#people will do anything to erase lesbians from media

[ninkaku]

strange behaviour from the arcane fandom when a woman that has relations with another woman goes down a darker path and people condemn her whereas if she was a man in love with another man this would be lapppped up as “toxic yaoi”. please get a grip

[styrofauxm]

This isn't my first post on this, and it probably won't be my last. But whatever. I have things I want to say.

Before we start, I want to be clear that this isn't meant to make anyone feel bad for shipping aspec characters. It's to provide another perspective for people (especially non-aspec people) to consider when engaging with aspec characters. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with shipping any characters, but I also think there's sometimes more to it than "it's fiction and I want to."

It's Just Fiction

And actually, that's the first thing I want to address. The idea that because it's just fiction, it is harmless. That simply isn't true. We know that implicit biases can be formed and supported by fiction. We also know that fiction can reveal a writer's implicit and explicit biases. Fanfiction isn't any exception.

If an allo person writes an aspec character in a romantic relationship, without properly understanding and/or conveying that character's identity, that inaccurate portrayal of our real-life experiences is what many readers will come away believing to some extent. If the writer shows any disdain towards aspec people, even entirely unintentionally, there will be readers who walk away with bias towards aspec people. That's simply the reality of the situation.

If you don't understand aspec experiences, you bear responsibility for people who read your work coming away with the wrong idea.

Mainstream writers are rightfully criticized for bias. You may only write fanfiction, but you are not free from criticism when that fanfiction has the potential to build up harmful mindsets.

"Aro people can still date" and "ace people can still have sex" are both true. So is "aromanticism/asexuality is a spectrum." But do you understand how being aromantic and/or asexual affects how we do those things? Do you understand the identity on the ace/aro spectrum that you claim to be writing the character as? Or are you just saying those things, then portraying the aspec experience inaccurately?

I guarantee there are plenty of aspec people who would be so happy if you asked them for their insight about their experiences. Who would be delighted to double-check your fan art or beta read your fanfic. Ask us. Please. (And if you are aspec, and trying to portray an aspec character with an experience/identity you don't have, also ask!)

Of course, that only goes for fanworks that, even poorly, incorporate an aspec character's identity. What about fanworks that completely, and deliberately erase it?

To that, I ask the most obvious question: "How would you feel if someone wrote this about a gay character or a lesbian character?" Because some people's answer is "that's fine," but many people's answer is "that's homophobia." It's a double standard. It's homophobia when it's gay and lesbian identities. But it's not aphobia when it's aspec identities.

Now, I don't fully agree with either of those. I don't think that the people doing that are certainly homophobes or aphobes. But I do think that it can be an indicator of homophobia or aphobia. Obviously, not everyone who ignores the identity of a fictional character is a bigot. But it's inaccurate to claim none of them are.

Representation

Running along those same lines, let's get into representation. Here's the wikipedia list of canon aromantic characters. There are 18 characters on it. That's right, in all media mainstream enough to have a wikipedia page (which is quite a lot of media), there are an entire 18 canon aromantic characters. The list of asexual characters is a bit longer, with 72 characters. But again, there is a crap ton of media big enough to be on wikipedia. 72 characters is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.

What I'm getting at is that there is next to no aspec representation. And yet the first reaction to the confirmation of a character being aspec is one of hostility. It's justifications for shipping. It's saying that word-of-god isn't enough, or isn't clear enough, or is a lie. It's saying that only explicit confirmations count (even if it makes no sense within the setting).

Instead of what every other queer confirmation gets. Near-universal celebration of representation.

That aspec people aren't even afforded an minute to celebrate representation is awful. That the rest of the queer community would rather discourse than celebrate with us is awful.

And it begs the question: why do you find your ship more important than representation? And why is that only the case with aspec representation?

Aspec Experiences

Part of growing up aspec for many people is not even knowing that our experience is real. It's believing that there is something wrong with us and if we just do the right things then we can be normal.

The message that everyone wants to have sex and fall in love is pushed by everyone in our lives, and is supported by almost every piece of media we see.

Outside of the aspec community, our experiences are depicted as wrong.

In media, our experiences don't get shown. Or if they are shown, they are something that gets fixed by the end.

That is why we cling so hard to the slivers of representation we get. It shows our experiences as normal, as valid, as okay.

So when we see ships of those few characters, we see the invalidation of and derision towards our experiences. So yeah, a lot of us get uncomfortable.

And we shouldn't have to push that down or not talk about it simply because it might ruin some people's fun.

Aphobia in Fandom

It's not just discourse. It's dogpiling aspec people who talk about our representation. It's harassing and sending death threats to aspec people who share their opinions on shipping aspec characters. It's all of that, and more, without anyone else from the queer community stepping in and defending us.

The same happens when we rightfully point out and criticize amatonormativity and aphobia in media and fandom spaces.

The same happens when we just post a headcanon.

Aspec people can only participate in fandom on the terms of alloromantic and allosexual people. The moment we start bringing our experiences into how we interact with media is the moment we get pushed out.

Beyond the more overt stuff, there's also a ton of subtle stuff. Ranging from "friends don't do stuff like that" all the way to insisting that a character is evil because they don't feel love (whether or not that's canon).

And if a character is confirmed to be aspec? Everything gets turned onto the max setting. Ironically, canon representation has the effect of making us less safe in fandom spaces.

Conclusion

I will not ask you to put down the ship. If you want to ship aspec characters, so be it. But do so with awareness of it's actual impact.

Understand that the fanart/fanfic you make for a character can have a real impact on aspec people. Understand that you may be counteracting the positive effects that representation has on aspec people. Understand that you are making fandom spaces more uncomfortable, and even hostile for aspec people.

Final note: I will not engage with anyone who acts like a jerk. I will just block, and if necessary, report them. I will also assume that anyone posting vitriolic responses didn't read the whole post, or they would have seen this part.

[emblemxeno]

Man I hate the fire emblem fanbase so much it is hurting my enjoyment of the games. They can nitpick every little thing about Engage's and Fate's story, but watch out if you point out that Edelgard blaming the church for her experimentstion and not, y'know, her uncle who she KNOWS is an Arganthan, or how it doesn't make sense that the disappearance of 9 royals was swept snugly under the rug in the empire, or how Jeralt was suspsicious of Rheas doing to Byleth what she did to HIM, and suddenly you're a "hater" and "you have bad taste" and " lack media literacy".

3houses has the same storytelling issues Fates and Engage have, but bc the game has big tiddy lesbians and "I can fix them" traumatized characters = best JRPG since FF7. Fuck right off bruh. I'm so tired.

It does lend a lot of chances to be hypocritical in the fandom yes.

For as much as people can hate about Engage's time travel and magic stuff, or anything regarding Valla in Fates, at least those are purely fantastical. Does it erase the problems? No. But "magic world has magic things that don't need to always be explained in great detail" is-or at least should be-a sufficient explanation.

3H's issues, meanwhile, are almost always logical, informative, and communicative. Edelgard's war is predicated on logic jumps built upon exaggerated issues, an inflated ego, a savior complex, and half truths, and she herself is a canonical liar and manipulator. 3H's worldbuilding is based upon taking NPCs, books, and character biases as fact, despite there being known cover ups in Fodlan's history; to the point where it's not even fully known whether the other Hresvelg siblings actually exist. Jeralt is supposed to be 100% trustworthy as your dad, but being vigilant means you'll probably realize he's kind of shit and did a poor job properly teaching Byleth growing up.

Fates might have the Valla curse and a magic truth throne, but those things have a simple A -> B explanation and impact on that game's plot. It's easy to criticize because it's easy to understand.

3H on the other hand, you have to constantly twist yourself into a pretzel in order justify every angle and every motivation for every character in the game, mostly in service of not overly shitting on Edelgard's character, which usually results in kowtowing to her fans by shitting on Rhea, Dimitri, the church and Faerghus or, in my eyes, giving up and claiming "no one's completely in the right and that's why the story's good in the first place!"

From my perspective, if this happens, where someone can't form a rock solid opinion on even just how they personally feel/think about the writing, then either they need more time to themselves instead of online discourse or (where I lean) the writing they're discussing simply isn't that good enough to warrant engaging with its bad faith fans.

Side tangent that doesn't really fit but I wanted to say it anyway: Other FE games' moral dilemmas worked as well as they did because they were ornamental; a spice to the main emotional and thematic thrust of what their stories were trying to convey. Even the more complex examples like the Tellius and Jugdral games, weren't trying to sell their stories based on "look how complex and morally gray everything is", they were natural elements of war stories that supplemented the more major storytelling beats (Tellius' discrimination aesop, religious and political dogma, class warfare, and Jugdral's geopolitical inheritance feuds and territorial disputes, blood quantums, and passing the torch to the next generation).

3H's main drive... is the moral grayness. War horrors, comparisons between peace time and conflict, and constant conversation over "what the other side's justification is" while trying to "fix Fodlan." And the sloppy, fractured, and overly bleak attempts at nuance exemplified in the story is precisely why moral grayness shouldn't be the main factor. But people ate it up because... well, the prose wasn't too shabby I guess.

[tiger-moran]

also random note but i FINALLY got around to watching Granada Holmes, and FINALLY seeing the canon story of A Scandal in Bohemia

i would like to join the Godfrey Norton Protection Society and also the Irene Norton (née Adler) Protection Society because what in God's fucking name are all these adaptations doing with her????? i have so many thoughts (all good re: Irene, ofc), but most of them summed up are -

do the people who adapt her character for other works not have a LICK of media literacy about them? at all? she writes Holmes a fucking letter EXPLAINING WHY SHE DID IT and they're like "mm yeah shes an evil vindictive seductress who would release these compromising pictures at the drop of a hat xoxo"

Honestly both of them are portrayed so badly in almost everything, so many people can't seem to stand the idea that Adler isn't a villain or the pawn of a villain or that she isn't interested in Holmes in that way and that she can choose for herself who she wants to be with and be in the right about him and him being a decent man who genuinely loves her. Godfrey has been killed off or else portrayed as an abuser (usually meaning she has to be rescued from him by Holmes, of course) in so many texts, or in one story I remember even though she supposedly loved him she still went behind his back to sleep with Holmes. One also had her killing him shortly after they were married too if I remember rightly. (Adler being an international spy and her and Moriarty being in love is a new one to me but if anything I found that even worse than most of the other portrayals of her.)

Then I come on here and see bullshit 'hot takes' about them in my tracked tags including "I am reeling from the fact that the gothic fiction tumblr fandom is currently elevating the shit out of Norton, a completely nothing background character in a Sherlock Holmes story, only because he MIGHT love his wife back. Anyway Irene Adler is a lesbian and Norton was her comphet crush she got divorced from" so stuff like that is always fun to see, not.

I mean there are a handful of stories that have portrayed one or both of them pretty well (though unfortunately most of those tend to be stories I don't otherwise like) but yeah, they're both portrayed really badly or else Godfrey just gets completely erased and ignored so, so often. The Granada episode was one of the very rare things that didn't do them a huge injustice.

I love both of them, cos Adler is not a villain - she might well commit certain crimes sometimes for various reasons including maybe even just because it amuses her but she's not an actual criminal, she's not a villain and she's not being manipulated by a villain, she's not a terrible person, but she is unorthodox and probably someone who many people would regard at least with suspicion if not outright hostility, because she's an 'adventuress'. She's the kind of person many men then might want as their mistress but never as their wife. But Godfrey is a respectable sort of man but he knows all this about her and he still loves her and he is prepared to not only marry her but also apparently uproot his entire life to try to protect her from one of her ex-lovers, a man who almost certainly has far more wealth and power and influence than both of them.

A Scandal in Bohemia does interest me not only because of them but also because it puts Holmes on totally the wrong side initially; it has him behaving actually really dishonourably towards a woman who behaves with nothing but kindness towards him and it's only by the end of it he truly realises he is on the wrong side and that Adler was a victim not a villain. (I do still love the idea that does fit in the canon that it was Moriarty who warned Adler about Holmes after he had been approached himself by the king to get the photograph back but had refused to help him. I do love the thought of Moriarty too being captivated by her, just as Holmes is, in a way that's not remotely romantic or sexual, and in this Moriarty was the one who was on the right side while Holmes was in the wrong.)

