Dude was trans, and pioneered a lot of gynecology. Turns out there’s a movie currently being made about him, except:
Hmm.
Hmm.
HMM.
this crosses the line of plausibly deniable ignorance and careens straight into the territory of intentionally erasing our stories and our history.
im still on this actually. doctor barry’s personal notes and journals describe him feeling what we would now be able to easily identify as dysphoria and he did not work as hard as he did to be recognized as a man just to be played by a cis actress and have everything he did written off as “a woman pretending to be a man.” between this and the narrowly avoided disaster that would have been rub and tug, hollywood seems to be systematically dismantling the history of trans people and erasing our heroes, saying that the whole time, they really were just their agab. you know, the same thing that has been said about every trans person throughout history.
give this the same uproar that rub and tug got. don’t let this rest until everything about this movie is either scrapped or changed. do not let a million cis people’s introduction to doctor barry be that he was a woman when he spent so much of his life escaping that very perception.
I think it’s time to consider the fact that Isabelle Eberhardt, writer and explorer, lived life as a male and that by consistently referring to him as “she” and a “cross-dressing explorer” we are missing out on a very important part of history. Isabelle Eberhardt changed his name to Si Mahmoud Saadi, and yes- dressed as a man, but also lived as a man, wrote as a man, and was accepted by his community as a man. His whole life, no matter where he lived, he lived as a man. When asked why he did this he said “It is impossible for me to do otherwise.” (Abel-Jaouad, Isabelle Eberhardt: Portrait of the Artsist as a Young Nomad”). Let’s respect who this brave, brilliant, and intrepid explorer was.
THE SINS OF THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN by “Jack Saul”, 1881
A strictly limited new edition of 5 handmade copies is now available for sale on my Etsy. After these copies are sold no more will be made. There are only two copies left, as of this writing.
The Text
Text is a series of explicit vignettes and gossipy short tales. It contains references to sex work, anal sex, spanking, underage sex, masturbation, oral sex. Mostly male/male.
This work was originally published London, 1881 in an edition of 250 copies. The work is now in public domain. If you’d like to get it in print but can’t swing my price, Valancourt Books has released it as a paperback. (Go and check out their incredible catalog of LGBT and horror lost treasures they’re bringing back into print! Highly recommended!)
Inside Design
The book’s layout and form factor are intended to mimic books of the late Victorian period.
The entire text has been reset using period appropriate fonts and the printer’s ornaments from the original edition. Title page mimics the original.
In this edition I have included a series of erotic cabinet photographs of two young adult males in feminine clothing, performing various sex acts. Their chemistry is readily apparent.
Outside
Each of the five copies has been bound in different complimentary cloth, paper and endpapers. Each copy is unique.
These books are 7.25x5.5″. I cut them by hand with scalpel and straightedge, then sand the edges down with sandpaper block.
Having separate flags is good bcos it’s good to have a symbol for your particular identity to embrace but it also important to remember the rainbow flag unites us all. All LGBT+ people can use it. I feel like it’s somehow become assumed by a lot of younger lgbt+ people that it’s only fr gay men, which it isn’t and never has been
The rainbow flag when originally created by Gilbert Baker in 1978 actually contained 8 stripes that were assigned values and specific meanings that were meant to show what unites us and what we value as a community,
It took 30 people to hand dye AND hand stitch the first 2 pride flags- 30 people of various identities came together to create the first symbol of pride. Hot pink was removed due to fabric shortages and turquoise was mixed with indigo to have the darker blue we have today.
Having individual flags is great to show your identity but I think we shouldn’t forget that the rainbow flag isn’t reserved for gay men, it was created to show what we all have in common regardless of identity.
“This is an important book, speaking to some of the most contemporary queries and issues relating to LGBTQ people, cultures, and our histories. Carefully attentive to the ways in which race, ethnicity, class, and gender (among other identities and power systems) speak to and with LGBTQ identities of various stripes, the book delivers a persuasive challenge to continuing presumptions that the South has never been a space or place in which LGBTQ people or cultures or communities could emerge, let alone survive and thrive. Rather than a book ‘of history’ it is ultimately a book about history—how it is made, what gets missed or elided by even the most well-meaning of scholars.”
Today’s episode is on the life and trial of early 20th century Australian transgender man Harry Crawford. Join us to learn what court records, newspaper articles and modern biographies can tell us about a century of Australian attitudes to transgender experiences.
[Image: Mugshot of Harry Crawford, taken by the New South Wales Police Department in 1920. It is a black and white photo Harry Crawford, a white man in a three piece suit looking at the camera with a serious expression.]
WasAnne Lister’s gay code not enough for you? Good news! 12th century nun Hildegard of Bingen (also likely queer), invented Litterae Ignotae, her very own alphabet designed for writing in her own constructed language, Lingua Ignota.
You can find a glossary of many Lingua Ignota words here, and use the key above to start writing coded notes to your friends!
