#lgbtqa issues
Three illustrations for Broadly:
>When IUDs Go Terribly Wrong
>For Aging Trans People, Growing Old is Especially Isolating
>‘This is an Epidemic’: How NYC Public Schools Punish Girls for Being Raped
Thanks Callie Beusman & Zing Tsjeng for the art direction!
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I’m reading The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of Americaandthe entire point of gay pride as a concept comes from police raids on bars, clubs, public restrooms, etc where gays were humiliated and outed in the newspapers (sometimes with their addresses!) and had careers ruined and lives upended by being associated with perversion and vice squads and all that and they responded by going “no I’m proud” and took that pride to the streets in defiance of the huge mechanism of shame that existed to oppress the gay community into obscurity and so the fact that people are now trying to apply conservative dogma to pride parades to make them “safe for children” or in other words “safe for people with oppressive conservative values” is simply insane
The thing about “the LGBTQ community” is that it has always been an explicitly political coalition. We didn’t all just come together and hug one day.
As a cis bi man, I have nothing individually at stake in political attacks on lesbians and trans people (sometimes I don’t even have anything at stake with certain attacks on gay men!) But I treat an attack on any of those groups as an attack on myself, because basically anyone who wants to target those groups also wants to target my group. This has always been the case: there is no inherent reason why gay men would form a community with lesbians, or lesbians with bisexuals, or bisexuals with straight trans people. But historically we know that an attack on one of us inevitably precedes an attack on more of us, so there was a choice made to unify under a shared umbrella.
The right knows this, and in recent decades has been investing in highlighting wedge issues to divide the coalition and weaken its collective power even as it grows larger. Attacks on trans people from cis LGBQs need to be understood as a form of support for these efforts at disempowering all LGBTQ communities (ex. those TERF orgs that signed on to a legal briefing opposing a comprehensive anti-LGBTQ discrimination law because it included trans people)
Bisexuals were essentially accused of murdering women via HIV in the 80s, either because we were intentionally duplicitous or because we were out of control maniacs who couldn’t resist unsafe sex. For many people of that generation, this was their first time hearing about bisexuals. Now folks want to pretend that didn’t influence today’s perception of bisexuality.
I think bi is dead. More pan. I love all.
I rest my case.
