#and the assimilation mostly applies to cis gay people

[mintharan]

the way that post abt so much heteronormative content for astarion where op never mentioned his sexuality in any way immediately got hijacked into "well actually the authors of all those tradwife fantasies clogging the tags that you mean evil homos complain about are bisexual so they're being radical about it! let people have fun why are you complaining abt how people play a game!" like. being a gay video game fan is hell actually

I mean...yeah, that's the feeling I get. Gay people aren't allowed to voice discomfort (and I will add the caveat that op of that post is bi, and several people who agreed with the post are bi as well) with heteronormative content in fandom (or anywhere, let's be real) without being accused of biphobia. Heteronormativity is not good, it's the social expectation that people be cis and heterosexual with the set behaviours that come with it. I think it's kind of tone-deaf to say that upholding the nuclear family ideal is fine actually if a bi person is into it. It's worth questioning why these depictions are so popular, and tbh if these women are bi that's even more concerning, do they see their attraction to women as a fetish? Something to pursue only for sexual gratification because they fully expect to marry and have children with men? Do they think this is more desirable/convenient? If so, why? What are the social implications of this line of thinking how does social expectations of cisheteronormativity play into it? Aren't gay people allowed to have thoughts on the matter?

I think at the end of the day, some people really want to believe that being cis in a m/f relationship is socially radical, actually. And they'll lose their minds if you point out this is the ideal couple form according to all the world's major religions and far-right parties.

[adorpheus]

on fujoshi and fetishization

Lately, more and more, both here on tumblr and on other sites, I keep seeing people spew unfiltered hatred at fujoshi - that is, women who like mlm content such as gay fanfic and fanart featuring men with other men. And I don’t mean like a specific type of fujoshi, like the ones who are genuinely being weird about it, but just like a general hatred for girls (but especially straight identifying girls) who express love for gay romance.

I hate to break this to you all, but women (including straight women!) actually are allowed to like mlm fanfiction and fanart, even enthusiastically so. A woman simply expressing her love of gay fanfic, even if it is in kind of a cringey way or a way that you personally don’t like, is NOT automatically fetishization.

I’ve been on the receiving end of fetishization for my entire life, from a very young age, as many black and brown folx have, so I consider myself pretty well acquainted with how it works. Fetishization isn’t just like, being really into drawings of boys kissing, or whatever the fuck y’all are trying to imply on this god forsaken site. 

Fetishization is complicated imo, and can encompass a lot of things, such as (but not limited to):

1 - dehumanization, e.g. viewing a group of people as sexual objects who exist purely for entertainment purposes, rather than acknowledging them as actual people who deserve respect and rights

and

2 - projecting certain assumptions onto said people based on their race/sexuality/whatever is being fetishized. These assumptions are often, but not always, sexual in nature (like the idea that black people in general are more sexual than other races, etc etc etc).

I’m going to use myself as an example to illustrate my point. Please note this isn’t the best or most nuanced example, but it is the most simplistic. A white person finding me attractive and respectfully appreciating my black features as part of what makes me beautiful is not, on its own, fetishization. A white person finding me attractive solely or mostly because I’m a PoC is now in fetishization territory. Similarly, assuming I’m dominant because of my blackness (like saying “step on me mommy” and shit like that) is hella fetishistic. 

That being said, theres definitely a difference between how fetishization works in real life with real people, and how it shows up in fandom. 

Fetishization manifests in many different ways in fandom, but most commonly on the mlm side of things, I personally see it appear as conservative (or centrist) women who love the idea of two men together, but don’t actually like gay people, and don’t necessarily think LGBT+ people deserve rights (or ��special treatment” as its sometimes dog whistled). These women view queer men as sexual objects for entertainment rather than an actual group of people who deserve to be protected from systemic oppression. I’ve noticed that they often don’t even think of the men they “ship” together as actually being gay, and may even express disgust at the idea of a character in an mlm ship being headcanon’d gay. In case its not obvious, this is pretty much exactly the same way a lot of cishet men fetishize lesbians (they see “lesbian” as a porn category, rather than like, what actual LGBT people think of when we read the word lesbian). There’s a pretty popular viral tweet thread going around where someone explains seeing this trend of conservative women who like mlm stuff, and I have also personally witnessed this phenomenon myself in more than one fandom. 

