Tag: lgbtquiA

fyodorpavlov:

dates-anthology:

dates-anthology:

The Queer Looks Kickstarter is live!

Queer Looks is a celebration a selection of iconic aesthetics and symbols used by queer folks in the west from the last 150 years. We have printers lined up and rearing to go, so all we have to do now is raise the money to pay our artists, manufacture the two hard enamel pins, and print the gorgeous 12-piece illustration zine!

Queer people have been sending messages to each other through clothes and accessories for ages, and we’ve always had ways to find each other in a crowd. In the Queer Looks zine, you’ll find the carnation codes of the 1890s, the queer blues divas of the 1920s and 30s, and even the denim and pins of the present day. All these–and more!–are gorgeously illustrated by our crew of Dates veterans:

Check out the Kickstarter page to find out more information…and to pledge! Even if you aren’t able to back the campaign, a reblog or share can make a huge difference.

Let’s make a zine!

Guess what? We HIT GOAL LAST NIGHT (then raised a couple hundred dollars more)! On to the stretch goals–just over $300 to go before we unlock that third pin!

Hey ho, I’m in this and it’s already funded?? Wow!!

how about you dont use the word queer to describe lgbt!!! its a fucking slur!

deepfriedfuckpotato:

deepfriedfuckpotato:

jaxxgarcia:

prismatic-bell:

hojabby:

I’m a qpoc, This is what I’m talking about when white people straight wash POC.

@hijabby may I hop on this post to make a point? You’re quite a bit younger than me, which isn’t a problem or a bad thing, it just means you will have still been in kindergarten or not even born yet when the events I am about to discuss took place and given the nature of queer history, it’s totally possible I learned stuff that’s faded into ephemera for your generation.

QUEER WAS THE ACCEPTABLE, ACADEMIC TERM FOR “LGBTQIA” IN THE EARLY-TO-MID 2000s.

I took classes in Queer Literature. We discussed Queer History. Some of my professors–who were themselves gay, lesbian, and bisexual, mind you–referred to historical figures as queer on the basis that those figures did not exist in societies that had a modern-day understanding of sexuality, and so trying to box them into modern labels is an exercise in futility. I went to marches where we screamed “we’re here, we’re queer, we want our civil rights.”

All of this, by the way, spawns out of the Genderqueer and ACT UP movements of the 1990s; they’re the ones who invented the chant on which the above chant was based, the one you may have heard elsewhere: “we’re here, we’re queer, get over it.” I’m proud of my own part in queer history, but those people, the ones who created the AIDS quilt and the die-ins and the fierce demands for same-sex marriage so they could visit partners dying in the hospital, they’re the real heroes. And they called themselves queer.

And?

Most of them were not white.

I am. The radical activism of my generation looks very different from generations past because, I’m sorry to say, white queer folks sat back and let queer folks of color do the hard part, and then we grabbed the baton and charged over the first big finish line while the sportscasters talked about the stunning race we’d run. I’m not sorry to be an activist or to be working in my own generation, but I’m very deeply sorry that queer activism en masse has widely ignored the nonwhite, noncis people who got us where we are.

“Queer” has more uses than just being a slur that was reclaimed 30+ years ago. Queer is a useful term if, say, you’re 15 and you’re not sure if you’re asexual or a late bloomer, but you don’t want to just say “oh yeah, I’m gay/straight.” Queer is a useful term if, like me, you escaped a fundamentalist church and your whole life has been defined by strict labels, and you just want out. Queer is a useful term if you’re from a country where gender doesn’t fit a Western binary but you want a quick term to describe yourself to Western people.

And do you know what else queer is?

Queer is hated by TERFs because it encompasses trans people.

Because it embraces aroace people.

Because it says “you are here, you are welcome, you belong” to people who say “I know I’m not straight, but I don’t know what I AM.” What you are is queer, and queer is enough. Queer is the place you can sit, rest, and figure it out at your own pace.

TERFs started the narrative of “queer is only a slur, has never been anything else, and was never reclaimed and you should never ever say it ever” in order to gatekeep our community. When you try to deny this term, YOU ARE DOING THE WORK OF TERFS.

