#That includes: literally everyone (lesbian gay bi trans aromantic asexual nonbinary and anyone else i’m lazy sorry)

[simply-a-moth]

happy pride month! enjoy a weirdly crusty sylveon figurine thing!!!! (his name is charlie)

[nona-gay-simus-main]

Top 10 Worst LGBTQ+ Tropes

It’s pride month so I’m talking about my least favorite LGBTQ+ tropes in media.

Disclaimer 1: Once again: my post my opinion. If you feel differently, do you. But I will assume you’re probably an asshole.

Disclaimer 2: In this post, I use the word Queer Interchangeably with LGBTQ+. If you’re uncomfortable with that, feel free to move along. If you tag my post with ‘q slur’, I will block you.

1. Bi/ Pan Character That ‘Doesn’t Use Labels.’

Why is it that gay/lesbian/straight people often just get to say what they are, but when it comes to bi/pan characters it becomes some type of extreme wordplay. “Ex lesbian”, “lower on the Kinsey scale”, “oh, I just like people, not gender.” (Yes, those are all real examples.)

Of course, there are people who don’t use specific labels, and of course, you can include that in your writing, but there seems to be a big disparity between multi-gender attracted characters who don’t use labels and everyone else, who weirdly enough, usually gets a specific label. 

Just... say the word, pal. Bisexual. Pansexual. It’s not that hard. It’s not offensive. And I’ve never met any bi/pan person who thought that erasure was all the jazz.

2. Coming Out Stories

I’m not saying that’s there’s no value in coming stories, especially ones that are in tune with the changing times, and especially coming out stories of anyone who isn’t a cis WASPy gay man (or occasionally a cis WASPy lesbian), but also, can we please get... something else. 

Like, literally anything else. Queer romcoms, lesbian mafia, bisexual vampires, gay pirates, asexual/aromantic monster-fighters, trans superheroes, nonbinary thrillers. Anything where we are allowed to just exist past our coming out and the focus isn’t how hard it is to be LGBTQ+.

It just seems like for the longest time Coming Out stories (about cis white gay people) were pretty much the only media we can exist in, and while that’s slowly starting to change in recent years, we are nowhere close to where we could be.

3. Bury Your Gays

If you have twenty characters and ten of them are queer; and if straight characters also die, then sure. I’ll let you kill a couple gays. 

But if you only have one or two queers (that also happen to be a couple) and you kill them (or you kill one half of the couple), we’re gonna have a problem.

Especially if the queer character ends up sacrificing their life to save the Straights. Just represent us in media, where we don’t die or suffer, how hard is that?

4. “Blink and You’ll Miss it” Representation

Oh, so you’re a major franchise, or maybe you’re writing a popular long-running book series and you have FINALLY added a queer character to your gigantic cast?

That’s cool. I mean it sucks it took you this long, but we all have to make progress eventually. So are they a main character? How much does their sexual orientation or gender identity affect their experiences? Who’s their love interest?

Or did you just mean they only show up for one scene and have a single line that confirms their identity, and then they disappear into the nether? 

Yeah, fuck you. That’s not representation. That’s you jerking yourself off for brownie points. Well, I’m not giving them to you.

5. Lesbians With Men

Sure, outlier cases exist, but... why do we gotta keep making stories about them?

If this is your lived experience and you want to explore it in a fictional medium, absolutely, by all means. But most of the time this story is made not by queer women, but... pretty much anyone else and it’s just. Exhausting. 

There’s a reason it’s called a “lesbian.” And if she falls in love with a man, at the very least have the decency to make it clear that she’s exploring her sexuality, and it’s cut and dry case of “turning a lesbian.” Or better yet, don’t write it at all.

6. The Trans “Twist”

Can we stop fetishizing and discriminating against (binary) trans people in this way? Trans people are just people. There’s nothing scandalous about someone being trans, and nobody is trying to trick anyone into anything. 

Stop treating being trans as this huge, insurmountable thing. Especially if your story is set in the last ten years or in an SFF context, and just portray trans folks like normal people. Please.

7. The Token Queer

There’s this group of cis allo straight friends and the one gay guy, who is also usually white, cis, middle class, etc. You know - for diversity. 

Sure, maybe if they were childhood friends, or a superhero team or something (although there’s literally nothing stopping you from making at least one more person in the group queer), but I have never in my life wanted to do anything less than constantly hang out with a group of straight people. 

The vast majority of straight people don’t make me feel safe, and I rarely have more in common with them than I do with other queer people. Also, if one person in a friend group comes out, at least two more will - this has happened to pretty much all my queer friends.

It’s far more likely to see a group of queer friends with one adopted Straight, who is a good ally, then the other way around.

8. The Awkward AroAce

There’s nothing wrong with being aromantic asexual. There’s also nothing wrong with being autistic and struggling in social situations. There’s even nothing wrong with being both of those things at the same time. And some people are indeed like that.

But why does this seem to be the only way to write aroace characters? It’s such a stereotype. 

