okay so i’m probably 7856454 years late to this realization but …i guess the reason straight people don’t really think our identities matter that much to us is because theirs don’t to them? like, i think about how not straight i am all the time but they don’t do that, do they? they don’t walk around thinking ‘i’m soooo straight’, right? so they don’t think it’s a big deal to other people maybe that’s it and maybe it’s not but i mean it’s something to think about for me
This is actually something that is super important to discussions of diversity and identity.
The people on top don’t “see” their identity the way the marginalized do. Men talk about the fact that they identify as men, but it’s not a part of their identity in the way that “woman” is for a woman – trans identities similarly challenge the status quo, and so you have groups of people who look at society’s expectations and say “I am not that. What am I?”
But people who meet the requirements of society never have to stop and think, “is this me?”
And so people don’t “realize” they’re straight because they don’t have to stop and think about it. People don’t “realize” they’re white because they don’t have to stop and think about it. People don’t realize they’re cis or abled because they never have to question what it would be like to not be what they are.
Academics aside and personal opinion: I feel like this phenomenon is a huge reason for the push back against these discussions by the people on top. People are offended that they are called sexist and racist, sure, but I think what’s most unnerving to these people is that they suddenly have to call who they are into question. They have to be aware of their whiteness or their gender or their sexuality in a way they didn’t have to be before.
i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me – actually, many people have – that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex – sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think – but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” – feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
This is such a powerful post. Read it fully, and spread it around.
I don’t know any history surrounding that but kinks and poly are not LGBT+. They deviate from social norms, certainly, but they’re adjectives, not subjects.
okay idk if that made sense im not an english major guys
Okay so I’ve made about a dozen of these posts in the last month or two, so I’m not going to get as exhaustive as I sometimes do, but here’s the history that my mother and aunties taught me about kink and polyamory as queer.
When I was growing up, I was told that the kink community was the physical space in which the queer community existed and that non-monogamy/polyamory as the concepts that exist today were born directly out of queer culture and the environments that shaped it.
Basically, back in the early years when most of queer culture was an arrestable offense and people mostly only got to meet their partners in the backrooms of old speakeasies and nightclubs, kink spaces were doing the same thing and were one of the only non-mob owned options for gatherings. Kink communities themselves were almost entirely made up of queer folks already anyways because surprise surprise a community made mostly of abuse survivors is gonna have pretty high rates of queer folks in it. And because of the semi-public nature of the spaces and the limited safe dating options polyamory and related non-monogamous practices became common place.
They became so common place in fact that queerness and queer culture completely and foundationally shaped the discussions around consent, relationship needs, emotional connections, and ethical behavior that became central to kink and polyamory as practices. They became so common place in part because it made sense, in part because the cultures all needed each other, and in part because, as my mother always said, “if society had already damned you just for being queer, what did you have to lose by trying all the other things society was going to damn you for as well?” This, incidentally, is also why there have historically been such high numbers of queer folk in illegal occupations like sex work and why my mom and aunties also used to consider sex work as a culture pretty fucking queer too.
But the years went by and your average, “respectable” white gay and lesbian folks with their picket fence day dreams started making progress. They started kicking people to the curb in an effort to make queerness look less “challenging” and different. Bye bye, bisexuals, bye bye drag and trans culture, bye bye non-monogamy what do you mean you actually think the “slippery slope” to gay marriage also leading to polygamy might be a good thing? Bye bye all you sex freaks, sexuality is something your born with and you can’t help who you love, it’s not like all that disgusting talking-about-sex-and-building-the-entire-network-of-sex-ed-information-we-used-to-desperately-try-and-survive-the-AIDS-crisis-ew-you-perverts-our-sex-is-beautiful-and-pure-like-marriage! And so on and so forth.
See, when it was all about survival, the distinction that Straight people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, etc was irrelevant. They’d kill us all the same so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive. But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to Straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight. Our labor, our physical space, our intellectual efforts all became irrelevant and all that mattered was when the Straights looked at White Cis Gays they saw Us instead. So the White Cis Gays fixed that by making it clear they thought we were just as disgusting as the Straights thought we were. They abandoned us and took our history and our language and our fucking lives with them and said we weren’t ~allowed~ to have it. And because those of us who were marginalized in many ways or who were doubly or triply damned were more likely to have suffered massive losses during the AIDS crisis and to still be living in poverty, in crime, and in general destitution of social capital, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle not to be erased ever since.
So now you have a whole generation or two or three who grew up being told a sanitized history where a “drag queen” threw the first brick at Stonewall, Pride wasn’t started by one of the bisexual Queens of Kink, and non-monogamy hasn’t been the natural progression of so many of our communities for generations. And they tell us we never existed, we’re just secret straighties thinking our gross sex lives make us queer, we could just choose to be respectable and “normal” like everyone else and then we wouldn’t be “bullied” (because god forbid our actual oppression be recognized) and they completely miss the irony.