Queer is not a slur. Queer is a reclaimed word that is of huge help to people across the community, but most especially to our fellows who aren’t “just” LGB, and to the nonwhite members of our community who do not fit into the gender binary.

Stop. STOP. Stop listening to TERFs who pretend nothing of queer rights existed between 1880 and 2015. Stop being ahistorical and disenfranchising.

We’re here, we’re queer, get the fuck over it.

In addition to all of this, The Bi community in the 80s and 90s used Queer a lot as well because the word Bisexual was less tolerable so to still feel a part of the community they rightfully were a part of, they used Queer. Granted, this was when they were rallying and making sure people saw “Bisexual” on posters and pins but it made gay people uncomfortable and not every Bisexual could handle that.

So when I see things like “Q Slur” what it looks like is the active invalidation of lgbt+ people who find safe haven in a word that is all-encompassing without specification. When I was confused and having panic attacks over the fact no label fit me – Queer saved me.

I think people have a right to choose not to use a reclaimed word for themselves, marginalized people get that choice. But to demand NO one use it often comes with the implication of an unawareness to the history behind it and how our community fought tooth and nail for that word to be reclaimed for us to use – decades ago.

Tossing in a bit of my own knowledge here: queer was also used as a positive self-identifying term as early as the 1930s interchangeably with gay (which was used by all genders).

We’re here, we’re queer, go fuck yourselves.

Pardon me, Gay New York by George Chauncey pushes this date back to 1910. My bad.

He Took a Drug to Prevent AIDS. Then He Couldn’t Get Disability Insurance.

actupny:

Three years ago, Dr. Philip J. Cheng, a urology resident at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, nicked himself while preparing an H.I.V.-positive patient for surgery.

Following hospital protocol, he took a one-month course of Truvada, a cocktail of two anti-H.I.V. drugs, to prevent infection. Later, because he was an unattached gay man, he decided to keep taking Truvada to protect himself from getting H.I.V. through sex.

The practice — called PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis — is safe and highly effective. Several studies have shown that users who take the drug daily are at nearly zero risk of H.I.V. infection.

But when Dr. Cheng applied for disability insurance — which many young doctors do to protect a lifetime’s worth of income should they be hurt — he was told that, because he was taking Truvada, he could have only a five-year policy.

[…]

There are nearly 800 life insurers in this country, according to the American Council of Life Insurers. There are no national figures on how many of them have denied coverage to men because they take PrEP.

But insurance brokers, gay-rights advocates and staff at medical clinics said in interviews they had heard of numerous such cases. H.I.V. specialists say the denials endanger men’s lives by encouraging them to drop PrEP if they need life, disability or long-term-care insurance.

HIV stigma is based on bigotry and fear, not facts.

He Took a Drug to Prevent AIDS. Then He Couldn’t Get Disability Insurance.

Toronto has had a serial killer operating in the gay Village for nearly a decade.

allthecanadianpolitics:

queenalia:

hewson-wehaveaproblem:

Gay men have been going missing in Toronto’s gay village since 2010. Last month, an arrest was made by Toronto police and Bruce McArthur has since been charged with 5 counts of first-degree murder. Today, police announced that six bodies were discovered on his property.

In June, I went to Toronto for the Gay Pride Parade. I spent a lot of time in the Gay Village. The first afternoon I was there, a friend took me aside and told me to be careful because people were going missing from the Village.

“Okay,” I agreed. No questions, no surprise. I went to Pride. My friend and I had a great time. We went out. We stayed out. And we were careful.  

I was in Toronto visiting friends over Christmas. On New Year’s Eve, my girlfriend at the time and I decided to head to the Village with some friends and hang out at a drag bar.

When we made plans, we were all keenly aware of the fact that there were rumors of a serial killer operating in Toronto’s gay village. We knew because we are queer, and we have queer friends, and we spend time in queer spaces.

In other words, we knew because we had to know.