“Jean Arthur herself had no children, and despite her marriages (the one to Frank Ross and an earlier one-day marriage to Julian Ancker), her sexual tendencies were ambiguous. Fellow actor Patsy Kelly overtly acknowledged (in an interview) Arthur’s lesbianism, while Agnes Moorehead did not contradict an interviewer who grouped Arthur with actresses who ‘have enjoyed lesbian or bi-relationships.’ Moorehead simply said that, like most women, Arthur was 'emotionally intricate’. Arthur was rumored to have been romantically involved with Mary Martin, gossip that seemed validated by a 1966 novel, The Princess and the Goblin, allegedly a roman á clef about their relationship; it was several years before its author, Paul Rosner, acknowledged that the story was wholly imagined, though he did draw on his own impressions of the two women in writing it. Speculation about Arthur’s sexual orientation was revived by Donald Spoto’s biography of Marlene Dietrich, Blue Angel, which cited Arthur and Martin among the 'charter members of America’s creative lesbian community’, while Hadleigh’s book assumed Arthur’s lesbianism or bisexuality 'as a given’.”
-FromThe Gay & Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era by Billy J. Harbin, Kimberley Bell Marra, and Robert A. Schanke
A lot of bisexual history has been erased so I figured I’d remind you all of some quotes and clear up any misunderstandings about bisexuality.
Bisexuality has been described as attraction regardless of gender for decades
“I am bisexual because I am drawn to people regardless of gender”
-‘The Bisexual Community: Are We Visible Yet?’, 1987
“In the midst of whatever hardships we [bisexuals] had encountered, this day we worked with each other to preserve our gift of loving people for who they are regardless of gender.”
-Elissa M., “Bi Conference,” Bi Women, 1985
“To be bisexual is to have the potential to be open emotionally and sexually to people as people, regardless of their gender.”
“Being bisexual does not mean they have sexual relations with both sexes but that they are capable of meaningful and intimate involvement with a person regardless of gender.”
-Janet Bode, “The Pressure Cooker,” View From Another Closet, 1976
“Over the past fifteen years, however, [one Caucasian man] has realized that he is ‘attracted to people — not their sexual identity’ and no longer cares whether his partners are male or female. He has kept his Bi identity and now uses it to refer to his attraction to people regardless of their gender.”
-Paula C. Rust, “Sexual Identity and Bisexual Identities,” Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, 1998
“In the midst of whatever hardships we [bisexuals] had encountered, this day we worked with each other to preserve our gift of loving people for who they are regardless of gender.”
-Elissa M., “Bi Conference,” Bi Women, 1985
“To be bisexual is to have the potential to be open emotionally and sexually to people as people, regardless of their gender.”
Bisexuality doesn’t have to mean a person “sees gender”
“[S]ome bisexuals say they are blind to the gender of their potential lovers and that they love people as people… For the first group, a dichotomy of genders between which to choose doesn’t seem to exist”
-Kathleen Bennett, “Feminist Bisexuality, a Both/And Option for an Either/Or World,” Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism,1992
“Some bisexual respondents bypass the issue of ‘degrees’ of attraction to women and men by defining bisexuals as a humanistic, gender-blind way of relating to others. They see bisexuality as a way of loving the person, not their sex, or being nondiscrimintory in their attractions to others. For example, Ludwica wrote, ‘I feel as if I’m open to respond to the person, not just the gender.’ ”
-“Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution” by Paula C Rust 1995
“I believe that people fall in love with individuals, not with a sex… I believe most of us will end up acknowledging that we love certain people or, perhaps, certain kinds of people, and that gender need not be a significant category, though for some of us it may be.”
Ruth Hubbard, ‘There Is No ‘Natural’ Human Sexuality, Bi Women’ ,1986
“Some women who call themselves ‘bisexual’ insist that the gender of their lover is irrelevant to them, that they do not choose lovers on the basis of gender.”
-Marilyn Murphy, “Thinking About Bisexuality,” Bi Women, 1991
“Some of us are bisexual because we do not pay much attention to the gender of our attractions.”
-Bisexual Politics, Quiries and Visions, 1995
Bisexuality is inclusive of all genders
“Who is this group for exactly? Anyone who identifies as bisexual or thinks they are attracted to or interested in all genders… This newly formed [support] group is to create a supportive, safe environment for people who are questioning their sexual orientation and think they may be bisexual.”
-“Coming Out as Bisexual,” Bi Women, 1994
“It’s easier, I believe, for exclusive heterosexuals to tolerate (and that’s the word) exclusive homosexuals than [bisexuals] who, rejecting exclusivity, sleep with people not genders…”
-Martin Duberman, 1974
“The bisexual community should be a place where lines are erased. Bisexuality dismisses, disproves, and defies dichotomies. It connotates a loss of rigidity and absolutes. It is an inclusive term.” -‘Essay for the Inclusion of Transsexuals’, Kory Martin-Damon, 1995
“Bisexual — being emotionally and physically attracted to all genders.”
