#in this economy? It’s hard being a trans gay man

[terezillustrations]

If I ever find a man like this, y’all will have to rip him out of the gorilla-grip bear hug grasp of my cold dead corpse.

[rubyhoshinoamastolfo]

Time for my kinlist omg it's so cliché but it's healthy for me, to help understand myself better after my coming out-

So, I think I can classify my current kins in two categories : the dragon side of me, the man side of me and the woman side of me (ah yes, the three genders)

PART 1 : The dragons

Zhongli (Genshin Impact) : Because contracts, skilled in economy, tea, good teacher...etc...

Dan Heng / Imbibitor Lunae (Star Rail) : He REALLY looks like the kind of dragon I see myself. Yes, on that point, I don't see myself low- /s

PART 2 : The men (You'll see a pattern among the non-dragon kins)

Momose Sunohara (Idolish7) : Still the top, my #1 role model, idol, gay, extrovert...etc...

Hajime Hinata (Danganronpa 2) : A remnant of my previous character, I still love him, because I love my Nagito kinnie <3

Haruhi Fujioka (Ouran High School) : Yes, I put HIM on this list because trans and because it's MY post so I do whatever the fuck I want. He helped me understand my gender

K1-B0 (Danganronpa V3) : Same as Hinata, but for my Kokichi kinnie <3

Basil (OMORI) : Anxiety, anxiety, photos, flowers, gay, flowers, nature, anxiety. Yes I had interests for photos and flowers when I was a child, and I want them to come back because I know that now, in 2023, I won't be laughed at anymore

Lyney (Genshin Impact) : We have the same "kind" of clothes (partially), we do magic (I don't remember many but I will !), and the mischevious side <3

Nazuna Nito (Ensemble Stars) : Cute and angwy, I like being cute and angwy even if I try not to be angwy)

Niki Shiina (Ensemble Stars) : Food, hungry, vore, food, cooking for everyone

Leo Tsukinaga (Ensemble Stars) : Literally my current biggest, zoomies, random, clingy. That's me.

Chiaki Morisawa (Ensemble Stars) : Same as Leo, but more opened to others, motivating...etc...

Sora Harukawa (Ensemble Stars) : Clingy, video games, feet, and we have some similar autistic traits (although I'm not autistic, just anxious)

Reki Kyan (Sk8) : Gay, energetic and colored (although I'm a "tired e-girl" since the beginning of 2023)

Hanako-kun / Amane Yugi (Toilet-bound Hanako-kun) : Mischevious ghost, clingy, pranky, that's me.

Maou Sadao (Hataraku Maou-sama) : Demon King, I love them, they are hot, so I kin them to keep them to myself.

Bachira Meguru (Blue Lock) : He's weird, cute, clingy and has ABANDONMENT ISSUES LMAO

Many men in Horimiya because they are so perfect and complementary.

PART 3 : The girls (You were waiting for it, I'm sure of it-)

Ruby Hoshino (Oshi no Ko) : Determined, magnetic, like her mother but I can't really kin Ai because she doesn't have enough development-

Akane Kurokawa (Oshi no Ko) : Anxious actress, someone absolutely perfect to look up to.

Mem-Cho (Oshi no Ko, yeah again, but this anime initiated the changes) : Older but as energetic and magnetic as the others

March 7th (Star Rail) : I love her, I love her colours, her mood, she's so great and energetic, I want to be as cute as her!

Kyōko Hori (Horimiya) : Okay she's giga biphobic but my Hori isn't, the me-Hori isn't! But she has social issues, she's strong, I want to be like her, and she has a kink about hot men being rough with her ////

Princess Syalis (Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle) : She sleeps. And her love interest is, to me, the Demon King

Chiho Sasaki (Hataraku Maou-sama) : Okay not really a kin but Maou's love interest, so I'm in.

Honestly, I found them but I forgot some-

Seriously, don't mind me, I try to embrace the cringe but it's hard ;_;

[yourlocalswan]

a few weeks ago, i went to my first gay bar.

it was cowboy themed that night, it was muggy and hot outside like it always is down South. my friends & i drank cheap alcohol i bought from the gas station (what person in their early 20s can afford $16 cocktails ?? IN THIS ECONOMY!?!). i let my friend borrow my cowgirl hat—me and other friend didn’t know the theme, and she’d just so happened to already be in a country outfit.

when i walked up to the door, everyone was so nice. so incredibly nice, with choice-pricing and little rainbow paper bracelets to let me get more alcohol. inside, country music was playing, and pretty girls gathered around the free water station.

everywhere i looked, there were queer people. people like me and not like me. trans girls in little pieces of pleather. gay men talking loudly between dabs. lesbians covered in glitter smiling into their kisses. friends holding hands as they danced.

out on the back patio, my friends and friendly stranger shared a bowl and passed around cigarettes and compliments. i was tore up one side and down the other, but i couldn’t stop smiling. for the first time in a long time, i didn’t feel like i had to watch my back. i drunkenly inserted myself into a group’s conversation to congratulate someone on getting their PhD.

i didn’t care that my romper was riding up and my ass was showing. my body, for once, felt like my own as it popped out of my clothes in places. i saw the most beautiful women i’ve ever seen, and they’d smile at me, a little older, a bit more comfortable being gay. i’d blush and look away still, like i always do when i feel attracted to girls, but then i’d look back, and they’d smile again.

at the water station, a man complimented me. i returned the thought. after a moment of conversation, i realized he was flirting with me. he was interesting and respectful, but i felt something small inside shriveling.

i felt inside, Is nowhere sacred? must men always find me? where can i go where i won’t be robbed of the safety i felt when i first walked in? where can i go where men’s eyes won’t follow?

i dragged my friends into the bathroom, and after a few minutes, i felt better.

we met some more nice girls and danced. the dj encouraged us to keep the faith against fascism. everyone in the room staked a claim to our soil and soul, in true Southern fashion.

when we left, i felt light again, and my eyes returned to normal. they’d been wide and sparkling all night.

being queer in Florida is hard, but the community never fails. world, don’t forget us. america, don’t forsake us. God, help us.

[existotherwise]

Wednesday, July 17, 2024 6:54pm

I promise I'm not being dramatic. I don't think anyone really cares for me, or maybe I haven't allowed them to really love me other than in person or over the phone, and any admiration I had stirred years ago, when I was more active, has dried up due to an infrequent presence online.

I'm at one of the worst places in my life thus far, and almost everyone I've developed attachment to over the years has frankly disposed of me, as in factual evidence and not a flare of drama.

I could sit staring at the walls and letting my time blindness unfold into the infinite void of the present, but I try to only feel the ocean waves pummeling my corporeal spirit when consented.

Since top surgery, I've felt more myself than ever before. I took time away in the woods over the winter to allow myself to fully embrace my new range of embodiment. I felt more myself when I was living alone for 4 months in a cabin on a hill in the forest than I do when I must interact with people within hierarchical resource economies for support.

There seems to be some very hidden very subconcious difference in the way that people with resources see me vs. the way that I see myself and how I value my offerings to them. It's as if I believe I am worthy, and they do not. As each domino falls however, I become more desperate... reinforcing a disillusioned banishment from cisgender society.

The base of this alternate reality is a predisposition to being "fully self sufficient" (as one of my friends, an elderly southern aristocratic cis gay man has told me bluntly). Allyship only goes so far to say: "If you can't provide for yourself the same way that I can, than I'm passing the buck to the next person down your already limited list of contacts that believe your reality is more than likely plausible."

Haven't they ever heard of the bystander effect? If Kitty Genovese got a chance to become elderly, she'd puke in disgust, but alas... she lies in dust in Lakeview Cemetary.

So, I'm arriving at a point of legacy-building....

One of my dearest trans friends died in 2018 in the ocean, drown to death, didn't know how to swim and got caught in a rip current. They were one of the brightest lights I still to this day have ever experienced. I went to the memorial. I went to the funeral. The loss of vitality of trans people happens more frequently to suicide or violence, but nevertheless Mother Nature scooped them up and the loss was felt heavily on me and the other trans people in our crew.

I'm haunted by not knowing how to advise a grieving mother on how to gender her baby correctly when the casket is open and the heart wound fresh. They were not gender in the way they wanted to be remembered, but what haunts me more is there is only a small trace of their legacy accessible to the public.

Their art hasn't been archived like Francesca Woodman's or Jimmy DeSana's. Their family did not start an estate, nor did I make them privy to my friend's last words to me ("I have so much more new shit I'm excited to share with you.").

.

.

This is the crux of my soul-death -- If I do not leave this realm with everything already archived and in order for someone to find... If I do not entrust my archive, my storage unit, my computer, account, hard drive passwords with someone who understands me and knows how hard I worked at this shit, knows how I felt intimately about my practice... then nothing was worth it. I'm just a spring cleaning away from the record of my creative mind decaying next to fast fashion in a landfill.

And in this same sentiment, I've recently felt like my present existence [this bodybag that doesn't have a job, can't pay rent, and is barely eating] is ultimately devalued by anyone I have ever felt like I'd write down as my Executor in my "After I'm Gone Organizer" (I neurotically impulse-bought a few months ago when all of this started) or trust with signing over my Google account to or given a spare key to my storage unit.

The only things that keep me going are Archive Fever, my kitten, the motto my dad signs ["I'm Still Standing Ya Ya Ya" (Elton John)] and surrounds with stickers on his letters to me, the discourse on suicide from Heathers (1988), and "Don't Try Suicide" by Queen.

[Pray for us]

[beaniehasapoliticalviewpoint]

An Opening Statement:

When impressing myself into the world of politics as a kid, I always thought I’d be the cool motherfucker that’d band people together to fight against an oppressive government and liberate the minority. And then, I realized that

1. People don’t like to listen to other people

2. It’s really hard to get America to stop being lazy

3. There’s more countries than America out there

That third one is a big one, I’d say, and it defines a lot of what makes the world what it is.

