#people. existing. aging. being queer

[batwynn]

Listen. The moment you get an older than 45 queer romance going in media I’m thrilled and I just don’t gaf if it’s sad, ‘Bad Rep’, light and happy, plot B, not ‘serious enough’, ‘too serious’, Can’t Happen Because One of Them Only is in Love With the Other Inside a Mind Split Work Place, Not Safe For Work, etc. I don’t care. I want it to exist and I will thoroughly enjoy it.

I grew up hearing about all the friends my mom lost in the queer community. I grew up knowing that those people would never have a romance that aged with their bodies. That they’d never have these kinds of stories. That the people who did survive still face hatred and violence just for holding hands in public even after living through this shit for so many years. So, yeah. I want to see the older queer couples in love, ok? I don’t care if it’s not the Young People Aesthetic or ‘Good Representation’ or wtfever. I just don’t care. They deserve to age, and love, and be messy, and be real people, and have stories told about it.

[mycological-mariner]

First day of Pride and I just want to shine a light on all the trans people who are unable to transition, especially those who aren’t fresh faced university grads. Those who don’t live in a supportive or even just accepting home or community. Those who aren’t well off, those who aren’t good at or popular enough to crowd fund. Those who can’t afford transitioning. Those who can’t even transition socially or need to stay in the closet for your safety. Those who rely on benefits or unforgiving jobs to just pay the bills. Having to hear day in and day out you’re just GNC, that your pre-transition body is “ugly” and the ways you can express your gender are “cringe.” Every trans person who’s been told they aren’t “trying hard enough”. Those trans people who won’t even get to imagine transitioning for years.

I see you. I love you. You’re so undervalued and under appreciated in a world where being a white, well off 20 year old on HRT and getting surgery is more common to see than people who work full time and just don’t have that privilege. It sucks, so much. But you are loved and you are seen.

Happy Pride Month to trans people who aren’t where they want to be. The world is better with you in it. We all need each other.

[asexualtuckerfoley]

The (tiktok) kids aren't alright they're so fucking stupid.

I saw a video speculating on Eddie's sexuality because of the Family Feud thing, and I posted a comment as part of a discussion saying Eddie's commitment issues are queercoded, and multiple baby queers got pissed at me saying queer people shouldn't be part of entertainment and that queercoding is a "personal choice."

So many of these kids think queercoding is a real life woman driving a subaru or a real life man with his nails painted, not a long history of using certain traits and behaviors in commercialized media to indicate that a character is queer when other forces (laws, executives, etc. or in more modern times, the progression of the story) prohibit them from saying it out loud.

Eddie is unable to commit to women, but he can commit to plenty of other things- he even said his marriage to Shannon was a commitment to the church and their child, not to her, which is part of why the marriage failed. He had a panic attack when things started getting serious with another woman, and a third moving in with him revived his religious trauma. It's all part of a larger narrative that screams "THIS MAN IS GAY."

Baby queers on tiktok are only seeing a hyper-sanitized version of queerness and think that and some discourse buzzwords make up the queer experience, and now they're trying so hard to force that view of queerness onto others that they've circled back to the Hays Code.

We didn't fight for our voices to be heard and our stories to be told, especially in complex and respectful ways, just to have some kid who can't even comfortably say Dick van Dyke's full name tell us we shouldn't exist in media.

[queerstudiesnatural]

seeing teenage gays out and about, holding hands and laughing and everything is SO healing. each new sighting puts a new bandaid on my inner queer child

[ofpd]

it's very funny whenever i see ppl talk about les mis as an old fixation from years ago when they were younger bc like this just happened to me in 2023 when i was 20 years old. in some ways being into les mis as a kid/younger teenager is such a specific fun vibe but i cant imagine what it would've been like... like i wouldve been crazier in both correct and incorrect ways

[wild-at-mind]

Had a really stupid conversation via minor emotional breakdown with a queer friend about what makes an LGBTQ person 'assimilist'. From what she said I'm kind of forced to draw the conclusion 'if you say you're not assimilist, then you're not'.

[dashiellqvverty]

having an actual copy of the newsies script in my hands is gonna make me insaneeee btw

[crazypossumman]

There is something incredibly charming about the bitchy-older-man-who-hates-kids-develops-a-meaningful-healthy-relationship-with-a-parentless-child trope. Especially in a world where nearly every movie/novel/whatever has to have a romantic plot/subplot when there are a plethora of other options. It’s a trope that carries great weights of love, caring, and understanding without being romantic; it expresses a different kind of love that is equally important in this world. To open your heart to a child and become the friend or parental figure they not only need but deserve is such a beautiful thing, and to watch a child help an adult learn something new about the world and the way they see it is a constant reminder that people will always have room to grow and change. To see an adult learn as much from a child as the child learns from them, sometimes even more so, is the reminder that so many people need that wisdom often comes in the form of a fresh perspective.

