#Excellent point about how everyone says learn your history until it's ours. Sighh

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

#the fact that he essentially called us privileged as if corrective rape isn’t one of the biggest issues we face

NO BUT REALLY. Also you made it plenty clear op I think, the sad thing is it only needs clarification to well. Anyone who isn't us and isn't used to seeing this nonsense happen (or perpetuates it themselves). We've almost all seen this before. What James Somerton said and did was egregious but it's nothing new. Him acting like cishet men are and were always so uncomfortable with our sexualities that as a result they...leave us alone and uh. Lol. LMAO even. If only.

And I know it's bad praxis or whatever supposedly, to blame people who were conned, but...idk. I'm not saying you need to go into the town square and self-flagellate while loudly proclaiming your wretchedness or the internet equivalent, but. Part of me feels like people who saw this and the worst of his misinformation (like the Pink Swastika conspiracy theory iykyk and I'm so sorry) and STILL took him seriously and sent him money should maybe feel a LITTLE bad?? (And then critically try to do better cause guilt by itself is just useless wallowing.) Like, if you really heard him say all this misogynistic lesbophobic and biphobic shit and still uncritically stanned him and sent him money, maybe a *tiny* bit of responsibility taking is in order? Even just moment, thinking to yourself like "ouch. Fuck, I shouldn't have listened to him without doing some fact checking? Maybe I shouldn't have let those things slide when he said it"?? Would that really be too much to ask?

Everyone hyperfocuses on this one dude and on the way he did his best to bury the evidence because it's more comfortable to ignore the looming elephant in the room...that he didn't happen in a vacuum. We can go on about how he bullied and lied about his few critics to silence them. And that's true, he did. But also...cmon, let's be serious.

The lesbophobia, biphobia, misogyny ntm transphobia and racism being basically okay as long as you use enough buzzwords...or just happen to seem Educated and Serious (being white ntm a man, a cis man, is not a requirement 100% of the time but it sure does help, and often seems to be the unspoken code for what that means to people) needs to stop. And so does the way people just never fact check things, ever, if someone says something they want to believe. (And I'm not saying I'm immune to that last particular issue, I'm not. I've been trying my best to be religious about it but I wasn't always.) If all that results from this whole Expose is...a bunch of ppl dunk on the visible, easy target then nothing is ever gonna change. There's gonna be more small-scale James Somertons if there aren't already (there are. I just know there already are).

I love all the dunking on James Somerton but I don’t think we’ve focused enough on all his lesbophobic rhetoric because the things he says are genuinely so astoundingly ahistorical and insensitive and it infuriates me that he was allowed to get away with it so long.

He literally said lesbians didn’t face police violence on the same scale as gay men when that’s just demonstrably untrue. Lesbians, ESPECIALLY butch, GNC, and trans lesbians, faced MASSIVE amounts of police violence AND STILL DO and if he gave a single shit about like. Women as people. Or even just LGBT history in general as he so proclaims to care about, he would know that. I’m going to start beating people to death with copies of Stone Butch Blues until they fucking listen

And I’d really love to know which fucking planet he lives on where lesbians apparently have all this great representation, and where we as lesbians are allowed to write our own stories, because I’m really not seeing that pretty much anywhere in mainstream media. I’m still seeing lesbians portrayed in stereotypical or fetishistic ways, and that’s when I see us portrayed at all. And yes cartoons are great and fine but there is so painfully little lesbian representation written by lesbians geared primarily towards adults.

But at this point, the wider community’s general lack of a reaction to lesbophobia in their ranks disappoints but doesn’t surprise me. It’s sad and somewhat astonishing that he’s escaped accountability for his lesbophobic comments up to this point, but again, not surprising. We need to stop letting our community, especially people like James Somerton who get held up as voices for the community, get away with lesbophobia.