#but what upsets me the most is a possible disabled queer getting interested FROM this article & going to watch it

[paris-geller-was-straightwashed]

'hazbin hotel is such a great queer show!' haha right except it's sister show set in the same universe & made by the same person, has the main character blatantly call someone a r*tard as a way to insult them soooooooooooooo......hard pass

[bookshelfdreams]

Im sorry about this i need to rant. I thought things were getting better but Izzy stan Twitter is at it again with their whining, truth bending and self-victimising.

'Do you like OMFD but wish the queer disabled hero didnt die?' IZZY IS NOT THE HERO OF THIS SHOW!!!!! He is at best a reformed antagonist. What an insult to the other disabled characters, and what about the actual heroes of the show??

'We've been betrayed by straight man writing queer stories'. First of all, way to dismiss the other writers. Also, its not his fault you project your personal traumas and mental health on a fictional character on a show with death in the title.

'GB's ending is comphet (?????) because 'we only need eachother' and theyre breaking away from their queer community' ED HAS BEEN WANTING TO LEAVE PIRACY SINCE LAST SEASON!!! also, its progress that Stede was able to resist basic flattery. And David made it clear that they still have work to do. This one truly broke my brain.

Im just sick of all this. Izzy stans have been coddled for the past week, being told its ok to grieve, but theyve crossed multiple lines. I do wish some things had been more explicit in this finale, only because David overestimated the maturity and media literacy of some people.

Sorry for this but i needed to talk to people here. Its beyond annoyance at this point. Im angry and sick of petty crybabies actively working to poison what we've built.

Don't apologize, feel free to rant at me any time!

"The Blackbonnet ending is comphet" surely is A Take, let me add that to the It's Only Queer If It's Subtext Collection, also featuring such gems as

The Lupete marriage proposal/wedding was basically straight

Canon queer ships are boring and unimportant

Izzy has the only queer arc

Izzy is the only "convincingly" queer character

It's super interesting to see this develop. The massive victim/persecution complex of a certain subset of Izzy fans. The vitriol leveled against all other fans, and the show itself, because clearly, these people never liked ofmd in the first place. Never liked what it actually had to say and instead, invented subtext that was never there to look into instead. It's like watching the birth of a conspiracy theory under controlled conditions in a petry dish. You will see these people say with their whole chest the most unhinged bullshit imaginable and receive praise for it, but when you keep in mind that for months, they have discussed the show Izzy in their insular little echo chambers, most of their takes become a lot more understandable. There's robust internal logic, even though, due to the flawed premise, none of it makes any sense.

But it becomes understandable when we loop back around to the point that a lot of these people don't engage with the show on its own merit. They really treat it as if it were just another queerbaity (maybe not even that) mid-2010s thing, too afraid to do something different.

ofmd is not that! But when all you have is a hammer. And when you're surrounded by people who keep insisting that yes, obviously that problem is a nail. That one too. Nails are all that exist. yk.

But. And please know that I am holding your hands and speak as gently as I can when I say this.

But please don't get angry about this? If this whole drama genuinely upsets you, you might need to take a step back and remind yourself that it's just fandom. It's just some idiots somewhere enjoying the pirate show wrong. It's not that important. There's plenty of things that are worth your anger in the world right now. Everything is fucked. But this isn't one of them.

Like, for me, this is fun. I am a petty bitch, I love to gawk at bad takes, I love conspiracy theories, reading things like this tickles my brain in the best possible way. It's like reading through the Psiram wiki (which is also something I do for fun. Yes, I am aware there's something wrong with me). It's even better, because it's inconsequential. It doesn't have very real human misery attached to it.

Like, obviously i think it's fine to be opinionated about dumb bullshit on the internet, and while picking fights with people who don't agree with me isn't something I enjoy personally, some people do and there's nothing wrong with that either. As long as everyone involved is having fun.

But. You gotta keep your distance, you know? Don't get personally mad at people with bad opinions. Having wrong opinions about the pirate show isn't actually harmful. Fandom isn't activism.

[niaking]

Bebop Thoughtz, part four

If you don't want spoilers for the live-action Cowbop Bebop series, I recommend sticking to part one.

This is a going to be a deep dive into episode three (Dog Star Swing in the live-action, which maps loosely onto Stray Dog Strut in the anime). This is possibly the zaniest of all the live-action episodes: It's got BSDM, a gratuitous massacre, dognapping and... whiteface?

The anime version and the live-action version only really have two things in common: 1.) the introduction of Ein to the Bebop crew and 2.) the villain, Abdul Hakim. In the anime, he's just a dog thief, but the live-action version he is also a serial killer. Odd choice, imho.

What I really want to talk about in this episode is the portrayal of sex workers and brothels, the unnecessary violence against disabled people, and some of the amazing work by character actors.

Spike and Jet are looking for Hakim, a Black man who has disguised himself as a white man through face-changing technology, at the two "low-rent brothels" on the planet Tharsis: Betty's Boop and Betty's Bottom. Betty's Bottom, where they eventually find Hakim, seems like a cross between a strip club, a queer club, and a kink club. I think it's trying to seem seedy, but it's giving pretty PG-13 vibes as far as portrayals of sex work spaces go.

After a chase through the brothel/club, Spike catches up to Hakim on the rooftop, where they engage in hand-to-hand combat using only found weapons. This fight scene was my favorite part of the episode. It's also where white Hakim changes back into Black Hakim. (In the anime Hakim is a white man who "becomes Black" through "plastic surgery." I think the live-action version made an improvement here.)

Later, after Hakim gets away, Spike and Jet try to get back into the club to find out if he's a regular of any of the sex workers there. They get their answer from Greta the Domme, a portrayal of sex workers I found truly bizarre. She seems to always be trying to upsell her customers on services they have no interest in. I've met a number of pro dommes in my life and she reminded me of none of them. (This actress, Natascha Diaz, is from Colombia, and I think is doing a great job despite the ridiculousness of the lines she was given.)

Having gotten into the sex (work), let's get into the violence. This episode contains, in my opinion, the most upsetting scene in the whole series. Vicious (remember him, our Big Bad?) has to shut down his drug manufacturing operation, by order of the Elders, and decides to do it by killing off all of his workers in the drug lab.

When we arrive at the lab, we see all of these workers are naked and have had their eyes sewn shut. Vicious and his sidekicks Lin and Shin then shoot all of them in a truly disturbing scene that is completely unnecessary to the overall plot.

Is the scene meant to establish that Vicious is a bad guy? Has the show not already done that by showing him as a domestic abuser? I truly could have done without this gratuitous violence against defenseless, blind workers. I honestly recommend just skipping 20:50 to 21:50 of this episode.

Lastly, I want to shout out a few of the memorable character actors whose appearances really make this episode. The first is Maaka Pohatu, who playes Benicio, "the black-market Santa." I could not take my eyes off him while he was on screen, in part because his face is covered in tattoos. The actor is a Māori musician from Aotearoa with zero face tattoos in real life. Shout out to hair and make-up, his look must have taken them hours.

Another memorable appearance is by Bronwyn Bradley, who plays Betty, proprietor of Betty's Bottom. I'm not sure if she's supposed to be a sex worker, a bouncer, or just a madam, but her 15-second appearance on screen is unforgettable, from her fire engine-red hair to her threat to "stab the beef off of" Spike and Jet.

(It turns out the actress that plays Betty is also from Aotearoa and graduated from the same theater school as Maaka Pohatu.)

I feel like the angry madam is sort of a trope or stock character. Heavier women are usually cast to play them and they are usually portrayed as powerful, and often a little sassy. I'm pretty much always here for it.

I want to give an honorable mention to Carmel McGlone, (also from Aotearoa,) the actress that plays Woodcock, one of Jet's informants. She is a ridiculous character with only ridiculous lines. She flirts with Jet in ways that are aggressive and uncomfortably racialized. Real cringe stuff.

Though I didn't love her character, I thought the actress did great work as one of the horny old women of Cowboy Bebop. (Faye's mom is the other notable example.) I've heard that it's hard for older women to get cast in Hollywood, but Cowboy Bebop has three that give really memorable performances, the third being Maria Murdock in episode four.

[bubbebruja]

On the Death of Sirius Black and Literary Gay Bashing in Harry Potter

In 2003, I was ten, straight, and positively obsessed with Hermione Granger.

If those last two things sound a little contradictory, it’s because they were. I do not mean I was “obsessed” in the sense that I wanted to dress up like her for Halloween, I mean “obsessed” in the sense that I literally blushed anytime my mom read her name aloud to my sister and I.

Queer. I was queer. I just didn’t know it yet.