“American Exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is either distinctive, unique, or exemplary compared to other nations.” - Donald E. Pease (I think, that’s what Wikipedia said they got the quote from)

You see, I live in a country that loves to suck it’s own dick, and pass around the fruits of that labour by spreading its seeds of “democracy” and “freedom” onto other countries that did not ask. Now, I love my country, I think US propaganda does a great job of making even the most US hating individual feel proud to love this country, and I do in fact feel wonderful every single day knowing I’m a citizen of the country that loves to spout off how free it is. I’m also not blind, it’s also a damn shame what the country looks like now. Shit, let’s be honest, the American government is an absolute cesspool of old dudes jerking each other off and making fuck tons of money doing it, which, by the way, could very easily be cut to go into our economy, but I digress, the American government is at core the fault of our country, and by god thank you for letting us see that, and giving us the option to vote them out- except we don’t. Because no one votes. And when they do, it’s always “vote blue no matter who” or “trump is the best”, stupid shit like that. The solution? Simple. Hell, let’s cut this whole chapter down to two simple words. “Start. Reading.”. It’s that simple. I mean, we literally have the biggest goddamn treasure trove of information ever held accessible to the common man, and y’all motherfuckers use it to argue whether or not trans people should get rights. They should by the way. Because they’re people. Expanding off that, I’m not saying I’m not guilty of the same stupid shit. My heart strings soar when I see some dumb shit confederate get clowned on online. But none of it means anything. I can talk smack all I want on this earth but it’s not gonna make it any greener. We’re members of a generation capable of making the most change, and we have been given the greatest informative platform to do it on. Stop staring at the next controversy when they made Ariel black; who the fuck cares if they removed a gay character from a show. While y’all weren’t looking, they let Florida allow first responders to legally deny medical care at their own whim, based on their beliefs. Imagine if you pissed some motherfucker off in 8th grade when you snitched on him for passing notes in class, and then 10 years later you go to a specialist, the same guy, and he denies you care because he’s a salty motherfucker, and you DIE. Who let this law pass? Certainly not the citizens of Florida, you guys are fucking awesome, but can’t see the obvious issues here.

We, as citizens of the United States, are held victim by our own beliefs and emotions. We impose our own restrictions on ourselves, by acting like the differences in the world is because one side lives a different kind of life. We draw so much attention to the smallest of differences, the pigment of our skin, who we love, who we want to be, and we miss the big picture. It’s not republicans Vs. democrats, the gays Vs the church or the north Vs the south (god forbid that shit happens again), it’s the fucking people Vs the goddamn government, and it always has been. Every distraction from our common goal of uniting against corruption gives more power to the corrupt, and they fucking LOVE it. And no, this isn’t me saying if you think gay people are inherently evil or some shit that’s ok. It’s not. You’re weird. Weirdo. This is me saying theirs a far larger issue at hand that could kill us all, and both of y’all need to shut the fuck up and look around you.

So yeah. I’m trying to be the cool motherfucker that bands the oppressed together against a common enemy. I wish I could. I’d be lying to myself, and you, if I said something like, “I’ve grown”. I haven’t. I’m no better than the person next to me, no greater than the young child behind me or the older folk in front. We’re all equal in a struggle against power. (And NO this isn’t some Marx shit, the economy is a joke and I’ll get to that later) All I’m saying is, we could do with a lot more loving in this world, because shit, that would make me feel a helluva lot better, and I’m sure you would too.

Remember when I said that thing about American Exceptionalism? Promise I didn’t forget about it while I ranted about America. Because it’s wrong. We aren’t special. We’re one empire in the long line of many, not the first nor the last. The entire world is out there, billions of people, millions of cultures, thousands more being made. Many suffering a helluva lot more than my upper middle class in college ass. Many living a lot more luxurious than I am too. Despite us all being the same species we manage to become so different, global divisions of “countries” and “nations”. I can’t speak of the minds of everyone, because I’m not everyone. I can’t say that every single person should act some way, because I didn’t grow up in their shoes, in their home. Everyone lives different lives, everyone lives differently. So why the hell should my country pretend to know what’s best for them. American “global security” is an authoritarian grip on the less fortunate, for our benefit. And only the people can fix that.

[possumcollege]

Visibility terrifies people who require a simplified version of the world to feel like they're in control. If the world is limited and operates on a fixed set of possibilities, it's knowable, predictable and safe for people who build their unifying theories, their very identities around knowing "how the world works."

People have been brought up in our society to crave endless variety in the things they can consume. The economy runs on novelty. Scarcity generates demand and value. However, if we ask people in power to provide something they weren't, to acknowledge and include an identity that isn't already in their system, they act like they must rob the citizens of their known world to care for some interdimensional alien refugee. Like that inclusion requires them to uproot their entire operation to provide services to who knows how many different kinds of people that weren't there before!

They were there though. They've always been there, but they don't take up space if you don't include them. Bureaucrats don't have to spend time on them, their rights don't need to be actively protected. Their needs don't have to be met if you can just erase them from the ledger and pretend you're seeing some bizarre new trend every time someone comes up and says, "I need help, because no one is providing what I need."

This has been true of indigenous people, enslaved people, non-white people, gay, nonbinary, trans people, refugees, immigrants, migrant workers, laborers, women- all of the people who have historically had to fight, literally and figuratively to be acknowledged as whole people under the law. This is a problem though, because Conservatives require simplicity. Their governance is powered by inertia and secured with the assurance that nothing new can be added. The bare minimum must be sacred and defended by force because the alternative, for them, is chaos.

If you act like marginalized people are constantly new and confusing, you can pretend you weren't just sweeping them into the closet to make your world tidier. You can say you've done your best to treat everyone with kindness and respect. You've done all you can for the real people. You can say, isn't it silly that some people are so selfish that they'll make up a whole new kind of person to get special privileges! Priveleges like being exempt from the laws defining marriage, or pretending to be a man to make more money, so they can take more than they deserve! You don't have to change those laws, or guarantee equal rights for everyone, or provide enough of anything. It's so beautifully convenient.

It's also lazy and evil coming from people that claim hard work, individuality and democracy are the very flesh, blood, and bone of our nation. It's fantasy and wilful ignorance. It enshrines the continued astronomical prosperity of a select few at the expense of millions beneath them. It's fanatical adherence to tradition in service of inertia. It is constant, active erasure.

remember 14 years ago when People magazine did an exclusive interview with a pregnant trans man

it almost feels like the media goes through cycles of collective amnesia and forgets that trans people ever existed and then they wake up like "hhHhhHh?women are becomingg man??" like. yeah we've been over this. can we please move on.

[volcanolotus]

Hi lotus! :] I am attempting to participate in the ask game. I don't know how it works but I think I should send you like an emoji? Yes.

I'm curious about 📌, 🎶, 🏳️‍🌈, 🍀, and 💕.

I hope youre having q wonderful day! :]

I’m glad you asked! Hi!!!!

📌 how did you find your hyperfixation? 

I Think I was looking for Mappy content i haven’t consumed several years ago, found it, forgot for another three years, and then found it again. Of course, I wouldn’t care at all had i not played the original arcade game.

🎶 if your hyperfixation has songs/an ost, what is your favorite song from it? 

Funnily enough, the shiftylook Mappy ost is just royalty free stuff. And I won’t lie, I’ve been searching for it for a month or so with my friends. They’re ten years old at least, so the endeavor is almost fruitless. But I can tell you about how much i LOVE the namco sound chip, which i’ve also been searching for for ages with no luck...... Being a fan of Mappy is so hard in this society.

💕 tell us about one of your favorite characters and why you like them! 

There aren’t many characters but I find there’s something to like in almost all of them. Mappy isn’t my favorite but I do have the most to say about him and i want to study him in a lab (i am goro). 

So like. I can’t exactly say he isn’t intelligent, he really is. But god is his judgement heavily clouded sometimes. His hubris makes him short sighted, considering he didn’t forsee that the jailing of Goro would result in the closure of Nyamco, which would tank the city’s economy, thrusting a good chunk of people into unemployment. I think that would be reasonable for Mappy have to at least assumed. I also kinda think he has a huge ego and i want to see him cry. Despite said ego my man is hanging by a fucking thread for real. i think he could snap at any second. i want this to happen. ALSO to add to the ego thing i love how much he fucking talks for no reason about how he Was a cop. like in episode 1 he starts going on and on like had he not said anything Skykid literally would not have known he was The Cop That Shot That Painting and Lost His Job also i’m glad he lost his job actually. fuck the police. Anyways Mappy has a lot of problems and ailments. Tell me why he thought it was a good idea to Re Steal the artwork that Goro stole. Mappy what the fuck. YOU JUST PUT GORO IN JAIL FOR THEFT. Idiot. I love this stupid mouse. i love thinking about how everything he does is like. 99% probability of things Mappy would do for Goro. like this man has him downloaded as a pdf.

 🏳‍🌈 do you have any headcanons (lgbt, race, neuro, etc) that are important to you? 

First of all not a single character in this show is neurotypical. ESPECIALLY not dig dug. i think most people would assume he isn’t but like. he isn’t. he’s the king of neurodivergence. 

Second of all We All picked up on the Homoerotic Tension in episode one where Mappy is talking about how he’s gonna put Goro in jail and Goro’s like no u wont~ and they have a back and forth. and even if you don’t read that particular scene as gay you at least CANNOT ignore Goro’s��“i miss you” in that very same episode, or his very direct “I love you” in episode 7, or his ENTIRE SPEECH to mappy in the finale. Literally ZERO hetero explanation for Any of what Goro says in those moments. anyways Goro is gay. the cat is a homo. I also think he’s gnc as fuck. but that’s a little more self indulgent of an hc. as for the others Mappy is bi ace (just like me fr), dig dug is trans (just like me fr), sky kid also. 

🍀 do you have any kins or comfort characters from your hyperfixation? 

....................... kin Goro jhgfjgfjhsgfsfg

[theshedding]

What Haiti's past tells us about the meaning of Resistance & “Revolution”

One of the realities of American education (public or private) is that the already abbreviated history of Black people in the United States is completely non-intersectional and without recognition of the larger international African diaspora with respect to (1) Black liberation or (2) American and New-world European colonial history. For instance, it is not commonly recognized that proportionally-most Black people from Africa who arrived in the “New World” due to the Atlantic Slave Trade did not live in North America but in the Caribbean, South and Central America. That is to say, if you were enslaved (or newly freed) outside of Africa at any point from the 16th through late 19th century outside of Africa, you would’ve had a one in three (or four) chance of living in the United States. Ask your average Black person on the street about this and it’s news. Ask your average non-Black person on the street about this and it’s even more surprising news. And why wouldn’t it be? Due to highly racialized educational systems, steadfast commitment to Black marginalization, indifference and/or Black & indigenous marginalization, most Americans who don’t actively seek this information have very limited knowledge about critical historical events. The American Revolution and details are reduced to incoherent romanticized narratives about English tea and “tyranny”. The Civil War is also vague and obtuse in its descriptions of Southern animus and economics. “Reconstruction” is a word that, admittedly, I did not learn (or had forgotten about) until an adult...and as a young person I fancied myself more knowledgeable than most about Black History through extra-curricular history lessons, elders, activities and educated parents. Even I was unaware of the sequence of Black history, resistance and triumph on critical historical events in Black American history.