I would love to have something which has Irene (or her and Godfrey preferably) interacting with Moriarty in a positive way - not her being his pawn or victim or 'love interest' (*barfs*) or being Moriarty herself (also not with her outwitting Moriarty because he's portrayed as a sort of 'bumbling idiot' almost) but as with everything it seems for this to exist I have to write it myself.

[nonbinarygamzee]

i feel a little guilty for this bc i do genuinely think one of the only appeals of "fandom" for me at least wrt homestuck is looking for projects where people are doing cool things, but i am sinply just not going to care about it if clown isnt involved. and im also very much going to notice if clown uninvolvement is rooted in vilifying them where you allow other "complex" characters to grow and learn. you dont have to like gamzee you dont have to focus on gamzee if you dont but like.... it is increasingly tiring to see the rest of the antagonistic(used so loosely here stay with me) trolls treated like complex characters while the one who is undeniably, deeply racist and ableist in their depiction/framing AND is the child who actively works for the child abuse demon is just thrown aside as unsalavagble evil not worth examination, usually with some half assed comment about being an abusive man.

like. i love vriska genuinely i do. but if we can blame all of gamzees intricate issues on the notion they are a capital m Man and somehow erase the fact this is also a child and a very bad-faith coded one at that, then why is is still so illegal to utter anything about vriska invoking a very very white woman centric abuse of power + refusal to engage her past when she changes...? like i dont get into my identity shit on here but i am a lesbian and i am a traumatized person who has crazied in ugly ways bc of my abuse, i understand as much as anyone else why vriska deserves to be looked at with complexity and sympathy and its undeniable a lot of what happened wrt fandom bullshit related to her was rooted in misogyny but my god am i sick of the refusal to engage with other forms of marginalization ESPECIALLY alongside the insinuation people were not horrifically harrassed for those reasons with gamzee or their attachment is inherently more vapid than others. theres thoughts i have wrt treating gamzee likers as stupid and incapable of analytical reading (and therefore less valuable to hear from regardless of other things that may tie them to this extremely loaded piece of media) which hits on weeeeird biases on its own but ok back to my hole.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

My name is Jaimee Michell. I am a lesbian woman and the founder and president of Gays Against Groomers. We are a nonprofit organization of gay people who seek to end the sexualization, indoctrination, sterilization and mutilation of children happening under the guise of “LGBTQIA+".

Gay people are not a monolith. I am here to tell you that not all of us are on board with this new modern rainbow movement we are seeing now. In fact, it is the majority of us who are not. That is why I started this organization. I could no longer sit by and watch this toxic ideology be foisted upon children in our name — in my name… I knew I wasn’t alone.

There was just no united front to voice our public dissent to what is being done. So I decided to create one. And now in just a little over a year, we have 17 chapters across the United States, over 100 members, and more than 700,000 followers on social media.

We have also been banned from 11 platforms in that short time, most notably being PayPal and Venmo. They’re clearly terrified of us speaking out from inside the community, and to be completely honest, they should be. They don’t know how to handle us, because they can’t dismiss us as homophobic, transphobic bigots like they do all of you, although they certainly try.

Protecting and safeguarding youth should not be controversial. It should be something everyone can agree on, but clearly that isn’t the case anymore.

The truth is, we never consented to pornographic filth being given to children in schools. We never consented to woke doctors sterilizing and mutilating children in our name. We never consented to radical trans activists taking over and speaking on our behalf.

These people, as well as every major institution in this country are actively manipulating the public and trying to use the rights that we fought for as an excuse for their grotesque behavior and the lies that they tell. Yet these are the same people who preach about how they promote love and acceptance. We beg to differ.

So called “gender affirming care” on minors has been banned in countries across western Europe and has been appropriately labeled the biggest medical scandal since the lobotomy craze. Doctors and scientists in these countries have recognized that gender ideology and the medical practices that go with it are catastrophic for developing children. It is also deeply homophobic at its core.

Without medical intervention, more than half of the children who express feelings of gender discomfort would otherwise grow up to simply be gay adults, according to many scientific studies. There is no wrong way to be a boy or a girl, and telling them otherwise is evil. It’s abundantly clear and cannot be denied that medically transitioning children is the new conversion therapy, only 1000x worse.

These children are being treated like lab rats. And we at Gays Against Groomers have helped pass over a dozen laws and policies across the nation to ban this barbaric practice. We plan on making child sexual mutilation illegal in all 50 states, whether these monsters like it or not.

This ideology is toxic, hateful, violates boundaries, and LIES. It lies to parents, to children, to us… to everyone.

It takes advantage of the most impressionable and vulnerable. Children cannot consent to these interventions. No child can make permanent decisions about ANYTHING, let alone becoming sterile and chopping off body parts. And NO CHILD is born in the wrong body.

Not only is this agenda hurting children, but us as well. The radicals who have hijacked our community are setting us back decades with their assault on children. The acceptance we as gays and lesbians fought to achieve in this country is now being erased seemingly overnight, and it’s devastating for us to watch happen.

We are deeply grateful for Moms For Liberty who are willing to listen and work together. We sincerely believe that the most effective way to end the war on children is by uniting together. Despite our differences, we all share the common goal of saving these kids.

No matter how many times they try to censor us, the truth WILL prevail. They can try to shut us up, but we will never keep quiet. We will not make peace with an ideology that seeks to sexualize, indoctrinate and amputate the healthy body parts of children. We will not let them continue this abuse in our name.

We have a mission and we're not going anywhere. We hit the ground running in our first year. And together, we will restore common sense and reality, and eradicate the social contagion that is poisoning the minds of our youth.

If you would like to learn more about our movement or make donation to help us end the war on children, please visit gaysagainstgroomers.com to learn more.

Thank you.

[rodolfoparras]

That poor dude...you answered to him in the best way possible. But I have a feeling that he's young like maybe at least 18 -20 still learning so I can't really blame him. I was once in his position I said something like that as well. It was because I was lost because my family was homophobic as well so I said random crap when I was his age, im still young myself only 23 so still learning myself but i have faith in him I hope that break he said he's taking helps him out a little. I'm just glad nobody is legit angry or him or well I hope they aren't, some people can't express themselves fully like that. Especially if you Live in a state where you really can't but I try but I live in Texas so...call it a "gay intuition" but I feel like it's because he also lost someone important to him that he was really close to and he might also live somewhere that he can't really show himself and he's scared too because looking through the post he made on your stuff he seems liked a good dude he just needs someone there like a lot of people do because like another anon said some people can't really express themselves. So when that no56yu dude returns I hope he's somewhat better, because I also get it somethings do get screwed into your brain, you try to get it out of your mind but something is stopping you from doing it. Maybe thay why he said that? Idk I'm just saying some stuff I had from my own experience

Thank you sm for your kind words sugar! I do try to formulate myself in a way that serves to educate rather than attack because we won’t get far with that mindset

I also understand when you say that he’s young he has a lot to learn, we all come from different walks of life I can’t compare my growth to anyone else and be like “why didn’t you educate yourself faster” however it is important that we do try to educate each other and start to learn about our history and it’s clear that this isn’t ops own thoughts like this is the usual argument you’ll see all across social media when pride month is mentioned any negative feelings aren’t specifically targeted at op but rather at society for making someone who is part of our community speak/ think this way

Pride month is the perfect month to educate yourself about lgbt history and I do want to say how important it is to educate yourself because what happens if you don’t is you’ll have a group of oppressed people who will attack people in their own community

I don’t rmr the term but someone equated it to ants in a colony where they’ll kick out the weak ants so the colony doesn’t suffer. That’s why for example trans ppl will talk down on people who use neopronouns bc “it’s pushing it” “yeah these aren’t real pronouns” they fear of losing the sliver of privilege that they have and that’s why they attack their own

Same with gold star lesbians why do you think they exist? Because society has told them that of course every woman wants a man and when they’ve finally convinced society that there’s a group of people who don’t want anything to do with men, you’ll get gold star lesbians who fear that lesbians who have been with men previously will ruin the little privilege they have

I do want to say that if you continue life that way it’ll come a day where you’ve erased your own identity despite staying in the frame of what’s considered acceptable

[nix-whythisfilm]

Movies and Shows to watch this Women's History Month

Coming from a culture where women are only celebrated selectively, and worshipped as a goddess but also are the majority of victims in the crimes here, I hope we can take back our power and find equality in this world that's meant for us all. From naive young girls to wise older women, from tomboys to prep girls, from emo girls to it girls, from straight girls to lesbian women, from ciswomen to trans women; a very happy women's day, including the identities I might have missed out on.

You are all valid. You are all worth it. You are all powerful. You are all more beautiful than any words can describe. You are more than what you look like. You are more than what other people see you as. You are so much more than any wild imagination. 

Bridgerton (2020)

With a new upcoming season about the fictional Queen from the first two seasons, the series has everyone biding time in anticipation. The series is based on the books written by Julia Quinn, eight books for the eight Bridgerton siblings. The show is said to be adapted a little differently, focussing on different details and following a different narrative. The first season is set like a typical chick flick, with the oldest daughter having regal confidence and feminine finesse with everything expected of her. The second season takes on a bolder tone, showing us the perspective of the older brother, known to be a rake, looking for a gentle wife, only to meet a pair of siblings opposite in their natures, both challenging his opinion of love.

I initially found this series through the buzz on social media and the modern aesthetics it appeals to despite being set in Regent England. The music was what drew me in, being classical adaptations of modern songs, but what kept me was the way women were not shown in any distinctive way but as themselves. The show highlighted the little details people forget are a part of being a woman, such as not being educated on the duties of a marriage or the quiet strength we all possess through our social capabilities and gossiping skills. It was amusingly empowering to watch how the women took power by not doing anything special but only by being a typical women.

Gangubhai Kathiawad (2022)

Based on the story of Gangubhai Harijeevandas, this film involves a girl running away with her lover only to be sold to a brothel and forced to work there. While the story is all too common to an Indian and gives us a chill every time we hear of something similar, this film brings us a side of the story that is often shunned and not accepted. Gangubhai was a prominent figure in Mumbai in the 1960s, fighting for the rights of sex workers and orphans rising from the red light districts. She has been shown to change as her life demands and took charge of the brothel she was sold to and was very well known in Kamathipura.

Chilling and raw, this film gave us the reality of sex workers in a barely romanticized narration. Alia Bhatt's performance is startling, and by the end of the film, we can find ourselves having a different opinion of the women in that profession. They have made it widely clear that she not only promoted their commercial prospects but also highlighted the confidence and sense of power in the women there to give them a choice in their lives. She fought for her life, her freedom, and the freedom of choice for other young girls who found themselves in her place. While many others would say that the film glorified the dangerous space that women and children could be stuck into, I will go ahead and say that things that cannot be erased or changed should at least be provided with the space to adapt as required.

Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung (2019)

Set in Joseon, this series is about the historians who worked in the Royal Courts of Korea, noting everything that happened, from simple interactions to actions taken concerning state matters. They were to be present at all places, documenting silently, around the King and the Court Officials. While politics and patriarchy were present nearly everywhere in that era, this show features a fictional prince who presented the idea of having female historians who would record everything that happened around the Queen while also providing challenging work opportunities to women of that era, who were always held back from higher education.

This series is remarkable for anyone interested in Journalism and gender equality. The main character is a modern thinker who goes out of her way to make people have uncomfortable conversations. Another thing that stood out to me from this show was the way they resolved the major conflict using non-violent methods, and the strike of honest intellectuals was justified from their perspectives. The series highlighted the importance of honesty and the way history is recorded. It focuses heavily on dramatic politics and simple romance, but they equally discuss the importance of literature and history, in the process.