The funny thing is, maybe its just me buuuut.... The place I see this particular kind of fetishization happen most is not in the anime/BL fandom, from which the term fujoshi originates - I actually see these type of women way way more in western fandom spaces like Supernatural, Harry Potter, and Hannibal. I can’t stress this enough, there’s a shocking amount of people who are like, straight up trump supporters in these fandoms. If you want to experience it, try joining a Hannigram or Destiel group on facebook and you will probably encounter one eventually especially if you happen to be living through a major historical event. Like these women probably wouldn’t even be considered “fujoshi”, because that term doesn’t really apply to them given they aren’t in the BL/anime fandom, yet they’re the ones I personally see actually doing the most harm.

Of course this isn’t the ONLY kind of fetishizing woman in the mlm/BL world, there are other ways fetishization shows up, but this is the most toxic kind that I see.

A girl just being really into BL or whatever may be “cringe” to you, or she may be expressing her love for BL in a “cringey” way, but a straight woman really enjoying BL is not, on its own, somehow inherently fetishization. Yes, sometimes teenage girls act kind of cringe about how much they like BL and that might be annoying to you, but its not necessarily ~problematic~. 

That being said, IT NEEDS BE REMARKED that a lot of the “fujoshi” that you all hate so deeply, are actually closeted trans men or nonbinary people who haven’t yet come to terms with their gender identity, or are otherwise just NOT cishet. I know because I was one of these closeted people for years, and I honestly think tumblr and the cultural obsession around purity is one of the many reasons I was closeted so deeply for so long. STORYTIME LOL!!! In my early adolescence, I was a sort of proto “fujoshi”. I identified as a bi girl who was mostly attracted to men, or as most (biphobic) people called it, “practically straight”. I wrote and read “slash” fanfic and looked at as well as drew my own fanart. We didn’t use the term fujoshi back then, but that’s definitely how I could have been described. I was obsessed with yaoi, BL, whatever you want to call it, to a cringe-inducing degree. I really struggled to relate to most het romances, so when I first discovered yaoi fanfics (as we called them at the time), I fell in love and felt like I finally found the type of romance content that was made for me. I didn’t know exactly why, I just knew it hit different. LGBT+ fanart and fanfiction brought me an immense amount of joy, and I didn’t really think too hard about why.

At some point, in my early 20s, after reading lots of discourse™ here on tumblr and other places like twitter, I started to get the sinking feeling that my passion for gay fanfiction was ~problematic~. I had always felt a sense of guilt for being into mlm content, because literally anyone who found out I liked BL (especially the men I dated) shamed me for liking it all the fucking time (which btw is literally just homophobic, like can we talk about that?). In addition to THAT bullshit, now I’m seeing posts telling me that girls who like BL are cringey gross fetishists who inspire rage and should go die? 

Let me tell you, I internalized the fuck out of messages like this. I desperately wanted to avoid being ~problematic~. At the time, I thought being problematic was like the worst thing you could be. I was terrified of being “cancelled”, before canceling was even really a thing. I thought to myself, “oh my god, I’m gross for liking this stuff? I should stop.” I beat myself up over this. I wanted so badly to be accepted, and to be deemed a Good Person by the internet and society at large.

I tried to shape up and become a good ally (lmfao). I stopped writing fanfic and deleted all the ones I was working on at the time. I made a concerted effort to assimilate into cishet culture, including trying to indulge myself more deeply in the few fandoms I could find that had het content I did enjoy (Buffy, True Blood, Pretty Little Liars, etc). I would occasionally look at BL/fanfic/etc in private, but then I would repress my interest in it and not look for a while. Instead I would look at women in straight relationships, and create extremely heterosexual Couple Goals pinterest boards, and try to figure out how I could become more like these women, so I, too, could be loved someday. 

This cycle of repression lasted like eight years. Throughout it all, I was performing womanhood to the best of my ability and trying to become a woman that was worthy of being in a relationship. I went in and out of several “straight” relationships, wondering why they didn’t make me feel the way reading fanfic did. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out why straight intimacy didn’t work for me. I just didn’t enjoy it. I always preferred looking at or making gay fanfiction/fanart over actual intimacy with men in real life. 