[lavendorii]

like. the problem is cognitive dissonance. young queer folk can say they think reclaiming slurs is fine all they want but more often than not they lose it when people identify as a fag or a dyke or literally whatever. I just think activism and community shouldn't be conditional

[xylophone888]

OH MY GOOD LORD YES

This might be a very controversial take but Sybil being fat with no hair and Adora being weird about golems and Granny being old and a virgin and Magrat being ugly and Agnes being fat and Nanny being Nanny and Cheery existing does more for feminism than 90% of intentionally "feminist" media produced in the past 5-10 years actually

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

oh cool APPARENTLY I aged out of queer dating events

[ur-friendly-nbhd-cardassian]

Is it just my bi ass, or does anyone else think every aggressively straight person is secretly just closeted?

[wild-at-mind]

If you ever see me becoming one of those transmisandry people, please fucking call me out immediately.

[anexperimentallife]

Project 2025 would ban anything the far right considers pornography. The far right considers anything queer-positive to be pornography, and they WILL encode that into law if given just a TINY bit more power.

Have queer fanfic (or trad published literature) or pics of your transition, or of two men kissing, saved to your hard drive? If the GOP get their way, you'd be guilty of possession of pornography. Did you share any of it? You'd be guilty of distribution of pornography. Have a sweet coming of age story with a queer protagonist? That'd be child pornography.

Even now, states are trying to make it a crime to be openly queer in public (by, among other things, classifying dressing as the "wrong gender" anyplace kids might see as a sex crime against children). Oh, and Florida tried (and thankfully failed) to impose the death penalty for the above.

This is just one example of the horrors awaiting us if the project comes to fruition.

And the far right is already screaming that any adult who mentions around kids that queer people exist is "grooming" children. Wear your Pride shirt past a playground? You're now a child groomer. Think they won't put that into law if allowed? You're naive.

The GOP currently controls the Supreme Court (which is how they overturned Roe v. Wade) and has a majority in one branch of congress. Imagine what will happen nationwide with the GOP controlling every branch of government, including supermajoroties in both houses of Congress.

Oh, and top GOP officials have also announced their desire to NUKE Gaza, so don't come at me with, "but I can't vote blue because Biden..." Or tell me how you think Gaza would somehow be better off with Trump and the GOP.

In France, the left and center joined together--even though they disagree vehemently on many issues (get two leftists together and they'll have three positions on any issue)--to stop the far right from totally taking over, because the one thing they ALL agree on is that fascists dictatorships are BAD.

Much the same with the UK finally kicking out their own neo-fascist party, the Torries, to install 400 Labour MPs. Not everyone loves Labour's policies, but virtually everyone with a brain cell recognizes that the Torries are fascists, and that FASCISM BAD.

"Every election, they tell us this is the most important election if our lives!" Yeah, because each election over the past several decades has been more important than the one before, until we are now at a tipping point between remaining a fucked up oligarchy with SOME resemblance to freedom, and an outright neo-fascist military dictatorship.

Trump has literally stated publicly his intent to criminalize dissent, use US armed forces against protesters (Kent State, but multiply it by thousands), purge all agencies and stuff them with those personally loyal to him, and use the DOJ to go after anyone he perceives as a threat to his political power, among other things.

And remember the things he did in office, like pulling the teeth of federal workplace protections for queer folks (which Biden reatored).

I don't care if you don't like Biden or Harris. Neither do I. But the alternative is Trump, and anyone telling you not to vote in 2024, or to vote third party, is rooting for Trump, and for Project 2025. Anyone telling you not to vote does not give one single solitary flying fuck about vulnerable populations in the US or anywhere else in the world.

"You're just being an alarmist!" Right. Like I was being alarmist when I predicted the failed Jan 6 coup attempt. Like I was being alarmist when I said the GOP would try to use control over SCOTUS to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Fucking vote.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Do you have a list of good sex ed books to read?

