There’s a post going around with the sentiment of like ‘you can tell when a gay character is written by a gay person bc the stereotypes are the right ones” and people keep adding what the ‘right’ gay stereotypes are with things like ‘always getting iced coffee’ or ‘having enamel pins’ and honestly….
Honestly, on a more serious note, the number of times in the past few years someone who was assumed to be straight wrote a gay storyline and loads of people kept talking about how they wrote their gay characters in a straight way because they were straight only for the author to end up publicly coming out due to all the pressure should probably lead at least some people to reevaluate whether their ‘straightdar for authors based on how they write gay people’ is truly always accurate lmao.
#ok listen to me: this is not about whether you personally like iced coffee and enamel pins or not#it’s about how the queer movement has been co-opted by middle-class teenagers and turned from a political cause into an aesthetic#it’s about how a community that’s historally about radically accepting those Othered and marginalised now asks people to assimilate#to their standards of queerness at the risk of being outed#it’s about how status symbols of class and disposable income (which iced coffee and enamel pins ultimately are)#are used to gauge your performance of your queerness