-The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, “Out of the Past: Teacher’s Guide” 1999
“Bisexuality is much more than, and different from, the sensationalized ‘third choice, best of both worlds’ phenomena it’s made out to be. Bisexuality is an inclusive term that defines immense possibilities avalable to us, whether we act on them or not.”
-“Bi Any Other Name”, Loraine Hutchens and Lani Ku'ahumany, 1991
“Bisexual consciousness, because of its amorphous quality and inclusive nature, posed a fundamental threat to the dualistic and exclusionary thought patterns which were- and still are- tenaciously held by both the gay liberation leadership and its enemies.”
-“The Bisexual Movement’s Beginnings in the 70s”, Bisexual politics, Naomi Tucker, 1995
Bisexuality historically and currently includes transgender and nonbinary people
“With respect to our integrity as bisexuals, it is our responsibility to include transgender people in our language, in our communities, in our politics, and in our lives”
-Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions by Naomi S Tucker, 1995
“Bisexuality is here defined as the capacity , regardless of the sexual identity label one chooses , to love and sexually desire both same - and other - gendered individuals . The term other-gendered is used here deliberately and is preferable to the term opposite - gendered , because other - gendered encompasses a recognition of the existence of transgendered and transsexual individuals , who may embrace gender identities other than [male and female]”
-“Bisexuality: The Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority” by Beth A. Firestein and Dallas Denny, 1996
“From the earliest years of the bi community, significant numbers of TV/TS [transvestite/transsexual] and transgender people have always been involved with it. The bi community served as a kind of refuge for people who felt excluded from the established gay and lesbian communities.”
-Kevin Lano, “Bisexuality and Transgenderism,” Anything That Moves, 1998
“Bisexuality means having the capacity to be attracted to people of both major genders ( don’t forget: there are gender minorities, too) .” “As with the word Bisexual, they usually also imply that relations with gender minorities are possible.”
-‘Bisexuality: A Reader and a Sourcebook’, 1990
“There were a lot of transvestites and transsexuals who came to [the San Francisco Bisexual Center in the 1970s], because they were not going to be turned away because of the way they dressed.”
-David Lourea in “Bisexual Histories in San Francisco in the 1970s and Early 1980s,” Dworkin, 2000 Journal of Bisexuality
“The actual lived non-binary history of the bisexual community and movement and the inclusive culture and community spirit of bisexuals are eradicated when a binary interpretation of our name for ourselves is arbitrarily assumed.”
-“Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out” by Lani Ka’ahumanu
“In the bisexual movement as a whole, transgendered individuals are celebrated not only as an aspect of the diversity of the bisexual community, but, because like bisexuals, they do not fit neatly into dichotomous categories.”
-“Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics” by Paula C. Rust, 1995
fuck all of u bitches with bad taste welcome to night vale did not have THE MAIN CHARACTER, THE NARRATOR, say hes in gay love at first sight with another man in goddamn 2012 when the best you could get was, like, glee, for you to say its only legacy is that some ppl r being cringe abt horror. fuck you.
people’s standards have dropped so fucking low n some of u have never had that experience of listening to the pilot for the first time and hear cecil wax poetic about how handsome and mysterious carlos is and have it be completely normal and expected! do you know how unprecedented that was? do you know how healing it was to hear gay love being talked about with such candor and without shame, without restraint?
wtnv was incrediblyy ahead of the curve in a lot of ways and it continues to be almost a decade later and i REFUSE to let yall slander it like this. it isnt even a horror podcast it’s a comedy with horror elements but it was never meant to be scary. the way that wtnv also does satire so well n the scathing critiques of contemporary society (esp the surveillance state)….. just say u never understood what it was (is & continues to be) abt and go lol no need to embarrass urself
and you see. the thing is. i remember being here. i remember when ppl were scared wtnv wld just be another bury your gays story. and i remember when the 1 year anniversary episode came out and EVERYONE being shocked that not only did nobody die but cecil and carlos rly got together! and i rmbr when wtnv topped the charts week after week after week following that and it was THE fiction podcast and it was THE podcast in general for so long until its popularity gradually lessened and people started to look at other things and listened to other podcasts.
but you cannot look at wtnv which was literally genre-defining in its ingenious storytelling and everything else and say its legacy is that ppl think trees with eyes are the epitome of horror.
i wont allow it.
they’re literally celebrating their 10 yr anniversary this year n they never dropped the ball, not even once. your faves could never. i need u to apologize to jeffrey cranor and joseph fink rn for this slander.
The mainstream LGBTQIA movement is becoming increasingly puritanical. In my eyes, this is a subconsciousness effort by queer people to fight for our rights by appeasing the cis-het overlords. Basically we are trying to get them to give us rights by acting just like them.