It took me an afternoon of Googling to piece together how many people had gone missing in Toronto. The articles I did find generally came from the families of some of those who had gone missing, desperately searching for information, or from queer voices out of the Village, wondering why no one had bothered to take notice of a serial killer targeting a specific demographic of Toronto.

It was a rhetorical question. We all know why.

To make matters worse, a strong element of racial bias undergirds the entire investigation. The outcry from Toronto’s LGBTQ community details a sickening degree of racism and willful ignorance.  

I should disclose that I live fulltime in Montreal.  But my best friend lives in Toronto. I had a girlfriend there for several months. Two of my closest friends visit their parents in the city regularly. I made it my business to know when my friends were headed to the Village, and to make sure they checked in with me at the end of the night. There are some things that you don’t, as friends, always acknowledge openly. As a gang of queers in our early twenties, we tacitly agreed to keep an eye on another as best we could. Certainly no one else does. We knew that, too.

Toronto had a particularly intense cold snap at the end of December, and the city was offering free public transit for New Year’s Eve, so we gladly avoided walking when we could— we stayed warm, and, I thought, avoided ridiculous Uber fares.

“I wouldn’t want to take an Uber anyways,” one of the local girls remarked as I expressed fascination at the efficiency of Toronto’s streetcar system.

“Why not?” As someone who grew up in a small town with minimal public transit, and pitiful taxi service, I couldn’t imagine not taking advantage of [carpooling services].

“Well, they think the guy abducting people from the village has been posing as an Uber driver,” my friend told me nervously. “So I don’t really want to take an Uber to the Village and back. Just in case.”

By this point, 7 people had gone missing from the village since 2010. The latest victim had disappeared only a month prior, on November 25th, 2017.

On New Year’s Eve, I smoked a joint on Bloor and paraded my drunken self up and down the street with no problem. I did not see a single police car or officer.

Toronto’s police force has been under fire for months for abandoning previous investigative projects regarding the missing men. Despite outcry from the LGBTQ community, Toronto police declared last year that there was no evidence of a serial killer at work in the Village.

Between 1975 and 1978, 14 gay men went missing from the Village. Police suspected a serial killer at the time, but half the cases—in which 7 gay men were brutally and violently murdered—remain unsolved today. McArthur was in his mid-twenties at the time.

It took me a fair amount of research and time and reaching out to put together enough information to realize the scale of silence and avoidance on behalf of media across Canada and the Toronto police department. I don’t wonder why. Dead queers are not headline news. Especially if they aren’t White. Or they’re queer women. I suppose, in the end, a serial killer is only as interesting as his victims.

And so this is Toronto—Canada’s largest city, where the crosswalks are painted in rainbow colors. And this is homophobia. This is transphobia. This is racism. And this is Montreal. New York. Every small town, big city, or backwater village in North America. Rainbow flags in storefront windows do not mean a damn thing when we are being picked off and abandoned. We cannot be quiet. I will not be quiet and pretend like this is not happening merely because it is happening to people condemned to expendability by virtue of their sexuality, ethnicity, or gender.

I’m done hearing things about living in a “post-gay” moment. I’m sick of listening to people whine about tolerance and inclusivity and bathroom policies. “It’s 2018,” people sigh at me. “No one cares about this stuff anymore.”

I’m going to start telling people that they’re right. No one does care about this stuff anymore.

I’m just not sure they ever did.

(source)

–

I wish all the victims and all those affected by the atrocities in Toronto–friends, families, fellow queers, and LGBTQ folks alike—peace, wellness, and justice. Don’t sleep on this. We cannot be silent. 

RIP. 

  • Skandaraj “Skanda” Navaratnam
  • Abdulbasir “Basir” Faizi
  • Majeed “Hamid” Kayhan
  • Selim Esen
  • Andrew Kinsman
  • Alloura Wells
  • Chase Kincaid
  • Tess Richey
  • Majeed Kayhan
  • Soroush Mahmud
  • Dean Lisowick

@allthecanadianpolitics do you know anything about this?

I’ve posted a LOT about this.