Tribhanga (2021)

Another jewel is this list, this film was written and directed by women, with a story involving mothers and daughters. The movie appears to break the fourth wall, where the characters seem to be talking directly to the audience, but as a start, the story begins with a prominent self-made dancer who hears of her mother being in the hospital. The scenes quickly cut to her hurrying there with her newly married daughter to the hospital, where her estranged mother has slipped into a coma. The film continues with Milan, a follower of Nayantara's work, pleading with everyone to talk more about her story as the mother, who was an author, was in the process of writing her autobiography.

The movie was entertaining, to say the least, and a caressing memoir at its best. Through tears and yelling, fights and hardships, the entire story of three generations of women comes to light in the span of this film. It starts with the mother who separated from her family to be a writer and raised her daughter as a single mother, who then grew up through her hardships to become an accomplished dancer and celebrity. Anuradha was a single mother who raised a confident, poised daughter who then chose to marry into a large family to have the life her grandmother had abandoned. The story picks and talks about the nuances of being a woman while feeling like a personal story to every woman who watches it.

Happiness (2021)

An unlikely genre for this list, this series is a horror-thriller show involving a fast-spreading disease that turns humans cannibalistic. Set in South Korea, this disease spreads much like Covid and the authorities take quick action to control the spread. The story mainly focuses on an unusual couple who move into an elite gated community of apartments. With their jobs being a challenge and being discriminated against for their job benefits, the show quickly focuses on the disease and the ripples of fear it has in the community. I put this show here in this list because the character Park Hyungsik plays, who is an unwavering feminist who goes above and beyond for his wife.

With not much buzz about this show, I discovered it in my interest in watching Hyungsik's work and was pleasantly surprised by the way they captured people's reactions to their epidemic. It was accurate with how the Covid pandemic happened and the trauma a disease can bring to any community through its horror elements. While there are numerous female characters in this show, some antagonistic in nature and others part of the complete story, the series can easily be categorized into a work that captures the story through the female gaze. It's a surprise how well the movies and series can be perceived differently when the perception of the director is guided by their gender.

Bell Bottom (2019)

A Kannada film set in the 1980s, the story follows a man struggling to be recognized as a detective and finally finds a crime that seems like a mystery. Rishab Shetty and Haripriya come together to show us a fresh story that scratches the back of our necks until the end. With their romance bringing an easy laugh and dynamics around the small town that keep us engaged, this film is sure to leave the audience thoroughly entertained.

Curious about the actors' work, I found this film a unique slice of entertainment. The cultural details of this story are highlighted excellently, and the feminist factors need to be dug into passionately. But through it all, the film can be called an easy and entertaining watch. Interesting with narratives that audiences are unfamiliar with, this quirky film brings us a unique set of feminists and characters that cannot be put into stereotypes.

Wheel of Time (2021)

Honestly, underrated for the breathtaking show that it is, this series deserves a much bigger audience. Following a prophecy that was foretold and fighting wars that are beyond humanity, this show is filled with beautiful visuals and meaningful narratives. It starts with one woman guiding five others through the trials for the people they are predicted to be and the story takes us through a journey beyond our imagination. With simplified concepts of fantasy and a world of politics, this show is ruled by the many women who control the stories of numerous others in the show.

A show that was exhilarating and left me wanting more, it was led by women in places of power who decided the fate of people with magic. A unique concept of only women having magic, this series brings us a tale that was written decades ago and gives us characters of various cultures coming together to fight against unfamiliar darkness. With every character holding the potential to be a game changer and everyone hustling to be in places of power, this series presents us with an intimidating world, quite similar to the one we are living in right now. And through it all, it also shows us women finding themselves and bonding with other women in ways that are not highlighted in reality nearly enough.

Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh (2016)

Raw and magnetic, this film is about a woman who defies odds thrown in her direction that are beyond ordinary. It starts with a haunting accident and leads a police officer to investigate it, only to find a woman he never expected to see with a daughter. With her daughter missing and criminal charges against her that make no sense, this film takes us on a sombre journey of her past and the things she faced. The movie has a grip over us with Vidya Balan playing Durga Rani and Arjun Rampal playing the police officer. This film is a slap of honesty and mostly focuses on the various women involved in this story who might not always be loyal to their gender.

Shocking me beyond imagination when I first watched it, this story managed to grip me even today with the narrative of a terrified woman facing the world by herself while also taking on responsibilities that were not hers to begin with. With dangerous people always around her, Durga Rani manages to do the right thing by herself and everyone who depends on her. This film empowered me on the struggles of being a survivor and ways one can push themselves to be more than their ruinous experience. Rooted in India and navigating the clutches of patriarchy, this film is a wake-up call to the silent bystanders and people who believe ignorance is better.

How to get away with Murder (2014)

Following the story of Annalise Keating prominently, this show is a dynamic punch for any audience. The show focuses on murders every season, involving the diverse characters of the show, who all grow through the six seasons. While the first season starts off with a student's narration, the following seasons involve the lives of the main characters and conclude with a full-circle story of Annalise. An intimidating woman to most, and a terrific teacher and lawyer to the rest, Annalise is a complex character who can be studied through various approaches. This show was unique with the narration having a feminist approach and having main characters that do not belong to the mainstream crowd.

I began this show hesitantly, expecting it to be a slow watch that would take me aeons to finish. Instead, I finished the entire series in three weeks and was left reeling on how they managed to involve a plethora of ordeals the characters experienced. From losing loved ones to doing the right thing, from being a single mother to experiencing health complications, from menopause to the struggles of being a part of countercultures, this show has managed to put it all together. Women in this show have been shown as the people they are, with their faults and quirks. Women from all stereotypes have been a part of this show, and somehow, the show manages to empower us with its dark truths and dangerous struggles.

Pieces of a woman (2020)

A heartbreaking film on the experience of losing a child, this film focuses heavily on the woman who lost her baby after birth due to complications. While movies exist about the loss of a child and the many labours of miscarriages, a film had never been made before about the experience. The directors, a couple who experienced this personally, brought out this script after surviving the struggle that was never spoken aloud about. Vanessa Kirby has played the character so beautifully it leaves us speechless on the woes a human being could go through.

Having found this film through a friend, we later wrote a paper on this and nuances that would be commonly missed out. The film is incredibly insightful on the details of motherhood and the changes a woman's body goes through post-pregnancy. It focuses on the way loss can affect a woman and a man, and how both adapt to it differently. The most important element highlighted throughout is the way a woman is expected to cope after a miscarriage. While we all hear the numerous pressures a woman goes through in her life, this film sheds light on the way a woman is expected to behave a certain way even through uncertain, hopeless times.

Bombay Begums (2021)

Starting with women in powerful positions this mini-series takes us on a ride with the stories of four women at different times of their lives. They belong to different social classes and have different aspirations, but they all are shown to have challenges that only someone would experience as a woman. While some are struggling for power and money, others are grappling to hold on to relationships and personal-social ties. Some women here are stumbling to balance everything as women are always portrayed to be doing, while others are exploring their options and finding themselves in the midst of everything.

I was confounded when I finished this series, only having imagined it to be a dramatic show with a plot carried by women. It had nuances to their struggles that couldn't have been explained in mere words and brought out their personalities in ways a male director could never. The series humanized the women to the people they were while also shedding light on the experiences that women are privy to. I recommend this show to every woman as it has captured something that has never been done before. The dialogues hit home as the story moves in an unpredictable direction leaving us with a sharp sting of reality over 6 episodes.

Easy A (2010)

A very typical American chick flick, this film is light-hearted and packs a powerful message. It starts with Olive, a seemingly normal high school girl, making up one lie about having a college boyfriend to appease a nagging best friend. The story then spins out of control quickly with wild rumours about her spreading all over her school making her a subject of gossip and school scandals. Being the good-hearted girl she is, she helps out anyone she can with the attention that she now commands, and once again the narrative is taken for a spin to paint her as a girl with loose characters and a nympho.

I watched this film years ago on television and thought about how people could miss the entire point of the film and only focus on the romantic ending of her story. Having "Scarlet Letter" as the prescribed text in the film, the students all witness their scandalous woman, when she starts dressing as they painted her in spite and to claim her power. A film aimed at teenage girls, this film can easily be watched by anyone who enjoys humour. We see a perspective that is often missed out in chick flicks and a main character who takes power in the stereotype she is pushed into. All in all, time spent watching this would be well entertaining.

[opinated-user]

Anyone else think her Huntlow post was a bit…unhinged?

I mean, I like the show. I don’t care enough to join a discord or anything, but it’s a fun watch.

But her constant accusations of the fandom being racist or emo edge-lords is starting to take up her identity as a fan of the show. And as someone who has only tackled a bit into the (tumblr) side of the fandom, I think majority of them are sane, nice people. Sure, there’s always a bigot, but what fandom doesn’t have one? They generally accept anyone until that someone crosses the line.

Idk, I read her post and I was just thinking “bitch where” every sentence. Where is she getting these crazy accusations from?

“People like Hunter because he’s a white boy”

“They only ship him with Willow because Luz and Amity were taken. Also something something racism”

“Wannabe edgelords won’t shut up about Huntlow”

…what are you talking about? What’s wrong with people liking characters you don’t? Just keep away from them! It’s not hard!

I think this woman needs to stay away from this fandom. All she adds is toxicity and unnecessary conflict between fans.

i think LO legitimately just forgot that a not small portion of the TOH fandom are teenagers, a majority of them probably teenager girls or afab people, because the show is all about that demographic. i always found it so disgusting for a grown woman on her 30s to go around telling teenage girls that they couldn't find a teenage fictional boy attractive. that would be some "i'm not like other girls" type of behaviour that reeks of internalized misogyny if LO was of their same age, but since she's a lot older than that? it's... pathetic. i actually don't have another word to describe it. it is pathetic for a 30 year old woman to be this mad about what teenagers girl like online on a show that was made for them, not LO. side note: that is not straightwashing means. Luz is bi so she dating a boy wouldn't contradict anything at all about her canon identity. i feel like LO slip up here by showing off, once again, that to her the only valid representation is when there is a romantic/sexual relationship between two people of the same gender and nothing else. a bi girl dating a boy is not legitimate representation according to LO, who loves to commit some bisexual erasure even against real life bisexual women who disagreed with her by calling them straight too. bisexual women are always queer, no matter who they date. here Rowan Ellis (no relation to Lindsay Ellis so LO can relax) made recently a whole video going in depth about the concept:

i do really recommend people to watch it, but to make it short: straightwashing is when a company decides to take a character that was established to be queer on it's original story and erase that identity when translated into other type of media. example: character was a lesbian on the novel, gets a boyfriend without any mention of queerness in the movie adaptation. people writing fanfiction can't do that because fanworks are never going to be on the same level of legitimacy as an official adaptation. those people who, again, on this context are most surely underage, afab and likely to be not straight themselves. people with zero power to erase the canon identity of any character like big production companies have. as to "fans of white boy needing to calm down"... i'd say the same about the 30 year old woman who celebrates for the death of a fictional teenager boy in a show made for tweens.