Fast forward to the 2016 Presidential Election, the word “Revolution” and phrase “We need a Revolution!” was flagrantly thrown around and abused in public discourse by young (and older) people who undoubtedly grew up with the same biased and negligent public educational system I had grown up with and (in many cases) profoundly less extra-curricular historical exposure and education. As a culture, we would then start to see real gains in the #BLM movement and the zeitgeist towards radical change and structural reforms from race to finance and public safety. I was quite happy to participate in the resurgence of a resistance movement, especially one centering itself around issues of Black liberation. It’s what I’ve been around most of my life. What I wasn’t comfortable with however, was the use of the term “revolution” to describe it. At least not by White people (there’s a reason for that) and/or by younger people (of any color/ethnicity) who also undoubtedly had been steeped in the vapid romanticism of ‘revolutionary’ history taught to us by our primary and secondary US educational indoctrinations. 

I have been in formal activism and education personally 30+ years now. Make no mistake, I absolutely support of “change” in our society, particularly towards social justice and Black liberation. And I have no wish to exclude White people or any other ethnicity from being enthusiastic activists or communicators of social/economic/political justice. That’s not my point. What my case is however, is that I’ve always been uncomfortable with the careless use of the term “revolution” in our national political conversations about race, justice, history and radical change. Particularly if that term is being appropriated for something other than racial equality of Black or indigenous people in this country. Historically, “revolution” has been inextricably tied to some aspect of Black resistance in the new world. To update the term in a way that erases or obfuscates deep racial inequities makes me uncomfortable in its lack of this historical context. Aside from that appropriative term however, the use of the sub-category or phraseology “radical change” in connection with “revolution” is problematic for its own reasons; ‘radical change’ and ‘radical ideas’ have become erroneously conflated terms in this way. Historically speaking, radical ideas have always endured much longer than the actual moment of revolution and change itself. In my lifetime there have been a number of “radical” changes; cigarette use and public smoking, seatbelts, recycling, eco fuels, Black people being on television and not talking “jive”, Gay/Bi and Trans people simply existing while not living a sad, diseased-ridden and isolated life, smoking weed and pre-existing conditions in health care are all things which were massive structural changes in society that took lifetimes to negotiate, deconstruct and implement. The idea came way before the actual change. And every one of those ideas were not radically “changed” in any one moment or by any one person. Instead those changes represented a patchwork of efforts by nameless, thankless individuals, organizations and multiple leaders whose work at times overlapped in various ways. Many of whom died or had to leave their advocacy before their desired change could be realized. Simply saying “radical change” and/or conflating change with charismatic leaders, “revolution” and politicians without acknowledging radical ideas, radical people (plural) and radical efforts over long stretches of time is a betrayal of history, the people working to change and correct it and those who have worked to correct it, for our sake.

On this day, January 1st, 2021, the 217th anniversary of the dissolution of Saint Domingue and the beginning of Haiti (Áyitì), the very first ever Black republic in the European/Western colonial world, named in honor of-and deference to-the indigenous Arawak/Taino “Indians” of the Caribbean, the process of what change really looks like is as profound as it ever was. Most of us have not studied this history in any appreciable detail-Black people included. Many might be surprised to know that Haitians came to Philadelphia, Charleston (S.C.) and New Orleans as a direct result of what happened in the late 18th and early 19th century and that there are Black and White Americans living there right now with traceable ancestry to this Caribbean island and the revolution that occurred there (until earlier this year I wouldn’t have known that either). Despite what Kanye West said, Black people did not ‘choose’ inferiority, slavery and colonial oppression. In fact, they resisted it and plotted revolution from the moment they boarded ships in West Africa. Especially in places like Haiti where many of the Africans arriving were literally soldiers, prisoners of wars and being replenished every 5-7 years because of the high death and production rates. There were hundreds of rebellions and revolts of enslaved Africans in the New world during the Atlantic Slave Trade; Haiti’s is just one of many. But Haiti’s is the largest, sustained revolt, with the most cultural, political and economic implications for its White, Black/African & African descended people -and- as people living in a “new” world trying to reconcile what it means to live together in a land post-slavery, post-European colonialism. To this day its people are a living testament to how difficult that work of Anti-Black resistance is in a global economy built around the presumption and instance of Black inferiority. The “project” of this revolution is yet unfinished.

Therefore in 2021, anyone studying, protesting, manifesting and politically agitating against our current socio-economic-political structures in America needs to study the Haitian Revolution in as much detail as possible. It is one of the biggest examples of how intricate, dynamic, long-suffering and difficult it is to actually perform “radical change”. During the pandemic I began (re) introducing myself to this subject by reading books, watching documentaries and listening to lectures outlining the layers of narrative involved in what would be come the Haitian Revolution; Macandal, the three “Commissions”, the Tricolor Commission, “Declaration of the Rights of Man”, the determinative links of the French Revolution, “Code Noir”, André Rigoud, British blockades, Spanish regiments, the “Coloureds”, returns to the plantations for Africans only, not “Blacks”(e.g. caste systems), trade embargos, Toussaint, Dessalines, etc....all confirming what was already apparent: change is hard, long and often takes generations.

If you are currently fighting for something, or against it, know that not one person or one act can or will likely “radically” change the reality. A “revolution” is a term not to be used lightly. When we de-romanticize it and “dig” into it we can begin to see more clearly how ugly and non-inevitable it’s results truly are. History tells us so-and we can learn from this history in a way that informs our present-day activism and fight towards justice of any kind, for any person, any ethnicity. Commit yourself and learn from those who have done it before you and recognize that the past will always be relevant to the present in resistance and change. 

Below are some great resources start to learning more on the Haitian Revolution👇🏿:

“Revolutions” (Apple Podcast, a immensely detailed lecture series!) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolutions/id703889772?i=1000358493623 PBS, “The Black Messiah: Macandal” https://youtu.be/cHIEYx2_C9Q “Haiti and the Atlantic World Reborn (New York Historical Society)” https://youtu.be/dpbLMkAJFtE “Noam Chomsky, Modern-Historical Political Commentary” https://youtu.be/e1JWr03P9W8 “Haiti Journal, 100th Anniversary of US Occupation” https://youtu.be/pILrdFJ683M

Happy New Year, Happy Haitian Independence Day and most importantly, Happy learning!!! 🤩🥂

[lifewithchronicpain-original]

I have something I want to say but want to forewarn that this is a political post and will be discussing HIV/AIDS. Also I won’t be adding to this, so feel free to comment but if you’re looking for a debate, I have promised my followers to limit purely political talk especially about the upcoming US election. This will probably be the only post I make where I mention who I’m voting for and why I hope others will do so too.

I think there’s no question that Trump’s response to this virus has been nothing less than horrifying and rage inducing. Not only that, we are dealing with a virus that has features we’re not used to dealing with. The amount of asymptomatic patients might be really high for this particular virus and is why the policy on face masks changed direction. We as a species are not used to the concept that you can be healthy and still infect and kill someone else. So it forces a societal responsibility some portion of the population will always have difficulty understanding and instinctually rebel at. Barring the outright fascist I know a lot of people have been confused by Trump and many may think that’s their own fault but I think it’s a lot to expect people who aren’t generally taught in public schools how to think instead of what to think. Of course that’s a whole nother debate so i’ll leave that thought there. But still many people are espousing beliefs of which the ultimate implication is that elderly and disabled people, which I can’t believe I have to remind people of this: Includes Young People and Children, are disposable and be sacrificed at the altar of the economy.

What I’m getting at not the first time a virus changed the rules, like the 1918 flu and the bubonic plague. But I’m thinking more recently, HIV/AIDS. The virus was novel, difficult to detect. In fact when I was young HIV tests took time and you always had to take to two. Drugs were effective in extending life beyond the initial horrifying death rate. It wasn’t until the new century did we start to make HIV the chronic livable condition that it can be for many, though still not all.

When HIV/AIDS first came about it was already an outbreak in Africa, no a gay man didn’t have sex with a monkey. Very specific underserved, and impoverished places in Africa were colonists forced natives into poverty, forced them to rely on chimpanzee meat. This is the accepted origin of AIDS which potentially first entered the human population in the early 19th century, had outbreaks in the 50s,60, and 70s before it finally left Africa in an increasingly globally connecte world in the 80’s. Someone simply migrated from Africa or traveled to Africa and came to LA where the first cases in the US were noted and that unknown person happened to be gay. AIDS has been around for some time and evolved into what it is now. When AIDS hit the Californian gay community, it also hit hatians, hemopholiacs, and hypodermics (drug users) and was called the 4H disease along with being the Gay Cancer. AIDS looked like it discriminated, but it never did. Like most disease it hits vulnerable populations first, gets a foothold and then starts ravaging an entire population.

Reagan didn’t give a shit. Despite numerous cases among heterosexuals (no, one lone bi man didn’t spread it to the straights ruining sex for everyone) that existed, it was still predominantly considered the gay cancer so no one would fault him for doing nothing. At least no one that matters to those people. When the dead started to pile up, when the lgbt community cried out in pain at the funerals that were happening every day, at the gay and bi men and trans women left to die by their families, the community activists lost, and lesbians leaving separatist communities to care for the dying because the straights wouldn’t. We staged die-ins to get attention, Act Up started in response to the government’s lack of doing anything at all about AIDS. Towards the end of Reagan’s presidency he finally did something and is pretty much praised by historians for doing so. For me, Reagan’s legacy is one of taking money from hard working people like my parents trying to eke our a living, and for leaving a trail of dead at-risk groups he didn’t give one fuck about.