Thus, I didn’t notice the Sirius/Remus romantic subtext as a child, drinking hot chocolate propped against my sister’s knees and listening enraptured as my mom read to us from the most recently released Harry Potter book. When Order of the Phoenix came out, I was far more interested in Angsty Harry™ and the evils of Delores Umbridge, and when Sirius died, I was not even all that upset. I didn’t really like him all that much, knew even at that age that he embodied too many of the stereotypically “masculine” traits I had already grown to hate with his pride and brooding and emotional immaturity. I didn’t much care, much less recognize that JK Rowling had done something rather unforgiveable.

But others did.

Seventeen years later, I get it.

By 2003, many older, wiser readers had long since clocked the queer subtext between Sirius and Remus. And, when I picked up the books earlier this year to re-read them for the first time since they were read to me as a child, I saw it too. (Notably, this was prior to JKR’s most recent round of blazing transphobia, after which I stopped reading.) And, okay, yes, I am the type of queer who reads queerness into many things. But y’all, I really didn’t have to try all that hard this time. If I were reading these books for the first time in the context of 2020, I would assume Remus and Sirius were canonically a couple, and JKR just wasn’t bashing us over the head with clear evidence of it. She doesn’t do that most of the time anyway. By Order of the Phoenix, in my opinion, the evidence (as movie Dumbledore says so awkwardly) is incontrovertible. The living together? The joint Christmas present? The “Sirius, sit down” scene early in the book? The confirmed HIV/AIDS metaphor, IN THE 90S?? THEY’RE FUCKING GAY TOGETHER.

And here’s the thing, (and I have no proof of this, so you’re just going to have to roll with it): I think it’s pretty clear that JKR became more conservative as time progressed. Money tends to do that to people, conveniently. What started as a series about the power young people hold to defeat evil and fight injustice eventually devolved into a flaccid epilogue where heterosexual nuclear families abounded and there were (still) no visibly queer characters in sight.

By the time the final book came out, I was a full-fledged teenager, and I, too, had abandoned fantasies of fighting evil and injustice for fantasies of settling down with “my perfect man” (L. O. L.) So, I get it. I get that priorities change for young people. But for adults, especially those recently drunk on the power of infinite amounts of money and fame? Nah. JKR knew what she was doing. JKR laid all the groundwork for a possible relationship between Remus and Sirius and then changed her mind. Or was told to change her mind. Or was forced to change her mind.

I have A Lot Of Feelings™ about Tonks and Remus’s relationship (most of which are about the way their canonical relationship plays into a lot of really awful tropes about disabled people which, no matter how you read him, Remus is). And I have a lot of feelings about Sirius Black as a character. I have a lot of feelings about Dumbledore, some related to his posthumous outing and some not. And, like most of us now, I have a lot of feelings about the entire franchise as a whole. But here’s what I know: It doesn’t actually matter, because JKR didn’t just change the explicit relationship dynamics between Sirius and Remus, she quite literally killed any chances of queer romance.

And she didn’t just kill Sirius. She killed Remus, too. And Tonks (who is a genderqueer butch and I will die on that hill). And Dumbledore. And the cute, squeaky house elf with a love for clothes and an obsession with Harry. And the young Gryffindor boy who followed Harry around, constantly asking for photos and autographs. And – you know what? Fuck it. – the person who lived INSIDE ANOTHER MAN’S BODY before returning to his bodily form, during which time he relied heavily on his male servant who cut off a literal body part to restore his master.

Am I reading too much queer subtext into each of these characters? Maybe. But, as this lovely article states, “close reading is queer culture, always has been.” And I can’t help but notice that the vast majority of the characters JKR didn’t kill off are, well, pretty fucking straight. (Drarry shippers, feel free to come at me. I’m sure there’s plenty of queer subtext there, too). They’re, for the most part, characters with a clear canonical history of heterosexual romance, as if only those with a possible future of a heterosexual, nuclear family are worthy of survival.

And I just don’t think this was an accident. I think it was the intentional plan of someone who started to feel like the world of inclusion she’d created was being read as far too inclusive.

To call this “literary gay bashing” is a pretty serious accusation with a pretty serious use of a very loaded term. But the thing is, I think we too often let people like JKR off the hook without recognizing what her words – both literary and non-literary – have done and can do. We too often dismiss it with statements like, “she’s entitled to her opinion”. Gay bashing is the intentional abuse or assault of someone perceived to be a member of the LGBTQIA2+ community, physically or verbally, that often results in lasting harm or death. And I use this term to describe JKR’s work particularly because it is sensationalizing, because it calls violence what it is: violence. Because, sure, she’s as entitled to her opinion as anyone else. But the second you create a world where anyone, especially children, are going to see themselves, going to feel safe, your “opinion” better do as little violence as possible.

When I saw the first Harry Potter movie, back in 2001, I refused to discuss it for months. I was furious. At the time, I couldn’t quite pinpoint why, but I now realize that I was heartbroken that Hermione Granger didn’t look like me. When JKR described a girl with wild, brown curly hair, I saw me. I saw my hair. And so, as children tend to do, I saw the rest of me, too. I saw tanned skin and dark brown eyes and full lips and high cheekbones (the ones people always told me made me look “Indian”, which I only partially am). I saw the quiet confidence that develops when you’re the brownest kid in your school, ready to strike but only when provoked. The pale, arrogant, racially unambiguous Hermione Granger I saw on the screen made me feel dirty, cast off, unworthy of representation. The self-hatred I felt when White Hermione Granger entered the film alongside White Harry Potter and White Ron Weasley and White Everyone Else was a kind of violence.

And when JKR killed off all of her queer-read characters, she took that violence to another level. Because they were there, we saw them, we did not imagine the romantic undertones between Remus and Sirius, or the way that a shape-shifting young woman with short, spiky hair reads an awful lot like a person uninterested in traditional gender. We saw ourselves in the most beloved franchise of all time. And then, she took away those possibilities, and she took away those characters.

And you know what? People die because they can’t see themselves in media. People die because that’s what they’ve watched everyone like them do on screen and in books. It’s not harmless, and it’s not victimless, and it’s violent.

There’s only one solution to literary gay bashing: To Bash Back. We can and do write ourselves into the stories, into the world, and refuse to settle for explanations that gaslight us into thinking we imagined things that were never there, or ask us to settle for tiny crumbs of useless representation.

I intended to finish my most recent story, “Come Healing”, with an ambiguous ending that left the possibility of Sirius’s death open to reader interpretation. But then, JKR kept going, and talking, and kept creating violence, and I got mad. And so, like so many queers before me, I rewrote the story and changed the ending, and created love and security and peace and life where the canonical author had created hopelessness and death. And in the world we live in right now, that is radical. It is bashing back.

It’s tiny, but it’s something. Every time we write a happy ending for a queer character, we create the possibilities of happy endings for queer people everywhere. And no one – no matter how hard she may try – can take that away.

[keplercryptids]

nonfiction LGBTQ+ books i read this year

i read a lot this year, and a good chunk of it was LGBTQ+ nonfiction. so i thought it might be nice to list what i read. as a note, many of these books deal with LGBTQ history in the United States. too often, mainstream US-centric LGBTQ texts focus on white middle-class cisgender folks, though I’ve done my best to balance that as much as possible with other perspectives. (that being said, if you got ‘em, i would LOVE book recommendations that tackle worldwide/non-white LGBTQ issues!)

Accessibility notes: Given the nature of the genre, there’s a lot of intense discussion re: homophobia and transphobia. Basically every book listed covers those things to some extent, and I’ve specified where there’s additional potentially triggering content. (If you have specific questions about triggers, please let me know!) also, some of these books are on the academic side. I’ve done my best to note when a book was very academic or when I found it to be more readable. (full disclosure on that note: I’m a college grad and voracious reader without any reading-specific learning disabilities, so my opinion may be different than yours!) as a final note, I was able to access most of these as e-books/audiobooks through my local library. I live in a major metropolitan area, if that gives you any idea of how easy it’ll be for you to find these books. I’ve noted when a book was more difficult to get my hands on.

History

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 by George Chauncey. As the title suggests, this book focuses on gay male communities in NYC pre-World War 2. Even with that limited scope, this is an important read to better understand gay male history in the early 20th century. Gay communities thrived in the early 1900s and this snapshot of that is really wonderful. This is definitely more of an academic read, but I highly recommend it. while it definitely focuses on white middle-class gay men, there was more discussion of poor and/or gay men of color than i had actually expected, so that’s nice. (CW for rape and sexual assault, homophobic violence and medicalization of homosexuality.)

Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture by Siobhan B. Somerville. Finally, a book about queer history that actually talks about black people! I was expecting more of a history book, whereas this was more of a critique of specific novels, plays and movies of the early 1900s and was way more focused than i was expecting. don’t get me wrong, I majored in English lit so i’m super into that kind of analysis as well, it just wasn’t as far-reaching as I would have liked. Also, it’s very academic. (Only the print version was available at my library.) (CW for racism, mentions of slavery.)

