#meeting a conservative they/them was just. in general. like I know queer people aren't a monolith but ???

[miralines]

throwback to the most baffling interaction of my life, when I was at a pride club thing for college a couple years ago and met someone who was into the magnus archives and wanted to try more podcasts, and asked me for recs

me: so I really like the penumbra podcast and stellar firma, [proceeds to give a brief plot pitch]

them: ...are those, like, anti-capitalist?

me: ...yes?

them: oh, I don't want anti-capitalist stuff, I don't believe in that

me: ...the magnus archives...is... anti-capitalist?

them: it is???

They genuinely had no idea. They also were shocked when I mentioned Daisy and Basira being an allegory for police brutality and complicity. I still have no idea how they listened to the whole thing without an inkling of any of the themes.

[gaykarstaagforever]

As an amateur marketing wizard, let me tell you why Tumblr isn't growing into the social media juggernaut Auttomatic wants it to be:

1. That isn't a thing anymore. Get with the times, Pappy. If you're not TikTok or YouTube, or the angry resthome that is Facebook, you aren't going to make money from this. Things have coalesced. You are either making all of the money or you don't get any. This is the market.

2. Their Big Idea was Live, a streaming thing they contracted another company to run for them. The Meet Group is doing good as a streaming provider. ...Tumblr is not a streaming platform. You can't just graft an unrelated thing onto another thing and ???, profit. They might as well have tried to turn it into Ebay.

They picked streaming because streaming is hip with the kids. ...On platforms that exclusively do streaming, and have robust tools to do that and promote streamers. Like Meet Group websites. People aren't looking for a cheap imitation of that, they just go to those to do that.

Sure, it could, theoretically, be a fun bonus thing. But it isn't, it is a weird thing most of us don't like or want here. Neither outcome was ever going to turn Tumblr around. Because, again, we can all do better streaming elsewhere. Why didn't anyone know this?

3. Ever since the Pornocalypse, the Tumblr base (it seems to me) trends young and rather disengaged from the platform. Teenagers drop in every week or so, look around, and move on. How were you going to generate revenue from these people with pay options? They don't have money, and what they have, they ain't spending here.

Even those of us who are here an unhealthy amount to do gay fandom stuff are in a groove with this platform where it is no-obligation. I pay for it to kill most ads, but I am an old man with a job who is bad with my money. I'm the exception. If the core demographic is people with no money, who see little benefit in paying for a thing that is bearable as a free product...they aren't going to give you money. That's the market. What was supposed to happen to change any of that? They didn't bring in older people, and they didn't offer any vital paid benefits. What...what was the plan?

4. We are known internet-wide as the sad gay website of sad gays and their sad gay blorbos. We are mined by them occasionally for our funnest stupidity, but that is this site's brand at this point. Trying to make Tumblr cool and profitable is like trying to turn your drag bar into a competator of Chick-fil-A. It isn't going to happen unless you radically alter your legacy brand. And when you do that, you immediately drive off the core patrons you have. I don't know how you fix that.

Conservatives and moms already have Facebook. They don't need Tumblr. And Tumblr is too Tumblr to be anything else. That is all it is.

Perhaps this platform is just inherently doomed to be exactly what it is, a giant queer money pit. Yahoo certainly thought so -- that's why they dumped us.

It sucks that Auttomatic can't make us profitable. And they're under no obligation to keep trying. But they shouldn't be surprised. We're fun at parties. But you can't take us home.

[silverslipstream]

the big ventbowski

CW: POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING TOPICS

The war in my head between 'are you straight and you've just co-opted a queer label because you get along better with the people more commonly found in queer communities and you identify with the culture' or 'are you still deep in internalised self-doubt due to low self-esteem, lack of experience and a significant absence of a stable queer community in every place you've ever lived?' is still raging on in my head.

God, sometimes (right now?) I feel terrible writing the word 'queer'. For me, it's the most comfortable label and way of expressing myself, but what if it's not my word to feel comfortable about? What if it's not describing me at all? What if this is all a placebo effect caused by a few misinterpreted chemical signs and my hopeless romanticism? Why can't I just fucking know?

I feel eighteen and conflicted all over again. I often say I was in denial for a very long time before I came out, and honestly I think I've never not been in denial about it. That hurts to say. Especially after I did the whole rigmarole of coming out as bisexual, crying to friends, putting up with homophobic attitudes and parental disapproval - it can't all be for nothing, right? It just can't.

It probably helps that I've had very little experience in the romantic sense. I was never going to be seen as a desirable person in school - too geeky, too disabled, too quiet. The most I elicited was a strange kind of mascot-like, objectifying sympathy from the popular girls, which was pretty gross. Especially when their boyfriends were the ones calling me things like cripple and retard, mocking the way I walked, shoving me in the stairwells, tripping me to every kind of ground they could find.

Even now, I don't get a lot of attention. I hate myself for phrasing it that way - it makes me feel pathetic, needy, desperate - but that's the easiest term to use. When out with my straight guy friends, I'm invisible, the smallest, skinniest, quietest. I feel like a wafer-thin slice of cake prised gingerly from the platter - different enough to be seen as other but not different enough that the difference itself is seen to matter. When they make a crack about me being 'gay' or 'liking men', I laugh, but I bite back the retort on my tongue.

I'm bisexual, you know this.

So what, mate? Isn't that just gay with extra steps? Or are you saying that 'cos you can't pull women anyway? Are you that desperate?

Am I?