[mithliya]

Hello! Can you suggest to read anything (article or books) on comphet? Long story, I slept with men, but I didn't ever felt attraction to them. I spend nearly decade 'fixing' myself, bc my first ever experience was sexual assault and then another and grooming. And then men I tried to date dropped me like hot potato telling everyone I'm frigid, which made me ashamed. They treated me like I am defected, hinting I am mentally ill. For not acting like what women in porn act at damn age of 16 bc from watching porn they insisted they know on women biology! I did not have any sex-ed anywhere so I legit knew nothing on my own biology. I did not know I am not experiencing sexual attraction bc I did not know how it works! Just these men telling me I'm not like other women. Not passionate. Women just so happy insisted I am frigid bc of the assault trauma, but I can train myself with practice. And that it's natural state to date men and my mental health issues would heal etc. Include some threats of godly punishments. I had more horrible exp, and I only now begin to realize that while yes majority of my exp were forced and later brain repeating trauma in hopes to fix it with repeating, it was also traumatic bc I can't feel a shred of attraction to men. I was madly trying to date at least any men with 'oh maybe I will not be revolted with him, or with him, or with him, bc I need to fix myself!!! I can't live being that way!' Like, honestly, mostly anything beyond a chaste kiss on the lips revolted me, but I kept making myself endure it over and over in hopes that I will 'get used to it'. Bc I was told how I react is abnormal. I froze 99% of time and could not tell 'no' or 'stop'. I was terrified when I felt that revolt first time from a kiss with guy, bc I was expecting first kiss as the dream exp, but first one was assault from drunk adult on my 15yo self, and then second was willing, but revolt I felt was extreme!! But all media and culture told me it would be the most magical exp! And everyone around acted that way too! My life was crushed and I had no idea how to live with it. And I did not tell anyone for years, being ashamed of my 'defect', just obsessively fixing it. And when I did told, women my age or older told me it will be ok once I meet the right guy/ I can just get used to it. My health, life, education, everything suffered from the cptsd I developed. I mean, now I have no idea how I was able to do it, bc no pressure can make me repeat any of it. But I was so ashamed of being frigid. And was sure it destines me to die alone. I legit was sure I am abominated defected freak and later started to act that part. It took some horrible rape for me to stop and go 'ok I will be freak, I will die alone, I will not leave the house actually at all, bc I can't take it anymore' and only then I was able to stay safe of assault and abuse. It took me many years of therapy before I stopped being dissociated from my body enough to be aware I have attraction to women instead. And I honestly don't think I am worthy of dating bc I feel stained, unpure, and generally to ashamed with all these experiences. I mostly did that all myself to myself. Honestly my worst fear is people thinking I am bi, bc saying I'm bi would erase that decade of suffering of 'what is wrong with me' I asked for books or anything, bc it makes me feel a bit less crazy if i read on similar experiences? Some things I still struggle to put together and the level of pain I feel is extreme as you can imagine.

hey anon, i’m sorry you went through all of that. it sounds quite traumatic, some of it overlaps with my experience (not knowing what’s wrong with me, trying to “fix” my lack of attraction, being dissociated and disconnected from my feelings, not feeling the way other women felt about men)

i honestly don’t know any resources that would help you. around a decade ago, i stumbled across the term “comphet” from other lesbians and they were mainly talking about it like.. ignoring your feelings because you think you must be attracted to men, even if there’s no evidence of that in your life. the more recent sources i’ve seen into comphet & more traditional sources are often moreso aligned with political lesbianism so i dont think it’s that helpful to any actual lesbians. i’ll instead reiterate the points that resonated with me back then:

1. having to dissociate to be with a man (can also be a sign of trauma)

2. choosing “crushes” on guys mostly to appeal to your friends or fit in

3. not being able to have sexual fantasies involving men (this does not include flashbacks or intrusive thoughts, but rather actual sexual fantasies)

4. sexual interactions with men feel forced & are unwanted

5. you are unable to envision a future with a man

6. mistaking feelings of anxiety or fear or nervousness for attraction to men (could be trauma-related, i advise to look back to before your trauma & analyse how you felt)

7. you felt the need to use substances to be able to get through sexual interactions with men

8. you have had to convince yourself that you somehow like a guy and practically choose to make yourself like him, whereas it comes naturally with women & is out of your control

9. you pretend to have certain feelings for men to appeal to others rather than genuinely having them

10. building on 9, playing up a romance with a man for public image purposes

11. struggling to relate to other women when they fawn about other guys

12. having beliefs that all other women find women attractive & think men are gross, but it’s just your obligation to be with a man anyways (so it’s not something you want, but something you HAVE to do)

i cant think of others but honestly what i generally recommend is to think through your life, & especially in your case think BEFORE the trauma. it’s tough because the trauma was at a young age, but it can muddy things as there are bisexual & even heterosexual women who become repulsed my men because of trauma. so think of your life before then, did you have feelings for guys? did you have male celeb crushes? or were they only female? don’t think of how you pretended for others, think of how you genuinely felt about it.

the things you said to me do not sound wanted and it sounds like you were afraid to speak up and would freeze in fear (a common trauma response). but again, it’s hard to know whether this trauma response is rooted in having a traumatic experience prior to this or if it is rooted in sexuality. don’t feel rushed to choose a label either, it took me several years before i felt confident enough to call myself a lesbian & it took a lot of introspection into my own life because like you, i was deeply dissociated and disconnected from myself (partially due to trauma & partially bc of pre-existing mental illness). being in such a state for prolonged periods can make it hard to understand your genuine feelings, but it’s possible.

also my recommendation is also to not look through comphet stuff online lol because nowadays people use it to even mean that they are attracted to guys & sometimes want to have sex with them, it’s unhelpful and might further confuse you. i wish i could share the stuff i read in the past about it but it’s all lost at this point 😭 good luck anon, take care of urself & take ur time figuring things out!!

[mirrorofprinces]

Hi! So i've been made aware of the latest polemic and i don't really wanna get involved, but I have a question. I read one of the infamous “het fics” (i am talking about the one where kinn it's a woman and she kinda? discovers that she is bi) and, well, i didn't find anything wrong with it. So I wanted to ask what was your opinion about this this or why do you think this is wrong. Again i don't wanna stir any shit, so feel very free to ignore me if you don't want to talk about this anymore.

cw for sexual assault mention.

this is all i'm going to say about this specific issue, and i'm not going to elaborate any further because there are a wealth of resources at your fingertips you can access for a better understanding, and other lesbians who are more prepared to exert the emotional labour of education.

as a lesbian, i am personally so fucking done with the "lesbian gets turned bi or straight" shit. this is not just a fun little trope when it has a very real and traumatic, violent history to it that exists outside of media and fanworks. on the lighter end of it, people (especially men) fetishize and hypersexualize lesbianism to the point where they don't take lesbians seriously and view our sexuality as a joke or as a performance for men, and on the heavier end of it, that shit leads to harassment and corrective rape. lesbians make up such a minuscule percentage of the LGBTQIA+ community as it is, yet we are constant targets.

to speak specifically about kinn, we need to remember kinn is not bi. kinn is homosexual. why go through the extended effort to erase the homosexual lead when there is already another lead character in the same show, that canon presents to us as being 5000% closer to the definition of bisexual? why can't gay people be allowed to be gay? the only other time i have ever seen a canonically gay ship turned straight was by a weird christian fic writer. so if that doesn't alarm you, i don't know what to tell you.

i feel like i'm constantly repeating myself at this point, but i'll say it again: everyone is free to write whatever they want, but no one is free from criticism about it.

[69balcony]

Larry Kramer Speech at Cooper Union

“The Tragedy of Today’s Gays”

November 21, 2004

I think this has been the most difficult speech I have ever had to write and to deliver. It is a long speech. I pray you will bear with me until its end.

It is an attempt to give you some idea of who and what we are up against. It is also an attempt to discuss our ability to deal with these.

I recently learned about two dear friends, both exceptionally smart and talented and each in his own way a leader of our community. One, in his middle age, has sero-converted. The other, in his middle-age, has become hooked on crystal meth. Both of them are here with us tonight.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all these things.

To us it defies rational analysis that this incompetent dishonest man and his party should be re-elected. Or does it?

I hope we all realize that, as of November 2nd, gay rights are officially dead. And that from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine. This past week almost 60 million of our so-called “fellow” Americans voted against us. Indeed 23% of self-identified gay people voted against us, too. That one I can’t figure.

The absoluteness of what has happened is terrifying. On the gay marriage initiatives alone: 2.6 million against us in Michigan. 3.2 million in Ohio. 1.1 million in Oklahoma, 2.2 million in Georgia. 1.2 million in Kentucky. George Bush won his Presidency of our country by selling our futures. Almost 60 million people whom we live and work with every day think we are immoral. “Moral values” was top of many lists of why people supported George Bush. Not Iraq. Not the economy. Not terrorism. “Moral values.” In case you need a translation that means us. It is hard to stand up to so much hate. Which of course is just the way they want it. Please know that a huge portion of the population of the United States hates us. I don’t mean dislike. I mean hate. You may not choose to call it hate, but I do. Not only because they refuse us certain marital rights but because they have also elected a congress that is overflowing with men and women who refuse us just about every other right to exist as well. “Moral values” is really a misnomer; it means just the reverse. It means they think we are immoral. And that we’re dangerous and contaminated. How do you like being called immoral by some 60 million people? This is not just anti-gay. This is what Doug Ireland calls “homo hate” on the grandest scale. How do we stand up to 60 million people who have found a voice and a President who declares he has a mandate?

The new Supreme Court, due any moment now, will erase us from the slate of everything possible in no time at all. Gay marriage? Forget it. Gay anything, forget it. Civil rights for gays? Equal protection for gays. Adoption rights? The only thing we are going to get from now on is years of increasing and escalating hate. Surely you must know this. Laws and regulations that now protect us will be repealed and rewritten. Please know all this. With the arrival of this second term of these hateful people we come even closer to our extinction. We should have seen it coming. We are all smart people. How could we not have been prepared?

They have not exactly been making a secret of their hate. This last campaign has seen examples of daily hate on tv and in the media that I do not believe the world has witnessed since Nazi Germany. I have been reading Ambassador Dodd’s Diary; he was Roosevelt’s ambassador to Germany in the 30’s, and people are always popping in and out of his office proclaiming the most awful things out loud about Jews. It has been like that.

All Mary Cheney is is a lesbian! Even her mother is hateful! That Cheney must be one fucked-up kid to stick around that family. I hope she doesn’t want to teach school. One of the reelected Congress persons vows to make it illegal for lesbians to teach school.

I know many people look to me for answers. Perhaps that is why many of you are here. You want answers? We’re living in pigshit and its up to each one of us to figure out how to get out of it. You must know that by now. Crystal meth is not an answer. You must know that by now. And quite frankly statistically it is only happening to so few of us that it is hard to get anyone worked up about that problem. Just as it hard to get worked up about a middle-aged man with brains who sero-converts. You want to kill yourself. Go kill yourself. I’m sorry. It takes hard work to behave like an adult. It takes discipline. You want it to be simple. It isn’t simple. Yes it is. Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. These are the answers. It takes courage to live. Are you living? Not so I can see it. Gay people are all but invisible to me now. I wish you weren’t. But you are. And I look real hard.

No one likes to be told to grow up. It’s insulting. But these are always the answers. They will always be the answers. The only answers. There will never be any other answers. Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. Be proud of yourself. Be proud you are gay. I don’t know why so many find all this so complicated. But then I am 69 years old and have less patience for the many problems I had myself when young. It is one of the privileges of getting old.

It is 25 years since 100,000 of us marched on Washington.

The Aids service organizations are all about to collapse. No money. And the problem is too big to handle anymore. We have not slowed this thing down at all. $100 billion we’re spending on Iraq. This is a conscious choice by our “leaders” and by a large portion of the population of this country. They have in their infinite and never-ending cruelty decided this was the most effective thing to do with 100 billion dollars that might also end Aids, and a few other things like worldwide hunger. But the cabal doesn’t care about these. People say: well we can’t take care of the rest of the world. That is so stupid. The rest of the world is us. We are so intertwined geopolitically that we cannot separate ourselves off into parts, into sections. Those days are over. If they ever were here. We have everything required to save the world except the will to do it. In a recent New Yorker piece Michael Specter writes that because of Aids Russia is on its way to disappearing. Disappearing. Imagine that.

The immense knowledge we have learned about Aids has provided us with precious little more than that knowledge. HIV/AIDS is now the worst disaster in recorded human history. In parts of Africa 7000 people are infecting each other each and every day. We who are here are idiots if we think this fact is not going to alter our lives mightily. If your company loses enough world markets, which it most certainly will, you are going to lose your job. You will not have health insurance, for a start. And for a finish. Economies are simply going to collapse. This is already happening.

In 1990, that is some nine years into what was happening, 46% of gay men in San Francisco were still fucking without condoms.

60% of the syphilis in America today is in gay men. Excuse me, men who have sex with men.

Palm Springs has the highest number of syphilis cases in California. Palm Springs?