Transgender History by Susan Striker. This book describes itself as an “approachable introductory text” to transgender history in the US, which I agree with. It’s a pretty short read given the enormity of the topic, so it doesn’t go into much detail about specific groups or events, but imo it’s a good introduction. Especially interesting to me was the information about where and when TERF ideology began. Academic but on the easier-to-read side. (CW for transphobia, gross TERF rhetoric, brief mentions of the AIDS crisis, police violence.)

Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman. okay so, I gave this 1 star. it’s probably a good book if you know absolutely nothing about US LGBTQ history and want an intro, but a review on goodreads said that it should be called Gay Assimilation instead and i completely agree. Faderman focuses on white middle-to-upper class gay and lesbian assimilationists, often at the expense of radical queer and trans people of color. The latter is hardly mentioned at all, which is ridiculous given trans folks’ contributions to the LGBTQ movement. When radical people ARE mentioned, it’s often in a disparaging way, or in a way that positions the radicals as too extreme. Faderman constantly repeats the refrain that the fight for LGBT rights was “just like what black people did for their rights” without any addendum about why that is...not a good take. There’s no meaningful discussion of race, class or intersectionality. She lauds Obama as a hero for the gays and there’s a ton (I mean a TON) of content about how military acceptance + gay marriage = we won, or whatever. anyway, i wasn’t a fan, although many of the events and organizations discussed in this book are important to know just from a factual basis. (CW for all the stuff I mentioned, plus police violence, medicalization of homosexuality. it’s also fucking LONG so i recommend the audiobook, lol.)

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States by Joey L. Mogul,  Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. This is “a searing examination of queer experiences--as ‘suspects,’ defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime.” A frequently upsetting but super important read about how LGBTQ identities have been policed in the past, and currently are policed today. i wish there was more focus on trans folks, but other than that it’s a solid read. (CW for all the things you’d expect a book about policing and imprisoning LGBTQ folks to include: police and institutionalized violence, sexual assault, transphobia, homophobia.)

Stonewall by Martin Duberman. This book follows the lives and activism of six LGBTQ folks before, during and after the Stonewall riots. Note: Stonewall itself is only discussed in one chapter about 2/3 of the way through, the rest of the book dedicated to the six individuals’ lives and activism up to and after that point. It’s a history book with a strong narrative focus that I found to be a fairly accessible read. (CW for minors engaging in sex work and sexual predation by adults, sexual and domestic violence, police violence, drug and alcohol abuse, mentions of suicide.)

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. This is a HEAVY but really important read about the AIDS epidemic in the US, tracking the disease and the political/cultural response from about 1980-1985. It’s journalistic nonfiction, so although it’s a very long book I found it easier to read than more academic-y books. the only thing i really disliked was how the book demonized “Patient Zero” in quite unfair ways, but it was originally published in ‘87 so that explains part of it. I want to stress again that it’s heavy, as you’d expect a book about thousands of deaths to be. (CW: oh boy where to start. Graphic descriptions of disease/death, graphic descriptions of sex, medical neglect, republican nonsense.)

Memoirs, essays, etc

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote. i felt mixed about this one! i appreciated the different perspectives regarding gender and desire, especially since this anthology contains a lot of essays by people who came of age in the 60s-80s (so there’s a historical bent too). but some of the essays feel dated, at best, and offensive at worst. there was more than one instance of TERF-y ideology thrown in. probably 1/4 of the essays were really really great, and i’d still recommend reading it in order to form your own opinions--also, imo it’s useful to see where TERF ideology comes from. this book was harder to find, and i had to order a print version through interlibrary loan. (CW for a few TERFy essays. i read this earlier in the year so it’s possible i’m forgetting some other triggers, sorry!)

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by (editors) Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. Serving as a follow-up of sorts to Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, this is a collection of narratives by transgender and gender-nonconforming folks. While not “history” in a technical sense, many of the writers are 30+ and give a wide array of LGBTQ+ experiences, past and present, that are important. I didn’t agree with every single viewpoint, of course, duh! But some of the essays were really powerful and overall it’s a good read. (CW for one essay about eating disorders, some outdated language/reclaimed slurs as to be expected--language is one of the main themes of the collection actually so the “outdatedness” is important.)

S/He by Minnie Bruce Pratt. A memoir published in 1995, focusing on Minnie’s life, marriage, gender identity, eventual coming out and relationship with Leslie Feinberg. i really enjoyed this one. it was beautifully written. there are many erotic elements to this memoir so keep that in mind. also was a little harder to get, and i had to order a print version via interlibrary loan. (i read this awhile ago and can’t remember specific triggers, sorry! if anyone knows of some, please let me know.)

I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya. A memoir by a trans woman ruminating on masculinity. it’s beautiful and very short (truly more of a longform essay), so it’s a good one if you don’t have the attention span/time for longer books. (CW for sexism, harassment, transphobia.)

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. god, this memoir is gorgeous and is one of my favorite books of the year. it chronicles Audre’s childhood in Harlem and her coming-of-age in the 1950s as a lesbian. ultimately, this is a book about love and that resonates throughout every page. idk can you tell i loved this book so much??? (CW for child abuse, sexual assault, a friend’s suicide, racism.)

We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib. suuuuch a good book! Samra writes about her life as she and her family arrive in Canada as refugees from Pakistan in her early childhood, onto her life today as a queer Muslim woman of color, photographer and activist. beautifully written and just such an important perspective. Only the print version was available at my library. (CW for child sexual assault, a suicide attempt and suicidal ideation, non-graphic mentions of domestic violence, racism and sexism.)

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kababe. this is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel memoir about the author’s journey of discovering eir identity as queer. i related to a lot of it, which was great on a personal level, but i also think it could be a great educational tool for those wanting to know more about gender queerness (especially for those who prefer graphic novels!) (CW for gender dysphoria, descriptions of gynecological exams, imagery of blood and a couple pages depicting being impaled, some nudity, vomit.)

[neversidefaerie]

Some light on the situation with Joye...

Who is Joye? She's a girl who has Lyme's Disease and Bipolar Disorder, the latter of which caused her to act abusively towards others in the past, but she has since reformed. She feels a strong connection with the character of Shadow Weaver in She Ra and is a big supporter of the idea of SW getting a redemption arc. She has strongly rejected the widely held notion that Shadow Weaver abused Micah and has found much evidence to suggest that instead they had a healthy friendship. She has also criticised many people who made the assumption that Shadow Weaver had no trauma to cause her to become abusive, drawing attention to how Shadow Weaver's most dangerous spell going wrong affected her mentally and physically. She is also an Entrapdak shipper, much like myself, and very active in the She Ra villain fandom.

She is a strong Christian, but is heavily critical of many beliefs and attitudes found in conservative Christian culture. I personally found her to be a very tolerant, non-judgemental and open-minded person, who never resorted to bullying when arguing her points about either faith or fandoms.

With these things in mind, I will now go into the controversy that caused her account to be deactivated (I am uncertain if this was an action of her own doing or if the staff suspended her).

Being a great advocate for a Shadow Weaver redemption arc, at some point she made a friend who also supported the idea. This friend had created a lesbian love interest OC for Shadow Weaver. I'm not exactly certain what happened, but at some point I believe that this friend asked Joye to draw her OCs in a romantic context. Joye didn't want to draw this and somehow this led to the friend concluding, due to her Christian beliefs, that she was "homophobic".

Another problem arose from one of Joye's ships: Shadow Weaver and King Micah. Joye believed it was only appropriate to see their relationship as romantic if Micah remained widowed and was well over the age of consent. I still personally never liked this ship, but I appreciated her efforts to provide circumstances for it that she thought were justifiable. Eventually, however, she stopped shipping them altogether.

As someone who previously supported a problematic ship (Lydia and Beetlejuice) but had decided after a while it was better just to see them as friends, I have undergone this journey myself. I remember how repulsed I was when I saw artwork depicting Lydia as a minor kissing BJ - I thought the relationship was only appropriate if Lydia was well over eighteen. Likewise, Joye had disapproved of people shipping underage Micah with Light Spinner.

The ex friend began accusing Joye at some point of supporting a paedophilic ship, even though Joye had only supported the ship in a more appropriate context and later disavowed it altogether.

The third controversy stems from a conversation on a post somewhere, which is regarding a scene in which Shadow Weaver is sick and suffering and Catra acts apathetic towards her condition. From what I can gather, the ex friend thought Catra's behaviour was justified because of SW's abuse, but it upset Joye, because she has a chronic illness and didn't like seeing Catra (or anyone) mistreat a sick person for any reason. The ex friend thought that Joye was saying that Catra was being abusive towards Shadow Weaver and took offence to this.