In reality however, we aren’t like them and we really shouldn’t be. The sexual status quo is fundamentally harmful and objectively flawed. Furthermore, appeasing one’s oppressors never works, it just makes the oppressors more powerful.
No amount of sexual stuff a child or teenager could see at pride would, even if we assume it’s not ideal, come close to what it does to you to grow up seeing airbrushed models selling everything with sex and having all the humanity edited out of sexual things and the sexuality edited out of all things human, including mainstream porn. I would rather a 14y/o spend their free time in a kink dungeon than in front of a billboard, because when you see and learn sexuality through actual people you see that it’s not different from other forms of human connection and interaction. And being around kink in a context where you can walk up the the people and talk to them will teach you actual boundaries and consent. Something that our culture sorely lacks.
This is such a bad-faith argument that I don’t even know where to start, @disabledstemstudent. But… let’s treat it like it’s in good faith and you’ve just got some shit to unpack.
Let’s start out with this: no one is fucking in public at Pride. Pride isn’t the Folsom Street Fair, which I often see it compared to, and all of the “look at this man getting fisted in public” or whatever comes from Folsom and is presented as taking place at Pride. It’s technically true that Folsom is a Pride event, because it’s a Leather Pride event, but you aren’t going to stumble across someone fucking in public at Folsom. You have to deliberately enter the closed-off area where Folsom takes place, so if you’re seeing fucking in public at Pride, you’re either at Folsom and that’s on you, or someone is doing something they shouldn’t be. We’ll come back to that second idea in a minute, but for now, let’s reiterate:
No one is fucking in public at Pride.
So what are we really talking about, here? What’s the real bugaboo that people are discussing?
Two things: public nudity and “leather/fetish/kink clothing”.
(I put quotes around the latter because what we normally refer to as “fetish clothing” is only a very narrow segment of what people wear for kink purposes, but I’ll get back to that, too.)
What is it that people are really objecting to, here? “I don’t want to see almost naked people in public. I don’t want to see clothing which I consider to be sexual signaling. Someone wearing a pup mask in public is engaging in a public scene and I don’t consent to being part of that.”
All of this hinges on the concepts of 1) consent and 2) how queer sexuality is viewed as opposed to cishetallo sexuality. So let’s start peeling all of that apart.
So let’s first talk about Folsom vs Pride. Folsom Street Fair in SF is literally what the ‘this should be in an 18+ space’ crowd is advocating for! This IS that space!
But people are (deliberately in many cases, ignorantly in others) conflating Leather Pride, in September, with the Pride which sprung from the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March organized by Brenda Howard, among others. That March, a continuation of the East Coast Homophile Organization’s 4th of July Marches started in Philly in 1965, gave birth to Pride Month.
Folsom, by contrast, began as a protest in San Francisco against gentrification of a historically gay neighborhood, and was specifically a queer/Leather pushback against people trying to re-closet the queer community during the AIDS crisis. San Francisco was specifically using the AIDS crisis as an excuse to close bathhouses and regulate bars, which started in 1984, so it’s not a surprise that the first Folsom Street Fair took place that year.
Both were protests against the ways in which white cishetalloperikyriarchy has tried to crush our community over the decades, but they are independent events with independent origins. They should not be conflated; if nothing else, it’s a disservice to our history.
However. Pride is not, and never has been, a family-friendly event; this protestation that it should be is rooted in protoTERF & white cis-gay sanitation attempts & ignores the history of the event itself. Pride was begun by kinksters, including Brenda Howard, famously quoted as saying, “Bi, Poly, Switch - I’m not greedy, I know what I want.” She was a Jewish disabled leather-community sex worker, & that identity is emblematic of the people who founded Pride in the first place.
This 'santization/cishet-friendliness’ of Pride completely plows over & astroterfs (not a typo) its roots:
All of the central figures in Stonewall were not cis, or gender-conforming, and Stonewall itself? Owned by the Mafia, since only they would bankroll gay bars at the time. (In fact, the rename of it was an attempt to keep the Mafia from having 'ownership’ since they owned Stonewall - there were concerns that the Mafia would say 'this is our event, you’re using the name of our bar.’ A far cry from Wells Fargo & Merck sponsorships, that.)
A scant few years later, in 1973, people were booing one of the activists from Stonewall, Sylvia Rivera, because the TERF-and-cis-LG pushback had already begun. The cis white LG’s were beginning their calls for respectability. This is the famous 'Y'all Better Quiet Down’ speech. People who were NOT at Stonewall were already trying to sanitize Pride, & there’s video from a radfem screaming at Sylvia and misgendering her. I will not name said radfem, may her name be obliterated.
Pride has ALWAYS included Leather and has ALWAYS included Kinksters because it was founded by them and this sanitization started as soon as the Comfortable felt like they could take Pride from the Most Afflicted and those who had been there. Like, the group Sylvia and Marsha founded was called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, run by trans sex workers for trans sex workers. This was NEVER the neat-and-tidy acceptable-to-straights corporate-friendly bullshit that people seem to think it is/should be now.
