star-anise:

magic-gps:

star-anise:

eternalgirlscout:

eternalgirlscout:

not gay as in happy, but queer as in i love you

i don’t mean this as a joke. i mean this as an expression of what queer means to me. this is the core of it: love, but radically. love, but in defiance. and i don’t mean “love is love” either; i mean love like militant solidarity between queer women and queer men and all other iterations and permutations of both and neither and something else. i mean love like trans self love. like decolonizing gender. i mean love like found families, like vows beyond and intentionally distinct from marriage. i mean love is a riot. i mean a love that transcends hunger. i mean love like disruption, like breaking concrete foundations like frost and thaw because to live otherwise is unthinkable or unlivable or simply and plainly unwanted

i mean queer like a shot-glass or a sledgehammer. something that shatters borders, that tears down walls and does not, cannot build them. i mean genderqueer queerplatonic we’re here we’re queer qpoc queer theory queer liberation queer Queer QUEER

They said it in the Queer Nation manifesto in 1990:

An army of lovers cannot lose. 

how do i do that if i’m not a loud person though? people say to get angry about it, but I can’t do anger as a motivation

I’m a quiet queer with my quiet identity that’s definitely weird and out of place and yeah, I was punished by my peers like everyone else, but instead of fists I got a wall of backs and if I tried to fight back, I got in trouble for initiating fights. so I stayed quiet because it was easier than being ignored. if you don’t say anything, you can pretend that they aren’t talking to you because you aren’t saying anything, not because they hate you

how do i do militant solidarity without anger. how do I do disruption without being loud. it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that it goes against the very core of what it means to be me. and even if I tried, i literally cannot hold on to anger. it doesn’t work

You love people.

You love and accept the people that you see who seem vulnerable or different. You send memes and cat pictures to friends who are having a tough time with the Discourse. You encourage artists or writers or anyone else who’s finding ways to express who they are, what their queerness is. You find small ways to share who you are, and practice showing them to people. You practice not closing yourself up like a flower if someone wants to see you. By very small acts we define ourselves, let ourselves be seen, see others, and validate who they are.

Buy a drink at a gay bar. Take a book on LGBTQ+ history out of the library. Reblog an inclusionary post. Honk when you drive past a picket line. Smile at someone on the bus who has a rainbow pin. Bring a box of donuts to protesters at a rally. You don’t have to be in the middle of the fight to contribute to it.

Silence is an even more powerful tool against us than violence is, because we have a chance to win a violent confrontation. But silence chills us, like a blank Arctic landscape, and it takes incredible amounts of hope and courage to begin defining ourselves in its face.

Don’t focus on the backs turned away. Focus on the other people who are marginalized, and begin building communities with them, of love. We will know we are winning when our queerness brings us love and belonging instead of silence and isolation.