I befriended Joye after she placed a supportive comment on an Entrapdak post of mine, in which I detailed a discussion I'd had with a delusional anti-Entrapdak who was convinced that Entrapta had been made to look underage as a form of fetishism. I soon went onto Joye's blog, where I struck up more conversations with her and we quickly became friends.

After her ex-friend started spreading information about the three preceding controversies, it caused Joye a lot of stress, especially since the ex-friend is very angry and spiteful towards her. Joye once said to me that the irony was not lost on her of the fact that this ex-friend was willing to advocate for war criminals to receive redemption arcs, yet believed someone guilty of alleged homophobia was unforgivable and deserved no respect.

I firmly believe it's never acceptable to harass or mistreat others, no matter how wrong their viewpoints are. It just causes the said person to think that the fact they're being attacked means that they must be doing something right. Also, I firmly believe it can make you a worse person than the person being attacked.

I also testify that Joye is not a homophobe. She did not express any hostility towards LGBT people and even openly condemned violence and persecution towards queer individuals. Perhaps your mileage may vary on what constitutes a homophobe these days, but I honestly do not think she qualifies.

Ultimately though, you can believe whoever you want to believe. I am just saying what I think is true, deduced from my interactions with Joye and my perusal of the ex-friend's blog. I can take pictures of my conversations with her if anyone needs proof of what I'm saying.

If the ex-friend or any of her supporters see this post, I want them to know this: I don't want a fight. And neither does Joye. Virtually everyone's mentally ill or mentally disabled here on Tumblr, and I can safely say that most bloggers don't want the added stress of getting involved in a big argument, which may be why Joye is currently offline.

There's enough problems with harassment in the Entrapdak community without there being in-fighting amongst the fans of She Ra villains. Joye is a good friend and I want her back on this site. I would also like her ex-friend to reconcile with her, but I don't know how possible that is.

Anyone who is a friend of Joye or thinks I'm telling the truth, please use the hashtag "#we support joye"

Thank you for reading!

[eveninglottie]

write what you want regardless of the genders. it's better to spit the story out and then go back and revise then get hung up on whether or not every interaction or plot point could be part of an 800 word call-out tweet-longer that briefly trends on fanfic twitter. everyone comes at fiction from their own distinct background. you could write the most 'pure' romance ever, regardless of the genders, and it could still inadvertently trigger someone or raise concerns. comfort can be misleading.

so I don’t want you to think I’m disagreeing with you here, because you’re right. people spend way too much time thinking out the possible doomsday scenarios of what they might do instead of just doing it to see what happens. I am one of those people, for sure, it’s stopped me from doing pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted to do my whole life, so we’re on the same page here with both the concept of not worrying about what other people will think and also how no one holds the magic gatekeeping key which dictates what is problematic or not. every person is different and some things will upset people in a way that doesn’t upset you. that’s just a given. 

but I think that’s not really helpful when you’re trying to figure out your own motivations for doing something. 

like, yes, is a lot of this affected by how I think other people will react to things I create? of course. everything i do will be affected by how I think other people will react. that’s just how my brain works, and it’s my job to keep growing more confident in myself to counteract that (because the older you get you really do give less of a fuck and boy it’s so nice!!) what I was trying to bring up in that post was my own reasons for feeling more comfortable writing one thing than another. 

because I just think it’s fascinating and complicated and I’ve mentioned more than once to friends that it really just surprised me how freeing writing m/m has been vs m/f. it’s like my descent into sk was this moment of enlightenment when I realized “hey this is a hell of a lot easier to talk about when there are two boys involved!” like I realize that the majority of my writing the past two years has been on my own, and even though I can tell you’ve I’ve written well over 500k words and only posted maybe a fifth of that I can’t prove what I’m about to say so you’re just going to have to take my word for it, BUT I’ve included so much more discussion about sexuality and how characters express it and grow with it and figure out for themselves what they are. like it was never a thing I thought about a lot when I was writing my m/f fics (even tho all the women were still bi but that’s a whole other barrel of monkeys). it was never me sitting down and interrogating my choice for writing that pairing the way I did. I just did it. (I didn’t stop to consider the gender is what I mean, I thought about literally all the other things but gender and sexuality were not included in that) but now there’s a whole other sphere of characterization that I keep finding myself drawn to, and even without realizing it, it becomes a big part of how I write certain characters. (like deciding to write keith as demi while still being sexually and physically attracted to shiro has been really eye opening for me as someone on the asexual spectrum.)

because like, for example, I wrote a fem!bilbo fic, right? so clearly I was thinking about gender a bit, but most of that had to do with me having always reimagined that story (and lotr) with female protagonists. that’s what I did with a lot of childhood faves, actually, eragon, harry potter being two of the most prominent, and thinking about fem!bilbo and how that would change the story especially if she was in a relationship with thorin and the shire was maybe a bit more stifling for a woman, etc. - BUT that was one of those pairings that I’d never been drawn to when it was m/m. I couldn’t really get into it, and I was not a fan of the hobbit movies at all, honestly, and I tried, and it was only when I switched things around did that fic click for me, but I wonder a lot if I were to have come to hobbit fic later, after I’d gotten over my aversion to m/m (not in general, just me writing it, because reasons), would I have written it with bilbo as a boy? would I have been less likely to imagine bilbo as a woman? or was it a number of factors that led me to write that fic which really couldn’t have existed in any other incarnation, and would it have been a different fic entirely?

(the hp thing in particular is SO WEIRD to think about now because a lot of what I’ve been grappling with in my drarry fic is very male-centric? not like in a bad way, just thinking about the rivalry and bonds between boys and how boys look up to their male mentors and authority figures in very different ways than they do their female counterparts and also what does being interested in other boys do to one’s internalized and very misogynistic/homophobic ideas of Legacy and Family and Proper Gender Expression specifically when it comes to sex with other men like it’s Very Gendered in my head and it’s hard to separate that from what I used to be interested in which has expressed itself in other ways, specifically roslyn as chosen one in ascendant which I’ve said before was the result of a decade of rewriting those boy heroes as girls because I felt so connected to them and wanted girls to be every bit as important as boys, like I could draw a straight line from me writing bits and bobs of girl!harry as a fourteen year old and me writing roslyn in ascendant and wow I kind of want to punch myself in the face for how long I’ve rambled on about my own stuff but you know what no this is my tumblr and I get to obsessively and exhaustively talk about my own fictional worlds if I want to)

so it’s been a bit of a mindfuck trying to reconcile this shift in my own interests with the fact that I am a woman who identifies as largely asexual. and I think it’s important to sit down with yourself every once in a while and really look at the things you produce and do some self-examination. because I do wonder a lot if my comfort writing m/m now is because of this lack of pressure I normally feel when writing female characters or if it’s because I don’t have to interact with Me As Author so much when I write about boys because I am not a boy or if it’s because I feel a lot more comfortable identifying as queer when for the majority of my life I’d forced myself to be straight even though it didn’t feel right. 

then there’s the whole conversation about women writing m/m and how a lot of queer men feel they’re being fetishized or that their stories are being appropriated by women, in the same way that white people writing stories about people of color can be appropriative, men writing about women, straights writing about lgbtq+, cis people writing about trans or genderqueer people, et cetera with literally any minority being written by someone not from that minority, right? 

and I think it’s a bit reductive to say that it doesn’t matter. because it does matter. you’re right in saying that it matters to someone and I think the job of anyone who creates any kind of content is to think about that and be mindful that you don’t create in a vacuum. your art has power even if you don’t think it does, if you don’t want it to, and that’s something no one should take for granted.

now, I am not saying that certain people do not have the right to write certain stories. no one has the right to write anything, just as no one is forbidden from writing anything. and no one writing anything should be harassed for writing something that people perceive is out of their wheelhouse (because a lot of marginalizations are not visible! abuse, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, whether you’re neurotypical or not! and there’s no requirement that you make public your trauma/identity to provide cred! in fact it’s kind of horrific that anyone thinks this!) it’s a complicated dynamic but the more we talk about these things the easier it is when a marginalized person says, “hey this thing you wrote is kind of bad,” the writer can go “oh man I’m sorry, let me think about it and see what I did wrong so I can do better in the future” OR “oh wow I see what you mean, but this is important to me” and the reader can go “I respect your right to write what you want and in the future I’ll do more to shield myself from this kind of content” instead of Cancelling someone because they didn’t effectively prostrate themselves before the ultimate judges of problematic content, a bunch of randos on the internet.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, yes, I agree with you that it’s not necessary to worry about this stuff, and that a lot of it is energy wasted especially when you’re worrying about theoretical responses from people who read your stuff, but that’s not helpful to me, because I think that’s disregarding the fact that we live in a society with weird power dynamics that are constantly shifting. I think it’s my job as someone who is mentally capable of dealing with this kind of self-examination to push back on some of these things when I can. because if I didn’t challenge myself every once in a while, I wouldn’t grow as a person or a writer and if there was one mantra I would live my life by besides the assertion that I would be blissfully happy if I downloaded my consciousness into a robot body, it would be that You Have To Be Okay With Critique and It’s Good When People Call You Out In A Safe Setting, like everyone is a dick and an asshole and a Bad Person and pretending you’re not is the most useless battle you could ever fight. we contain multitudes and some of those tudes are downright ugly.

