#homophobia -//

[lizardwizard2000]

See this is what it means to be an ally!

[voidyellingback]

has anyone else noticed that cishet people have started to use "twink" and "zesty" in a derogatory way... like, seemingly in place of the f slur?

[hawkins-batman]

I cannot understand queer people who engage in this behavior.

Like, my support for Noah is well known; but even if you were someone who didn’t like him, I want you to understand that this kind of behavior—designating certain individuals in the queer community to be targets of homophobia—harms the whole community.

It’s literally a right-wing, homophobic tactic. Homophobia kills. And when you normalize it towards one person or two, or a small group, you contribute to normalizing it towards everyone in the queer community.

((Never mind the fact that this person gets all the facts wrong about the incident they’re talking about and then has the audacity to proclaim they they’re “responsible” about the things they post 🙄))

I just want to let fellow queer people know: homophobes wont spare you, just because you join in on their bigotry against people you don’t like, when they decide it’s your turn.

P.S. - if you’re homophobic or say homophobic things or slurs about a fellow queer person, your queer identity doesn’t “cancel it out.”

You’re still homophobic.

[im-the-antonymph-of-your-mom]

I got the briefest whiff of the "metrosexual" thing as someone who was super duper young in the early 2000's, so some of the things Tumblr strangers say about it are like "oh yeah, that" and some of them are a total mindfuck.

hi yes hello what the fuck is metrosexual lmfao

It's hard to explain to zoomers just how insanely homophobic the early 2000s were. If you were male, and like, washed your hair regularly, people would call you a faggot.

So, dudes who washed their hair and wore button ups developed the term "metrosexual" which meant "I care about my appearance but I am attracted to women and don't have sex with men."

[prokopetz]

Honestly, part of why it irritates me when people act performatively shocked at the homophobia in 2000s media is it wasn't just media. "Can you believe this aired in 2008" buddy, in 2008 I was having shit thrown at me from moving cars for having long hair, and you wanna get worked up about sitcoms?

[animentality]

[autistic-ben-tennyson]

This may also be a good explanation for why the “cultural Christianity” discourse was so heated. Since atheism is accepted or at least tolerated more in Jewish communities, mainly reform, it’s not seen as much of a big deal to be one and they’re less likely to be shunned by their communities and families. That’s not really the case with ex Christian atheists who often lose family or friends and are far less accepted, even by many progressive Christians. So these jumblr blogs who don’t see being an atheist as a source of trauma or rejection don’t get why someone wouldn’t want to be associated with the label “culturally Christian”. Now yes, Dawkins who is a racist Zionist uses that term to refer to himself and reading r/exjew will give you a different perspective on this for atheist Jews with religious trauma but that’s not what you get on jumblr. It’s not to say that ex Christian atheists don’t need to unpack anything but the way jumblr acted wasn’t actually much different from how Christian treat them.

due to crude half-baked misunderstandings of intersectionality, you might initially think that a gay jew obviously has it harder than a gay christian, because two oppressions is more than one, and privilege and oppression work like effect multipliers in a videogame. but actually, when 81% of jews believe homosexuality should be accepted and only 16% believe it should be discouraged, and the figures are 54 to 38 for christians, you’re looking at gay christians facing significantly higher rates of rejection from their communities, families, and religious institutions.

you might think that the more christian a group is, the more hegemonic it is, and thus the more privileged the members. in some situations, in some senses, this may even be true. but a key consideration is that religious fundamentalist groups are bad to be in, especially for women and lgbt people. a lesbian raised into evangelical christianity was raised, yes, into a group with disturbing cultural sway in USAmerican politics, but also into a group very dedicated to and effective at making people like her want to die. the people high control religious groups hurt most are their own members. this is a vital consideration when talking to and about people who have left christianity, especially fundamentalist and repressive christian denominations. it may be tempting, for some people, to consider ex-christians barely-reformed representatives of the hegemony, who can’t possibly understand what it is to be repressed by christianity the way a jew does. but please consider that people who have been emotionally traumatized on religious grounds by their christian families and communities have direct, visceral, non-hypothetical experience of being actually, irl abused by these institutions. getting antisemitically microaggressed by your christian coworker is, i need to stress this, not actually as bad as being religiously abused.

religious abuse is by no means unique to christians, jews do it too, fundamentalists particularly but by no means exclusively, this doesn’t mean that lgbt jews aren’t oppressed or aren’t oppressed in distinct ways or situations, it doesn’t mean you can’t be annoyed at ex christians getting stuff wrong, it doesn’t mean that christians are the real victims of christianity or that members of minority religions aren’t, it means have a sense of the meaning of actual individual human suffering relative to the notional minority stress of being officially, statistically at risk for oppression. and have some compassion.

[shiftingwithmars]

Fuck off🖕

[draconym]

Seeing tumblr users tag their blorboposts with "gay panic" is making me insane. This term does not mean what you all think it means.

[theconcealedweapon]

It's like how conservatives regularly insist that businesses have every right to discriminate when deciding who works for them but shit themselves when a business won't hire unvaccinated people.

[pirateprincessjess]

“Hey guys, just because it’s about a gay space and was written, and performed by gay people who sang songs for gay people doesn’t mean it’s a gay song” is an insane level of cognitive dissonance.

[nando161mando]

Pro-homosexual forces stay winning

[snartfulisms]

Scout’s step towards self discovery

(sort of) a prequel to this

etsy

[cookinguptales]

So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.

See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.

I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.

Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.

In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.

They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.

Conservatives lost their damn minds.

Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.

When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.

Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 

Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”

Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.

The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.

This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.

Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.

The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.

I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.

Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.

Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.

The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.

That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.

They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.

So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.

We have! To keep! Pushing back!

[prokopetz]

I understand that folks tend to think of open homophobia in popular media as a Thing Of The Past, and that the 2000s are still sufficiently recent as not to count as The Past in a lot of folks' minds, but still it kills me the sheer incredulity I keep bumping into when people are confronted with how casually homophobic early 2000s popular media actually was. Like, buddy, you have no idea how recently "isn't it shameful for a straight man to know what a latte is?" stopped being a standard sitcom bit. There were whole shows airing as recently as the early 2010s whose entire premise was "this ostensibly straight man has somewhat fruity mannerisms" – like, that was the entire joke.