Not unlike trump doing something, his useless travel bans, and trying to act like all that absolves his inaction that has directly lead to the deaths of thousands of people. His willful lack of testing because he doesn’t want the numbers to go up. Regardless of the fact that people have the virus whether we test it or not, and when we don’t more die. He goes on TV not because he’s leading a country through crisis, it’s because he wants to spin his narratives and he likes the ratings. He’s trying to turn this pandemic and the deaths of thousands into the Trump Show.

We’ve been here before. Not a thousand years ago, not a hundred years ago, but 35-40 years ago. It’s an example of an outbreak with modern medicine where precious time was lost because politicians and the person at the very top dragged their feet, because who cares about the gays and the drug addicts and the disabled who need transfusions and black people? Now today it’s who really cares about elderly, the disabled, and the disproportionately hit black and poor people?

Certainly not our president.

For those who live in the US and have considered not voting for Biden because it’s not Bernie or someone else, plus you have legitimate issues Biden or want to go 3rd party, consider this: For all Biden’s faults (and there are many) he’s not going to do nothing about this pandemic that has every possibility of hitting us really hard again this fall as it coincides with the seasonal flu. I never wanted to vote for Biden, I voted for Warren, but in a matter of life and death you have to vote your head not your heart, because in this particular case I feel like doing nothing against trump, not even using the only political power many disabled people have, you might as well be endorsing Trump.

Please support Biden in this upcoming election not because he’a traditionally a good fit for moderate politics, but because he has experience in a federal pandemic response and he won’t drag his feet. This will save lives and for me, that’s The Only issue coming this November. I am voting for Biden not because he’s my man, I’m voting for him because I don’t want to die and I believe he will immediately back an evidence based response for the pandemic from the ground running.

Thanks for hearing me out.

[sam-winchesters-lost-shoe]

Let me get one thing straight, and if you disagree with these I would like you to unfollow me. Here are some things I would like to clarify:

-Black Lives Matter. All. The. Time. I don’t want any arguments because it’s not up for debate. WHITE SUPREMACY NEEDS TO FUCK OFF AND DIE.

-I don’t care about your political orientation unless the person you’re voting for is a terrible human being who hates everyone that’s not a straight white man. (To sum it up, I don’t care if you’re republican or Democrat, but Trump supporters specifically need to fuck off)

-the education system in America is Shit and needs to be changed. Stop saying ‘it’s always been that way’, that argument is also trash.

-Wear. A. Motherfucking. MASK!!!! Social distance, too!!!! This isn’t a joke or propaganda people are dying for no reason because of everyone’s stupidity!!!!

-LGBTQ+ is valid and deserves as much love as everyone else. I know what it’s like because I’m in there too, but we also need to get better at excepting EACH OTHER. Gay, Bi, Asexual, Genderdluid: you’re all wonderful and we need to support each other more then ever.

-Rich people need to be taxed more. Sure they’re paying the government more, but when you have 30 million dollars in your bank account it doesn’t even matter to you.

-Speaking Of money, minimum wage is hard to live off of, so if someone complains about being underpaid, THEYRE NOT LAZY OR BAD AT HANDLING MONEY, THEIR JOB JUST ISNT PAYING ENOUGH.

-Birth control and abortion are a human right and should be covered by healthcare. (Don’t even give me the argument that late trimester babies get aborted because that hardly ever happens and when it does it’s because the woman would be endangering her own life to give birth)

-Women are still not equal to men. We’re getting closer, but we’re not there yet. Feminism is needed, and most women aren’t as extreme as the stories you hear about. Feminism means women should be equal to men, not more important or anything like that.

-Mental health is not something to brush off. To all my friends with anxiety, depression, adhd, autism, ptsd or anything along similar: YOU ARE VALID. I know what it’s like and I love you and your situation doesn’t change the fact that you’re a wonderful human being who deserves love.

-Stop fatshaming. Just stop. Most of the overweight people you see are more healthy than those in magazines because the celebrities and everyone in the media usually take drugs or starve themselves. Being fat does not mean you’re unhealthy, but shaming them does make you rude.

-stop using religion as an excuse to hate people. I’m Christian, and the argument that ‘gay people are sinners’ falls apart because EVERYONE is a sinner and you’re directly going against God’s rule of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ anyways, so you’re no better.

-speaking of religion, every religion and branch of every religion is also valid! I’m sorry that some of you don’t feel welcomed or allowed to express yourself in public because you should be. Your hijabs and traditions or any other part of your religion are beautiful and you shouldn’t have to hide them.

-Trans women are Women! Trans men are Men! Accept their pronouns or new names and give them love!

-Also, there are more than 2 genders. Accept that and get over it. Stop calling people “snowflakes” and shaming them for not wanting to associate with gender roles that are unnecessary anyways.

-And finally, if you’re old enough to vote, VOTE BLUE! Like I said in the beginning, I don’t care if you’re republican or Democrat, but I DO have a problem with trump! He’s making racism, sexism, transphobia and all sorts of other problems even worse and he’s not doing anything positive in return! He isn’t improving the economy, he isn’t saving lives from coronavirus (he’s actually making things worse) and he won’t even dispute the fact that WHITE SUPREMACY SHOULDNT BE A THING. If you’re a republican, he’s a terrible human being who’s setting us back hundreds of years and we need to get him out of office before he makes things worse. Biden has some issues, but for fucks sake he’s better than trump. Everyone please vote blue this year and afterwards you can go back to your parties but we need to get trump out of office NOW.

Alright......I think I’m done now. Message me if you wanna talk about anything I said and debate it’s validity because I’ve done it my whole life and most of the arguments against these are stupid. Just love everyone no matter their gender, orientation or sexuality....but Fuck Trump and his followers.

[trans-advice]

Hey, for the past 5 or so years I have privately identified as nonbinary or not conforming to any gender, and even recently requested that my boss and coworkers use they/them pronouns. About a month ago I stumbled across a "gender critical" blog and started reading it. I know it's a bad idea to engage with trolls, especially when it will impact your sense of self, but I felt restless that my existence was being debated and wanted to hear the other side. Now I am feeling confused (1 o 2 asks)

I’m feeling confused and gross, wondering if all this time I have been actually working against my own feminist beliefs, or if I’m just being naive and getting indoctrinated. Like,I worry about me being a female who simply didn’t subscribe to gender stereotypes, tricking myself into thinking I"wasn’t like the other girls". I have also been wondering about what it means to identify into an oppressed group, and why we can’t talk about it without being dismissed as a dumb TERF. (1 o 2 asks) Thx

— Eve: CW: long post, possibly rambley, could’ve used better editing, transphobia, “gender critical”, recuperation, discussion of “terf” politics, recuperation of liberation movements, politics, oppression, rape culture, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist,

So basically I have tried for almost 4 weeks to write a response detailing this stuff. however it’s gotten too unwieldy. i tried to condense it, but this was as close as i got. it’s practically like 3 drafts back to back. I couldn’t figure out the differences & when i saw similarities it seemed significantly different enough. so I’m not editing any further. here’s a mindvomit. i wish i had this more polished but I can’t do that & i didn’t get a response.

however I’m going to make a history book recommendation, a referral to gendercensus2020, and i need to emphasize that these are much more like personal beliefs & not generally the tone of this blog which aims to give advice & positivity, while this is inherently political, the good bad & ugly. and there are trans people of various persuasions so I don’t want alienate them. i dissecting some ideologies that are transphobic, how they became that, how they got recuperated, and how you can find the same concerns being addressed. I’m answering this because it totally makes sense to me that this is asked in good faith & I want to respect your concerns & show that there are better methods of liberation activism that are trans affirmative, or at least must become & develop into such.

So I’m going to recommend the book “Transgender History (Second Edition)” by Susan Stryker, which I have put on our blog’s google drive account, so hence a link. It goes into the historic common ground between the feminists & LGBT+ peoples. It also gets into historic movements. And on top of that, the first chapter is literally a list of terminology deconstructing gender, which is also helpful for analyzing topics feminism analyzes..

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IvCwNvCJ_EiDmOer4zS8SbFGz4m-WDJ1

another thing you need to know regarding the label lesbian back in the day is that it was a catchall for any woman who didn’t have sex with men. now granted, this was a cisnormative understanding, but basically lesbians included celibate women, asexual women, and of course bisexual women in addition to gay women.

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money to have sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (granted, communities cannot be monoliths if they want to be ecosystems, like any movement label there are different interpretations made by members of it, and therefore there are some strands that uphold a homonormative appreciation for conversion therapy. perhaps a middle ground for understanding how that happened is that joke about macho sexuality purity “if a man masturbates with his hand, he’s using a man’s hand to get off, then it’s gay.” granted, there was of course a political/economic reason to this, but still, it seems in terms of history that this joke was considered actually legitimate.)

“lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included ace, celibate & gynephiliac women. part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married which I’ll detail a few paragraphs from now. (while this next thought could be incorrect because I did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, I think the vestiges of those economic pressures are basically the gist of “comphet”.) the goal of political lesbian as well as lesbian separatism was to build an economy/get money that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, via marriage, pregnancy etc. so basically in an effort to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

however these networks ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. it makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210] >

birth control helped to liberate women & that accommodation/handicap for reproductive health disabilities (disability is merely inability to do something that’s Normative. so if having a uterus, pregnancy/menstruation/having breasts etc aren’t considered normal, which is especially common in a patriarchal society for these examples, then it’s disability.) It should be said that due to the desire for bodily autonomy to regulate our own body parts, as well as a desire to manage our fertility & sterilization, the transgender movement has a lot in common with feminism’s female-as-disability movement.)

it should also be noted that before the medical transitioning became accessible that us trans people relied a lot more on social transitioning than medical transitioning. it should also be mentioned that the medical procedures are available & used by cisgender people too.

that being said, since both cis females & transgender women were denied birth control etc, there was a very intense fear of impregnation happening & trans women going back in the closet not only to get money under patriarchy but also because life raising a kid is hard. like if you’ve ever seen “the stepford wives” & look at how the ally husband betrays his feminist wife, then that should clue us into how a lack of birth control scared us.

the problem with the school of feminism that emphasizes physiological sex over gender identity (in order to deny the existence of trans people with female-organs or not) is that it doesn’t account for birth control & how that’s affected the landscape, the economy etc, the revolutionary impact of birth control basically. it also ignores that trans people & cis women feminists have the same goals when it comes to getting freedoms about reproductive rights & bodily autonomy. therefore it ends up being transphobic & wanting to run back into the times when we didn’t have abortion access because they want to hurt us.