I do not want to hear each week how many more of you are becoming hooked on meth.

HIV infections are up as much as 40%.

You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and live like this!

One of these days the miraculous drugs we have to keep us alive are going to stop working. Our systems cannot process these extreme chemotherapies indefinitely. That is what we are on. We are on daily chemotherapy. No one wants to call it that. We call it the cocktail. We are on chemotherapy! Chemotherapy either kills the disease or kills us! What are we going to do when they don’t work any longer?

Some 70 million people so far are expected to die. “July 3, 1981, Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” When I first started yelling about whatever it was there were 41 cases. THERE ARE NOW OVER 70 MILLION WHO HAVE BEEN INFECTED WITH HIV. Somebody up there is really listening, don’t you think? There is no way that all infected people can be saved. No one ever says that out loud. Have you noticed? Somehow in some dream world we are going to get treatment into 70 million people. It is never going to happen. IT IS TOO LATE. We told them. But they didn’t do anything. Did you notice? Nobody every does anything. I hope it’s finally dawning on you that maybe they didn’t and don’t want to. So, in case you haven’t noticed, we have lost the war against Aids. I thought I’d tell you that, too. I hope you might have noticed. I can’t tell.

The President refuses to buy generic drugs for dying people. He is still saying he is waiting to hear if they are safe. These drugs have been approved. In some cases for several years. Does this sound like a President who wants to save anyone?

I do not understand why some of you believe that because we have drugs that deal with the virus more or less effectively that it is worth the gamble to have unprotected sex. These drugs are not easy to take. There are many side effects. Not life but certainly comfort threatening. I must allow at least one day out of every week or two to feel really shitty, to have no sleep, to be constipated, to have diarrhea, to require blood tests and monitoring at hospitals or in doctors’ offices, and to have the shakes. The shakes, which come often, are not useful with a mouse or reading a newspaper or with a lover in your arms. And I don’t enjoy eating anymore. Keeping on weight is a constant problem. I have dry mouth. I get up six or seven times a night to pee. Many of the meds we are now taking are new meds and were approved quickly and side effects have a sneaky way of showing up after FDA approval, not before. I recently discovered that I was taking an FDA approved dose of Viread that has turned out to be five times the amount I actually need. We are all probably taking too much or too little of every single one of our drugs. Doctors don’t want to test for this; tests are not readily available. You have to do a lot of homework yourselves on these drugs. Is a fuck without a condom worth not being able to taste food? Obviously for too many of you it is.

My lover often sits on top of me to make me eat. The first time this happened I was in the hospital just after my liver transplant and I wouldn’t eat and Dr. Fung said I had to eat, or else I would die, and I just couldn’t eat (do you know how strange this is to someone who was always on a diet?). It was New Year’s Eve. We were in beautiful downtown Pittsburgh. David had brought a hamper filled with my favorite dishes. And I could not eat anything. Furiously he crawled into bed with me, boots and all, and started to cry. “We haven’t come this far for you to die because you won’t eat,” he screamed, tears streaming down his face. I will never forget that. I will never forget this man I love so much in bed with me with his snowy boots on starting slowly to spoon into me whatever he’d made and I trying so desperately hard to swallow it, looking at him, this man I love so much, doing this for me, both of us now bawling our eyes out and hugging each other in this strange bed in this strange town, wondering how we got here.

It’s so wonderful being a gay person. I said that before. I’m going to say it again. I love being gay. And I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all of these things. And I try not to forget them.

Since the very first day of this plague we have been given, almost as if by some cosmic intentionality, American leaders who most assuredly wish us dead. There can no longer be any way to deny this fact. Each day brings more and more acts of hatred. Tell me it is not so. Tell me that the amount of good that is being attempted is not totally and intentionally overwhelmed by the evil. Point out to me how this is not so. I cannot see it. I have been unable to see it since July 3, 1981. I thought it was because it was a tricky virus. That is what we have been told. It’s a very tricky virus. I hoped for a while. But we are being played for chumps and it has been so since July 3, 1981. And we never saw it.

We of course continue to be in our usual state of total denial and disarray. Whatever structure the gay world had, if we ever had one, is gone. Our organizations stink. Almost every single one of them. I cannot think of one single gay organization that despite the best will in the world is now anything but worthless to us. Oh maybe one or two. We have no power. Nobody listens to us. We have no access to power. The cabal disdains us totally. We are completely disposable. It is a horror show. There is not one single person in Washington who will get us or give us anything but shit and more shit. I’m sorry. This is where we are now. Nowhere. And you expect me to cry for you if you get hooked on meth or can’t stop the circuit parties or the orgies. OK, I feel sorry for you. Does that change nything? I would say I feel sorry for myself, but I don’t. I know I am fighting as hard as I can. I may not be getting anywhere but I am trying. It’s exhausting and I have to do it every day, every single day, like taking my meds which if I stop I know my body will cease doing something or other. I have accidentally missed a few days of meds and boy do I know fast that was a mistake.

I fear for us as a people. Is that crazy? I am always being called crazy by somebody. I love being called crazy. That’s a sign to me that I’m on the right track. Maybe it takes a crazy person to see into the future and see what’s coming. Straight people say “my how much progress gay people are making. Isn’t that Will and Grace wonderful.” If it’s so wonderful why am I scared to death? More and more I am filled with dread. That is my truth that I bring to you today. Larry is scared. Do you see what I see? I don’t think so. Most gay people I see appear to me to act as if they’re bored to death. Too much time on your hands, my mother would say. Hell, if you have time to get hooked on crystal and do your endless rounds of sex-seeking, you have too much time on your hands. Ah, you say, aren’t we to have a little fun? Can’t I get stoned and try barebacking one last time. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND! At this moment in our history, no, you cannot. Anyway, we had your fun and look what it got us into. And it is still getting us into. You kids want to die? Because that’s what I sometimes think. Well, then, die.

You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and live like this!

And by the way, when are you going to realize that for the rest of your lives, probably for the rest of life on earth, you are never going to be able to have sex with another person without a condom! Never! Every time you even so much as consider this I want you to hear my voice screaming like crazy in your ears. STOP! DON’T! NEVER! NO WAY, JOSE! Canadian scientists now warn that even partners who are both un-infected should practice safe sex. As I understand it, more and more new viruses and mutant viruses and partial viruses that are not understood are floating around. Are you ready for that one?

Does it ever occur to you how much you have been robbed by both your country and your behavior? America let the men who should have carved out a space for you in the social discourse, the development of your history and being, America let these men who should have been your role models die. So there is this big empty space in which you live. And you don’t know where to go or how to fill it in. This is not my original thought but Michael Brown’s of the NYU gay student organizations that helped to bring me here, who gave me this to think about. It is sad for a young gay person to feel this way.

I had people to follow and many of you have not. No baton was passed to you. In a way you must start everything over. You must invent a world from which you can move forward from. This is both an extraordinarily exciting challenge and a terrifying one, one that can just as easily leave you by the wayside as make a new man of you. I say man because it is gay men who appear to have the greatest difficulty, it seems to me, in moving forward, getting off their particular dime.

Many of you deny the horrors of what happened to your predecessors. That is something I do not understand. Every moral code I know of requires respect for the dead. I often hear that many of you don’t want to know about them or admit to them. You disdain anyone older who was there.

This is denial of a most destructive nature. You cannot move forward without accepting your past. I am going to say that again. We cannot move forward without accepting and understanding our past. We were as varied as you are. We were no different, really. We were very different from those who preceded us. We were the first free gay generation and we were murdered because of our freedom. And yes you were robbed of this freedom that for obvious reasons could not be passed on to you as your heritage. So instead of being understanding of all this, you condemn your predecessors to non-existence and flounder into a future that you seem unable to fashion into anything you can hold on to that gives you emotional sustenance. You refuse to be part of any community. But if you don’t have any community you have no political strength. You are too busy denying and disassociating to know that. You do not seem able, it seems to me, to fashion your future. To discover what you want. You don’t even ask what you want. You don’t even ask what you need. Your needs are as mighty as needs always have been, but you don’t ask what they are, which amazes me. How can you not have curiosity about your future as a gay person? Don’t you want to go anywhere? Do you want to stay where you are? That is too bad if you do because we are about to enter a place more monstrously worse. You can deny that, as you deny those of us who went before you, but just know that down this path of your numerous denials lies your own continued destruction, the continuing destruction of gay people as gay people, which this cabal of haters I shall shortly describe, and its supporters, which are legion, are intent on accomplishing with increasingly ruthless vengeance. If you do not fight back you will be murdered in ways just as hideous as the ways in which we got murdered.

Every single president since 1981 has denied our existence and denied the existence of AIDS. And we let them get away with it. Oh a few thousand of us fought for the drugs that we got but many millions of us did nothing and of course an enormous number of them died. They died because they lost their health along their journey of non-involvement and their lack of responsibility to their brothers and sisters. Instead of learning from this lesson, you are repeating it. And you are acting like this with your health intact, many of you, which strikes me as even more perverse than what your dead predecessors did to destroy themselves.

Does it occur to you that we brought this plague of aids upon ourselves? I know I am getting into dangerous waters here but it is time. With the cabal breathing even more murderously down our backs it is time. And you are still doing it. You are still murdering each other. Please stop with all the generalizations and avoidance excuses gays have used since the beginning to ditch this responsibility for this fact. From the very first moment we were told in 1981 that the suspected cause was a virus, gay men have refused to accept our responsibility for choosing not to listen, and, starting in 1984, when we were told it definitely was a virus, this behavior turned murderous. Make whatever excuses you can to carry on living in your state of denial but this is the fact of the matter. I wish we could understand and take some responsibility for the fact that for some 30 years we have been murdering each other with great facility and that down deep inside of us, we knew what we were doing. Don’t tell me you have never had sex without thinking down deep that there was more involved in what you were doing than just maintaining a hard-on.

I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend’s death. I listed all the ones I’d slept with. There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick? It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know. You know how you sometimes know things? I know. Several hundred over a bunch of years, I have to have murdered some of them, planting in him the original seed. I have put this to several doctors. Mostly they refuse to discuss it, even if they are gay. Most doctors do not like to discuss sex or what we do or did. (I still have not heard a consensus on the true dangers of oral sex, for instance.) They play blind. God knows what they must be thinking when they examine us. Particularly if they aren’t gay. One doctor answered me, it takes two to tango so you cannot take the responsibility alone. But in some cases it isn’t so easy to answer so flippantly. The sweet young boy who didn’t know anything and was in awe of me. I was the first man who fucked him. I think I murdered him. The old boyfriend who did not want to go to bed with me and I made him. The man I let fuck me because I was trying to make my then boyfriend, now lover, jealous. I know, by the way, that that other one is the one who infected me. You know how you sometime know things? I know he infected me. I tried to murder myself on that one.

Has it never, ever occurred to you that not using a condom is tantamount to murder? I cannot believe you have never considered this. It is such a simple and intelligent thought to have. And we all should have had it from day one. Why didn’t we? That has been haunting me for a while, that question. Why didn’t we? It is incredibly selfish not to have at least thought that question at that moment, all those moments when we were playing Russian roulette.

>From here on I am going to get even more complicated. I want you to pay attention. This is the most important part of this speech.

Bill Moyers recently said this in a speech on October 20, 2004 at the Palace Hotel:

“For years now, the corporate, political, and religious right—this is documented from 1971 on—the religious and political right has been joined in an axis of influence whose purpose is to take back the gains of the democratic renewal in the 20th century and restore America to a rule of the elites that maintain their privilege and their power at the expense of everyone else. For years now, a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life.”

“Take note,” Moyers continues. “The corporate, political, and religious conservatives are achieving a vast transformation of America that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest inequality in America since 1929, they have saddled our nation, our States, and our cities and counties with structural defects that will last until our children’s children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions, except rewarding the rich and waging war.”

In other words, our country has been taken away from us by a cabal that includes all the people who hate us.

These people make the rules. They are rarely elected officials. They may or may not know each other. They have several things in common. They are very rich or have strong connections to money or power. They are in agreement on what they do not want. They believe fervently in their God. And that they are doing all this for Him. And they stay in constant touch.