Eventually, I stumbled upon a trans coming out video that someone I was following posted online, my egg started to crack, and to make an extremely long story short, after like 3 years of introspection and many gender panic attacks that I still experience to this day, I realized that I’m uh... MAYBE... NOT CIS..!? :|

I truly believe if I had just been ALLOWED TO LIKE GAY STUFF WITHOUT BEING SHAMED FOR IT, I probably would have realized I was trans way way sooner. Because for me, indulging in my love of gay romance and writing gay fanfic wasn’t me being a weirdo fetishist, it was actually me exploring my own gender identity. It is what helped me come to terms with being a nonbinary trans boy.

Not everyone realizes they are trans at age 2 or whatever the fuck. Sometimes you have to go through a cringey fujoshi phase and multiple existential crises to realize how fucking gay you are AND THATS FINE.

And one more thing - can we just be real here? 

A lot of anti-fujoshi sentiment is literally just misogyny. omg please realize this. Its “women aren’t allowed to enjoy things” but, like... with gay fanfics. Some of the anti-fujoshi posts I see come across my dash are clearly ppl projecting a caricature they invented in their head of a demonic fujoshi fetishist onto any woman who expresses what they consider to be a little too much enthusiasm for gay content and then using their perception of that individual as an excuse to justify their disdain for any women, especially straight women, ‘invading’ their ~oh so exclusive~ queer fandom spaces.

 god get over yrselfs this is gatekeeping by another name

idk why i spent so long writing this no one is even going to read it, does anyone even still use this site

*EDIT: HOLY SHIT WHEN DOING RESEARCH FOR THIS POST I FOUND OUT THAT Y-GALLERY IS BACK OMG!!! 

[nikkiscarlet]

As an attempt to answer the question of those tags, at least from my lived experience:

‘Queer’ was (and is) separate pretty much because there’s a good subset of people for whom their identity was/is complex, and it’s easier to just say “I’m queer” as shorthand for “lol idk I’m just definitely not straight/cis,” or “listen I could go into specifics but we’d need three hours, several diagrams I have in a folder at home, and a lot of coffee.”

It was/is also often used as a catch-all for people who didn’t/don’t fall into the typical first four letters of the rainbow alphabet. Maybe they’re ace/aro, or a subset thereof. Maybe they’re nonbinary and don’t quite feel the T fully applies in their case. Maybe their identity falls outside of definitions covered by the English language/the Western colonialist lens. Maybe they *are* fully and completely lesbian, gay, bi, or trans, and nothing else, but just also like reclaiming ‘queer’ for themselves and hanging out under the term’s umbrella with other people who can relate, even in slightly different ways, to their experiences. They can all find camaraderie within the queer community.

“Queer means strange, weird, odd!” a lot of people point out. And … yes! That was/is our way of acknowledging that we don’t quite fit into the mainstream (many of us didn’t/don’t even fit into the LGBTQ+ mainstream!) and we’re looking for others who’re like us! We are odd! We’re not the norm! And that’s not a bad thing! We’re just different, and that’s a lovely thing. We’re choosing to take delight in the infinite variety of experiences that being human can offer. To see something that doesn’t fit the standard mold and go, “Oh, hey, I don’t fit the standard mold either. While we also might not fit each other’s molds exactly, we still have a lot in common. Let’s be friends.”

Long before I had any concept of my queerness, I was a Weird Little Girl. It was mostly neurodivergence and trauma behaviours coupled with a rich imagination, but I was weird. I ended up embracing that and going goth in high school (or at least, as goth as a lower-class kid with social anxiety could go). By that point in my life I’d said to myself, “Yes, I am strange. I’m not like the majority of other kids and they’ve made that very clear. And you know what? I still like myself. I even like the weird parts of me. Maybe not all of them, not yet, and/or not all the time, but a lot of them I wouldn’t trade for the world.” And putting on whatever parts of the Goth Uniform I could scrounge up was my way of signalling to the other weird kids (or to perfectly average kids who were just friendly and curious, which itself can be an unusual trait in some places) that I was like them, that I wanted their company. It was my way of signalling to the Oh So Very Normal kids that I was okay with them not wanting my company and they were free to stay well away from me as they liked.