That being said though, we need to have birth control & more in order to help liberate trans people too, so if somewhere doesn’t have birth control, then we’re not doing well either because it’d pay a lot more to be transphobic (which of course it doesn’t now when we have birth control & various medical & other technologies). i think what I’m trying to say is that similar to disability accomodations clashing with each other, if we of the women’s liberation, the trans liberation, and the gay & lesbian liberation, and the bisexual & ace liberation get stranded then we’re all doomed. granted we might be doing that due to defensiveness with hostility similar to how in the 1980s feminism got very conservative in USA & how some transgender people get spared in systems with strict gender conformity & anticolonialist values, it’d be wrong to say that all our liberations are in conflict with each other. they can be mishandled, but ultimately, safety still tends to favor cisheteropatriarchal people. internalized patriarchal thinking is like internalized queerphobia, and so forth.

I want to emphasize that it is relatively easy for transgender people especially nonbinary people to find gender critical discourse somewhat appealing. Here’s why: TERFs & Gender Critical discourse is agender-normative disability discourse regarding reproductive health & other AFAB organs. (a disability is being unable to do things that society considers normative. so if you can’t drive & your locale de facto requires it, then that’s a disability. also in usa you’ll find that pregnancy & disability are the main things welfare programs prioritize. a pregnancy can be harmful, but can be easier with the right monitoring etc. which again is the same with disability.)

the problem though is that they then insist on misgendering you as one of the binary genders based on objectification of your body (specifically, “morphology”). point being, because you feel dysphoric over being misgendered as something nonbinary as being mislabeled as cisgender, this implies that you are indeed transgender.

https://gendercensus.com/post/612238605773111296/the-gender-census-2020-is-now-open

—

Now to be clear, there are historical economic considerations that made the decisions to specialize on the intersectionality of cisgender AFABs, but the economy & technology has changed. Basically marriage back in the day was economically necessary because there was effectively no birth control available. Therefore, to get child support etc, required getting the father to pay the consequences. However, marriage was very much a chattel property institution, marital rape was still legal, and women couldn’t get credit etc in our own names.

#

At the same time, similar to birth control being unavailable, hormones & other procedures for medically transitioning trans people were unavailable as well, which meant social transitioning & wardrobe etc were the main methods of affirming our gender. however, we sometimes got lucky & had a doctor write us a note affirming our gender & sometimes we got even luckier & govts accepted this. this however required getting labelled sick & begging doctors to give us treatment & getting money for this since insurance companies etc still discriminated against transgender people even when we agreed to have our gender identity situation labelled as sick & medically necessary. (similarly insurance companies still refuse to cover abortions & so do some doctors & hospitals.)

#

So this meant that AFABs were concerned about getting hijacked via impregnation. Because of the patriarchal economics of the whole thing, people were afraid of “the stepford wives” repeating itself in their own lives, where the mind can only handle what the ass can stand would mean trans women would go back into the closet.

#

Granted, that’s a bit misrepresentative of trans women & trans people because trans people & cis women who can get pregnant do have a lot more in common. we take the same meds, go to the same clinics, menopause etc gets taken due to distress over how our bodies work, etc. then again, how would trans AMAB people have gotten the money for child support?

#

historically & still to this day we basically had to beg doctors for the ability to get hormones to get a surgery to get a gender marker change & so on, which granted, what we trans people had available to us varied from locale to locale because it required collaborations of trans people, doctors, and the local govts & especially their police stations. again, before roe v wade abortion providers were super underground & secretive & there were specialized units at police stations for hunting down patients & providers under the charge of “murder”. it’s the same dynamics.

#

seriously trans people & people with bodies that can get pregnant, menstruate, menopause, etc, we go to the same clinics! women’s health clinics take trans patients, planned parenthood takes trans patients, do i need to go any further on how trans people & feminists have the same interests regarding reproductive health?

—

as for political lesbianism:

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money before having sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (i’m not sure what the conditions were like surrounding not piv sex among the straights, and therefore what the likelihood of avoiding piv sex was. I do know that rape culture was much more heavily normalized than it is now.)

“Lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included: - ace, - celibate - bisexual - gay women. Part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married, (while this next statement could be incorrect because i did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, i think the vestiges of those economic pressures such as weddings are basically the gist of “comphet”.)

The goal of Political Lesbianism as well as Lesbian Separatism was to build an economy that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, such as that of marriage, pregnancy etc. In efforts to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

However these networks, (partly due to lacking radicalization) ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. It makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> “The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210]”

[anonymoustalks]

It has a Confederate soldier memorial and statue out in front I'm shocked they didn't make them take it down

(6-18-20) You both like Politics.

Stranger: Hey

You: hi

Stranger: What's up

You: mhm sleepy mainly

You: you?

Stranger: Nice

Stranger: Just showered now I'm sitting here

You: mhm anything you care a lot about?

Stranger: Social issues

You: like?

Stranger: Hmm abortion, guns, religion, immigration

Stranger: Transgender people

You: okay

Stranger: You?

You: mhm I'm abstract

You: I'm kind of a hippie haha

Stranger: Oh haha

Stranger: I'm conservative

You: but I believe in being nice

You: that's fine

Stranger: Haha good

You: people have different beliefs

Stranger: That's fair

You: where are you from?

Stranger: US

You: one of the more liberal states or conservative?

Stranger: South East

Stranger: Conservative haha

You: oh it's late

Stranger: Oh yeah 2 am

You: I'm northeast haha

Stranger: Lol

You: what kind of things do you like the most?

Stranger: Like in general?

You: sure or big picture

Stranger: Food, guns, movies, video games

You: mhm guns for entertainment?

Stranger: Not sure what else

You: like shooting range?

Stranger: Yeah like that

You: mhm I've never been

Stranger: It's fun

Stranger: I'd like to go camping sometime

Stranger: I never have

You: really? you should

Stranger: Yeah I really should

You: does anyone in your family do much camping?

Stranger: Nah nobody

You: aww haha

Stranger: Haha

You: my family doesn't either, but I've gone a few times with friends

Stranger: That's good

Stranger: How old are you

You: 26 you?

Stranger: 20

You: mhm how is college this year?

Stranger: Well schools were totally shut down for a while haha

You: is yours opening in the fall?

Stranger: Yeah I'm pretty sure if nothing changes

You: I guess it's nice to go back

Stranger: You think we will go back into lockdown if the virus gets worse

You: idk, I think it's hard to say

Stranger: I don't think my state will

You: I think they might if the hospitals get overhwhelmed

You: otherwise I think many states will care more about the economy

You: even if there are infections

Stranger: Right bye grandma

Stranger: We gotta fix the economy

Stranger: Haha

You: it's hard to make value decisions...

Stranger: Yeah it really is

You: I guess that's politics in a sense

You: What do you think? family or economy lol?

Stranger: I have many older family members who the virus could easily mess up

Stranger: Or kill

You: right

Stranger: My grandmother is 89

You: mhm

You: so for you, you would prefer it if the lockdown stayed?

Stranger: Hmmm it's really hard to say

You: mhm

Stranger: Cause it really is wrecking the economy staying in lockdown

You: mhm

Stranger: But the risk is much higher now

You: yeah, I don't really envy the people who have to make that choice

Stranger: Pray and hope for the best basically haha

You: I guess that's for the best I guess

Stranger: Right

You: are you very religious?

Stranger: I wouldn't say very

Stranger: I don't go to church and I'm not going start now

You: ah, why not?

Stranger: But I do believe in God and all that

Stranger: Well you know the virus I meant during the virus time

You: oh yeah haha

Stranger: Sorry haha

You: sorry lol

Stranger: But maybe one day I will

You: for some reason I read that as you never went to church?

Stranger: Oh I never have I mean I've went like a long time ago

You: oh okay

Stranger: When I was still a kid basically

You: does your family still go or were they not so religious?

Stranger: They weren't so religious yeah

You: mhm kay

Stranger: They are religious but they just don't like church for whatever reason

Stranger: I guess mom has hangovers Sunday morning lmao

You: ohh

Stranger: I'm kidding but she does drink

You: yeah

You: although I can kind of vaguely relate to not wanting to go

You: I don't like to go to things in groups

Stranger: Well church at least down here has a lot of uppity bastards

You: I feel like a person's relationship with God is also a very personal thing

You: uppity?

Stranger: That treat church as like this thing like for connections

You: oh...

You: that's not cool

Stranger: Instead of going for religion

Stranger: Uppity like wealthy and snobby

You: ahh okay

Stranger: You know those types?

You: yeah, I feel very uncomfortable

You: my family also immigrated so there's a cultural difference for me too

Stranger: Where they come from

You: china ^^

Stranger: So you're Chinese?

You: yup, ethnically

Stranger: Cool

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: I'm white

You: there are not many asians on the east coast lol

Stranger: They are more west coast

Stranger: Haha

You: yep

You: I was like the only one in my high school

Stranger: Lol

You: yeah it can be awkward at times

Stranger: My highschool had no Chinese people

Stranger: We had like 1 Indian

Stranger: It was mostly just white people haha and some blacks

You: mhm

You: it's the same for us except not many blacks either

You: New England is very white

You: lol

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: We only have that big black population due to them staying after slavery

Stranger: Without the black people this place would be like all white

You: mhm

Stranger: Hmm how many gay people did it have?

You: up here?

Stranger: Yeah

You: we are pretty liberal so we had a couple

Stranger: We had like one gay one and one bisexual

Stranger: And maybe one trans but I don't know

You: mhm I think we had more lgbt people than that

You: how big was your high school?

Stranger: Pretty small compared to a typical high school

Stranger: I mean we only had 1 floor

Stranger: No upstairs

You: ahh that's pretty small

Stranger: You actually had to leave and go to the other high school in the county if you wanted certain classes

You: did you grow up in a rural area or something?

Stranger: Oh yeah lol it's all woods around the highschool

Stranger: And around my house

You: ahh kay

Stranger: Pretty cool I always thought

Stranger: But lonely too

You: yeah nature is nice

Stranger: Cause unless you go out of town there is really nothing to do for young people

You: right

You: were you always involved in politics?

