hey can you do me a favour?? Can you go get that nice pristine sketchbook or journal you’ve been hoarding and put some kind of mark on the first page? Anything will do, like a smudge of graphite or a blob of ink, or perhaps a very scribbly dinosaur. Just put something there. Please, or the dinosaur will be sad.
I was SO SAD for this dinosaur that I grabbed the nearest notebook (a calendar) and drew a little sailing ship for him
cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
happy pride month to country mama lynn and country mama lynn only
Someone give this woman a damn crown and medal
Happy pride month to country mama lynn and ger gay son only
aint it crazy how many people realize they’re queer when they have the language to express how they feel and a support system to encourage self exploration????
I never stop enjoying reading this. Literally everyone’s lives improves.
Ancient legends say that if you reblog this on June you get 110% gayer and stronger
right at the beginning when she’s like how do I help my son feel loved and accepted I’m here shouting “QUEEN YOU ALREADY DID THAT BY TAKING HIS SIDE AND LEAVING THAT NO GOOD HUSBAND FOR HAVING THE AUDACITY TO KICK YOUR BABY OUT!” And Good for her! this is the only response to a man who kicks out a child.
It’s very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you’re trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you’re why the cishets don’t accept us or including [aces/bi people with the ‘wrong kind’ of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can’t you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? – to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.
On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids – late teens, early 20s – asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled – or didn’t handle – the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the “women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it” poster. And so on.
I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, “they didn’t care until it started infecting more than just the fags.” I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, “remember when they called it 'gay cancer?’”
That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.
Never.
These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can’t have it and they’ll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They’ll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.
And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.
Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.
You couldn’t create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.
Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I’m a dyke, which seems to depend on who’s yelling what from which window and what day it is.
Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they’re the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They’re the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word “dyke” in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don’t fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.
Most cishets, though… well, they don’t actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you’re right there in front of them. Maybe they’ll be okay with you, personally, especially if you’re the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.
They need people to know that they don’t have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You’re useful.
But they call you by your deadname when you’re not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won’t put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.
I didn’t want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he’d advocated for that tattoo being “over their assholes.”
(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.
Fucker.)
But yeah. I didn’t want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven’t given up.
I need you to know that, too. This isn’t a white flag. I’m not surrendering. This isn’t over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.
But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them – and he’s not – then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can’t trim ourselves down to something they’ll accept.
The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It’s revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don’t challenge them too much, or it’s conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we’ve got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.
That’s it. Either it’s all of us or it’s none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don’t agree with it but we’ll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.
The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.
This is important. But also who is Pete Buttigieg in all seriousness
Pete Buttigieg is a US politician best known for being a moderate mom-and-apple-pie Democrat. He’s white, upper-middle-class, graduated from Harvard, married to a schoolteacher, Christian, Navy vet. He ran for President in 2016 and he’s currently the Secretary of Transportation.
He’s the epitome of respectability. If anyone has won the respectability politics game, it’s Pete. He’s so respectable he doesn’t even swear. He looks and acts like a slice of Wonderbread came to life.
He’s still a just another faggot.
Also been sucking shit as SOT
I’m gonna say this again, and I’ll say it every time I get one of these fucking point-missing additions on this post:
Hey. Let’s be clear here: this isn’t about whether he’s doing a good job or whether you like Pete personally or whether you think his politics are ineffective milquetoast liberal bullshit. The point is not “he’s not special, he’s just another faggot like the rest of us, he hasn’t opted out by being cool and good” or whatever the point of the above comment is.
In fact, the point isn’t even about Pete Buttigieg at all. You can substitute in any one of us who is “respectable,” including any of your personal darlings, if it helps get the point across. You can sub in anyone currently being lauded by the media, or who ever has been. Ellen, Rosie O'Donnell, Neil Patrick Harris, Lily Tomlin, Sir Ian McKellen, Grant Robertson, Ed Koch, Wilson Cruz, Jodie Foster, Elliot Page, Xavier Bettel, Harris Wofford, Jens Spahn, George Takei, Sarah Paulson, Dan Levy, Richard Chamberlain, Ana Brnabić. Whoever.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the Transportation Secretary or a beloved actor or the Prime Minister of fucking Luxembourg, to the people who want us to disappear from public life, from this fucking earth, we’re all just trannies, faggots and dykes. That is the point. It’s not about this one dude, and it never was.
uploaded this at 1 am thinking ‘oh no one is going to see this, whatever :)’ but reading your thoughts, your heartbreak and ultimately your hope made me feel like the world is one yknow what? We got this