There was never any hope for me of being Normal, even before I started figuring out that I wasn’t straight. By the time I’d started sorting out my identity, queer was just another label to throw on alongside goth, nerd, fangirl, weeb, and so on. All of those other labels were slurs, too, in their way, back then. Maybe not major ones, but still slurs. And they were also all ways of signalling to other people like me that I was a safe person to talk to, and that I would share in their passions with them, or at the very least understand and support them. “Yes, I get bullied for being this way as well. Let’s go hang out over here where it’s quiet and safe, and I’ll check out the story you’re writing. It sounds like a story I’d enjoy!”

Nobody in the world is 100% normal. There are many who very desperately wish to insist that they are Normal, often due to trauma associated with stepping outside the bounds of the majority culture. And that’s fine, everyone finds the ways of being that work for them. For some, assimilation with the majority culture works for them and they find success and security that way. For others, like me, it was safest and most satisfying to stop trying to assimilate (because I kept failing) and instead find joy in being different. A lot of people who embrace Queer as their label (or one of their labels) are people who embrace being different. Being odd, weird, strange. It’s a joyful, colourful thing, and it’s a big enough umbrella that a big variety of People Who Are Different can stand under it. And we become our own culture, or group of cultures. And we survive together, and thrive together. We don’t mind not being Normal, as long as we’re permitted to exist as we are without being mistreated or disadvantaged for it. We keep fighting for our right to be treated with dignity despite not being part of the majority culture, rather than for the right to be assimilated into that culture. We only ask that the majority culture learn to have the same joyful curiosity about difference that we have. And that’s going to continue to be slow work, but it’s worth doing.

Splitting this off from the post it was on to say... no. Actually. It isn't.

This whole "queer is the worst word" is very recent - like decades more recent than the rise of the idea of a queer community - and before that point, queer was ... like... just... another word for us. It wasn't any worse than gay or lesbian, which is how you get a show called Queer Eye and another one called Queer As Folk and so on.

Queer as a community predates this whole "queer is a slur (and by this we mean the Worst Word, totally unreclaimable, and different somehow from all of the other slurs for us)" garbage by like... 3 decades? And the formation of that community has nothing to do with the reactionary nonsense about the word queer, ginned up by TERFs and other intracommunity bigots, which happened decades after its formation.

The fact that we've had to say, over and over, that being queer is opt-in, and no one's going to try to include you in the radical activist community against your will, and if you don't want to be queer, you're not, to the point that people now seem to think that deference to their bizarre insistence that this one word (which is an identity word as important as trans or lesbian or gay) is so much worse than all the other bad words for us (like... gay... which was The Worst Word 20 years ago)...

G-d, that's exhausting.

And yes, I'm aware that's the most ADHD sentence on the planet and that my parentheticals are out of control, and yes I actually talk like that. I wrote many words today and it's 6 am., sue me.

No, I am not deferring to the (frankly kind of bizarre at this point) hyper-vigilance about the word queer when I refer to the community which arose out of AIDS activism. I am referring to it by its historical name.

Nobody should be called things they don't like, but for fuck's sake, is there ever a point when we can get past this whole "lesbian not queer/queer is a slur" thing like I didn't meet my first homophobic violence being called a lesbo? Like, this whole thing keeps getting played very deliberately as a manipulation tactic and people keep falling for it and it's SO exhausting. I feel like I've literally written this exact post at least half a dozen times over the last few years.

[lightheartedrascal]

What’s going on with queer visibility and will we ever break out of the gay tropes in TV and movies?

In writing, film, media and advertisements the depiction of queer characters is often easier to write, or perhaps easier for the audience to accept, if they fall into a familiar stereotype, or better yet a well-known trope.  Queer character have been written this way for as long has there has been writing, film and more recently advertisements.  But why do character have to fit into these neat little pre-packaged storylines, why can’t they just be people living their lives in three dimensions like everyone else?  Part of it may have to do with the Hays Code that began in the 1930’s, when, for moral reason, depictions of queer characters was not permitted.  This, of course, did not keep the film and television industry without queer characters, rather they began working out a series of stock characters that could be identify, many of which lead to our modern day queer tropes.  “Characterization, narrative and sexuality tropes commonly applied to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual or queer characters. While in the real world, LGBTQ+ persons are just as varied in personality and traits as straight/cisgender ones, it has suited television writers to use common stereotypes for their gay characters in lieu of actually making them ‘real people’ ” ("Queer as Tropes - TV Tropes," n.d.).  These conventions make it easy for a writer to convey background with less actual story, tropes are similar to stereotypes but with more backstory, they give context, where stereotypes just give us a single aspect of a character.  With tropes we can guess what the character might do, say or feel just because we know what trope they are portraying.  And how does this relate to queer visibility?  Does it enhance queer visibility, or diminish it by reducing it to a set of pre-made rules and character traits.