And as much as I hate that I have to list my credentials in order for there to be a chance in burning hell for this response to be considered legitimate, I am the nonbinary, bisexual, polyamorous, kinky, intersex child of a bisexual, kinky, polyamorous woman who spent all of my life and most of hers in the heart of Queer culture and politics to the point that she put me on the stand in front of the entire school board and a third of the state at age 10 to fight for our right to participate in the Day of Silence without fear of suspension, expulsion, abuse, or injury/death. I was on my mother’s hip at the state capitol protests with police in riot gear ready to do whatever it took to prevent us from entering the building. I am Queer in so many ways, including ones no one can dare fucking argue and so was my mother before me and my aunties before her, and this is THEIR history I am telling and will keep telling until I’m dead because I will rot before I let people erase their memories, blood, and joy from our history by claiming that kink and polyamory don’t belong.
I apologize for that all sounding angry and upset. It is not aimed at anyone in particular. I am just very very tired and it’s almost Passover which means that my auntie’s are a lot more on my brain than usual and I am just so exhausted by the way I have been mocked and belittled for months now over things that were simply Truth when I was growing up. Please understand how much history is denied and how many ancestors are dishonored by this rhetoric of “who REALLY belongs in the community?”
We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.
We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate.
We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better
itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of
seeing people pretend otherwise.
When I met my “First queer person ™” back in 1990, one of the things she said to me that I spent about 27 years unpacking was this:
“monogamous heterosexual relationships are patriarchal bullshit.”
I took offense at the time. But when you don’t let people use words like “queer” to describe “everyone who isn’t in this Normative Bubble of heterosexual serial monogamy”, you have to get pretty specific about the fact that STRAIGHT refers to this concept of being “normal” which in this culture has meant for many years “Straight, cis, monogamous (or doing your best to fake all of the above)”
Quit fucking gatekeeping.
The people who hate us hate all of us. Joining them in their hatred doesn’t solve the problem.
The way they win is if they get us to fight each other.
okay so i’m probably 7856454 years late to this realization but …i guess the reason straight people don’t really think our identities matter that much to us is because theirs don’t to them? like, i think about how not straight i am all the time but they don’t do that, do they? they don’t walk around thinking ‘i’m soooo straight’, right? so they don’t think it’s a big deal to other people maybe that’s it and maybe it’s not but i mean it’s something to think about for me
Me @ The No.6 Fandom: Pssst. Guys. I love No. 6 but it is like…30 years behind the first legit LGBT representation in an anime. Please don’t call it a trail blazer. It’s awesome but it took like 50 years of perfecting to get it to that point and it still has a lot of problems.
katcitica said: Can you explain more on this please? emoji-octopus said: What was the first one?
Oh yeah dudes! There’s a ton of LGBT anime out there for you! No. 6 is like so far from the first/only one.
Barazoku was the first magazine by and for gay men in Japan featuring illustrations, which was published in 1971. It’s not exactly a manga, but I’d call it the start of representation in publications outside of maybe some obscure porn I don’t know about.
In terms of anime, I’m not exactly sure what the first ever gay character in an anime was because there are just so many freaking anime out there. Discounting Yaoi, and Yuri, I can give you the first most prominent example of a gay couple in anime which would be in YuYu Hakusho.
This show was a shounen that aired in 1991. It featured a gay couple, Itsuki and Sensui, and a trans character Miyuki.
More popular would be Sailor Moon’s, Hotaru and Amara who featured prominently as supporting characters in the second season. This show also aired in 1991.
It also had the Kunzite and Zoisite, a gay couple, plus a few other canonically LGBT characters, and more who played around with gender roles and identity. (Fun fact, the author of Sailor Moon, Naoko Takeuchi, was married to the author of YuYu Hakusho, Yoshihiro Togashi.)
Tomoyo from Cardcaptor Sakura (1996) was canonically gay. But these are all supporting characters. You guys want main characters right?
Revolutionary Girl Utena! and it’s film follow up Adolescence of Utena featured a bisexual couple as the main protagonists and gender and gender roles were explored explicitly in the story itself. Utena I’d say may also qualify as gender fluid as the beginning of the show has her state plainly she wants to be a prince, and not a princess.
Wandering Son, (released 2011, the same year as No. 6) depicts Shuichi Nitori, and her quest to change her gender identity.
Shinsekai Yori, released in 2012, featured not one, but four cannon same sex couples, and had commentary on gender and sexuality.
Doukyuusei, a film that came out in 2013 features the story of two high school seniors falling in love while also dealing with questions and conflicts in their relationships and just some mello slice of life issues.
And most recently the manga Shimanami Tasogore which has an almost exclusively LGBT cast and was written to talk about homophobia and how LGBT youth try to come to terms with their identity as they grow up. (Out of all of these I’d say it’s the most competent depiction of LGBT folks in anime. Also the artwork is gorgeous.)
I’m sure there’s more out there, because like I said, I didn’t do a complete list because there’s just so much anime out there. Seriously though, if you look there’s a lot of representation that’s been there for years. Don’t think that No. 6 and Yuri on Ice are the only ones out there.
This seems pretty good, aside from one error: Sailor Moon’s Haruka (Amara/Sailor Uranus) wasn’t in a relationship with Hotaru (Sailor Saturn), but with Michiru (Michelle/Sailor Neptune)
When you’re not straight, dating is a lot like trying to get a job: either you try online or get a referral from a friend
omfg its true
Straight dating can be that way too, especially if you’re not outgoing
Okay but like you can literally walk to the grocery store and find your potential mate without fear of judgement or being harmed. I can’t just walk into a Home Depot and shout “anybody queer in here?” So yeah
ruby-dear archive 