quick sidebar: I would not have been able to have this kind of conversation with myself four years ago, and something I have not even talked about is how my shift toward more m/m content began at the same time as I was getting used to getting medical treatment for my grab bag of mental illnesses, like it’s pretty obvious that I got into sk right about the time I settled into my meds so what does That even mean?? so many THINGS to consider!!

idk. I know when I write stuff like this people think I’m beating myself up over it, but I’m really not. I just like talking about it sometimes and this tumblr is where all my neuroses go to live forever more in the annals of this blue hell until I chicken out and delete them the next day. I guess I know that when I read other people talking about things I’ve also been thinking about, it’s nice to hear. and as this is something that is still new to me, fandom in general is still bonkers to a part of my brain because I came into it as an adult, the whole conversation (if there even is a conversation because there might not be but there’s one going on in my brain) about women writing m/m is interesting complicated and something I think about a lot. clearly without any real focus or conclusions to be drawn, because I dropped out of college and never learned how to make my point in a concise and understandable manner. 

anyway I hope you don’t read this as me arguing with you nonny, I just wanted to clarify what I mean in the original post

[itsclydebitches]

This whole thing has got me thinking about representation, specifically potential bad representation. In western media certain types of characters are usually certain races,sexes, ect. I was thinking about Adam. What if nothing about his character changed except that he was a woman? It would add representation much earlier confirming Blake is a lesbian. However, it would also make that a lesbian abusive relationship. Adam would be the lesbian abuser.

Definitely agree about Adam’s gender. That’s another reason why other considerations---such as how quickly you introduce queer characters, how many, etc.---matters just as much. Introducing that abusive lesbian relationship after, say, Blake and Yang have been made canonical is a very different situation than the same canon we got, just with changing Adam’s gender. Because then the narrative is saying, “Lesbians are just people and represent that diversity accordingly” rather than “Lesbians are evil abusers.” You need variety and you need to think about what you’re introducing first and how many characters fall into this identity. Do you have a variety? Or is one character meant to represent everyone?  

The villains conversation is definitely a complicated one. In that we’ve had a veeeery long history of woman, disabled people, POC, and queer coded antagonists, all of which use those identity markers as explanations for the villainy. The confident and sexually promiscuous woman can’t be trusted. Nor the effeminate man. Nor anyone who doesn’t look, move, or speak like you. Meanwhile, though cis white men have absolutely been portrayed as villains a great deal, it’s almost always in a sympathetic light. See: the recent Joker controversy. From Kylo Ren to Walter White to Barry, the cishet white man’s privilege carries through to fiction, so that you either a) end up with a story interested in getting us to cry over the circumstances that ‘forced’ them to become this way, or b) the story tries to paint them as unsympathetic and a HUGE number of people justify their actions anyway. It’s why we we’ve coined terms like the Skyler White Effect. In most stories the white man antagonist will lie and cheat and kill and rape... but who do viewers hate the most? The “Mary Sue” who (supposedly) learned to use a lightsaber too quickly. The wife who dared to be upset that her husband entered organized crime. The abuse survivor who’s sometimes self-absorbed. White men can go on a killing spree and the response is, “Well that’s obviously bad, but...” Women and minorities are mean to the man one time and it’s, “What an irredeemable bitch.” 

Would I love to see every type of possible villain without any real life consequences attached to those choices? Yeah, but we don’t live in that world. The average white guy is not in danger of being thought of as abusive or manipulative just because we’ve entered an age where some antagonists now look like them. Especially when the vast majority of those stories are invested in both putting them in the spotlight and painting them as sympathetic. Adam, in terms of how RT portrayed him as unarguably abusive and giving him the ending he deserved, is very much the exception, not the rule. 

[theexistentiallyqueer]

Okay so I’ve been thinking about that really bad Hot Take that’s been circulating about fanfiction. And it’s been kind of simmering in me. The root of the problem with it isn’t so much that it diminishes the quality of fanfiction so much as the way it characterizes two completely different genres of media.

Preface: at no point is this ever, ever, ever a diatribe or condemnation against fanart or the work fanartists put into their work. This is about the value that is ascribed to visual art vs the value ascribed to literary art. I am trying to talk specifically about the denigration of literary art in fandom spaces and the way it’s been recently, in a very popular tumblr post, martyred at the expense of queer and disabled writers and writers of color.

Fanart (as a collective genre, according to that post) - Good, artistically-driven, pure, wholesome. Fanartists draw for the sake of becoming better artists, and every work a fanartist draws or creates is made with the goal of becoming a better artist. Fanartists never draw anything that is base, silly, shippy, or smutty; if there is pornographic art, it isn’t pornographic but Erotica. There is no such thing as low- or middling-quality art, because all artists are striving to sharpen their skills and become better artists, and there are no fanartists who draw just for fun or shits and giggles. Fanartists achieve fame purely on the merit of their own artistic ability. There’s no room to criticize fanartists who attempt to cis-wash trans (or trans pesenting) characters, or fanartists who blatantly, frequently, and with frankly no impunity (as their art is reblogged, and reblogged, and reblogged) whitewash characters of color.

Fanfiction (as a collective genre, according to that post) - Smutty, ship-fodder, audience-pleasing trash. Fanfic writers write for the sake of expressing their inner boners or enacting their internal fantasies. No fanfic writers seek a sense of growth in their writing or work to improve their writing in any way. The only reason any works of fanfiction are popular is because they cater to the readership’s base instincts, and the True Authors, the Really Daring authors who write Real Literary Content, are cast the wayside.

It’s such a two-dimensional view of the situation--and it doesn’t even take into account edited content, such as gifsets, which makes up a huge portion of fandom content and has been a type of content, along with fanart, that fanfic writers have long voiced their (our) upset about getting more active & polarized attention than written works. It presents this dichotic view of fanart good/fanfiction bad. Which is also incredibly ugly and disturbing when you consider the fact that fanfiction is the earliest form of curated fan content, and fanfiction itself is inherently transformative in a way that fanart and edits are not, because fanwork in general, and and fanfiction in particular, is inherently in and of itself the public (fans) themselves overriding the corporate-owned landscape with their subversive interpretations.

Like, I have seen not-good fanart. I have seen bland, unimpressive, generic fanart. There is fanart from artists who don’t have their own unique sense of style. Fanart from artists who are just starting out and haven’t developed their skills yet. Fanart from artists who draw as a hobby, and damn they may be good, but they don’t give a fuck about contributing to The Body of Artistry because they have bills to pay and career interests outside of art, and damn, they’d really rather draw these two characters making out, or blushing at each other, or straight-up fucking, than they would create something of Great Artistic Importance. That art gets so many notes. It is liked and reblogged and shared.

And that’s all valid, because art ISN’T A COMPETITIVE SPORT. I embrace fanartists who draw just because they want to, because they don’t care about quality or artistic ideals or whatever, and just want to draw someone being happy, or sad, or angry, or getting dicked down, or whatever!!! It doesn’t matter. Draw because you want to draw. Because your art is an expression of yourself that speaks of your experiences and transgresses the definitions of the world you’ve been told to adhere to. You make art for yourself, to say fuck the system!!!! We’re just the lucky souls who get to appreciate it afterwards.

The complaints that come from fanfic writers--and yes!!! I am one, so proceed with the accusations of butthurt--are that fanart and edits get more social media attention (in the forms of likes, reblogs, retweets, shares, etc.) than fanfic does.

And it’s a valid complaint! It isn’t rooted in some alien reality that fanfiction is inherently more base and less artistic than fanart. I’ve seen some pretty aesthetically displeasing fanart get a high reblog count. And I’ve seen some incredible works of literary attention get no recs, no likes, no comments. I’ve seen works of middling writers who have a lot of fucking talent and show it in their work, and yeah maybe they write porn, but their prose SINGS, and no one comments, no one shares it, no one makes their love of it public the same way they do the fanart, the same way they do the edits and the gifsets.

It’s rooted in two things:

1. Literature (which fanfiction is a subgenre of) takes time to appreciate. You can look at a piece of art and reblog it without thinking about it. It could be a work on par with the Mona Lisa, and you could still look at it without any aesthetic or artistic sense and say, “Hey, that looks pretty.” But you can’t read without thinking; reading is an active mental pursuit you have to engage with. (If you try to pull out Twilight on this point to fight me, I’ll fight you back. I’ve actively read Twilight. Even reading awful literature takes effort; arguably it takes more effort than reading something good).