I hope you realize that all these people Bill Moyers is talking about hate us. Thriller writers write better histories of our times than actual historians.

Anyway, it is done. What Moyers is talking about. It’s already happened. On a scale of such magnitude that it is difficult to see how we can ever take it back. It’s all in place now, this cabal of power. It almost doesn’t make any difference who is president.

You want to know why AIDS was allowed to happen. This is your answer. You want to know why gay people have no power and are unlikely to get any. This is your answer.

The top 1% of wealth holders control 39% of total household wealth.

The richest 5% of households own 2/3 of the value of all stock owned in the our country.

The the top 1% have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million.

The richest 20% of households received almost 50% of the national income, while the bottom 20% received only 3%.

At a time when 265 people in the United States were billionaires, 32 million people were living beneath the official poverty line.

This inequality gap in the United States is the highest in the industrialized world.

“That drive,” Moyers continues, “is succeeding with drastic consequences for an equitable access to public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of American democracy is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.

“We are experiencing a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power.”

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a Richmond lawyer who called himself a centrist, was secretly commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Congress to write a confidential plan on how to take back America for the survival of the free enterprise system. Not democracy. Free enterprise. Barry Goldwater had lost, Nixon was about to implode, Vietnam had sucked the nation’s soul dry, the cabal saw their world unraveling. They saw the women’s movement, black civil rights. student war protests, the cold war. They saw the world as they knew it coming to an end. (We are not the first to feel our world crumbling and becoming powerless.)

This is what Lewis Powell wrote: “Survival lies in organization, in careful long range planning, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available through joint effort and in the political power available only through united action.”

This was the birth of what is now called the vast right wing conspiracy. It is known as the Powell Manifesto. You can google Lewis Powell (not the one who helped to assassinate Lincoln) and read it in its entirety.

Under the supervision of some of the richest families in America, that plan has been followed faithfully since 1971 and it has resulted in these past years of horror and the reelection of George Bush. Nine families and their foundations, all under the insistent goading of Joseph Coors, have financed much of this. The Bradley Foundation. The Smith Richardson Foundation. Four Scaife Family Foundations, The John M. Olin Foundation. The Castle Rock (or Coors) Foundation. Three Koch Family Foundations. The Earhart Foundation. The JM Foundation. The McKenna Foundation. From 1985 to 2001 alone they contributed $650 million to this conservative message campaign. They have helped to launch and gain financing for networks of newspapers and magazines. They have seen to it that hundreds of the most powerful think tanks have appeared, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise, Cato, Manhattan, Hudson Institutes, and many more. There are now in place an ever growing number of well-funded student organizations at many colleges. There are legal advocacy foundations, such as the Center For Individual Rights and Judicial Watch. There are Leadership Institutes and Action Institutes and Institutes on Religion and Public Policy and Religion and Democracy. There is a heavily visible media participation: Fox Television and Pat Robertson and Oliver North and Radio America and the Washington Times and Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, to name but a very few, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

For the preparation of this manifesto, Lewis Powell was rewarded by Richard Nixon with a seat on the Supreme Court, where among other things he voted against gays in Bowers v. Hardwick, and against Black people in Bakke v. University of California.

It is vital for us to realize that this plan was written in 1971. The people it was written for did not go off then to a disco, or to the Pines or into therapy, or into drugs. They took this plan and they have executed it religiously every day and night for the next thirty-five years initially with some 400 million dollars and always from then until now with unending hours of backbreaking, grinding, unglamorous work, of civic engagements county by county across the entire expanse of America. They took the richest and most liberal nation in the history of civilization and turned it hard right into a classist, racist, homophobic imperial army of pirates. 30% of America now self-identify as conservative or extremely conservative. When Lewis Powell wrote his Manifesto that figure was less than 10%.

And on the morning of November 3d we wrung our hands and wondered why.

And we have a community that still cannot decide on what we want or what to do. We are completely inept at organizing ourselves and have a monstrously bad record of attempting unity.

The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works out like this: HIV allows “them” to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our own minds, their thinking we are sick, and in the eyes of the world, everyone thinking we are sick. All of this obliterates the consciousness of those who should help us and don’t. This liquidates and incinerates our individuality and our spontaneity, our abilities to fight back, to hold our oppressors to task. They want to keep HIV going as long as they can! Why haven’t we seen that? The signs have always been there! But like everything else we couldn’t believe them. No one could be as cruel as that. They want to make us superfluous. Their media, their newspapers, their networks will see to it that our good qualities are invisible.

It should therefore come as no surprise that when HIV came along they, this cabal, facilitated its rapid deployment and continue to do so. Before even making the feeblest attempt to commence any miniscule response or inquiry into what their press was not reporting, which they most certainly knew about themselves, they waited until masses of us had all been exposed to the whatever it was. We on the other hand chose to not believe that the whatver it was was a virus until this was incontestably proved. But they knew what it was, or were willing to take the chance and hope that it was, and they just sat back and waited. Their wildest dreams then started to come true. The faggots were disappearing and they were doing it to themselves! I can locate no work of any urgency, or indeed much work at all on aids for most of the period between 1981-1984. Oh many claim it, as many claim seeing cases many years earlier, which I also doubt, but I cannot locate whatever these are claiming. In those four years almost every gay man who had fucked in America had been exposed to the virus.

And when they did start doing anything it was with such feebleness that it amounted to nothing for ten years. You can give me all kinds of reasons why it took so long but my research has convinced me that the actual scenario was completely intentional neglect. Oh perhaps not the doctors or the scientists. But they had no money. And they were not going to get any money. Or enough money. People upstairs were going to see to it that there would be no money. Let even more people get infected first. Blacks, junkies, prostitutes. Every color of skin but straight white. Every religion but Christian. Excuse me, white Christian. Then we’ll throw them a few pennies to make it look like we’re concerned.

The cabals Bill Moyers talked about have called all the shots in facilitating and accelerating the plague of aids. If scientists discovered something useful, it has rarely been available. I spoke earlier about the refusal of this president to allow already approved generic drugs out to a desperate Africa and elsewhere. Of that huge Congressional approval of many billions for HIV around the world that Bush brags about, something less that 2% has left Washington almost four years after its approval. Does this sound like a President and a government and a country that wants to help?

I guess I have suspected behavior like this all along. But I never knew it in quite the way that I have now come to see it thanks to Bill Moyers: intentionality is the only word to describe the genocidal treatment the world is drowning in. Much of the world, most assuredly including us, has been intentionally hung out to die. So far some 70 million of us. That is some manifesto Lewis Powell birthed. And all we have to do is keep fucking each other without condoms and the rest of their “moral issues” will be dead.

Do you seriously think they care about the continuing rise again of HIV infections? They are grateful for them. Do you think they care about a sudden plague of crystal? They thank us for our cooperation. And we thought for one brief second of time that we might even be allowed to marry the ones we love.

And while all this happened, even if we had enough suspicions to act, what did we do? We completely shrank from our duty of opposition. Those are Christopher Isherwood’s words: “the duty of opposition.” But he was flagellating himself with these words. He fears that should he have to live face to face with a war in his backyard that he “would shrink from the duty of opposition.”

Marriage? Forget it. Non-discrimination laws? Forget them. Those that have been enacted will be rescinded or amended into toothlessness. Adoption? Equal rights? Forget everything. We are going to be erased into nothingness. They hate us so much and now they are in complete and utter power, the most dangerous situation in the world for the unwanteds to live under. And I no longer think it matters who is President. Clinton turned out to be as rotten for us as George Bush, either one.

Ok, keep putting your life in jeopardy. 110 of their drug companies certainly want you to do so. Keep dancing your asses off at circuit parties all over the world as you go down to the sea in ships that are made to intentionally capsize and take you down with them. Ok, keep being bored and crying for your poor selves. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. With our complete cooperation they have already murdered several generations of us so far. They won’t have to murder so many more of us to get their wish. Like Russia, we will disappear. That is what they want to do. Disappear us. And now they are able to officially do it. George Bush has his mandate. Can’t you see all this! People high up there in their secret powwows don’t want us here. Word has come down from on high: get rid of the faggots once and for all. You think the law will protect us? Think again. Wait until you see the new Supreme Court.

You are here as a gay person because of certain events and certain people who lived and suffered and died before you. You must learn about them and not continually deny their existence and importance in our history, the history of gay people in America. You must learn about them! They have made your life possible! What kind of person doesn’t want to learn about themselves? I don’t know why but you don’t want to. Most of our fellow gays don’t read books about us. Or come to plays about us. What do you want to do? I don’t know. And for all I can tell in talking to many of you, you don’t know either. And this is very frightening. A large uncongealed mass of potentially superior beings doesn’t know what to do with themselves or bother to learn their history. So they dance. So they drug. So they go on to the internet to find more sex. These are useful lives being wasted. Why is that? Why is there no useful creativity going on? Why is there no mental agility visible, no audible questioning discussions of… almost anything of importance? Don’t you long for some involvement in the humanity that you belong to, for your place in the scheme of things? You don’t know how to make entrance on these playing fields, is that it? I don’t know what is wrong with us. I wish you could tell me. What do you do with yourselves all week long, seven days and nights a week, that amounts to anything really important? I can’t see many of you as doing anything important, to give your lives meaning. Oh I can see lots of frocks on the runway but I can’t see bodies inside of them, bodies with brains and concerned with anything but pretty and orgasms. What do you do to make your world, our world, a better place? A world that needs every bit of help it can get, our world, not their world. You don’t seem able to connect with anyone beyond the basest ways.

“Why can’t we look at our bodies and see not just a sexual definition? Why can’t we see in the body all that the body represents? Sexuality, yes. But also mortality, humanness, humaneness, innocence, purity, health, sickness, strength, consideration, responsibility, divinity. When did we rob our bodies of all the complexity they possess? Why do we refuse to see all that we are capable of? All the other things that make us full beings.” That very beautiful paragraph was written by my friend, Jordan Roth, who is one day going to be a very fine writer if he just keeps at it.

Do you know you are taking the same crystal meth as Hitler? The stuff that was being used well into 1997, the government outlawed one of the ingredients and so the orignal process was resurrected, the one as used by the Nazis. It was first synthesized by the Germans in the early part of the 20th century. Hitler was a crystal addict. The new version is much more potent than the stuff you were taking before 1997, which is the main reason why it is so hard to break an addiction. Dr. Howard Grossman told me this bit of history. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about the Hitler part. To the more twisted among you it may be a turn-on.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.

But I am finding that I am not so proud of being gay anymore. It’s come over me slowly. As much as I love being gay and I love gay people I’m not proud of us right now. It’s disappeared. I almost could say we’ve disappeared. But since you are here I can’t quite say that. But that’s how I feel.

I do not see us, don’t you see? I do not see us! They are killing us. They are eradicating us from this earth. Little by little by little we are disappearing. I do not see us and I am beginning to see us less and less.

I have recently come to believe that gay men and women are tragic people. We are so wonderful but we are also so fucked up. So blind. So ignorant in ways to look after ourselves. So uninterested in the Outside World that is subsuming us when we thought we were making them pretty and giving them songs to sing. So without agendas to utilize our wonderful-ness. We know who the enemy is and we just stand here letting them shoot us over and over again. WE STAND HERE AND LET THEM DO IT! All of the brains and abilities we have among us are useless. The smartest among us, our famous ones, our rich ones, seem to allow this most of all. The ones who should help us and speak up for us refuse that responsibility. We have enough rich gay men and lesbians to finance a takeover of the world but their brains and their money and their skills are not available to to help us. To lead us. To inspire us. To finance us. To be like Lewis Powell’s Nine Families. That, too is tragic. To have so much money and to not to use it for brothers and sisters, for family, for our continuation here on earth. Why is that? Rockefeller tithed himself from his very first dollar, to go to his church for his salvation. Please, can we get word to every rich gay person to show up to help save us. We need our Nine Families desperately.