So now we’ve established that this event sprung from the “unrespectable queers” because the respectable ones had been doing the organizing before then and had resisted joining with the unrespectable queers, the kinksters and the leather daddies, because they didn’t want to be seen as “like that,” but when Pride became successful and actually got somewhere, they sure were happy to swoop on in and literally tell Sylvia and Marsha “you can’t march with us because you’re not respectable and you would drag us down.” (They showed up and walked in front of the parade.)
Well, so what? Why does it matter if they wanted to exclude trans sex workers who weren’t respectable in appearance, amirite? If the Respectable Gays wanted to swoop on in and take from the Unrespectable Queers what the latter built?
Well, aside from the fact that what they did and tried to do was shitty? Because the whole thing started because of sumptuary laws. Pride literally springs from cishetallos deciding what clothing is “acceptable” for queers to wear in public based not on how much of their body is covered but upon the perceived queerness of their clothing.
Stonewall began because cops were enforcing vice laws targeting trans and gnc people. At the time, it was illegal to wear more than 2 items of clothing associated w/'the wrong gender,’ so a trans woman wearing bra, panties, and a skirt was illegally dressed. So they were literally raiding bars, getting people’s IDs, and comparing their junk to their clothes and deciding who was illegally and immorally dressed.
Let that one sink in for a minute, in context. I wonder why Pride had so much emphasis on kinky queers & trans queers & GNC queers being out loud & Proud in whatever the fuck they wanted to wear on this ONE DAY when they were all together & physically more people than the police could stop. (Not that Pride wasn’t a permitted march from the first - it was - and it was a protest, not a party.)
And now that we’ve established that Pride, the protest March, not the street fair for corporations, is and always has been by and for the leather daddies and the Dykes on Bikes, the revolutionary contingent who got into fights with cops over the right to wear the clothes they wanted to wear – and had been doing so for years, by the way, Stonewall was just the first well documented violent conflict between cops acting on repressive vice laws which targeted femme queens in specific and the people they were oppressing with the weight of the law…
… let’s actually talk about consent.
Those vice laws were based on consent. The idea that the general public didn’t consenttoseeing trans women in public. The idea that the general public got to have a say on whether or not they consented to seeing trans people in public was the whole basis of those laws. I don’t consent to seeing you queers and recognizing you as queer.
But it’s different! The anti-kink-at-Pride crowd cries. This is explicitly sexual clothing!
First of all, no. It’s not. Kink is not inherently sexual.
Second of all, even if kink is inherently sexual, even if what you object to is clothing which signals sexually to other people, why is this particular clothing which signals sexually to other people what you object to? Why is it this?
Why aren’t you objecting to cishet women in plunging necklines or wearing tiny bikinis to the beach? Why aren’t you protesting billboards where m/f couples in almost nothing, or sometimes totally nothing, literally have their tongues down each other’s throats?
Is it because this clothing is indicative of what you think of as deviant sexuality?
I’m willing to bet it is, and if that’s the case, then there’s an awful lot to unpack there about who and what has a deviant sexuality and why we hypersexualize and condemn queer displays of sexuality, especially QTPOC sexuality.
(There is a lot of very racialized bias in this conversation but that is not mine to unpack – I just need to stop and say YES THIS EXISTS, because boy it sure does.)
Why exactly do we think queer sexuality displays require MORE consent than the hypersaturated cishet sexuality surrounding us like a dank BUYTHISNOW miasma every time we turn on a TV/walk out the door?
The answer is internalized homophobia & transphobia. That’s yours to unpack, and it is not the job of a random stranger to change their behavior because you see queer sexuality as inherently more sexual or aggressive, nor is it their job to regulate their clothing according to the possible sexual trauma or sexual orientation of others.
The idea of consent in sexuality and discussed in BDSM/Leather communities centers around the idea that someone should not do something to you without your consent. It’s a good concept! I like it! It’s correct that it is a cornerstone of BDSM and it SHOULD BE.
But, and this is really important, so I need you to read this several times and really sit with it:
The idea that someone simply wearing a pup mask in public is doing something to you while a woman in a thong bikini is not requires you to be examining the world through the homophobic lenses which society smacks on all of our eyes.
Read it again. Think about it. Be okay with the fact that this fact makes you uncomfortable and resistant to recognizing it. Be okay with your discomfort so you can actually unpack that.
The idea that you need to consent to seeing a leather daddy in a harness, but skinny cishet white girls at clubs aren’tdoing something to you by wearing bondage pants & harnesses (which they do, all the time, & no one blinks) comes from internalized homophobia and transphobia.