2. Literature is hard to market with words, because when you’re trying to encourage other people to read it, you have to use even more words. You have to use words to convince someone to read even more words! Some fanartists draw comics or fanart inspired by fanfiction--I love those artists and they do more for us than they could possibly know--but for the most part, you can’t use visuals to show someone why they should invest their time in reading a thing. And unlike fanart--when it’s a tribute, when it’s a showcase of the character’s or characters’ canonical attributes--fanfiction can’t be green-stamped by creators, because fanfiction is inherently built in narrative, and canon-compliant or not, that opens the legal owners of the property up to legal disputes.

So much easier, then, to focus on fanart, which distribution and publishing companies love because they see free advertising in sharing it, to complain that fanfiction is a dispirited genre of unartistic creators who just want to read the queer version of a bodice-ripper.

And then we get to the question of: why is the bodice ripper so bad? Are you willing to critique Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski with the same derision you have for queer writers? Are you going to hold the wish-fulfillment fantasies and introspective examinations of sexuality in relation to gender, race, class, and physical ability written by writers expressing their own experiences as inherently debauched and debased because pornographic fanfiction is popular, but not hold George R R Martin to the same standard? Are you going to criticize the prejudices and disparities and biases in publishing that prevent marginalized writers from being able to break into the industry? 

Are you ready to combat the enduring popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is overwhelmingly a series of heroism tales about shitty and mediocre white men?

Are you going to take aim at HBO for taking a fantasy series that, while still written by a sexist author who has a disturbing fixation on female sexuality has uplifted its female characters as heroes in their own right, and then drove it into the dirt to end on a note with the male “hero” murdering his female lover, an abuse survivor, after engaging her in an intimate kiss?

Did you take issue with the streaming blockbuster Stranger Things only confirming a character as canonically gay--after planning to have her be a straight romantic option for a major character--because the actress is the one who repeatedly badgered the showrunners about how she didn’t feel her character fit that role?

Are you invested in the fact that video games continue to be majority white, majority male, majority able-bodied, and majority inaccessible to disabled gamers?

You want to complain about fanfiction having too much porn and somehow that deligitimizes fanfiction as a genre as a whole?

Fuck off. There are hundreds, thousands even more likely, of other authors of equal skill to you or greater, who are struggling to have their works recognized in fandoms that don’t want to put the effort in to reading them, the effort into sharing and appreciating them. It’s harder to make someone care about a fanfic. You can reblog a fanart, and your followers will see the art itself right away. If you reblog fanfic, they have to make the conscious choice to engage with it. And none of that is your fault, because you can’t control how other people engage with fan content, but you can advocate, vocally, for the fair and equal respect for fanfiction and fan-written content. You can remind people, again and again, how fanfic writers do so much for so little.

But you want to come into my house and compare fanart to fanficton and claim one is inherently better? You’re the Banksy to my Catherynne L Valente, to my N.K. Jemisin, to my Seanan McGuire.

Start understanding the system is built against us all and start understanding why your battle is uphill. What’s oppressing your creative success is a white, straight, cis monopoly on what the good story, what the correct story is, limiting your options, tying you to a narrative you don’t belong to. Queerness and marginalization exist beyond what’s depicted in mainstream media, and fans expressing that through their own written content?

That’s us taking back the corporate-owned narrative for ourselves. It’s self-liberation through the written word. And yeah, some of it is porn.

It’s porn when it’s a drawing too.

[unwoundbobbin]

Nine Worlds 2018 - Sunday & Homeward

This write up is bought to you by a pack of Nerds, so who the hell knows how coherent it will be by the end.

(Actual footage of me)

From Saturday!

Sunday:

Our Last Best Hope for Science Fiction: 25 Years of Babylon 5

A look at a ground breaking sci-fi series, celebrating a show we love and how it grew from a something set on a space station to something truly special.

(Two Centauri, a starfleet officer, and a Morden(?) walk in to a panel...)

This is the panel I missed the talk on Golems for, and much as I wanted to see the Golems, this was 100% worth the trade, because I’ve never met that many people who are in to B5 before, and it was a really funny and thought provoking panel with some beautiful moments in it, including the moments of silence when we remembered those from the Babylon 5 family who have gone beyond the rim.

There was also discussion of favourite moments from Babylon 5. Mine has to be this, from the Centauri’s final assault on the Narn Homeworld. Peter Jurasik’s acting is superb here, but I love that the writers and director made a place in that episode to show the flipping of Mollari when he realises what he’s done - how out of control and repelled he feels by what should be a moment of triumph. And the moment he starts to work his way back towards some sort of redemption.

I think my favourite quote of the whole thing was by the person cosplaying as Londo Mollari:

"Behold minbari Jesus - his name is Jeff" 

(This psycop lurked for the entire panel. It’s as perfectly creepy and wonderful as it sounds. When I mentioned that on twitter, it devolved in to a Babylon 5 pun war...)

When I came out of the B5 panel, the one person I’d seen with a brain slug had become a collective. And they continued to grow in number throughout Sunday. Props to the person who spent an entire year making brain slugs to give away to strangers at Nine Worlds.

(The frightening brain slug collective. They continued to multiply throughout the day. Possibly the creepiest cosplay of the weekend, just because they continued to multiply.)

History’s Hidden Heroes III

Following two years of back-to-back success, the ‘History's Hidden Heroes’ session returns to its original format of ten to fifteen minute mini-talks by individual presenters discussing their favourite figures lost - or pushed aside - from mainstream history. Introduction by EK McAlpine, with talks from Tara, Avery, and Reiley.

This session was run by EK, and the speakers were Avery Delany, Tara Brown, and Reiley Daniels who all spoke about people in history who were part of the LGBTQ community, including some who were trans (though not remembered that way), some who were gender non-conforming, some who were openly queer at a time when that was (more) dangerous than now.

Avery spoke about trans masculine people in history, including a pioneering doctor, James Barry (note - while that Wiki article generally avoids using any pronouns at all, there is a source from the time quoted that misgenders Barry, so be careful if that would cause you any distress).

My favourite quote from Avery was “Do some queer history“, but I also really appreciated something I didn’t get the exact words of, but amounted to the idea that someone wouldn’t live as a gender different to the one they were assigned at birth for over 50 years if they did not actually identify as that gender. I really wish I’d got the actual words, because that quote stuck with me as much as anything.

Tara Brown spoke about three women of colour who were pioneers in blues and jazz - and sexuality, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley.

One of the most interesting, and awful, takeaways from this talk was the brief discussion about how there is some difference in the historical record as to the sexuality women presented, and that this is due to McCarthyism which basically forced at least Gladys Bentley to present herself as no longer a lesbian. It made me so cross to think of a person as comfortable in their sexuality as Bentley having to forcibly change themselves because of the massive risks that being out and proud served in the backwards looking 1950s America.

Reiley spoke about a quack physician called Charles Hamilton (misgendered practically everywhere on the internet), and the importance of checking multiple sources and subjecting them to due scrutiny.

If anyone enjoyed this panel is interested in other hidden heroes from sources that aim at diversity in who and what they talk about (and use content notices), I highly recommend @missedinhistory, Sawbones, and @rejectedprincesses.

The Future of Nine Worlds

It's time for a chat about Nine Worlds and where it's going. If you have strong thoughts about what you'd like to see the event become, and would like to get involved in making things happen, this is your in-person opportunity to talk about the options and understand how we got where we are.

Went to this, and I honestly don’t have a lot to say about it - not a lot a could say about it because I’m very much not the right person to speak about what happened in the majority of the session.

I will say that the announcement that Nine Worlds was re-constituting after this year’s con felt like a blow to the gut.

(This was an incredibly powerful moment, and to know that even though the current director is stepping back a future nineworlds is possible meant so very much.)

(Main point by what may turn out to be the future team was that Nine Worlds is too precious to lose)

CN for discussion of police at con, and a failure act appropriately to the stated concerns of a con-goer (and more concerned people who did not speak about it at the Future of Nine Worlds panel). When this section is over there will be a delightful gif of Wonder Woman deflecting bullets so scroll below her if you will find this section challenging.

What happened next is best summed up by Alecto101 in this post which I urge you all to read (also please read this followup thread by the same person). Her recollection of what happened at that panel is extremely accurate. I was there, and that is what happened. It was not dealt with adequately by anyone there in an official capacity. Most people who wanted to say something in follow up raised the fact that Alecto101 had not had her question and concerns adequately addressed, and when the people on the stage did so, it was in an inappropriate way that put the emotional and intellectual workload back on the person who had rightly raised legitimate concerns.

I have absolutely no patience with the people who immediately strawmanned (Oh, you don’t want police there at all - you can’t exclude attendees based on job) - I was there and at no point did Alecto101 suggest that.

