Get you one who can do both 😍

being a scavenger animal must be so fucking great. imagine if every time someone died a new restaurant opened up downtown.

[VD: a TikTok by @kirburb. It’s features a brunette woman making many statements in quick succession. She says:

This is my favorite thing to make for girl dinner. Girl math is when small purchases don’t count. I love doing my silly little lazy girl job. I’m going to explain what’s going on in Ukraine, but so the girls can understand: imagine NATO is Hailey Bieber. When he gets in your feminine energy you’re never gonna wanna to go back. I just hit a curb because I’m a girl driver. Girls you can do the girl push ups but the boys are going to have to do the reals ones - wow you throw like a fucking girl. I’m one of the few sane members left in this generation; I’m actually saving myself for my husband: nobody’s truly happy in a 50 50 relationship, don’t let him trick you. This is my day in the life of a stay at home girlfriend. You’ll know you’ve found peace when you no longer have to protect yourself with masculine energy: he’s gonna protect you with his masculine energy; he’s gonna make you feel like a little girl. English is the girl subject and science is for boys. I though he was straight but then he wanted to order bottomless mimosas, and there’s something a little fruity about boys who are too into theater. Now men are pretending to be women because they want Olympic medals. The only way to protect your kids is to keep them at home. This is my morning routine as a Pastor’s wife: I start breakfast at sunrise. Maybe there’s a good reason for the abortion, like… rape or incest. Otherwise… Being a godly woman in the twenty first century can be so challenging. He keeps talking about inflation but I’m a girl, I don’t know economics. She would spend a nuclear war just because she’s on her period. There’s something so wrong with this generation. They need to keep those things out of kid shows; the media’s trying to brainwash our children. Have you heard of 12 3 30? It’s the perfect lazy girl workout. The government wants to take away your rights as a parent. [pause] This is what I’m having for girl dinner tonight!” End VD].

^ From a therapist-friend, in case any in-therapy-friends ever worry about this. 

And this is because it would be really shit of them to open up your entire brain into hysterical Upset and then boot you out without helping you find equilibrium, but there is probably someone right after you. Just to fully articulate.

Yeah exactly. When I do therapy I always keep an eye on the clock so I know when I have enough time to keep opening up big issues, vs. when I have to work on getting them back to stable so they don’t leave my office and walk straight into a wall.

Thank fucking God holy shit

i'm not very resilient so i hate small inconvniences, try to reduce them whenever possible, and im resentful when they're imposed on me.

sometimes ppl don't get why im trying to set myself up not to have to deal with something that's not a big deal... it IS a big deal if it's the difference between me doing something and not doing it, and it may be, because i'm not very resilient

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

This is important and should have more notes.

The name of this creature is YOTAcat or POTOOcat.

This creature is a combination of Yotaka (potoo) and cat.

His true identity is one of an alien reconnaissance unit that plans to invade the earth.

His body can change its shape at will by copying other creatures and objects.

When he came to Earth, he first tried to copy the appearance of the planet's main life form.

However, the first thing he saw there was a cat. He decided that the creature was the main life form and tried to copy the cat's form.

However, by some accident, he also copied the information of Potoo, and his body became a chimera of cat and Potoo.

What was even more unexpected for these aliens was that once they copied the earth creatures, the original spirit invaded their psyche.

His spirit was about to be taken over by cats and POTOO!

The human who found the strange creature brought it home out of curiosity. Not knowing it was a vicious alien.......

do kids these days know about glomping?

What is that?

hehe…. *glomps you* OwO

:3

What the fuck?

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it.

I want to say that with trans folk now being at risk of the fucking death sentence in Florida....

The time for community is Now. The time to start planning and organizing how to get our rights back is NOW. bring it up at your local LGBT craft events or book club or support group or whatever. Tell your friends. Spread the word. And maybe see which ones will have the safety and resources you'll need should a Lavender Hunt happen in your area.

And on the scarier end of reality....

This is fucking terrifying. Lots of people are at risk. Personally, I'm terrified this rhetoric will spread much like Trumpism did. I'm scared for my gf and I'm fucking scared for myself because we know historically that it isn't just trans folk on HRT or drag performers that they go after.

And you have every right to do whatever you need to protect yourself.

I'm not going to shame folks who quit HRT, who take the rainbows out of their bio, the people who start saying partner instead of revealing a gender, or anyone else taking a few steps towards the safety that the closet provides. WE shouldn't.

I fucking love you. And we'll be okay as long as we're together, okay?

We keep us safe

This is what I'm talking about for the people unaware.

I looked up the lavender scare last night and was sadly unsurprised to see that the last time the community came together...was a lavender scare.

Pride was a riot because the government started doing to us then what Florida is doing to us now. It was triggered when a man was fired from his job on grounds of being gay and tried to take it to court.

This is why we have pride. This is why "think of the children" is/was an awful rhetoric to push at leather daddies and drag queens. It's not just a bad opinion or stupid discourse, it's a talking point for the right wing to justify fucking kill us.