You can find all I’ve posted about this disturbing story under the following hashtags: #Bruce McArthur, #Toronto, #LGBTQ, #Serial Killer, and #Homophobia.

Tonight I posted a new disturbing development in this story:

Remains of 6 people found at property tied to alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur

I recently posted a careless response to another post. This is the post I should have made instead:

If you have the bandwidth to correct people’s terminology and assumptions without being an asshole please do, because we only grow from education and experience.

If you lack the bandwidth for that today or any day, it is fine. Bitch to your friends or on Tumblr or whatever you need because self care is important too and it is exhausting to explain things all the time. One of the reasons we need minority spaces, whether that is a GSA or any kind of diversity related high school or college club or center or bar or whatever separate space, is to be with people we don’t have to explain ourselves to.

Tumblr as a culture right now seems to be rife with calling people out and presenting ‘receipts’ of bad behavior which might just amount to misusing a term. Yes, there are people who are doing abusive, horrible things and need to be stopped, but sometimes people are just in a learning curve. If you feel like sending anything, send corrections, not for example, death threats. I wish I was exaggerating. The world would be a little easier to navigate for people who want to be our allies if we try not to yell at people who are making attempts at changing their terminology, or sometimes their whole worldview. They will make mistakes on the way, as we all do. My mom has always had gay friends, is really socially liberal, but used to be a strict enforcer of the gender binary and she’d say really thoughtlessly hurtful things. Often. She’s getting better. Sometimes her attempts at humor or just general inclusivity are cringe-worthy and when I have the bandwidth I help guide her. I hope all those of us who are able will do the same.

yaminoendo:

nico-incognito:

doobiewrap:

inourwildest-dreams:

ezrasbarry:

nektannneightyfour:

the-real-eye-to-see:

It is perfect!

#LGBTQ

I don’t think it’s proper. You can’t spread equality with a closed fist.

You sound mad fucking stupid man shut the hell up

I think this creates a separation in the LGTB community. Why not just have one flag for everyone?

There are literal hundreds of LGBT flag variations to upfift said Race/Religion/Country 

Even ones for the specific areas in the LGBT community 

How the fuck is this any different? Why is it everytime black people come up with something for themselves y’all have to come out with this show your entire asses with this “"segregation” shit. 

Suck on my entire dick

Also, if you’re in this thread and have never made nor reblogged a post about the way POC, especially Black people are treated in the LGBTQ community then motherfuck you. We wouldn’t feel the need to remind you that we’re here, if you didn’t treat us like we weren’t.

Originally posted by yourreactiongifs

please help me escape arranged marriage

princessnaima:

my name is naima and i’m an eighteen y/o somali lesbian in desperate need of help. over the past few months i have been under the impression that my family is warming up to the idea of me not being what they want me to be. unfortunately this is not the case and i believe the only way out is to escape as they have now resorted to basically treating me like a prisoner and promising me to a man instead of letting me go to university as they promised. i have no funds of my own and to even think of escaping and surviving the first few weeks i desperately need money. i have to use ko-fi since it’s the most anonymous of ways and my father has found out what i do online before (i had to remake my tumblr). despite everything i do not wish any harm on them. i simply want to part ways. i don’t have a lot of followers but if any of you is willing to help i will forever carry you in my heart.

ko-fi.com/princessnaima

katsgf:

one of my best friends is a bisexual woman who used to identify as a lesbian, and when she realized that she’s actually bisexual she was really scared about telling people because she feared backlash and rejection. but for her, the bisexual label is really important and she took the most amount of comfort in it. she initially identified as a lesbian because she couldn’t conceive of being attracted to men and women simultaneously, and she needed a way to articulate that she likes women. similarly, lesbians who have once identified as bisexual probably needed a way to state that they like women but didn’t know that it was possible for them to like women and /only/ women. we have to ensure that questioning wlw who are moving between labels and figuring out who they actually are for the first time feel safe and comfortable in doing so. 

HELP needed! Calling everybody in the Rainbow Family!

aftertheworldends:

callmegoddess618:

aftertheworldends:

aftertheworldends:

This book needs your support.