What I’m trying to say is something EK said much more eloquently: “Concerns about how police participate in 9W and the separation of their jobs and their everyday lives as fans are ABSOLUTELY valid and not the same as “ban cops”.“

The developments since have been a little more positive, and I’m hoping that the reconstitution can be used as a way to build in representation of PoC from the beginning rather than trying to add on later. The way 9W works for members of the LGBTQ or disabled communities needs to be the way it works for the BaME community too, or it is not diverse (I’ve paraphrased here. I’m pretty sure I’ve just mangled the original quote. I can’t remember who said it but it wasn’t originally me).

For followup, I recommend reading Avery Delany’s thread here and this thread on the official Nine Worlds twitter account. This web page from Nine Worlds is also very important reading. If you have the physical, emotional, and mental spoons to do so, please consider signing up to be part of the future.

Finally, if you’re thinking about writing to Alecto, please first consider this tweet from the official Nine Worlds Team: “We do not want people to interact with the blogger on our behalf. We do not need defending. We do not want them pursued again for conversations they don’t want to continue. Their opinions are valid and we are glad to have heard them. “ and just DON’T.

After that I had more con crash, and tried to manage it myself in the quiet room, before worrying that my nose blowing was going to upset those who had sensory overload and needed genuine quiet, and ran away to my room where E wrapped me in a blanket and fed me biscuits until I was human again. She is awesome and I’m totally in her debt. (Thread here of what I struggled with wrt the quiet room - I am not saying it should go away BTW - I don’t know what the right answer is, just that I found it challenging for my own particular issues)

The end of the con was then barrelling towards me at a terrifying speed. I went off site for food with some friends, and then we all formed half of a team for the unofficial “The Not The End of the Con Quiz” as team Last Best Hope for Victory, and we only went and bloody won! Massive props to @knittedace and @laalratty who basically carried our team through two rounds pretty much on their own (even though one of our team who shall remain nameless nearly submitted “Aragorn” as the name of the giant spider in Harry Potter, which was caught before we submitted for marking, but they shall not live it down... for a while anyway :))

(Team Last Best Hope for Victory. Actual quiz victors!)

Went to bed at midnight after several rounds of Slash, which was really the perfect end to a great con (even if I did keep crashing).

(Me on my way home. I look pretty knackered there, but it doesn’t even touch how completely mentally (and to some extent physically) exhausted I was, and still am. Completely worth it though.)

I may have listened to this on the journey home and sobbed. Like I said on my Friday post, it’s somehow become the song of the con for me.

[theliterateape]

The News and My Feelings

By Elizabeth Harper

It’s my own fault. I charge my phone on the nightstand by my bed. I don’t jump out of bed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed each morning. I sit in bed and check my phone: the notifications, the news app, email, and worst of all, Facebook. I do this to see if there is anything urgent I need to respond to, and also because I’m not ready to get out of bed yet. But scrolling through the news and my friends’ posts makes me not want to live in this world, much less get out of bed.

I know the news is not about my feelings.

I know I’m coming from a privileged place–a home, a bed, access to technology, no obstacle to obtaining food except my own lack of appetite and will to live, etc.–to even have the luxury of having feelings about what is happening in the government and to other people. On the other hand, given my own lack of energy and preoccupation with obtaining and paying for my own health insurance, I must say the spending of effort and funds to make people’s lives objectively worse galls me.

What was the price tag on the recent ICE raids in Mississippi? Was that a good use of time, resources, manpower? Whose interests did those raids serve? And speaking of costs, I don’t just mean financial. There are emotional costs to wars, inadequate healthcare, imprisonment, and many more injustices, including these latest immigration/ detention/ ICE policies that are getting so much attention. But I’m saying something obvious here. Apparently everyone already knows this, as I see post after post about traumatized children.

When I first saw the news about the ICE raids in Mississippi and how many people were involved, 680, and what kind of businesses, food manufacturing, especially chicken processing, I thought, aren’t these raids bad for business? Won’t they hurt those industries by causing labor shortages, lower productivity, supply chain issues? How does this make any sense at all?

So I started searching on the handy-dandy internet, looking for more information to confirm my suspicions, to try to understand. And I do find a statement explaining that yes, indeed, these raids are bad for businesses and communities. I found this and this and this.

But I also found more about how some see these raids as retaliation against workers standing up for their labor rights. Some speculated that one of the raids was retaliation against workers because of a sex discrimination/ harassment lawsuit.

One of my friends posted that it was common knowledge that, when workers join a union, their employer calls ICE–on their own employees! Some do it so the raids happen on payday, so they won’t have to give workers their checks, and then they can just have a job fair and hire a whole new batch of immigrants, who will also be potential targets of ICE raids if they dare to advocate for treatment in accordance with state and federal labor laws. Here’s an article claiming a company used the threat of ICE to intimidate employees. Here’s an article about how some unions are supportive of immigrants while others are not.

Is this common knowledge? If I didn’t know it, then I should have. But then I think, maybe I did know this, and maybe I forgot. Maybe it wasn’t forefront in my mind because I was worrying about my own life, aka, what to do about health insurance. Or maybe it’s that if I kept all the terrible stuff going on in the world at the forefront of my mind all the time, I couldn’t function in my own life. Why would I want to get up, get dressed, eat, wipe my ass, play my role, complicit in the system of violence and exploitation that pervades every aspect of my life and makes it possible?

Why is this so upsetting to me? It’s the duplicity, cynicism, the populist pandering to disguise the most egregiously unethical abominations of capitalism. It’s being afraid of the government, the abuses of power, but also the shortsightedness and incompetence.

I can hear my friends’ voices in my head say, “Elizabeth, why do always act like you just woke up? Atrocity is nothing new. Class warfare, racism, Karl Marx, capitalism needs an underclass, politicians need a scapegoat, etc.” Yes, yes, I know. I know all of this. I read Marx as a teenager, and Hegel, too. I’ve read plenty of history and theory (anarchist, Marxist, feminist, queer, post-structuralist, crip, economic, etc.). I’ve written at length about the Chinese Exclusion Act, Trail of Tears, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and more, so much more. But I don’t know everything. No one knows everything. I read, but that doesn’t make me an expert on a particular industry, issue, or country. I bite my tongue. I can’t be confident in what I say until I collect more information. Maybe I don’t have access to all the data. Who has access to all the data? Is there more to the story? Why is this story getting the attention? Is it a distraction from something else?

Meanwhile, the loudest voices prevail. The ones that oversimplify, gloss over complexity, distort the truth to serve their own agendas, pander to the desperate and disenfranchised.

And even if all the news is always old news, even if exploitation and violence and misery are the same old same old, that doesn’t make it any less of an affront to my feelings, my desire for truth and decency and integrity and for things to work in a way that makes sense and for history to progress towards freedom and flourishing for all.

I know terrible things were happening before the current US president took office: an overpopulated prison system in which prisoners don’t get appropriate medical care or due process; torture at Guantanamo Bay; drone strikes killing civilians, etc. Still, the blatancy of the current racist, xenophobic, populist rhetoric is disturbing, unsettling.

My Facebook newsfeed is filled with a Diary of Anne Frank quote and comparisons to Nazi Germany. If the comparison is so apt, why aren’t any of the political representatives able to nip this nonsense in the bud? Are the majority so lacking in intelligence and integrity? You would think people in power would want to stop it for the sake of their own self-preservation.

But what do I know? Maybe all my questions are merely rhetorical, and I’ve already answered them all myself. Thus the feeling that I don’t belong in this world where people repeat the catchphrases of debunked ideologies and lie with impunity.

Here’s a poem:

Journal Entry 8-8-19

The news makes me sad I try to understand

Something feels very wrong I reach out to a friend

He says it’s class warfare As if I didn’t know

But if feels like more than that Populism, ignorance, resentment A very bad show

I wonder, is it the news or is it me? What’s making me so upset?

Why do I pay attention? Why am I so distraught?

Something feels very wrong I hope my efforts aren’t for naught

I collect information Try to read between the lines Make sense of the contradictions Look for signs

Yes, I know, systemic racism, but … Aren’t ICE raids bad for business?

Whose interests are being served? Who benefits when people are scared And truth is obscured?

[keihlfeminism]

A new take on an old misconception

This piece discusses some upsetting topics and uses some offensive terminology. I’ll wait while you decide whether to move on.

Now that you are consenting, let’s try to go through this to the end. I hope it will be rewarding for you.

