly reflected in the narrative of his story. He says so himself that he only enjoys the company of men. He speaks, at length, of how unhappy living under the ruse of being straight made him. He tells the Inquisitor of the blood magic ritual his father was going to use on him in order to alter him. I get it. It’s a video game. It’s a fantasy. Your mods don’t affect my game in any way. It doesn’t impact canon in any way, either. But, as a gay man, your mindset affects my life. Your willingness to alter and change a gay character to suit your needs reflects horribly on you. If you look at Dorian and think, “He’d look better with a female character,” that reflects horribly on you. If you change your game and ignore his narrative, ignore every word out of his mouth on the issue, that reflects horribly on you. And when queer people stand up and tell you how deeply uncomfortable your mod makes them? If you tell them it doesn’t matter, if you make them feel like their discomfort is stupid or immature, that reflects horribly on you. The fact that so many people are so smug about this issue makes my stomach twist into knots. I’ve seen people say that it doesn’t matter. Or that love knows no gender. And it makes me sick because you’re taking homophobia and making it romantic.  It’s vile, and this entire commentary for the straight Dorian mod makes my skin crawl. It just really goes to show how little gay voices actually impact some straight women in this community.

Source

I have a few copies of “Playboy” from the 1970s stashed away somewhere. One of them has a letter where a guy writes in saying, “I met this really gorgeous, sweet woman, and we were planning to get married, but she sat me down yesterday and told me that she had a sex change before she met me. Mr. Hefner, should I marry someone who used to be a man?” and the response was, “So she had a sex change, big whoop. Would you be asking this question if she’d made any other change in her life before she met you? You love the woman she is now, and that’s all that should matter. If you want kids you can adopt or something.”

I feel so conflicted right now

Do you guys SERIOUSLY not know that Hugh Hefner is super respectful of women and doesn’t play around with peoples misogynistic bullshit?

just because you want to be surrounded by hot ladies 24/7 doesn’t mean you’re a douchebag

^^^^^^

bisexual guys are assumed to be secretly gay

bisexual girls are assumed to be secretly straight

both are assumed to secretly like men

see what i’m getting at?

 #men in society: forever believing that the world revolves around their dicks #talk about egocentricism

Don’t forget that gay men are gay because they lacked a “strong male figure”. And lesbians either haven’t found the right man or are gay because of a guy.

Sports anchor Dale Hansen for ABC local affiliate WFAA in Dallas. Whoa.  (via lgbtlaughs)

Audre Lorde (via stories-yet-to-be-written)

***URGENT PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT***

Grindr, a popular app for gay men, now carries an urgent warning for users in Egypt. According to many sources, Egyptian authorities are posing as LGBT people on various social media sites to identify and arrest homosexual people. The app is urging users in the region to proceed with extreme caution, especially when identifying themselves or arranging meetings/hookups. While so far the focus seems to be on gay men, all LGBT people in the area should be cautious. Reports show that Egyptian police have carried out violent raids on private homes which lead to the arrests of several gay men. These men were then subjected to disturbing medical “exams.” Police also raided an LGBT party last year, violently arresting many and sentencing them to up to 12 years hard labour. While homosexuality is not illegal in Egypt, athorities are using sexual deviance, debauchery and insulting public morals as terms for the crackdown. Many claim this fresh attack on the LGBT community is lead by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi who wishes for his country to be more Islamic.

For all of my LGBT friends here on tumblr, please be extremely careful as this situation develops. Remember to clear your search history, use private browsing if possible, and be extremely cautious with who you talk to online.

How to Behave Around Your Gay Teammate in the Locker Room | John Loos via the Second City Network  (via gaywrites)