The way that we view queer sexual signaling no more overt than what cishet people do constantly and base entire economic systems around as doing something to us in a way that requires us to consent to even seeing it is based in homophobia and transphobia.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant my school administrators in the 90s fired a gay teacher because kids might see her at school events with her partner.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant that the administrators first barred the only lesbian couple at my school from holding hands & kissing each other goodbye in the halls and then barred the straight couples from doing so too when rightful claims of discrimination flared.
And? All of this argument requires us to think of Pride as a singular event with no variations, striations, separate areas, etc. This is clearly not the case. If you look at the slate of events for any major city’s Pride events, there are very clearly multiple different events across multiple days for most of them. If you want to create a PG-13 event, or attend one, most places have those!
Expecting the entirety of Pride to be kid-safe is ahistorical, treats adults like children, and requires you to smack them homophobic glasses right back on your eyeballs and insist that the Bad Queers go back into the closet.
And, of course, this all ties into the “pedophile” and “groomer” bullshit which has sprung back up like fucking mushrooms. Oh, those bad nasty queers who are … wearing leather pants in public and going bare-chested and wearing a face mask and a leash! Oh no! They’re making things unsafe for our children by wearing clothing less revealing than the average beach!
But it’s bad clothing because it’s queer clothing and queer sexuality is, in this mindset, inherently threatening and doing something to you. So engaging with this argument supports that shit, and honestly… it’s fucking obscene.
Using this argument against queer adults who are literally just there enjoying the company of other queer adults is fucking violence. This argument and its root implications are the accusations which got (and still get) queers evicted, fired, and beaten to death.
So, IN CONCLUSION:
How dare you come to an event founded by kinksters and swarm around them like the other animals clamoring at the Little Red Hen for the bread she baked?
How dare you look at the leather daddies who survived AIDS and say “we climbed on your back to where we are now, where big corporations see the dollar signs in the queer community rather than condemning us to literally die in the streets, now go away, because you’re unsightly and we don’t wanna see you anymore?”
How dare you engage this in an environment where they’re literally trying to make social transition for minors illegal. What is social transition? Clothing. So now we’re back to “wearing the 'wrong gender’s’ clothing” is the crime they’re trying to make a Thing again in Florida.
How dare you and everyone making this shit-ass argument year after year look at Dykes on Bikes who nursed and buried their dying friends when no one else would and say “mmm, you’re a pedophile actually because you want to go topless in the sun and show off the tattoos that you got in defiance of a world that didn’t want you to live, and ride through the street with your lover’s arms around you for one day, pretending this world still doesn’t want you dead?”
How dare you wield the very important language of consent like a fucking scythe against your fellow queers?
That is a tool, not a fucking weapon.
Do not use it to attack our history, this event that your elders made for you.
Strangers on the street are not responsible for your sexual trauma, and if your trauma is so bad that you can’t walk around in public and see people wearing sexually-signaling clothing, then I commend you to mental health care and wish you the best of luck, because that’s almost all the clothing that people wear, in one form or another.
Itstill isn’t the responsibility of adults wearing clothing they are otherwise permitted to wear to change that clothing because you don’t like the messaging it sends about who they fuck and how they fuck. A leather harness and a slinky black dress both convey that information, so why is only one of those things objectionable?
But Spider! What if I’m walking down the street at New York Pride and a dude has his dick out and is getting a blowjob right there in the street!
Well, buddy, then that’s bad regardless of whether the dude in question is wearing leather pants or a polo shirt and khakis, but…
… why did you only picture one of those two images when you read that sentence? Why did you immediately conjure up a specific image in your mind, and why wasn’t it a dude in jeans and a t-shirt? Trust me, the gays in polo shirts and khakis fuck just as much as the ones in mesh shirts and latex dick slings.
Yeah. That shit is yours to unpack and deal with, not other people’s to cater to.
“JUST MARRIED,” Fernando, seated, and his husband, both members of Los Angeles’ Blue Max Motorcycle Club, get pulled over as they leave their wedding ceremony, December 1969. Photo c/o @onearchives. In the mid-twentieth century, the Blue Max Motorcycle Club, along with many other gay motorcycle clubs, provided an alternative to gay bars, which were constantly at risk of police raids and harassment. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #queerhistorymatters #haveprideinhistory (at Los Angeles, California)
fun fact: motorcycle clubs in the U.S. were founded and run largely by gay men who missed the homosocial camaraderie of being in the U.S. military during WWII. the lifestyle and aesthetics of those motorcycle clubs gave rise to many of the stereotypical/classic gay “looks” (leather, chaps, etc) and indeed to the gay leather scene itself (both the gay male leather/biker scene and the lesbian/dykes on bikes leather/biker scene)
Just to add to this - the classic “metal look” that heavy metal rock came to be associated with (leather, studs, tight fitting clothes) was introduced by Rob Halford of Judas Priest, an openly gay man who says he was simply wearing the look from the gay leather subculture on stage, and people started imitating him.