On the other hand, I don't often 'go out' socialising with my queer friends, but sometimes even just being around them I feel so... fake. They're much more safe in their identities, secured within their respective labels' communities. The loneliness of being the only queer cis guy in my friend group hits me again and again, and then the subsequent guilt whips right back. Your friends are wonderful! They like you! You like them! Stop being ungrateful for the people you already have! But I can't shake the sense that I'm this generic indecisive cis guy spattered across their star-trails, like biting into an M&M and feeling your teeth crunch on a hidden piece of tinfoil.

Our area is pretty conservative in a country gradually sliding to the right side of the political compass. There's very little LGBTQ+ representation or community spots. Our university has a LGBTQ+ society, but it's very small, underexposed and chronically ignored by the student union and the university themselves. I look at all the other universities online, see their bustling queer communities, and feel oddly cheated. That should be me, I think in my head. University was supposed to be this place of uncoupling from my old self. I love my current friends, of course I do. It's just... I wish it was easier to meet more queer people in my area, to have more LGBTQ+ friendships that aren't determined by the landmine-dotted social islands of dating apps or tempered by the expectations of romantic and sexual relationships. To have someone else who understands what it's like to be the quiet geeky cis guy who sits on the fence of the straight/queer divide, yet you can't tell which way he's gonna fall.

It's not like I don't cultivate my own distinctive image: far from it. I wear glasses and turtlenecks, collared shirts, blue jeans and brown boots where the sole flaps precariously off the front. I've built that image piece by piece over the last couple of years, and independent of my sexuality and identity, I love that for myself. I think I have style, I'm recognizable, I like the way I look. This would've been an alien concept three years or so ago, where I hated my acne, my awkward limbs, the hard angles of my damaged muscles and crooked bones (but let's save the internalised ableism for another day, shall we?)

But the self-doubt creeps in, those thoughts that weed their way through saying things like people like you can't be pretty and who are you trying to fool? Maybe I'm trying to fool myself.

It doesn't help that the pittance of romantic experiences I do have are mostly negative. My first kiss was non-consensual: I was drunk, they were not, and they slowly but surely steered the entire night into a kiss I'd never asked for, manipulating me into something I'd never wanted. I can still remember their hand in my hair, holding the back of my head as I tried to pull away. Afterwards, they smiled, kissed me again on the cheek, like it was something we shared, something I'd wanted. I just felt sick and lost and so, so confused.

The first time I took a girl home, it was November of my first year in uni. She was a friend of a friend, who'd come up to drink and go clubbing with us. This time, the attraction was mutual - I still remember her shy eyes, her darting glances at me over the rim of a glass, the whisper of her voice in my ear asking if I wanted to go to the smoking area. After the club, we went back to my flat. I kissed her while Billy Joel sang 'Vienna' with my room bathed in half-light from the bathroom's fluorescent strips, and for a mesmerising, teetering second, it was everything. I remember thinking, it can't be this easy, not to want, not to be wanted.

Short answer: it wasn't. That's another story for another day, but suffice it to say after two months, I lost my main group of friends and was left almost totally alone, clinging to counselling like a punctured liferaft in the middle of the endless Pacific.

After that came a long drought of anything romantic, occasionally sprinkled with a flirty stranger or overly aggressive guy who thought 'being queer too' was all the consent he needed.

Then I met a boy.

It was through Hinge, because of course it was. He was shy, quiet, had dyed red hair, perpetually nervous. On our first date, it took him an hour just to compliment me, and when I gave a compliment back he looked at me like I'd just thrown a stick of dynamite at his head. He took me to buy my bisexual flag water bottle (one of the two pieces of outwardly LGBTQ+ paraphernalia I own) and that was it. We dated again, and again. He bought me birthday presents and wrapped my scarf around both of our necks. Around the lake where my late grandfather used to fish, he told me (face redder than his hair) that he wanted to kiss me. I was bowled over. We didn't kiss until our next date: drinking schnapps in the harsh fluorescent lighting of my university kitchen, I noticed his gaze lingering on my lips every time I lowered my cup.

I know what you want, I thought, I've watched so many films, read so many novels that frame this exact moment in time. So I asked him if he'd kiss me, and he did. I felt nothing.

How? How? Granted, it wasn't the world's best kiss (he approached my lips with all the finesse of a train crash) but I liked this guy, didn't I? Sure he had his flaws and things that made me hesitate, but that surely didn't outweigh the butterflies I'd had while texting him, the way I loved to fluster him and make him smile, his red hair and freckles and shyness? It should've been the Heartstopper gateway of my life, or at least the first major step of my burgeoning bisexual arc. Instead, this particular rollercoaster flew off the rails and straight into freefall.

That was five months ago. We kissed a few more times and he improved, but I could never shake that hollowness. We broke up three days before Valentine's, because I freaked out at the idea of doing romantic shit with a guy who I was so indecisive about. I kept telling myself it was for the best, that his red flags had been valid, and I couldn't afford to let the rose-tinted glasses of 'first same-sex relationship' blur them out. But was that really why, or was it just the realisation that kissing a man had done nothing for me, that I was straight and had been lying to myself the whole time?

Since I broke up with him, I've been so lost. Am I bisexual? Straight? Does the -sexual part of the label even apply to me? Am I asexual? I removed the part where I stated I was bisexual from my Tumblr pinned post months ago, so am I kicking myself back into the closet, or is the closet just a shape I scrawled on the wall behind me in crayon, a jagged attempt to belong to something, to share an experience with someone?

I can't answer these questions. That's the worst part. I want to be loved and to be in love, to find that person I'm waiting for.

But how will I know what they look like, how they might identify? How do I know I won't completely overlook them because of the labels I set for myself and the turmoil in my mind?

How will I know that I deserve them?