Sigmund Freud postulated that there was a dichotomy to how society views women, known as the virgin versus the whore concept. In politics, the conservative desire is for women to be virgins, because otherwise they are whores. The liberal stance is that a woman can be whatever she wants, as long as there is consent. I prefer to look on things sort of like the Golden Girls mixed with Wiccan concepts around the maiden, the mother, and the crone. You could see Rue McClanahan as the maiden, who feels young and vibrant, Betty White as the mother who is loving, nurturing, and supportive, and lastly you could see Estelle Getty as the crone, someone who has seen a lot and carries much wisdom and strength. At this point, either your mind is blown, or you’re thinking that I am one chromosome away from a potato.

As someone who is genderfluid, I do not like binary thinking, so I like to think of ways that we can break away from dichotomies into trichotomies or even matrices. So when I was reflecting upon the virgin versus whore dichotomy and trying to apply it to masculinity in society, I could not apply it in the same way, because the defining attribute for masculinity in western culture is that of strength.

When I suffered from severe asthma problems due to pneumonia or back issues due to injuries on the job, I was demoted in people’s eyes as a man, solely because I refused to wear out my damaged body with too much manual labor. People assumed that somehow making a pair of women set up a folding table, for example, was shirking my duties as a man. Masculine people are expected to stoically bear the burden of their labors and keep it bottled up. The old saying “are you a man or a mouse” is embedded in us as youngsters. But thinking about that saying, it means that we consider women to be nothing but rodents and pests. This illustrates aspects of a larger point, which is that binary thinking and toxic masculinity go hand in hand.

                       (You were expecting a GIF here, weren’t you?)

Think about it: in toxic masculinity, there is only straight or gay, and if you are gay, then you are not considered a real man, but more akin to a eunuch, as he is less so-called “competition” for the mating pool of eligible women. If you are a married man, then you are beholden to your vows and you do not want to break them. A man who can not provide for himself and others is demoted to being less of a man. While current generations have come to embrace the stay-at-home dad, many people still assume that he is just lazy. We have been taught that housework or “women’s” work is too easy for a man to do, and hence is not really fit for a man to do as his main responsibility. A loyally married man is considered almost cuckolded by his wife, but never the less controlled from what society considers men’s natural status of being a sexually aggressive creature.

Choose whatever term you like, but the descriptions all mean the same thing: Lothario, Casanova, Don Juan, Horndog, or the more offensive internet term, F__kboy.

The trichotomy of modern masculinity seems to exist on a spectrum between statuses of being a Horndog, a cuckold, and a eunuch. Each status has its different aspects to consider, so let’s start with the one we all know and hate: the horndog.

A lot of our iconic figures are horndogs: James Bond, Captain Kirk, Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and most male protagonists in action films or comedies are horndogs. We look at the horndog as the natural state of masculinity, looking only to have sex with everyone possible, disloyal and disrespectful to women unless he can use them. We see them as predatory animals, fiends and enemies, liars who will do anything to get what they want, and in turn, slaves to the fragile male ego.

By contrast, in society, you often see the cuckold and the eunuch grouped together. The cuckold has popular icons too, like Robocop, John McClane, and Jack Ryan. The eunuch has characters like Frodo, Luke Skywalker, and other characters who are both somewhat infantilized and therefore sexless.

You only have to look at shows like Two and a Half Men to see all three concepts lined up as caricatures in front of you. Cuckolds are essentially considered limitedly sexed and compared to the Don Juan, they are considered limitedly aggressive, not unlike livestock that has been broken. They work hard but do so for a reason, and are not given to excesses in their appetites, because their love is considered purer. Eunuchs are the men you consider harmless. They can be older to the point that they are determined toothless and weak by others. Of course, as we all know, age does not bring with it such things, but it is how society seems to consider such men, simply because they are no longer teenagers or young bucks as the saying goes.

When we find out that a man we have in our midst likes to date women, then we automatically lump him into the Don Juan category. We assume that he will not respect boundaries, that he is a sexual deviant, and that he is low and animalistic; hence the terms dog or pig. Single men are basically considered vagrants in polite society until they are older or married. Anything said or done by the Don Juan is deemed as in pursuit of sexual gratification.

Of course, when we lump men into these categories, we ignore the possibilities that they are queer, asexual but romantic, survivors of rape or incest, demisexual, or that they just aren’t interested in gratuitous sex. So comes the time, dear reader, when I put it to you that you may have been lumping men exclusively into these three categories. And why not? You had examples given to you of clearly defined pop culture figures who fall into these three areas. Except James Bond got married, as did Han Solo and Captain Kirk. Alan Harper on Two and a Half Men had quite a few girlfriends, while Charlie went steady with women a few times, and even Alan’s son, Jake had a few girlfriends in the show’s run.

The truth is that just like with the Virgin versus Whore dichotomy, no person is exclusively in one of these pigeonholes. For example, I was attending a church in Toledo, Ohio, and for some reason, everyone just assumed that I was married. I had a noncommittal partner whom I brought to services, but people assumed we were married. (I wanted marriage some day, but she was against it.) Once I explained that I was single, people assumed that I was interested in all women: married, single, or anything in between. I loved my partner, but we weren’t exclusive, so she gave me permission to date other women. I didn’t really date a lot during that time, but I would flirt a little.

We assume that unmarried men will commit every sexual taboo from adultery to dating someone much younger than him, and even certain crimes, like child molestation and rape. But of course, such presumption ignores the droves of married men who rape women and children every year, to say nothing of the Eunuch group, like Catholic priests, who take a vow of celibacy.

We assume that all men are basically sluts, rather than discussing matters with them, and will often send unmarried men off if they rise to our microaggressions or grow fond of anyone in particular and flirt a little. Toxic masculinity has dictated for so long that men can only feel anger or pride. If a man cries or feels mournful, then we demote him for being sensitive. If our harsh words or actions to marginalize him makes him cry foul, we ignore his pain and describe him as a weakling. If he loves someone, we still see it as only a means to sex. We have actually stopped considering a father’s love real: turning it into a form of responsibility and devotion. We say that fatherhood is his job, being a husband is his job, everything comes down to working. Your love and affection for someone is unappreciated, and the man who feels it is considered a milquetoast or a faggot.

One of the reasons why we have to employ women-only safe-spaces is because of the problem of male gaze. Women are conditioned to be highly sensitive to being looked at by men, and hidden camera footage from women walking the streets has shown that men do not just look: they stare!

So I will not call on the women in the audience to change their perceptions of men more than they are willing to, but I challenge all the men taking this in to reconsider themselves and the men around them.

And don’t simply call out men who are acting like Horndogs. Call them in and call them forth: which means you should encourage them to look on themselves as more than the horndog. Don’t look on horndogs as broken, either, because there are good aspects to being a horndog. Being confident and independent fosters spontaneity in your romantic life, surprising a partner or spouse with random gifts, compliments, love notes, or tender affection. There are positive sides to being a Eunuch when the time calls for it. You could work with beautiful women all day, and it is a good work habit to view your female coworkers as people. So it can be good to be asexual at work. Likewise, while we view the cuckold as a humbled figure of a man, or a noble one, let us instead just accept that being part of a family is a natural aspect to that individual man. If he is older and single, do not look down on him as broken or flawed, but as undiscovered. A lot of Millennials are marrying later in life, and many people with disabilities find it hard to date or maintain relationships; especially those with invisible disabilities like social anxiety.

The more we look at one another as whole people, the better off we are. Men and women have a lot more in common than we are taught. People like me who are nonbinary or gender-nonconforming understand this very well.

So while we could sit around, and try to label every person we know as one of two or three mutually exclusive things, it will not lead to a greater understanding of the person you’re examining.

If you want to look at men differently, start by not grouping them all together, and instead, really piercing his soul to understand him. He may need help reflecting on himself, so encourage the men in your life to be sensitive and to undertake emotional labors like empathy.

It will be worthwhile for every man to see himself in more than two dimensions, and for those around him to see him for everything he can be.

Part of the point of this discussion is that we often hold men to the virgin versus whore dichotomy in society, especially in progressive circles and safe spaces. Once we see a person in the light of the whore, our image of them as anything else tends to shatter. So as previously stated, we have to open up our definition to accept that people generally do not want to date someone, unless they like them as a friend first (eunuch - emotionally open and basically asexual, possibly oblivious/naive) and when building a relationship, someone may wish to engage in healthy, consensual affection in different ways (the cuckold - tempered and emotionally in tune with a partner), but once it feels appropriate to engage in sexuality, the Don Juan can emerge: wanting, spontaneous, emotionally engaged in connection with the other person. The average person exists on a state that is rarely exclusive to one camp, but exists in a blobby, grey area, the facets of which are more prevalent in one area of life than in others. It means that we can allow for men and those assigned male at birth in many spaces.

For example, we can allow for trans folks in public bathrooms, because they are not there as the Horndog, but as the Cuckold or the Eunuch. We can allow for bachelor men to be around kids, and encourage an air or respect and affection for the same reason.

The implications are far reaching, but the more we come to understand that there is more to men than anger, ego, and libido, the better off we will be.