It was never "just discourse" it was a right wing psyop to cripple us from coming together to fight against attacks just like this.

Your enemies aren't other queer people with labels you don't like. Those are your allies. Because you know who else doesn't like them?

Nazis.

And they don't like you either even if you have a "normal" queer identity and you don't make it "your whole personality" or whatever.

You're both still queer. And that's all they care about. Trying to placate bigots wont save you. Quit playing the part of "acceptable gay" and throwing everyone else under the bus.

Besides, that they WERE thinking of the children when they started those riots dressed in stuff that makes you squirm. They were thinking of You. Of your life. Your children. Queer children.

• Broke: think of the children
• Woke: think of where you'd be right now if Drag queens and leather daddies weren't there to throw that first brick. Think about about all the other people currently at risk of being killed through the Same Exact method that you had the privilege of escaping, precisely because of the people you can't stand.

Hey y'all please reblog this version so people can see the article and explanation, there are a few confused people only seeing earlier versions that dont explain the connection/threat because it doesn't have the article.

An interstate rainbow railroad.

For those unaware that's this. It's been done before.

A lot of people are scared. And I really, really want you to know that the riots started because someone scared asked for help and people answered

It wasn't organized. It just happened. People decided to risk it at a moments notice.

This is ours. And we've done it before.

Stormé Delariverie, the Stonewall Lesbian that triggered it all.

And everyone who was there for her.

Were just like us

So how do we do this?

I played that level in Mario Kart but that was it. I wanna be there for you, we all do, how do we do that?

I bet one of us could call and just ask. Who doesn't have anxiety. Oh wait it's posted on their site :)

Kinda reads like a How To 👀

Find your niche and offer it.

People need help, you figure out how/who can, and then you follow through.

• Can you drive
• have gas money
• have extra food
• Got some clothes or meds
• An extra bed or couch
• maybe even an extra property or hotel room to spare?
• Do you have money for those things?
• maybe you're able to connect people with needs to people who can help?
• can you share/spread posts asking for help?
• Or may you can just make them some tea while the host of the house is out cuz they don't want to be alone in a new place
• Maybe you keep up morale by just being hopeful
• can you somehow show that there are people who are taking steps to materially care for and support trans and other lgbta people in Florida?

What can You do?

Because you are not nearly as powerless as they want you to believe, especially with some help.

" Your enemies aren't other queer people with labels you don't like. Those are your allies. Because you know who else doesn't like them?

Nazis.

And they don't like you either even if you have a "normal" queer identity and you don't make it "your whole personality" or whatever.

You're both still queer. And that's all they care about. Trying to placate bigots wont save you. Quit playing the part of "acceptable gay" and throwing everyone else under the bus.

Besides, that they WERE thinking of the children when they started those riots dressed in stuff that makes you squirm. They were thinking of You. Of your life. Your children. Queer children. "


I just wanted to point this itsy bitsy part out. because some people need to fucking listen to it.

This ENTIRE post is worth listening to, it doesn't matter if your trans, or not. Please just fucking listen. For the queer kids and teens and for the adults and drag queens that are scared. Nobody should be scared to die. Not just in florida either.

The time for community is now. Because here’s the thing... we will not get out of this overnight. Just like Obama didn’t magic us into permanent liberalness and inclusivity. We got some steps, but now we’re all watching them get rolled back bit by bit. We have to fight back bit by bit. 

And how we do that is community. Because here’s the secret... that’s how they’re doing it.

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”

This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.

ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep

Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.

Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.

Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!

So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.

Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:

Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?

I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.

if I was matt murdock and I found out the same chemical spill that blinded me and lit the world on “fire” turned a bunch of turtles into pizza loving ninjas I would lose it actually

I’m not going lie the thought of matt finding out he’s radioactive ooze brothers with this particular version of the tmnt has me in tears

matt, trying to recount his childhood and ignore the smell of turtle, three day old pizza, and sewer: …..so yah, after my dad died I was basically on my own.

the turtles, already planning on buying their radioactive waste brother a shirt that says “I fell in radioactive waste and all I got was these glasses”: cowabummer dude. our dad’s a rat

Cowabanger of a post

Paintings by Micah Ofstedahl

i feel like we, as a fandom, gloss over the scene where palamedes brings “dulcinea” tea.

he knows the real dulcie dislikes it when people bring her tea!!! he’s judging cytherea’s response! he’s starting to figure things out before abigail and magnus are even killed!

an excerpt from dulcie’s letter in the mysterious study of doctor sex (which everyone should read, by the way):

in conclusion: WHAT A MAN

Also, Palamedes Sextus is a master of psychometry - if “Dulcinea” handles the teacup (let alone drinks from it), and he can get his hands on the teacup during the clearing-up, he’ll instantly know pretty much everything about her. Him offering that teacup is like a cop offering you coffee so that they can get your DNA from the discarded paper cup.