Public service: how many religions demand this of their members? How much public service in behalf of your brothers and sisters, your family, have you performed recently? Don’t tell me you don’t know what to do. If you can find another ass to fuck, and you seem endlessly inventive at accomplishing this, then you should be able to locate a more useful and responsible outlet.

For a few brief years we had some noble moments, of togetherness and anger and progress. Not many of us, mind you. If you are still alive, you know who you were and where you were during those worst years of our mass murder. You know what you did and what you didn’t. And I know too. I know that most of you, should you still be alive, didn’t do a goddamned thing. In fact, you were ashamed of us, many of you were. I remember that as well as I remember those who died. “Friends” crossing the street to avoid me because I was advising cooling it. I was actually told to not come back to Fire Island Pines. Lots of people come up to me now on the street and say, thank you for what you did for us. I do not consider that a compliment. My response quite often’s been a curt Fuck You, why aren’t you doing it too! I don’t do anything that anyone else couldn’t do. I just do it, and some 10 or 15,000 other people did it too then. And the rest of you sat on your asses. And, those of you who are still alive, know who you were and how little you did.

Yes for one brief moment in time we got angry. Correction, a few of us got angry. Of all our many many millions of gay people in this country, about 10,000 of us or so got angry enough to accomplish something. We got drugs. We got aids care. We got enough so we could continue fucking again. That in the end is what it amounted to. As soon as we got the drugs, you went right back to what got us into such trouble in the first place. WHAT IS WRONG WITH US? The cabal can’t believe their good fortune.

How many gay people in America in those years of Aids? Ten million? Twenty million? Thirty million? How many of us are there now? We don’t even know how many of us there are! Or how many we lost! And every time some statistical number is released by some faceless organization or government office, I always wonder: how the fuck do they know how many of us there are when we don’t even know how many of us there are? And none of our so-called gay organizations ever bothers to find out. It would be nice to know, helpful to know. Don’t you think?

You know, it isn’t meant to be easy, life. I don’t know why it isn’t meant to be easy, but it just isn’t, so we might as well get used to it and try to find things that give us a certain sense of pride. We must create ourselves as something we can live with. It takes energy, yes. Why are we so crippled intellectually? Oh, we study sexuality and gender stuff until it comes out of every university’s asshole but we don’t study history, who we were and where we came from and our roots, the wellsprings of our historical existence. We do not honor our dead as we do not honor ourselves. We continue without surcease to be and remain, endlessly, day after day, helpless victims. “In my country when they raise the bus fares, we burn the buses,” a Brazilian journalist said to me as she watched a sparsely attended Act Up demonstration.

There is never one single hour that a disenfranchised minority does not have to fight to breathe and stay alive. The hate out there will never lessen. It only grows and grows, this hate. Most of you refuse to face this. I hate you for your doing that. I really do. I have no more patience for this kind of weakness. I know this is uncharitable of me. I don’t care. I am too tired of fighting with so few troops. You are now dancing your own dance of death, you know. And I hate you for this, too. Grow up, I beg you. Oh, grow up.

Time goes by so fast. We are allotted so precious little of it on this earth. How sad that you use it so stupidly. Every minute that goes by is gone forever. You who have been given a new lease on life, the very gift of life itself, piss it away. It is so incomprehensible to me who has come so close to death a couple times. I find your inactivity and ingratitude and lack of imagination on how to act in emergencies incongruous, incomprehensible, insulting. And unacceptable. I could never understand during all those years of Aids why every single person facing death would not fight to save his own life. And I cannot understand now how, life having been given back to us again, again you treat your life with such contempt.

Yes, all that I have spoken of tonight is the stuff of tragedy.

I wish we could truly look upon each other as brothers and sisters. It sounds corny I am told when I keep using terms like this. How can we be related I am asked dismissively. You do not know or want to know that we have been on this earth as long as anyone else and that we have as many available heroes and heroines as anyone else. Your family has been here a very long time and has an ancient and distinguished lineage. You must learn that Abraham Lincoln was gay and George Washington and Meriwether Lewis and so many others we are only just beginning to uncover. But they will not let gay history be taught in schools and universities. And we seem unable to teach ourselves. My own college, Yale, with $1 million of my own brother’s money to do just this, will not teach what I call gay history, unencumbered with the prissy incomprehensible gobbledygook of gender studies and queer theory. Abraham Lincoln did not talk that language.

We richly deserve the government we have received. We do not even know who we are. And our enemies participate in their convictions every day of their lives. We only show up when we want to, which is not very often. But then perhaps you do not love being gay. Or think we are better than other people, and smarter and more talented and more tuned into what is happening, and are better friends.

I leave the hardest topic we must face till last.

How do we fight as a united front when they don’t approve of our “behavior” and when our behavior is inseparable from our beings? How do we fight as a united front when some of us won’t or are unable to change certain behaviors that many of us have difficulty in supporting and defending ourselves? We’ve been so concerned about showing the world a united front. We feel the need to say that everything gay people do is good and it simply isn’t so. We must have an honest discussion amongst ourselves about what’s good and what isn’t. This is of course the problem that has finally brought us down because we have refused to deal with it, and perhaps is one reason today’s youngsters have difficulty in acknowledging our past. It is the unfaced devil in our closet, if you will, that we have refused to deal with and which, now, now that they have achieved their position of imperial power, will be used to hang us once and for all. To be crude about it, how do we market and sell our wishes and our needs as they have been able to package and sell their wants and needs so successfully for thirty-five years? How do we frame this issue? How do we claim the God that they have subsumed into their own ownership? It is inhuman to think that the only way we can get through to some safe other side is by policing each other and in so doing destroy whatever hope we have of getting along? If they have been able to convince this country that the Republicans are the party of the people, surely so many sons and daughters can be smart enough to find a way to sell our parents permission to co-exist.

I do not know how to answer any of this. And I don’t think anyone among us does either. To talk out loud about what our bodies have done and continue to do is asking for trouble from others of us. How do we admit our past, own it, and evolve from it and move on? For we must do this.

I know some of you will immediately jump up to act. I caution rushing off to form anything quite so fast until we decide how we want to deal with what I have raised tonight. I know many of you are prepared to tough it out and say to them, “fuck you, I am what I am.” And point out quite rightly that they have simply pushed us too far and, no matter what we have done and continue to do we simply cannot allow them to treat us this way any longer. We are human beings as much as they are, and their God is the same as our God and He simply cannot be allowed to be as punishing as they are requiring Him to be.”

But this is perhaps too honest and reasonable to say to those who are not either. Reasoning like this has not worked for us in the past. But I sense that ignoring this question of responsibility for much that has murdered us will only please them more.

These are the problems we must confront as we go forward. If you are going to fight in a united way, which I am convinced is now the only way that can save us, we must find a platform that all of us can support without divisiveness and shame and guilt and all the other hateful weapons they will club us with.

And if we do want to go out and fight again in a united way we must ask ourselves: are we able to replicate the kind of devotion and commitment and backbreaking thankless work and tactics that continues to bring them year after year into such positions of unlimited power. Thirty-five years of that? For thirty-five years the cabal I have spoken of has worked every single day and night to bring them their success. Quite frankly they deserve their victory and we deserve our loss.

I would like to quote this from a Baptist minister, Tom Ehrich, in Durham. By chance, I found it on a Christian website at 3:00 this afternoon. “It would be helpful if we started in silence and just listened to each other’s voices. Whether we can muster such maturity amid toxic political attitudes remains to be seen. If we are to have a meaningful national discussion of moral issues, we will need to start with the sexual issues, not because they are the most important but because they are the fire engulfing the tower. Let’s get it all on the table…

“And let’s do so openly and boldly, without the code language that we often use in moral debates, without our usual cherry-picking of Scriptures, without our usual blistering indignation, without the bullying that elevates one’s viewpoint into divine certainty.”

So we are being invited to this table whether we want to or not. We must be prepared.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and better friends. I do, I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things.

And I passionately and desperately want all my brothers and sisters to stay alive and well and on this earth as long as they want theirs to.

Can we all help each other to reach this goal?

[thousandyearphantombunker]

(this is a vent and I get nasty so possibly don't read)I've got no idea as to why this has become a thing recently or how to properly articulate myself rn but here I go: When I analyze characters I don't just look at how their actions are framed, i take off the frame. I take off the edgy and dramatic lighting and the very emotionally charged/biased language, the edgy outfit they got put in and I look at what they actually did what actually happened, i look at their actions alone (well not alone I still need context) and that has me being labelled media illiterate. 'the story said they where a bad guy! Look at how they are being framed! Look at what language they used to describe them! The story is telling you they are bad' and like I know that, I know im supposed hate them but when I look at there actual actions and what they've done without the frame they aren't that evil to me, i know what im being told but i dont buy it because once you get past very loaded word choices and the unflattering picture the creator used... They aren't doing anything bad in the photo, it's just at a bad angle. when you replace the emotional language and make it more neutral language (without changing the story) and you can see plain as day that.

King magnifico wasn't a villain, he's just an asshole with emotional issues, Ironwood while a villain was being demonized for the wrong reasons, he was facing an ethical dilemma alongside team rwby no matter what the show did neither side was 'right' nobody was gonna come out of that shit smelling like roses no matter if you were pro ironwood or pro rwby (maybe the writers could've learned something from ever after high about these sorts of situations you know the show for little girls handled shit like this better) and belos and the collector feel very contradictory? Like very different people each time we got some development from them. The fans who got excited over the idea these two where more complex than story states weren't being stupid, they saw the compelling ideas and interesting contradictions and got excited, and if I like a character that's supposed to a hate sink maybe I'm not stupid maybe the show didn't do its job right, maybe I don't want the writer to hold my hand maybe I want them to explain the story better and maybe I don't wanna do wikipedia homework to understand the show.

Fellas is it a sign of media iliteracy to not take the story at face value and eat what we are being fed without looking to see the ingredients or if its properly cooked? I genuinely got convinced by the owl house fandom that I was stupid for having complaints that I was clearly incapable of the higher thinking required to understand the story and if I didn't like it I clearly wasn't analyzing things deeply enough but when I did analyze the story deeper I found even more issues, my problems originally where with the coven system, coven heads, Darius and Eberwolf turning out to be secret rebels and the fact luz and hexside broke a major law with zero repressions and that Belos's plan was weak, analyzing deeper made me realize the magic system was weak and while i had massive issues with the finale already (fuck the dream sequence light glyph nonsense, and i hated the titan reveal because of the chosen one nonsense especially the titan saying he did make philip's life harder on purpose- which made the fact that he. Still discovered the glyphs impressive) i said I could still watch the show pre finale but after looking deeper I noticed the 'us vs them' mentality was through out the show - not just the finale i didn't like that philip's complexity got erased or that Luz was a chosen one and again i fucking hated the dream sequence, the light glyph nonsense was confusing, (that also helped me realize if the magic system got developed more maybe they could've introduced a mechanic that explained that shit) i also hated that the principal at luz's school was framed so badly- I'm autistic im latina i am a lesbian- im not an ableist racist homophobe- i would've demanded Luz get in school expulsion, and if she got into another incident that she go to summer school, and do community service or i would press charges- still a pretty light punishment but God he was not a bad guy I only saw that problem in the finale when I was told I was dumb I decided to try and reanalyze the show again and came out with an even more negative opinion

Maybe instead of insulting people's intelligence and acting condescending you can just say 'well if you look at the story from my perspective' and share why you think what you think because I do see the appeal of belos's ending and death I do see the appeal of this show- or another here's another idea just agree to disagree and not act high and mighty calling everyone who disagrees a nitpicker a 'stupid Steven universe fan' or lily orchard simp but no Doug walker having a mostly positive opinion of this show while still sharing his minor critics was a sin! I can't believe this is the fandom that made it so I defend nostalgia critics opinions- i genuinely don't like that guy but some of his critique aimed at the show is valid. I feel like this post is pretty meanspirited and I'm sorry for anyone who decides to read this tagless mess but I can't stand smugness or the idea that looking a story deeper makes you stupid. Im just salty and this is a dumb vent over old shit but God I'm pissy still.