Stranger: We have a movie theater that some old man owns and he plays new movies for like $5

Stranger: That's like it haha

You: oh those kind of small places are cool, at least I think so

You: I like small random bookstores and stuff

Stranger: I hope he isn't closed I mean I haven't checked

Stranger: I hope Coronavirus didn't kill his business

Stranger: Oh yeah we have lots of little random stores

You: mhm yeah...

Stranger: We have a little historical building downtown that uses to be the courthouse

Stranger: It has a Confederate soldier memorial and statue out in front I'm shocked they didn't make them take it down

You: is your local county/town/city more conservative or liberal would you say?

You: compared to your overall state?

Stranger: Very conservative socially

Stranger: Even the democrats are socially conservative they just are left money wise

You: mhm

Stranger: So thats probably why haha

You: yeah I guess that makes sense

Stranger: That was there when the building was a actual court house

Stranger: So a black guy going to court sees that lol

You: yeah I wonder what they would feel

Stranger: I broke the law in the wrong neighborhood

You: mhm I feel like it's a kind of scary thought

Stranger: Exactly it probably makes you think is the judge or jury racist

You: yeah

Stranger: The sheriff is like related to me

You: ohh really?

Stranger: Distant family

Stranger: Yeah

You: that's cool

You: is it like a small town family thing where all the families know each other?

Stranger: Lol yes everyone figures out everyone's business

You: oh lol

You: my town growing up had a significant catholic community, and they were really tightly knit

You: like some of the teachers, students, all went to same church

Stranger: Yeah it's pretty close knit here

Stranger: This place is weird

Stranger: It's like one county with three little small towns that are very close

Stranger: That almost overlap

You: huh

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: Isn't that great?

You: I mean it's interesting I guess

You: I wonder how things turned out that way

Stranger: Like you could drive 5 or 10 minutes and be in the other town

Stranger: And 15 to the other

You: I'm surprised that like with a school your size, you don't have something like a regional high school or something

Stranger: The biggest town in the county has a highschool

You: ahh

Stranger: And out in the boonies between the other two was mine

You: right

Stranger: Haha it's just interested

Stranger: Interesting

You: yeah it's interesting for me to hear

You: do you ever get new people moving into your town in stuff?

You: or is it pretty much always the same families?

Stranger: And if you shoot a gun in the yard the cops don't come haha

Stranger: I've had a neighbor do that

You: is your area mostly safe?

Stranger: Oh yeah

Stranger: My brother had a guy try to break in once

Stranger: But he scared him off

You: mhm

Stranger: Just the same families

Stranger: Rarely you'll get like a immigrant family coming

You: yeah we have a lot of moving up here

You: not necessarily immigrants, but people moving in and out of state

You: that kind of thing

Stranger: Oh I see

Stranger: You in a big city?

You: no, suburb, maybe like 45 minutes out?

Stranger: Oh I see

You: yeah, but I think a lot of people move here when they get a job somewhere

You: I guess they move out if they follow their career elsewhere

Stranger: We move out of town when we want a good job haha

You: oh lol haha

Stranger: Unless you do a store, cop job, or military

You: mhm

You: you have a military base nearby or something?

Stranger: We do have a small community college

Stranger: Oh yeah we have a national guard Armory

Stranger: You can be there I think

You: mhm

You: yeah it's cool to hear about the kind of place you grew up

You: and sort of think about how that affects politics on the bigger map

Stranger: Oh yeah lol

Stranger: That's a little about the south

You: a little about the south?

Stranger: Yeah my southern state

You: oh okay

Stranger: Haha

You: is the older generation in your area more conservative than the younger folk?

You: or not really?

Stranger: Oh definitely

You: hmm you sounded like you were pro-lgbt but not trans, if I'm guessing your position correctly?

Stranger: Yeah I don't like trans people

Stranger: But some gays are fine

You: only some? ^^

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: The ones that are normal people are fine

You: ah okay

Stranger: Like I don't like the really feminine ones or activist

Stranger: I'm bi

You: mhmm

You: okay that's cool

Stranger: Thanks

You: I'm surprised because I would have thought you would have been more supporting of other lgbt people

Stranger: Ohhh

Stranger: I guess it's my upbringing

You: you don't like the activists because... they stand out too much?

You: or...?

Stranger: Right

You: too liberal?

Stranger: I don't like the obviously gay guys

You: mhm

Stranger: And that too

You: are you out to your family?

Stranger: No

Stranger: Not yet

You: do you think you will some day?

Stranger: At some point maybe

You: mhm I get it

Stranger: But only if I'm with a guy

You: what about with your friends?

Stranger: Otherwise I'm not going to risk them having a bad reaction

You: yeah it makes sense

Stranger: I'll probably tell friends

You: mhm but you haven't?

Stranger: No just a online friend

You: aww that's sweet though ^^

You: I think it's good to be out to someone

Stranger: He's gay so he gets it

You: yeah

You: I'm happy for you

Stranger: He likes me but he lives very far off

You: aww yeah distance is a problem

Stranger: He's a British guy that wants to come move here haha

You: oh haha

You: I feel like that must mess with your timezones lol

Stranger: Lol hes conservative and likes Trump

Stranger: That's funny for a gay British person

You: yeah but hey, your sexuality doesn't define you

You: you can be conservative, liberal, whatever

Stranger: Yeah he's always sleeping when I get up

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: Or something like that

You: mhm do you like him?

Stranger: Oh yeah I do

Stranger: He's great

You: oh that's great ^^

Stranger: Haha you like hearing about this don't you

You: yeah I love hearing about this

You: it makes me smile haha

You: it's really sweet, seriously

Stranger: Maybe it is haha

You: mhm I'm happy for people when they find things for themselves

Stranger: Me too

Stranger: do you like someone?

You: yup

Stranger: Who?

Stranger: Guy or girl

You: mhm... I have a complicated situation

Stranger: Ohhh

You: oh? xD

Stranger: Are you a guy or girl?

You: well first of all, what do you think?

Stranger: I can't tell haha

You: lol

You: I guess that makes me happy

Stranger: Which are you?

You: mhm you can think of me as a guy I guess

Stranger: You trans?

You: I'm kind of have an androgynous perception of myself

Stranger: Ohhh

Stranger: I like to think of myself as masculine and all that

You: technically it's nonbinary, but most conservative people don't take that very seriously

Stranger: So you're non binary?

You: I'm not really that much of a labels person

Stranger: I don't know about that one

You: but yeah, if you want to put me in a group, that would be the most accurate description

Stranger: I know what it is but I don't know how that works

You: oh what I mean by "labels" is that I don't think the terms are important

Stranger: Oh I see

You: like bi vs pan vs whichever other term

Stranger: I don't like pan

Stranger: To me it's no different than bi

You: mhm

You: to me they're very close to interchangeable

You: but for some reason people have a preference for which term they like

Stranger: I see

Stranger: Bi makes more sense to me

You: mhm

Stranger: Bi means 2 and you like both sexes

You: yup

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: And do you like a guy or girl?

You: idk there's people who spend too much time thinking about this and come up with terms for a lot of things

You: uh, I lean towards liking guys, and a little bit less towards girls

Stranger: Ohhh

Stranger: You like a guy now?

You: nope I'm with a girl now

Stranger: Ohhh

Stranger: I gotcha

You: like if I were to give it numbers, like usually I'm more into guys like 80% of the time, and girls like 20%

Stranger: That's how I am

You: mhm awesome lol

Stranger: Lol

Stranger: It was great talking to you but I should go I think

You: okay, it was great talking!

Stranger: Goodnight

You: night

Stranger has disconnected.

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming. If you like this series, or my other work, and want to see more of the same, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who’s writing his memoir in the late 80’s. I’m gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R. Delany, he’s been namedropped on this channel before and he probably will be again because he’s my favorite writer. Delany’s writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50’s/early 60’s - that is, nearly a decade before Stonewall - and he opts to share a couple of anecdotes, which I will relate to you now.

One is about a time when he decided to come out to his therapy group. While being gay in mid-century New York brought Delany a lot of joy, he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix. By reflex, he presented himself as lonely and ashamed, though, in reality, he was neither. And, while he did eventually describe himself more accurately, he can’t help but muse, in the book, on the limits of language at the time.

Back then, the word “gay” was explicitly associated with high camp and effeminacy, where Delany is more of a bear, a term that was not yet in common usage. The default term was “homosexual,” which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder. “Queer” and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriated. So, while all the words to describe himself were, technically, available, they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men: that they were isolated, aberrant, and pitiable.

Another story is about Delany being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups. By the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secreted between parked semi trailers, any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him, but none could get a view of the whole. But, during the raid, from his vantage point, Delany saw, for the first time, the size of the entire crowd, and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops. In the morning, the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who’d been arrested, and not the 80 or 90 who got away.

Both of these stories are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self-reinforcing: A constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and, consequently, from each other. And the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by straight people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing their narrative.

Delany argues that, among the most revolutionary things the 60’s did to culture, was the radicalization of language - redefining old terms and popularizing new ones - and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers. In short, two of the most powerful tools for making any marginalized group less marginalized are Language and Visibility.

Folks, we’re talking today about Mainstreaming, the process by which a group or idea from the fringes of society moves towards the center. How strangers become neighbors and how thoughts become common sense. There is a concept known as the Overton Window, which I am not going to describe because plenty of people have done so already - link in the down there part - but, in short: as a fringe group becomes more visible, and their language becomes commonplace, their presence in society starts to seem normal. They become demystified. Some people who thought they were strange and threatening will start to warm up to them, though this does not happen across the board. Many who hated them when they were fringe will see their becoming mainstream as a kind of existential occupation of territory, as in “If this is normal now, what does that make me?”

But much of what is considered standard in society today has gone through this process.

Now, straight folks like myself often think that greater queer visibility and the proliferation of queer language is for our benefit; if our queer friends feel safe coming out to us and we know which words we should and shouldn’t use, it makes it easier for straights and queer folks to be pals! And it is true that no one gets mainstreamed without advocates in the existing mainstream, but let’s not beat around the bush: Language and Visibility are tools of consolidating power. Visibility means having a sense of your numbers. Common language means forming alliances. You get a bunch of formerly isolated gay men connecting with each other and accurately describing their experiences, you’ve got yourself a movement, with or without straight friends.

This is why it’s to the benefit of straight society to tell queer men they are isolated, because isolated queer men are in no position to make demands.

