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.
I thought this was a het couple and then she turned her head. Like really just gets better and better
Anonymous:
i apologize for being nosy, and please don't answer this if you don't want to, but i remember a few years ago you had identified as asexual and i was wondering if you still do? i did for a long time but i'm with a new partner now and i'm starting to wonder if maybe the connection just wasn't right with anyone before and that's why i wasn't into having sex? is that normal? i mean, i identified that way for YEARS so i'm just. very confused at myself.
I mean listen, I’m in my 30s. These labels don’t mean a lot to me anymore. Like, literally everything is normal. Everything is fine so long as nobody’s feelings are being hurt. Don’t worry about some label that used to be useful maybe not being useful anymore. Thank it for its service and let it retire. Maybe one day it will be useful again. That doesn’t change anything about you, because you are, and always have been, a complex, multifaceted, constantly changing kaleidoscope of emotional and sexual needs, and “asexual” is just a word that helped you make sense of it for a while.
Like, y’all, give yourselves a break. Sex is complicated. Some people are straight their whole lives, and then they meet one person who changes everything. Some people are one thing for a while, then they’re another thing, then they go back to being the first thing. Some people stay one thing forever. Some people are really into something in their 20s that grosses them out to even think about for the rest of their lives. All if it’s normal.
The words you put on your orientation are not elementally a part of you. They are tools, and as tools they should serve a function. That function can be to help you understand and categorize your own experiences and desires. It can be to help you find a community. It can be to help you get laid. It can just be to set social expectations. These words can be a revelation when you first apply them to yourself: they can be life-saving. But you are not beholden to them.
“Idk, I thought of myself as ace for a long time, but I’m into my current partner, so like, enh? I’m having a good time and my partner and I are both happy, so I guess labels aren’t really useful to me right now” can be all you have to say on the subject.
The words you put on your orientation are not elementally a part of you. They are tools, and as tools they should serve a function. That function can be to help you understand and categorize your own experiences and desires. It can be to help you find a community. It can be to help you get laid. It can just be to set social expectations. These words can be a revelation when you first apply them to yourself: they can be life-saving. But you are not beholden to them.
Oh, man, I really want that “Grammatically Sound: Singular They Since 1300″ shirt.
I’m not NB, I’m cis-bi, but I’m also an editor who is really annoyed whenever people try to say the singular they is not grammatically correct and man do I relate to that t-shirt.
one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you’re going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you’ll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you’ll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar’s history, you’ll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as “guys” and “boys”, you’ll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have “he / him” painted on his chest, and you’ll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you’ll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how “problematic” it all was and it’s honestly tragic
Once, back when I worked in an LGBTQIA dungeon, I encountered a significantly older person who remarked to me that they hadn’t been to “this type of place” in decades. They struck up a conversation with me and told me how amazing it was to see an openly transexual youth such as myself. I asked them about their experiences with gender and they said “oh, well, I’m a bit male and a bit female. Men’s and women’s clothes, sometimes makeup in a suit, sometime fresh faced in a dress when I’m at home. You know, bisexual” Obv this puzzled me at first until I realized this person was using bisexual in a very, very, literal and old fashioned sense, as in, dual-sexed. Non-binary.
Y’all gotta understand there are generation gaps in the language we use and you open yourself up to a LOT of very interesting stories if you stop blocking off the past.
One of the biggest problems with modern community is the idea that (white) western, post 2000s LGBT vocabulary is the only correct way to speak about sexuality and gender.
Like the freak outs under pictures of protests from the 70s-90s because signs and shirts say faggot and dyke and queer, as if these words weren’t a key part of identity and activism.
Beyond just English, I saw a couple people making fun of the term “gender x” in an anime…but why would a Japanese production adhere to English standards?
Or the way people talk about pronouns as if every language uses pronouns the same way as English.
It’s just…it indicates a mindset that these words are objective and written in stone and western youth culture is always the most correct in a way that…feels icky. Diversity in people includes diversity of language.
Hey, gay working class and gay rural interests, aesthetics, and culture belong within the wider LGBT+ community. Country music belongs in gay spaces. Camo and trucker caps and work boots belong in gay spaces. Trucks and doorless jeeps and shitty old beaters belong in gay spaces. GEDs and high school educations and blue collar jobs belong in gay spaces. Being broke and looking like shit belongs in gay spaces. The community isn’t owned by the wealthiest San Fransisco and New York gay-geoisie. Their interests, appearances, and beliefs do not define queerness.
Me: It’s important to remember to be inclusive of gay people from rural backgrounds.
Parts of Tumblr.com: I have literally never heard of classism and thus have no frame of reference for the idea that I should be nice to people with stereotypically low class interests and so I will make fun of those interests now.
Me: Ah so I see I have overshot where y’all are at
Everyone in the notes: Yas! I love farms! Love them chickens, farm core is my life!
Bitch we all know you like farm asthetique. What we want is support for the Actual rural southern queer community. The trailer park/pre-used prefab queers. The ones who are never going to get more than a 10th grade education and work dirty blue collar jobs with hard labor. And remember that this whole ass time we often have to lie about who we are so we can keep the shitty hard labor jobs that fuck up our bodies. And remember that these communities are also black and Hispanic communities?? I see y'all in the notes “this is so white, this is so white” like the entire South isn’t full of poc and queer poc who struggle even harder because of all this??
Broke: everyone in the rural south is white homophobic racists
Woke: the rural south has large populations of queer poc who get no support and no acknowledgement within broader queer culture past the “gay cowboy” asthetic
wow this actually makes me feel really happy cause that person is me…
It me
I have to tell this story.
I thought I was the first person to come out on either side of my family, but like three years after I came out, my mom was like, “By the way, my Aunt Mildred was a lesbian.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah. My mom just told me this story the other day about her. She also had really bad depression, so bad that she was hospitalized. Her father flew out to San Diego to see her there. The nurses caught him on the way in and told him the no matter what she said, he was not allowed to get upset.” (This is the Catholic side of the family. Like, serious Irish Catholic with eleven kids and multiple priests in the family. Also super-duper Southern. And this was the 1940s and it was illegal.) “And he got real scared, but he went in. And she said, ‘Daddy, I’m a lesbian.’ He threw his hands in the air and hollered, ‘OH THANK GOD! I was worried it was gonna be something bad.’”
So. Shoutout to my Great Aunt Mildred, because she got there before I did.
Further shoutout to my second cousin Jared, who thought he was the first in even the extended family until he turned up for Granny’s 90th birthday, saw me for the first time in probably fifteen years, and heard me utter the words, “My wife…”
General shoutout to anybody who even thought they were the first in their family when they came out, even if they found out differently later on.
Y'know what, I love this story so fucking much that I’m going to schedule it to reblog when people will see it.
shoutout to those nurses who were ready to throw the fuck down for their young depressed lesbian patient like… when we talk about allies that is actually the kind of ally that has helped us to survive. in the most literal sense.
sometimes i think about gay people who lived centuries ago who thought they were all alone who imagined a world where they could live openly as themselves who met in secret spoke in code defied everything and everyone just to exist and i’m like..i gotta sit down. whew i gotta sit down
this is why this sappho fragment hits me so hard
If this little book should see the light after its 100 years of entombment, I would like its readers to know that the author was a lover of her own sex and devoted the best years of her life in striving for the political equality and social and moral elevation of women.
“The Great Geysers of California” by Laura De Force Gordon, 1879, unearthed from a 100-year-old time capsule in San Francisco, 1979.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are.”