So the two “iconically heteo” fixtures of masculinity - biker gangs and heavy metal music, are both actually just gay culture that heteros unknowingly adopted.
For roughly a century, my hometown was the location of the largest biscuit manufactuer in the UK, Huntley & Palmers, and even though they’ve not really been as big of a deal for some time, you can still see various buildings and parks in the area named after the two founders.
However, the popularity of the brand ended up leading to it taking an odd place in British LGBTQ history, all due to one guy’s decision to use the founders’ names as euphemisms.
Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time (lesbianism never was, but was still highly taboo) and the Wolfenden Report would actually play an important role in in it getting decriminalised in 1967 (albeit for men over the age of 21).
However, the decision was made by Wolfenden and the panel to use Huntley and Palmers as internal euphemisms for “homosexuals“ and “prostitutes“ so not to “scandalise” the secretaries who were writing down the minutes of the meetings surrounding their report.
So yeah. That’s how the British Isles’ largest biscuit brand accidentally got tied to LGBTQ history!
Okey, as a young man Price had extremely right wing political views adopted from his wealthy parents, this, unfortunately, included saying some praiseworthy things about a certain Adolf Hitler. However, as the 1930s rolled on he “came to his senses“, in his own words, and went on to become one of the most vocally liberal actors in Hollywood for the remainder of his career, viewing his brief period as a fascist sympathiser with understandable shame for the rest of his life.
Indeed, in the biography of the actor by his daughter, Victoria Price, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Commission had Vincent “greylisted”… For being a “premature anti-nazi“ (something he noted he apparently shared with Eleanor Roosevelt).
For the remainder of his career worked tirelessly for socially progressive causes, be they denouncing religious and racial prejudice (referring to it as a “poison” on the radio in 1950) or his work supporting the LGBTQ community (Vincent was bisexual and his daughter, Victoria, is a lesbian), including openly criticising the anti-gay rights campaign by bigot and singer Anita Bryant in the 1970s.
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the American literary icon who influenced Brooklyn’s artistic and intellectual life in the mid-1800s. Did you know that Whitman was an acting Librarian at the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library? The predecessor institutions of the Brooklyn Museum, the Apprentices’ Library and the Brooklyn Institute, engendered cultural legitimacy in the rapidly expanding village of Brooklyn, and fostered a creative atmosphere that bolstered Whitman’s talents. These institutions played a role in Whitman’s writings throughout his adult life—from Brooklyn Standard, a poem recounting Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette laying the cornerstone of the Apprentice’s Library building, to the multiple Brooklyn Daily Eagle art reviews praising the Institute’s representation of Brooklyn artists. An art aficionado himself, Whitman inspired many young artists, including painter Walter Libbey whose portraits are currently on view in our fifth floor Luce Visible Storage and Study Center. His deep-rooted connection to Brooklyn as a whole is pervasive in his literature: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry describes the common commute of a Brooklynite traversing the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and Leaves of Grass was published here. Even after moving away, Whitman’s lasting love for the borough caused him to return multiple times over the following decades, and his legacy remains alive in Brooklyn today. Come visit the Brooklyn Museum and help us celebrate two centuries of Walt Whitman!
Posted by Alison Hirsch Thomas Johnson (American, born England, 1843-1904). Walt Whitman, ca. 1890. Etching, drypoint, on white wove paper. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Spencer Bickerton, 33.338
A Medieval Gay Brawl in the Synagogue On Yom Kippur
Sometimes the finds of the Genizah are so incredible that you have difficulty believing that it’s really there, that you are really peering through this window into the lives of medieval Jews around the Mediterranean. This story caught my attention in a footnote of Goitein’s and I thought I would post it for Yom Kippur… It’s not really magic-related, except that I think there’s a certain magic in recovering and reclaiming the past.
The fragment shown here, T-S 8J22.25 in Cambridge, is a letter from a Jewish pilgrim named Hasan ben Mu’ammal, who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the High Holidays, Tishrei 4813 = September 1052 CE. He reports that a certain Daniel had wished to see him but he was unable to, because of “the altercation” that had happened in synagogue. Apparently, on Yom Kippur, many pilgrims had gathered from around the Mediterranean, and “a man from Tiberias and a man from [Tyre] became involved in love, and the Tiberian began fondling [?] the Tyrian in the sight of everyone… and the people from Tiberias and those from Tyre began to fight with one another and went out to […] and they brought the chief of the police to the synagogue and […] until the people calmed down.” Hasan goes on to report that Daniel had told him that “such is the behaviour of these people every day,” and concludes the letter with best wishes to the recipients (his brother Abu Nasr and family). A wild ride from start to finish. Goitein drily observes that the letter indicates that homosexuality was regarded as a “vice rather than a deadly crime… [and] it did not form the object of great social concern.”
Shana tova — welcome to 5777! May all who are fasting have a meaningful, enriching, and affirming day… and hopefully a peaceful one too!