(Just so it doesn’t get left out of yet another conversation, Delany is writing about gay men because the book is a memoir and that’s his experience, but neither he nor I are ignoring that the Gay Rights movement was kicked off by trans women.)

Okay!

While the example I’m using is a positive one that any progressive worth their salt should be in favor of, mainstreaming is a morally neutral phenomenon. Culture is plastic. Any fringe group or idea can become normalized, regardless of its inherent worth. And, for a certain subset of extremely online people with fringe beliefs, who understand the ways mainstreaming has evolved in the attention economy, it can be a weapon.

We need to ask how a group of predominantly disgruntled twenty- and thirtysomething white men congregating on anonymous imageboards becomes a political movement, whose members get profiled in the New York Times, whose writing patterns are recognized by most of the internet, and whose figureheads get staffed in the White House. Where did the Alt-Right come from?

Mainstreaming is not a wholly organic process, because usually the people who get mainstreamed are actively working to become so. But people usually have only so much control over how and how fast this happens: A group expands its language and visibility; if this leads to larger numbers and greater mainstream acceptance, the process repeats, this time with a bigger group and a bigger audience; so long as there is growth, each cycle is more impactful, as the bigger a group is the faster it gets even bigger and the more common language becomes the faster it proliferates.

By all rights, if your beliefs are wildly unpopular, this process shouldn’t work. Your language and visibility don’t expand because too many people don’t want to talk like you or about you. So what do you do then? Well, normally, you either give up or bide your time, but, if you have a lot of media literacy and no real moral compass, you get it done dirty.

If the media doesn’t want to cover you, make yourself newsworthy. Threaten to publicly out immigrants in front of a crowd. Start a hoax about white student unions. Lead a white power rally and leave the hoods at home. Do the kinds of things that journalists cannot, in good conscience, ignore. Once you’ve made yourself news, they’ll feel they can’t publish a condemnation without getting your side of the story, so, bam, you’ve got an interview. The more erratic and dangerous you seem, the more they’ll want to write a profile so people can figure you out; the article about how surprisingly normal you seem in person basically writes itself. If you want to spread a conspiracy theory, send it to a small, local news site that doesn’t have the resources to fact check you; once they publish something salacious, all the bigger news channels will have to talk about it, if only to debunk it. Put provocative stuff in front of politicians; anything they retweet has to be news. In a pinch, you can always piggyback off a famous activist by making takedown videos, or, if you’re really ambitious, harass someone at a conference.

Everyone’s desperate for clicks. If you can generate them, you’ll get your message out.

If nobody’s adopting your language, adopt it for them. Make sure you and all your friends each have half a dozen fake Twitter accounts spamming the same terminology at everyone who discusses race, gender, orientation, or ability. Put every Jewish name in parentheses until everyone on the internet knows what that means whether they want to or not. Hell, don’t even do it yourself: Russia’s not the only one who can make bots. Make thousands of bots. And make sure your real account, your fake accounts, and your bots all talk the same so no one can tell the difference anymore. Make hashtags and get them trending all by yourself, and, while you’re at it, spam all the hashtags for movements you hate with porn and gore so they can’t be used. And if your words and memes still aren’t popular? Just steal words and memes that are already popular. Just decide “this? this means white power now,” “this is antifeminist now.” Saturate the web with your new usage, always insisting that you’re doing it “ironically,” while eroding confidence in anyone who uses these words in the original sense. And never stop insisting that most everyone would talk the same as you if there weren’t so much damn censorship.

Delany’s experience was having few words to describe himself that could conjure images of a gay man in a loving community. What the Alt-Right does is shout “you just call everyone you don’t like Nazis” while their people are giving interviews wearing Nazi paraphernalia; they even imply that calling dudes marching to the tune of “Jews will not replace us” Nazis is somehow antisemitic. Meanwhile they ask to be called identitarians and race realists. They want to stigmatize words that conjure images of white fascism - which, again, they very explicitly support - and replace them with words that conjure images of clean-cut philosophy majors.

And where Delany saw a group of 80 or 90 gay men reported in the papers as a group of 4 or 5, the Alt-Right wants to get reported as being much larger than it actually is. They want to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary, up to and including violence, but to ensure that, any time the cameras train on a violent act, there is a man in a suit ready to distance himself from it; to paint the picture that, but for a few bad actors, this is a peaceful movement of young, presentable intellectuals.

This isn’t simply a battle between different ideologies, this is a battle over the definition of normal. The Alt-Right knows how plastic culture can be. Their anger comes from the normalization of things they hate, and their movement exists because they believe anything that becomes mainstream can be made fringe again. Which is why, if you wanna cater to them, you promise to reassert old norms.

Much as we’d like to believe people are driven by morality, most people are driven by the desire to be normal. And when the news is filled with images of swastikas, iron crosses, and tiki torches, the guy in the suit with the fashy haircut looks pretty normal by comparison. And that’s why he wears the suit.

Thankfully, the plasticity of culture cuts both ways. Just as surely as we can lose all the ground we’ve gained over the last half-century, everything the Alt-Right does to make itself palatable can be undone. (In fact, it’s maybe beginning to happen.) It’s going to be a long road that will probably require changes to how media platforms generate traffic and a lot of new politicians. But I want you to keep a phrase close to your heart: this is not normal.

That phrase has become something of a mantra since the election in 2016. It can be misused: white supremacy, sexism, and every other kind of bigotry are part of the fabric of American life and always have been, so, even if this is more extreme than the ushe, it’s not by nearly as much as most privileged people like to think. So I want you to treat it less like an observation and more as a statement of intent. Whatever shit the Alt-Right pulls, I want you to say: this is not normal; this is not normal; this is not normal.

We will not let this be normal.

[theliterateape]

[From the Archives] America is Not the Amityville Horror or Poltergeist House

By Don Hall

The couple who moved into the house in Amityville knew about the murders.

According to the book, George and Kathy Lutz knew about the brutal murders and kept most of the existing furniture as well.

So, when the walls started bleeding and George (the white, straight man in the story) started getting up at 3:15 a.m. every morning, eventually losing his mind and becoming a murderous monster in turn, no one should’ve been surprised. Live in a haunted house and the payment is far more than property tax.

Likewise, when fictional Steven and Diane Freeling moved into the house in Cuesta Verde, the clown doll went nuts, a tree in the backyard grabs the son, and their youngest gets sucked into the Netherworld through a TV. The Freelings, however, did not know about the fact that the house was built on a Native American burial ground with the bodies of American genocide just beneath their basement. Ignorance doesn’t give them a pass, though. They were white people who bought a house on land that was stolen by other white people. The ghosts of dead Indians Natives had every right to terrorize them from their spoiled graves.

✶

There is a sense of justice implied in the ghost stories associated with houses that were either built upon or were subject to the horrors of humanity. There is also a sense of fantasy as these stories are fiction. How much fun is it to visualize that our spirits infect places and things long after we’re gone and how brilliant a morality tale to envision that wrongs done in the past can revisit us from beyond the grave? It’s like karma (via malevolent spectres) coming back on bad actors through either genetics, heritage, or the blind luck of those arrogant enough to buy a house with blood still dried in the beautiful hard wood floors.

The house that is the United States, if it were an actual house, has plenty of flakey hemoglobin on the grounds.

The legacy of genocide as white colonists brutally killed off the indigenous people to gain control of the New World. The history of chattel slavery as well as immigrant servitude that built the early Southern economy and later built the railroads. The bloody fields of the Civil War. The overwhelming evidence of men subjugating women as if they were property. Jim Crow. Nazi sympathizers leading up to WWII. The creation of massive wealth due to the arms industry selling weapons to both sides of almost every armed conflict since. The HUAC bullying and reputation destruction by a sitting U.S. Senator. 

If America were a house like in the movies, we’d be overwhelmed by the ghosts and poltergeists and revenants of a billion unjust acts.

Since America is not a house built on fictionalized bogies, however, it seems we have living ghouls cropping up to remind us that, because of the atrocious history of the country, we must discard all the good done to build it and sustain it and toss it all out in an Us vs. Them, Oppressor vs. Oppressed Joseph Campbell screenplay.

Like the Freelings, some of us live here absent of the knowledge of habitating a land founded by slave-owners and rough riders but due to our almost non-existent culture of whiteness, deserve to be crushed with guilt and shame. Others, like the Lutzes, are well read enough to understand the devil’s bargain we’ve entered into by being both white and American, and thus are complicit in the atrocities.

We are all, however, beneficiaries of the Grand Democratic Experiment. White, black, Latino, Asian, Jewish. Straight, gay and trans. We all have benefited from the capitalism that allows us to buy cheap shoes and technology created by the poorest in the world. We have all, in large and small ways, benefitted from the Constitution written by slave-owners and the economic boom following the Second World War. Contrary to the #NotAllMen or #NotAllWhites horseshit hashtags, this is a recognition that it is absolutely true that #AllAmericansAreComplicit.

#AllAmericansAreComplicit. We are all the 1% of the globe. We are either all of us guilty of the sins of our forefathers or none of us are.

So what do we do with our history? How do we live with ourselves? Why are we not all perpetually flagellating ourselves for living in a house built on the suffering and misery of so many?

To quote a man far smarter than I:

“…it does everyone a disservice to pretend that the past is just some under-evolved, caveman version of the present. We are the product of our history, our stories, our actions. I think it is reductive to judge all past culture by the lens of the present. Are Ming dynasty Chinese people idiots because they didn't know about antibiotics? I am not interested in denying our collective heritage and development any more than I am interested in embracing every story as a how-to manual for existence. I think hewing to a good/bad dichotomy determined by whatever the current loudest cultural tumult abandons nuance and the interaction and participation available in art.”  — Phill Arensberg, on Faceborg many moons ago

✶

Like Faceborg and Twitter, America isn’t an abstract concept that we can judge from afar. America, just like social media, is us. It behaves as we behave. It is a tool and a government and a heritage that the collective we, tribes of dissent and all, own and use every day.

We know about the murders and genocide the place was built upon. We hope the ghosts of that past don’t punish us for it. We still own the furniture and some of us wake up at 3:15 a.m. because we hear voices. Maybe the house needs to be destroyed or maybe it just needs a good landscaper, a solid coat of paint and a serious redecoration.

But it’s our house, not the home of ghosts.