[autolenaphilia]

I don't have much of a stance on baeddels, because i'm not good enough at tumblr archaeology to have one. I have actually done research, because trans women are interesting to me. It seems to have been a small tumblr clique of trans women in the early 2010s? And they had some particular transmisogyny analysis? They imploded around 2014, after only getting started around 2013, as these culty cliques tend to do due to sexual abuse and personal conflicts.

But i can't get any firm grip on who they were and what they believed. It seems lost to time. There is not much evidence as blogs are deleted and are not archived well. Like this post tries to be a comprehensive explanation of who baeddels were, but if you check the sources it's mainly links to non-baeddels explaining what baeddels believed. There is like one archive link that doesn't fully work. The post is essentially third-hand hearsay. Of course I suspect the primary sources are mostly gone at this point. Because the baeddels mainly existed on social media, so much is erased or lost, they are mostly a memory at this point. It does feel like tumblr archaeology, this feels like trying to understand some early christian sect who we only know from accounts of people who opposed them.

Like the baeddels didn't publish books to my knowledge, or seem to have been in the habit of writing manifestos or explanations of what they believed. Like it's not with radfems where you can easily read Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex or Ti-Grace Atkinson or Janice Raymond to find out what kind of bullshit they were on.

I'm not convinced the baeddels were like a distinct movement with a well-defined ideology, as that post linked above seems to argue. That they explicitly believed that gender is a choice and choosing to be a man is bad. There is just not enough evidence to do that. Like the primary sources the post have is screenshots of self-described baeddels making mean-spirited posts about transmascs. A lot of it is pretty bad, but doesn't create a picture of a well-defined ideology. I'm not convinced there was really a "baeddelism".

Like I haven't been convinced the baeddels were anything but a specific clique of tumblr trans lesbians who found out about the word baeddel and reclaimed it, believing it to be root of the english word "bad", had a transmisogyny analysis and had some bad, hateful rhetoric directed towards transmascs. Like none of that makes for a distinct ideology, no matter how incoherent.

Part of it that it seems that the baeddels were a relatively small group, that probably had an outsized impact on tumblr discourse. Like I've heard assessments that are like the core baeddel group was like 8-10 people.

The closest thing I found to a baeddel manifesto is this medium post which was published years after the baeddel clique seems to have imploded, and I don't know the connection the person who wrote it had to the original baeddels. I don't know if they thought this is a good summary of their thinking or not. Most of the text is defensive and presents what is basic transfeminist analysis as baeddel theory, which I don't think they can claim? It's not a reliable guide, especially being from 2017.

If you argue that baeddelism is something like "Transmisogyny exists, it's a real systematic oppression that transfems face, and yes, even TME trans people can perpetrate it", I guess I'm a baeddel? This strikes me as basic transfeminist theory, a basic transmisogyny theory as Julia Serano put it. If this is baeddelism, most transfeminists are baeddels.

And here I think the problem lies with "baeddel" as it's used today. They were probably never a well-defined ideological group, but tied together more by personal relationships (which is why they imploded when those relationships turned abusive) and some shared rhetoric. And a lot of what they actually believed is lost to time, due to them only being online and on tumblr specifically.

So "baeddel" has become such a loose word that it can be removed from the context of the tumblr baeddel clique and applied as an insult to practically anyone. The way I seen it used it often means "transfem who writes mean things about transmascs". But more worrying is that basic transfeminist analysis/transmisogyny theory or criticism of transmisogyny perpetrated by tme trans people are labeled as "baeddel".

It seems similar to how people don't have a good handle on who radfems/terfs actually are and what they are, so they label basic feminist analysis as "terfy" or define terf as "self-proclaimed feminist who hates men". I have written extensively about radfems here.

The post about baeddels I linked above actually does this kind of thing to the baeddels. It calls them "transinclusive radical feminists" and describe their ideology as radfem. Which I strongly doubt is true. That's because radfem ideology defines womanhood through biological essentialism and believes cis women's biology is why misogyny and patriarchy exists. It's hard to have a strong transmisogyny analysis with that kind of theoretical grounding. Trans women are neither women or targets of misogyny when you define womanhood that way.

This is why "trans-inclusive" radfems are so often not really trans-inclusive. You can't really take the biological essentialism and transmisogyny out of radfemism, and have it still be radfemism. So accusing the baeddels of doing that doesn't really hold water. Baeddels seem to have had a lot of man-hating rhetoric and separatist ideology, but that is not what defines radfem ideology.

And I do mean it seems to be applied to trans women doing basic transfeminist analysis or using transmisogyny theory. Turns out I was wrong about baeddels not publishing books, because apparently Julia Serano was basically a proto-baeddel and Whipping Girl is the tap-root of baeddelism.

Like look at these two posts.

Calling Serano a radfem is hilarious. Like she is not even remotely that. But I'm actually worried about how transandrophobia/misandry people have this view that Serano and Whipping Girl are this fountainhead of evil "transandrophobia", based mostly on some bad quotes. Because if you cancel Serano and Whipping Girl, it's a way of canceling transmisogyny theory, because Whipping Girl basically created the concept. I'm not saying that criticism and disagreement of Serano and her ideas are bad, but there is this attempt at canceling her. Due to transmisogyny, any mistakes a trans woman make are magnified and used as part as an attempt to destroy her career and isolate her from community. And Serano being such a major transfeminist that it would be a major loss.

And trying to describe her as baeddel-ascent is especially telling. The word is then entirely disconnected from the tumblr clique who claimed the word and whose crimes (which i do not necessarily deny) gave the word its modern power as an insult.

Two more screenshots:

The term is so vaguely defined that this kind of paranoia worries me. Like if you believe that there is this evil cabal of "transmisandrist" trans women still around, and not calling yourself a baeddel is no defense, I don't see this ending happily due to transmisogyny. The transmisogynistic current of call-out culture will practically get people hurt by this. Especially if it seems that critcizing transmisogyny, especially from transmascs seem to be enough to be labeled a baeddel.

The original baeddel clique might have done some horrible crimes. But I doubt they represented some distinct ideology that we need to root out of trans spaces, especially as no one can define and primary sources on what the baeddels believed is scarce.

And that's because of how online they were. I do not want to minimize any abusive content they might have sent, but it strikes me how insignificant the baeddels were. LIke they seem to have existed largely online and wielded their influence mainly on tumblr. They never seemed to have wielded any kind of institutional power. And that's not surprising, if you are a trans lesbian you don't have much power.

The actions of self-described baeddels might have been a problem, but unlike say radfems they seem to have been a very minor problem Like Janice Raymond was working with the Reagan adminstration to deny trans people healthcare, and in my country radfem groups today provide the Swedish government a feminist alibi for not taking action to improve trans rights. Radfems have had a very demonstrable effect on institutional transphobia.

You can't say that about the baeddels. And they probably were nasty to transmascs, but i suspect their greatest victim was the poor trans woman who was one of them, but who was raped by a leading member.

It's kinda insane how they, a small internet sect, have become this boogeywoman to wield against trans woman talking about transmisogyny, including major figures like Julia Serano.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

since i’ve been seeing a lot of posts on my dash of people shipping kate bishop with yelena belova, i feel the need to make a friendly reminder that yelena is canonically aroace.

[photo id: a screecap from lgbtqia-characters.fandom.com that says “yelena belova is an aroace character from marvel.” /end id]

[photo id: a screencap from the wikipedia page for yelena belova, with a highlighted portion reading, “she is the first confirmed asexual character in the marvel universe.” /end id]

creator/author devin grayson said in an interview that yelena is “more likely to identify as asexual than to follow Nat’s romantic path.”

in this panel from a comic, another character asks yelena if she is a lesbian, to which she emphatically replies, “no, i’m not a lesbian. i’m not... anything.”

now, if you’re not aware, it is incredibly rare for aromantic asexuals to have any canonical representation in popular culture. there are aroaces in webcomics and podcasts, sure, but in the kind of media that your straight friend can actually name? almost unheard of. and for that aroace character to be a person instead of a robot or alien? doubly almost unheard of.

the point i am getting to here is that i need you guys to be fucking respectful in your fanworks. i need you to not erase yelena’s orientation and make her allo just because you want to make two hot ladies kiss.

i’m not saying that you can’t ship them, and i’m not trying to rain on your parade. there’s nothing wrong with wanting two hot ladies to kiss. but i personally find it deeply offensive when people change an aro/ace character’s orientation because it’s “boring” and it gets in the way of your desire to make them bone and/or fall in love. seeing that really fucking sucks for us.

of course i can’t speak for all aroaces, but as an aroace it makes me feel pretty shitty to see post after post calling yelena a lesbian, and even shittier to know that a lot of people will continue doing that even if they see this post or other posts from other aroaces talking about this. it feels like the queer community doesn’t really care about us much, because fantasizing about two attractive women kissing is more important than some actual aroace representation, or caring about how we feel. 

if you want to write kate/yelena fanfic while being respectful of yelena’s orientation, check out this writing asexuality in fiction post.(the links in that post are unfortunately broken. try the articles on this site.) if you want to do some more research on aspec identities themselves, consider my asexuality resources tag and aromanticism tag.

bottom line: please be respectful and please prioritize aspec people over your headcanons. that isn’t too much to ask.

[alvie-pines]

transcript:

NOTABLE ANTI-ZIONIST JEWS

Many Jews have, since Zionism's foundation as a political ideology, rejected its policies of colonialism, apartheid, supremacy-and now genocide of the Palestinian people. They know that this violent, nationalist ideology is an insult to our core Jewish and human values, and that our liberation and that of Palestinians is bound together. Here are some you may have heard of…

JVP BOSTON

All sources: bit.ly/42LdLrs

NOAM CHOMSKY

Noam Chomsky is an American author, professor, linguist, political activist and US foreign policy critic. He co-authored "On Palestine" with Ilan Pappé.

"States recognize each other but not their 'right to exist' - there is no such thing. But Israel raised that barrier to require that Palestinians accept that their oppression and expulsion is justified… Of course they're not going to accept that, so it was a nice barrier to stop negotiations."

Source: bit.ly/onpalestinencip

SIMONE ZIMMERMAN

Simone Zimmerman is an American activist, co-founder of IfNotNow, and one of the subjects of the documentary "Israelism."

"If there's anything that gives me even a drop of hope in this horrific time, it's that more people are going to take the blinders off… That people are going to stop believing the lies we were taught and have the courage to face the reality of Israel and not the fantasy of it."

Source: bit.ly/szimmisraelism

DR. NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

"My late father was in Auschwitz concentration camp. My late mother was in Majdanek concentration camp. Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians!"

Dr. Norman Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist, professor, and author focusing on the Holocaust and the occupation of Palestine. His works include "Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom".

Source: bit.ly/nfinkwaterloo

LESLIE FEINBERG

Leslie Feinberg was an American LGBTQ activist, communist, transgender liberationist, and author.

"I am lesbian and transgender. I am a working-class, secular Jewish socialist. And with every breath and every sinew, I fight for Palestinian liberation. I do not believe that our sexuality, our gender expression, and bodies can be liberated without making a ferocious mobilization against imperialist war and racism an integral part of our struggle."

Source: bit.ly/lesfein

ILAN PAPPÉ

Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. Author of many works about the occupation, most notably The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

"After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large- scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally."

Source: bit.ly/ipappeecop

WALLACE SHAWN

American actor, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and socialist best known for roles in Toy Story and The Princess Bride.

"Obviously, like anyone who is Jewish, millions of my relatives have been massacred. You would think that would teach everybody from that background that this is a tragedy that should be avoided and hatred against particular groups is wrong. Many people don't seem to have picked that up…

Source: bit.ly/wshawnhr

end transcript.

Another post for JVP Boston I made and am quite proud of! I may do a sequel if requested because there are so many more great people we could cover:

Judith Butler

Jamie Margolin

Rabbi Alissa Klein

Miriam Margolyes

Avi Shlaim

If you have any more suggestions let me know!