A classic post! This source is now available with a full translation and commentary in my book, A Rainbow Thread. Shana tova, and may all who are observing Yom Kippur have a meaningful holiday!
Did you know violet flowers used to be a lesbian symbol?
Often featured in Greek poet Sappho’s writings, violets also made a comeback in the 1927 Broadway play, “The Captive,“ about two lesbians, where one woman sends a bouquet of violets to her lover. There was so much public uproar about the play that protestors and police shut down the final performance in France. But the violet became known as the "lesbian flower,” and supporters of the play would wear them in their lapels, or as a subtle symbol to other women that they were gay.
What little LGBTQ+ “symbols” do you wear today - rainbow shoelaces, lesbian flag-colored phone background? Also…can we make violets A Thing again?
In light of February being LGBT+ History Month, I thought that I would take this blog post to write a little bit about my favourite historical figure, Alfred Kinsey, Regarded as the founder of modern sexology and responsible for (unsurprisingly!) the Kinsey Scale, the Kinsey Reports and the Kinsey Institute, it’s the research behind these things which makes him perhaps the most influential sex researcher in history.
A zoologist and entomologist by training, Kinsey’s first works focused on gall wasps and botany. However, his interest in human sexuality was sparked when teaching a college sex education course in the 1930s, and his realisation that there was very little information on the topic in response to his students’ questions. He therefore established a sex studies programme, designed to apply the principles and methods of scientific research to human sexuality. Over the next decades, the institute collected data from 11, 240 participants regarding their sexual behaviours, and these were published as Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female(1953).
The results shocked America. They presented an offence to the prevailing public view: that sex was heterosexual, within marriage and male-dominated. Instead, Kinsey’s statistics discussed the female orgasm, sex workers, masturbation, anal sex, sexual orientations, sadomasochism and even sexual activity with animals. They recognised the fluidity of sexual orientation and behaviour, and the Kinsey Scale was born with reference to this, acknowledging a spectrum of sexuality and asexuality.
His methods have been criticised with regards to the demographics represented within the sample. However, right up to today, few researchers have conducted such large-scale studies, the only comparable one being the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL), first conducted in the UK in 1990 in the wake of the HIV epidemic, and repeated twice since. Kinsey was just as progressive in his personal life. He was openly bisexual, and maintained an open marriage with his wife, Clara McMillen. His legacy has been continued by the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, ad in the plethora of research on sex and sexualities for which he opened the doors to. In his active confrontation of the societal values surrounding sex to which the US held dear, he revolutionised the way in which the public viewed sex, and was considered by many to have been one of the catalysts for the sexual revolution in the 1960s. His findings had a profound impact upon education, public understanding and even sexual morality itself.
Defamed by the McCarthyist movement, Kinsey lost his research funding and died shortly after. However, his publications remain amongst some of the most influential scientific texts of the 20th century, and the impact of his research on academia and society endures.
Most Americans, and most other people, are familiar with Abraham Lincoln. He was the 16th president of the United States and was known for freeing slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation before his assassination.
What most people are not familiar with, however, is Lincoln’s sexuality. Lincoln was married to Mary Todd from 1842 up until his death. However, it is thought that Lincoln had some male lovers both before and during his marriage to Todd.
From these relationships, it is thought that Lincoln was at the very least fluid with his sexuality, if not bisexual or pansexual.
Most Americans, and most other people, are familiar with Abraham Lincoln. He was the 16th president of the United States and was known for freeing slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation before his assassination.
What most people are not familiar with, however, is Lincoln’s sexuality. Lincoln was married to Mary Todd from 1842 up until his death. However, it is thought that Lincoln had some male lovers both before and during his marriage to Todd.
From these relationships, it is thought that Lincoln was at the very least fluid with his sexuality, if not bisexual or pansexual.
[clutches my pearls]Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought trans people were trendof today’s youth!
I’d like to add my great great aunt Flora!
Y'all wanna know why we don’t see or hear about trans people from that era?
That’s because that picture was taken at what is known in its native language as Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, it is the place where the first trans healthcare was developed, where the term transsexual was coined.
Do you want to know what happened to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft?
It was the victim of the very first Nazi book burning. Their teachings were outlawed and their books destroyed. Their leaders - such as Magnus Hirschfeld - were criminalized and exiled, if not outright murdered.
The fascists exterminated not just a generation of trans people, but they erased our history from the books almost entirely. It took us almost a century to get back to where we are now.
We’ve always been here, but our future is not guaranteed. We have to fight for our survival, because it’s happening again.
![socialistexan:emdots:thattallnerdybean:[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought](https://64.media.tumblr.com/995b65701b7602bc1e4061c13204950c/tumblr_ot75q086AK1s9c6nao1_1280.jpg "socialistexan:emdots:thattallnerdybean:[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought")
