Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
The largest mass shooting in American history was a hate crime against gay people. Don’t ever forget that.
June 12, 2016. Putting a date on this for when it gets reblogged months from now by people who think the post is about something from 30, 40 years ago.
I am a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, having grown up in Orlando and just turned 20 a month prior. If you didn’t know, there were several families who refused to claim the bodies of their relatives due to their sexuality. One family even had their relative’s name removed from the memorial. Murdered by the same hate with which their families reject them in both life and death.
Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:
We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.
The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.
At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:
ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.
Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.
This year was the sixth anniversary. The first couple years I received dozens of messages checking in on me on 6/12. Year 5 got enough news coverage for people to think to reach out to me. This year it was my therapist, the woman I kissed in that photo, and a couple of other gun violence survivor friends. People are forgetting already.
With the 7 year anniversary <2 weeks away, I figured I’d reblog this
Anonymous:
Do you have any favorite examples of bizarre sexual dimorphism in nature?
the blanket octopus is a wonderous creature. reaching about two meters in length, the females glide majestically through the tropical south seas, trailing two huge vibrant coattail cloaks of fused tentacle webbing behind them!
they use their brightly-colored cloak as an intimidation factor, tricking predator and prey alike into thinking that they’re MUCH bigger than they actually are! look at this, would you mess with this?? I would not mess with this.
the males, on the other tentacle arm, are about an inch long.
CW: genocide, fear, destruction of cultural heritage
If your utopia is a society without ethnic, cultural or religious identities… I don’t trust you, I fear you, the idea of you and your ilk at the reigns of power is an existential threat.
No matter what social or economic conditions you imagine will bring about this homogeneous world without pressure or coercion, it simply will not… And so like every other governing entity throughout history that has found subject peoples unwilling to assimilate you will turn to force.
You say we will not exist and we will be happy for it. But I have seen Torah scrolls decaying behind glass in a monastery, taken as trophies of the inquisition. I have seen bins filled with tefillin, taken as trophies of the Third Reich who built a museum expecting it to explain a people that used to exist. I have seen the triumphal arch depicting the sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Menorah carried away by the Romans.
You say we will not exist, and I see in my vision our places of community burning. I see our holy items confiscated and destroyed. I see my people fleeing wherever they can and hiding when they must. I see us surviving still, as we always have.
A revolution that doesn’t liberate us on our terms is trading one oppressive society for another, no matter your good intentions.
עם ישראל חי
I have never, ever considered this perspective and I am so glad to have read this. I need to go fix some of my fiction ideas
The greatest trick Christianity ever pulled was convincing the world that the elimination of other cultures and the goal of “universal brotherhood” was liberation rather than empire.