Being aroace just don’t experience romantic and sexual attraction, it doesn’t mean you can’t make friends, or that you don’t know how to behave socially. Aside from their (lack of) sexual and romantic attractions, aroace people are just people and they come in a variety of personalities.

9. Queer Villains

I actually love queer villains. 

In a lot of stories the villain is the most fun and interesting character them being queer is a way of reclaiming things that have been used to hurt us in the past (and still are, in some cases).

But it’s still pretty problematic when this is the only queer character in the work - whether explicitly or just in coding. 

You can have a queer villain, but make at least one of your heroes queer too.

10. The Non-Human Non-Binary

I think it makes sense that some aliens, robots and otherwise non-human entities are nonbinary. Why would a robot have a human gender? Why would an alien race have the same exact gender and sex divisions as humans do?

But can we also get nonbinary representation in humans? Please? Because I don’t think that an alien is doing much to help us be more accepted, and might, in fact, be even more alienating. (ha-ha, alienating. Get it?)

To end this, because of the time we live in:

A list of organizations dedicated to helping Black people you can support.

[soft-butch-cassidy]

Yo, I really hope this doesn't come over as rude (since it's just me trying to learn about the experiences of my fellow lgbt peeps) but I was wondering why lesbians have a flag separate from the rainbow homosexual flag, and why it's such a bug problem for it to not be included? I assume it has something to do with the sexualization of lesbians but I'm not sure, could you explain?

Anonymous said: whats that post saying like “why include an ace flag but not a lesbian flag”, like whats wrong with the ace flag? and theres a gay flag

I’m going to answer these together, because they are related asks. 

The lesbian flag started out as a flag especially for high femme lesbians– for lipstick lesbians. Eventually the lipstick kiss was dropped and the flag was adopted as the flag for lesbians as a whole. This is as far as I know– I could be wrong, but the research into LGBTQ histroy and symbolism is vague and poorly documented.

The lesbian flag is important to lesbians because we have a separate gay identity. We are still gay, but lesbianism is a culture in and of itself. No one else can use terms like “femme” and “butch” for example. We’ve always been about breaking the gender binary. Our history in LGBTQ history is important. We’re the L, after all. 

Of course we use the rainbow flag. It’s a bit of a blanket flag for people who experience attraction to people of the same gender, just like the term “gay.” Lesbians are gay. But lesbianism is a culture. The attraction of feminine aligned people to other feminine aligned people has always been unique. But outside of our own community, lesbians have been erased, dismissed, and punished.

Lesbian is a porn category designed with straight men in mind. The existence of a relationship between two women, where no men are involved, is sexualized for the consumption of men. Outside of porn, lesbians are thought to have more frivolous relationships; that they don’t last, that it’s not sexual at all, that it’s friends with benefits, etc. Even butch-femme is thought by many to be “mimicking” heterosexuality. It isn’t; it’s breaking the gender binary. A butch woman is a woman. She’s not a man. She’s butch. She’s not “copying” men or “performing masculinity” or whatever. It’s a unique aspect of gender in lesbian culture. 

(for the record, I’d describe myself as soft butch)

Everything about lesbians is constantly forgotten or dismissed. We’re murdered on TV, we’re used as fanservice, we’re ~palatable~ to a straight male audience (side-eyeing game devs on this one) to sell entertainment. We don’t get happy endings in movies or shows. We get killed. Bury Your Gays trope, anyone? We get told we’re not really gay, we’re actually bisexual, we need to be open minded, we need to not exclude men from people we would date. 

The exclusion of lesbians from pride, from tumblr’s gif to photosets and shit from users… how many of those “pride x for everyone!” posts do you see that have the red, the pink, the white? There’s always gay, bi, pan, trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, asexual, aromantic. We get left out, or lumped in with gay. We’re gay, yes, but we’ve got our own flag. 

As for aro/ace flags in the gif… I used to ID as asexual. Even today I’m not a terribly sexual person. But the ace community is a goddamn nightmare. It’s horrendously homophobic and bizarrely attracted to the desire to be oppressed. Cis, straight ace people are still straight. Cis straight aro people are still straight. Asexuality is a fairly newer term, coined in the last…. thirty years? I believe? Aromantism is even newer. Neither are terribly well-known outside of the internet or liberal areas. Which, sure, is pretty lame for aro and ace people, but…

I’m terrified of how society views me for being gay. When I ID’d as ace I was never scared that someone might literally murder me for it. There’s no ~~sin~~ in not experiencing attraction. I don’t hear the same awful, horrible things about asexuality that are said about being gay. I’ve never seen anyone say anything like “you’re going to hell” for being asexual. Children don’t get kicked out of their homes for being ace.

Ace people aren’t murdered at a nightclub for being asexual like gay people have been.

I like who I am. I am happy with who I love, with how I love. The lesbian community is, in my experience, lovely. TERFs aside, because they aren’t allowed in the lesbian community, of course. 

But we have been left out of everything. We’ve had to carve ourselves out, scream about our love from the side, and still, we’re ignored, forgotten, dismissed.

This is all my personal perspective on it. Take it with a grain of salt, but don’t dismiss my view.