It’s written by a queer author and
features many LGBTQIA+ characters.

Lesbians? Check. Gays? Check?
Pansexual best friends? Right here. Wanna have some badass bisexuals? It has
them. Trans soldiers? No problem. Looking for genderqueer folks? Find them in
this book. Aro besties who are also pro pilots? No problem. Ace single moms? Have it.

image

This book was self-published
because it had ZERO chance to make it out in the cruel publishing world. It rubs
people in all the wrong spots:

– it tells you marriage isn’t
sacred

– it puts POC people in power AND
as respected professionals in their field

– it has a mixed Middle Eastern and
Slavic descent MC

– glorifies friendship over love
(particularly possessive love)

– strong women. strong women
everywhere

– Whut even are gender norms?

– No gender assumptions, tell your
PRONOUN with your NAME

– self care

– no bullshitting about mental illness

– survivor trope without focusing on the trauma

– the military doesn’t give a shit
about your gender as long as you kick ass

– I’m sorry, did I say ethnically diverse OC cast??

image

Help out by spreading the word, or
better yet: read and REVIEW. 

Amazon will bury this book unless you help it.  It needs urgent reviews or it will DIE in the trenches.

Support Rainbow books by Rainbow
authors!

Stay readin’, folks!

Ro-ri

Currently on discount at amazon.co.uk! 🙂 

Ace single mom you say?

Hello! ^^ 

Meet Sergeant Natalie Barrero. 

Former Junior Sergeant for the Iron Squad of the elite Special Forces team S-400. During the series, she is a Sergeant in charge of guarding the Central Military Corps near the Republic’s capital. (Obviously there is a commanding officer somewhere there in charge but who cares, Natalie rocks.) 

Her son’s name is Brendan. He is 3 at the time she meets with the Blackthorns again. 

Natalie is dedicated to my ace/aro grandmother, who has always wanted children, a peaceful life, security in her own home, and the chance to have a career. Through Natalie, I try to tell the story of the life she could have had if the world was a better place. One day, I will write the most mundane “a day in her life” sort of thing, just for her. 

Until then, stay readin’,

Ro-ri

asexualspectrumspector:

pastel-kawaii-shitpunk-pokefurry:

star-anise:

robotbisexual:

memestealingasexual:

hottestaceinthisplace:

If you don’t believe being asexual has any negative affect on people I was told by a psychiatrist that none of my relationships count because we didn’t have sex, and
I can’t say I’m gay since I don’t want to have sex with girls.

and I was taken off my antidepressants because they may be lowering the libido I never had in the first place (plus various other reasons, but still immediately, cold turkey, which should NEVER happen unless they’re switching you to something else)

But aphobia doesn’t exist and asexuals are privileged, right?

Sorry to add to this but I wanted to say since I’ve had bad experiences with mental health professionals and biphobia, I usually get asked “but are you sure you are sexually attracted to both sexes, are you sure it’s not just an emotional attraction?!” Like my dude don’t you think I can tell the difference between wanting to date someone and wanting to be friends? Also, due to be gray ace 90% of the time I am not even attracted to anyone but like sure, make me feel guilty that I can’t “prove” my bisexuality.

Sorry too but to add on, being aro isn’t much different. I told my therapist and she was immediately concerned that my meds were repressing “all my emotions” and wanted to take me off them. My insurance ran out and I went off them bc of no money before that happened. She also suggested dating someone anyway to “fix” the “issue” and expressed concern that my emotions (romantic feelings) weren’t present because “I’m suspicious and untrusting of everyone and don’t want to try hard enough.”

Having your orientation medicalized and invalidated is bad enough, but its fucking dangerous to have your meds taken away because you’re not performing relationships the way some doctor thinks you’re required to.

Aaaand this is why we need the bi/pan/ace/aro alliance.

this is why we need to recognize more queer experiences and identities than gay and lesbian, through increased awareness, information and representation.

My hand slipped…  (P.S. It’s transparent!)