[homosexualeo]

1. He spends half a semester staring at me across the seminar table, flirts with me over Instagram, Super Likes me on Tinder only to say “I don’t date other grad students, I just wanted to show you some love” when you then ask him out. I feel confident he never would have swiped right in the first place if we had never met.

2. Around others, they are aggressively friendly and even flirtatious. Although they make it a point to mention they love spending time with other people, other bodies, every attempt to spend time with them one on one gets deflected or expanded into group plans; either way they rarely come to fruition. Eventually, over text, they tell me they are dating someone. This is our primary means of communication; it is the one where my body is least present.

3. I ask S out, they say yes. After three dates they tell me they aren’t in a space for dating and intimacy is hard for them right now. We keep flirting. A month goes by and I ask to check in. They say nothing has changed; intimacy is still hard. Two weeks later I see them on Grindr. I know that Grindr is used for a lot of different reasons, but I wonder why we never talked abt boundaries around intimacy before breaking up, and it crystalizes what has transpired. It has happened. Again.

4. I meet a social media celebrity through A, a mutual friend. We have heard of each other, but aren’t connected and don’t follow the other. This is common for queer of color microcelebrities. Queers of color always seem to think my work on bodies is somehow not as relevant to our communities. They rarely connect with and uplift my work the way I see white people from fat communities. This night, I see them flirt with the tall, thin, light skinned friend we met through. They post my work about economies of care on their platform for Valentine’s Day. I am flattered, and wonder why we never even exchanged numbers.

5. I’m with S at a dance party, shortly before I ask them out. I turn around and they are talking to someone that had approached them and introduced themselves. I keep dancing. I turn around and they are making out. I leave to give them space. Sometime later my friend reappears near me. Before I can talk to them someone else approaches them. And then other. I give them space. At the end of the night I leave without having met anyone new, without being approached or feeling confident any attempt of mine to approach someone would be received positively.

6. I’m with S on a date at a gay bar. A lesbian interrupts us to fawn over how beautiful they are in their tall, thin whiteness. She only interacts with me to affirm their beauty. Later we are at a coffee shop. Someone approaches them for a blind date for a friend and they decline graciously. We are sitting at the same table but the person does not interact with me. And even later, they casually name a Black trans femme mutual friend as being ‘bad at rejection.’ I wonder if they have considered how an evidently superior handle of rejection is might correlate w an experience of having opportunities handed to you, an experience less common for those of us not tall, thin and white.

7. My thin friends tell me abt their dates and their hook ups. They seem to offer this information as if it were not imbued. My attempts at making these connections similarly are rarely successful. My messages get responded to so infrequently I have stopped sending them. I offer the emotional labor of processing their rejections with them, and am humbled to see that thin people experience this too. I try not to ask for it back; I’m not sure if they can hold it. I’m not sure I can ask for anything at all.

8. My queer friends of color commiserate abt having our hearts broken by white ppl and masculine ppl. I wonder why we aren’t dating eachother but I also know why. The people we are fawning over are all some combination of thin, white or masculine.

9. My tall, thin, light skinned friend A and I talk abt how their normatively desired body is fetishized and tokenized in communities. I have listened to their stories of people crushing on them. I know the discomfort and dehumanization of being fetishized or even just desired. I would still take it.

10. Someone messages me on a chubby chaser platform and I can tell they are also fat because their message is polite, cautiously friendly and purposefully vague. It reads like a message I would send. I wonder abt the collective social histories that have produced this dynamic, and also why this is the only platform where I have seen ‘married (to a woman)’ as a relationship status.

11. I go on two dates with a fat, white guy I match with on Tinder. I find him obnoxious and ultimately us incompatible.

12. I have a date invitation from a fat man of color older than me. I’m open but reluctant, unsure of how well our political beliefs and intellectual interests align. I accept halfheartedly.

13. I gaslight myself by saying standards and expectations are not luxuries I can afford if I want to be loved. I wonder if the people I want to love me ever tell themselves this.

14. I spend most of last Monday sexting with a guy on Grindr. He initiates race play by telling me to worship his big white cock and tell him how much better white men are. I do it willingly, eagerly, happily. It feels good that someone wants to be honest with me for once. It fucks up my sleep schedule and we never end up meeting as promised.

15. A new friend taps me on Grindr. I feel confused abt the whole situation and try to lean into it. He makes a big show abt wanting to hang out; I invite him over at 11pm and he takes a raincheck. We mention plans abt Friday but never confirm so I make other plans. When he txts me that morning I feel guilty and cancel my other plans. He says he will txt when he is free. I dont expect to hear from him and have a fine night alone, but it hurts to be flaked on. When he finally txts at 2am I check in abt our tentative plans. He apologizes that time got away from him and I say I understand but it felt bad, am honest abt it being triggering and ask him to be more mindful in the future. He responds affirmatively and over the next few days our previously casual and consistent texting throughout the day slows to a complete stop.

16. The next night, I have a reading with T. 3 of my thin friends show up. I realize it’s the first time I see S since they broke up with me the second time. A and C come from hooking up w different people. J invited someone they wanna kiss, who kisses them back. I come home and C texts me abt how cute T is; T texts abt how cute S is. My thin friends throw themselves at eachother in front of me, casually mention their easy access to sex and pretend I have not recently vented abt the difficult it is for me to meet people, even for casual sex. Everyone is angry at S when I tell them the story. They all seem to see themselves as different, as separate.

17. This is how it is and how it always has been. I have no reason to believe it will ever be different. I have no more good faith to cling to.

[hillaryisaboss]

Happy Birthday Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton — 3 million popular vote victor:

Youngest lawyer ever appointed to an impeachment trial. 26-year-old Yale Law graduate Hillary Rodham. Watergate.

CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND:

Investigated African American juveniles being placed in South Carolina adult prisons, and posed as a racist housewife to expose segregation throughout schools in the South.

FIRST LADY OF ARKANSAS:

Hillary successfully reformed the entire K-12 Arkansas educational system, expanded healthcare for those in rural Arkansas, worked at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Legal Services, and co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. First female partner of the Rose Law Firm.

The joke in Arkansas was that they “hired the wrong Clinton.”

FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES:

Hillary spearheaded the Adoption and Safe Families Act, the Foster Care Independence Act, Office on Violence Against Women, the Campaign Against Teenage Pregnancy (lowering abortion and teenage pregnancy rates), and the Children’s Health Insurance Program — providing 8.9 million low-income children with healthcare access.

In 1994, Hillary proclaimed on the world stage in Beijing, China:

“If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.”

TWO-TIME NEW YORK SENATOR:

Hillary secured 20 billion in federal funds to rebuild downtown New York City after 9/11. She also secured healthcare for 9/11 First Responders and expanded access to care for the National Guard, Reservists, and their families.

U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE:

Passed the first-ever U.N Resolution on gay rights (proclaiming: “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights” on the world stage), and made it so trans Americans can legally change their gender on their passport. Hillary also rebuilt relations with every nation after the disastrous Bush Administration, traveling to 112 countries — more than any other Secretary of State. Our worldwide favorability rose 20% during Hillary’s tenure. Her primary focus was on women’s rights and health, bringing up issues such as forced abortion and maternal mortality rates. Hillary re-opened relations with Burma, enacted a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and killed Osama Bin Laden. She also was instrumental in putting together the Paris Climate Agreement, something Trump has since removed us from.

HILLARY QUOTES:

“I’m not going to mislead anybody. Politics is really hard. And it is harder for women. There’s a double standard, and you can’t complain about it. You just have to accept it, and be smart enough to navigate it. And you have to have a pretty tough skin. To paraphrase a favorite quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: If a woman wants to be in politics, she has to have the skin of a rhinoceros. So occasionally I’ll be sitting somewhere and I’ll be listening to someone perhaps not saying the kindest things about me. And I’ll look down at my hand and I’ll sort of pinch my skin to make sure it still has the requisite thickness I know Eleanor Roosevelt expects me to have.” ~Hillary Rodham Clinton

“When you stumble, keep faith. And when you’re knocked down, get right back up, and never listen to anyone who says you can’t or shouldn’t go on.” ~Hillary Rodham Clinton

“I really don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what people think about me…I would be totally paralyzed. How could you get up in the morning if you worried about some poll or what somebody said about you? That’s giving up power over your life to somebody else, and I don’t intend to do that.” ~Hillary Rodham Clinton

“Every moment wasted looking back keeps us from moving forward. Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been.” ~Hillary Rodham Clinton

NEVER FORGET:

Any man with Hillary’s credentials and qualifications would have been given the benefit-of-the-doubt far more than Hillary was given. People would have been quick to say: “they’ve been around the block and had to play the game” — don’t hate the player, hate the game, right?

Yet with Hillary she was demonized. But a man would have been glorified for playing the game and winning (just like Trump was). The ironic difference is that The Clintons actually left our country in great shape while Trump went bankrupt on Daddy’s money and got bailed out by a Saudi Prince.

Hillary Rodham Clinton already made it to the White House twice with her husband, President William Jefferson Clinton. The Clintons don’t have anything left to prove.

The Clintons left us a surplus and a booming economy (23 million new jobs, 7 million fewer living in poverty, minimum wage up 20%). President Bill Clinton balanced the budget 4-times because he was a great negotiator and a true pragmatist. These days, however, both the far-left and the far-right hate pragmatists.

Instead of declaring “Clintionism” dead, Americans should remember how much compromise, corporation, and broad-based prosperity occurred during the 1990s when two pragmatists (and policy wonks) occupied the White House. Minimum wage was up 20%!

Though the '90s weren't progressive compared to today’s standards, we must remember — the Clintons were a breathe of fresh air after the “Reagan Revolution.” If not for Bill Clinton rebranding the Democratic Party, we would have been stuck with another 4 disastrous years of Bush Senior continuing Reaganomics.

During the ‘90s, Hillary helped create the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP — 8.9 million children insured) and was instrumental in all of Bill’s policy decisions. Many said Hillary was the one who actually ran the White House during the prosperous 1990s.

The Clintons will always be political icons and legends. Two-time winners that won the popular vote for a 3rd straight time. Thanks for leaving our country in such great shape! The 1990s were great. Wish we could have continued our Democratic progress with Vice President Al Gore in 2000 and with Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton in 2016.

"I've been called many things by many people. Quitter's not one of them." ~Hillary Rodham Clinton