BOY DO I

please bear in mind that some of these books are a little old (10+ years) by research standards now, and that even the newer ones are all flawed in some way. the thing about research on human beings, and especially research on something as nebulous and huge as sex, is that people are Always going to miss something or fail to account for every possible experience, and that's just something that we have to accept in good faith. I think all of these books have something interesting to say, but that doesn't mean any of them are the only book you'll ever need.

related to that: it's been A While since I've read some of these so sorry if anything in them has aged poorly (I don't THINK SO but like, I was not as discerning a reader when I was 19) but I am still including them as books that have been important to my personal journey as a sex educator.

additionally, a caveat that very few of these books are, like, instructional sex ed books in the sense of like "here's how the penis works, here's where the clit is, etc." those books exist and they're great but they're also not very interesting to me; my studies on sex are much more in the social aspect (shout out to my sociology degree) and the way people learn to think about sex and societal factors that shape those trends. these books reflect that. I would genuinely love to have the time to check out some 101 books to see how they fare, but alas - sex ed is not my day job and I don't have the time to dedicate to that, so it happens slowly when it happens at all. I've been meaning to read Dr. Gunter's Vagina Bible since it came out in 2019, for fucks sake.

and finally an acknowledgement that this is a fairly white list, which has as much to do with biases with academia and publishing as my own unchecked biases especially early in my academic career and the limitations of my university library.

ANYWAY here's some books about sex that have been influential/informative to me in one way or another:

The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Michael Warner, 1999)

Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (Laura M. Carpenter, 2005)

Virgin: The Untouched History (Hanne Blank, 2007)

Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education Before the 1960s (Susan K. Freeman, 2008)

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (Mary Roach, 2008)

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (Revised Edition) (Susan Stryker, 2008)

The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Jessica Valenti, 2009)

Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (Amy T. Schalet, 2011)

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Hanne Blank, 2012)

Rewriting the Rules: An Integrative Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships (Meg-John Barker, 2013)

The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Realities (Rachel Hills, 2015)

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Tranform Your Sex Life (Emily Nagoski, 2015)

Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men (Jane Ward, 2015)

Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Jonathan Zimmerman, 2015)

American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (Lisa Wade, 2017)

Histories of the Transgender Child (Jules Gill-Peterson, 2018)

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights (Juno Mac and Molly Smith, 2018)

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Angela Chen, 2020)

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (Kim Gallon, 2020)

A Curious History of Sex (Kate Lister, 2020)

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Orenstein, 2020)

Black Women, Black Love: America's War on Africa American Marriage (Dianne M. Stewart, 2020)

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (Jane Ward, 2020)

Hurts So Good: The Science and Pleasure of Pain on Purpose (Leigh Cowart, 2021)

Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs (Ina Park, 2021)

The Right to Sex: Feminist in the Twenty-First Century (Amia Srinivasan, 2021)

Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles (Eric C. Wat, 2021)

Superfreaks: Kink, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Arielle Greenberg, 2023)

[aroaceleovaldez]

okay last one for the night but. honestly i really hate how the franchise has been using loyalty to Rick as a shield for so long. If Rick was involved in a project or not doesn't matter, especially not anymore.

ReadRiordan and the publishing for the franchise has been using this tactic for ages - they obscure if any writing related to the series wasn't written by Rick unless it's special circumstances. It's near impossible to find out who the ghostwriters are (Stephanie True Peters and Mary-Jane Knight). TSATS was promoted as the first time we got a non-Riordan (Rick or Haley) author working on one of the companion novels despite having seven already existing ghostwritten books in the series. The only reason Mark Oshiro was emphasized so heavily for TSATS was because they also work as a sensitivity reader for topics such as queer identity, and Rick had received backlash in the past for being a Straight Cis Old White Guy repeatedly falling into bad habits (that he hasn't broken out of) with certain characterizations that he kept doubling-down on or retconning into oblivion. The show emphasizes that Rick was involved, but the LA Times article brings into question exactly how much he was involved, and it doesn't even really matter either way. The ReadRiordan site actively avoids putting any writing credits on their articles (or art credits...) or anywhere on their site.

Practically the entire fandom unanimously agrees the musical - which had zero involvement from Rick - is the best adaptation of the series so far, including the TV show. Some of the best writing to come out of the series recently was the stuff ghostwritten by Stephanie True Peters (Camp Half-Blood Confidential, Camp Jupiter Classified, Nine from the Nine Worlds, etc). And yet when promotional stuff is posted about CHB:C, there's clearly coded language used to hide the fact that Rick himself didn't write it. Yes, that's how ghostwriters work, but at this point we should really stop pretending "Rick Riordan" isn't just a pen name for a group of authors like "Erin Hunter" and that Rick is actually writing everything in the series. I can easily look up and see which Animorphs books were ghostwritten, and who those authors were. I can find every "Erin Hunter" easily listed on official sites. And yet most people don't even know the Riordanverse franchise has ghostwriters at all.

And the franchise is still trying to use the "Tio/Uncle Rick" stuff. Author loyalty and marketing parasocial relationships isn't going to save the franchise when the author himself can't hold up his own original themes or even keep basic series bible details straight, and especially not if the editors are barely if at all doing their job. And please at least get a goddamn series bible by this point.