An argument could be made that many cis/straight characters are also based on tropes, so why is it a big deal that most queer characters are trope-based?  I think the biggest reason is that they’re not good tropes.  Cis/straight characters get the positive tropes, both the good guys and the bad guys.  Some examples I found include: The Damsel in Distress, The Cool Old Guy, The Chick Who Can Hang with The Boys, The Mama Bear, The Casanova, The Evil Step-parent, The Overprotective Dad, The Hot Scientist, The Corrupt Hick, The Mommas Boy and many more ("Stereotropes," n.d.).  But the queer community is relegated to: Gay Pedophiles, The Why are All the Good Men Gay, The Bait-and-Switch Lesbians, The Club Kid, The Drag Queen, The Magical Queer, Nobody Over 50 Is Gay, The Sissy Villain, The Transparent Closet and many more ("Queer as Tropes - TV Tropes," n.d.).  The tropes do nothing to enhance queer visibility, rather they keep the queer community on the outside as an other.

One recent gay show, that had a great opportunity to break from these norms, but didn’t, was the HBO Original series Looking.  The show centers around a group of mostly gay, white men, living in San Francisco (nothing new here).  The characters are overall flat, and follow more mild versions of familiar gay male tropes.  There’s the unsure-of-himself main character, boyish and mostly sweet, Patrick.  There’s an unsure artist, who’s a little dirty and experiments sexually, Agustine.  There’s the handsome Peter Pan-type who just won’t admit he’s getting older and tries to keep seducing ever younger boys to bed with him, Dom.  And the sister of Dom, Doris, who is the ultimate fag-hag, not living her life while she waits for her brother to get his together. The rest of the cast also reads like watered-down tropes with a kindhearted older man trying to help Dom ease into middle age.  Patrick get’s mixed up with his boss, and Agustine’s sexual drive drives his partner away.  There are plenty of club scenes and parties, not to mention fabulous living spaces, even though most of the characters complain about money and of course there are drugs; maybe one of the only positives is the show does discuss the use of PrEP in the gay community but that ends up being dropped as a plot line.  

Perhaps after the “shocking” shows like Queer As Folk, The “L” Word and others of the late 90’s and early 2000’s writers just don’t know what to do with gay characters, or if there isn’t sufficient view potential.  And to be clear, I’m not saying that those shows of the 90′s-00′s were ground breaking in terms of queer visibility from a character development point of view, but they were important from an in-your-face look-at-us kind of way, that drove more queer visibility.  

I found an article that echoed my suspicion of the flattened characters in Looking, “In a certain sense, Looking is what happens when you try to expand this argument [of gay lifestyle] —the core of the ‘post-gay,’ nothing-unique-going-on-here ethos—into 30-minute chunks of television” (Lowder, 2014).  So what’s next for queer character?  There has been some traction in getting trans characters into television, in shows like Transparent and Laverne Cox’s character on Orange is the New Black, though her role is minor.  Bisexual characters, however, are basically nonexistent, “It's been noted...that in contrast to gay characters and their stereotypes, bisexual characters are virtually unknown on TV” ("Queer as Tropes - TV Tropes," n.d.).  So, I guess my question remains, what does the future of queers in mass media look like and how does this effect queer visibility? Because people feel that mainstream “gay” has been accepted, do they not see the need for other members of the queer community to also get visibility, and the work isn’t done with gay characters - the media is still saturated with white, upper-middle class, people with limited struggles.  I think the future of queer visibility needs to be included of the entire queer/LGBTQQ+ community and all backgrounds.

————— Lowder, J. B. (2014, January 21). Looking: HBO’s gay show is boring and bad for gays, straights. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/01/21/looking_hbo_s_gay_show_is_boring_and_bad_for_gays_straights.html

Queer as Tropes - TV Tropes. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/main/queerastropes

Stereotropes. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://stereotropes.bocoup.com

Waldron, L. (2014, January 7). Seeking Queer Visibility, Rejecting Assimilation | The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucas-waldron/seeking-queer-visibility-_b_4525703.html