A friend of mine just came to me fucking crying bc he thinks he may be non-binary and you know what his other, NON BINARY friend told him?
“You don’t really seem non binary to me. You don’t seem all that feminine.”
I’m gonna fucking break everyone’s necks. Non binary doesn’t mean “Androgynous or feminine”, it means whatever the fuck you want it to be. It’s being outside of the binary.
ITS BEING OUTSIDE OF THE BINARY. MASCULINITY CAN BE NON BINARY TOO. I WILL FUCKING KILL ALL OF YOU GODDAMN RADFEMS.
Being trans, being non binary, is a fucking personal journey and you all fucking hate masculinity and men so GODDAMN much. AMAB non binary people KNOW this. Trans men KNOW this. Transmasculine people, whether non binary or binary or AMAB or AFAB, know that you guys fucking HATE US for not “”“"choosing”“”“ femininity.
Oh and of course, when we do ”“"choose”“” it, we don’t perform it well enough. We should actually just be a man already.
Like. No matter what we fucking choose, none of y'all are fucking HAPPY. Fuck you. FUCK YOU.
So look. I agree there should be more queer folks involved in the creation of media, particularly mainstream media. (Other groups too but I’m speaking on queer folks right now.) Queer people are underrepresented and shoved to the side and poorly portrayed and that sucks, and there should be more of us involved, particularly when it comes to telling our stories.
HOWEVER
Nothing good comes of the idea that ONLY queer folks should tell queer stories or portray queer characters, or that it’s okay to critique and harass straight folks purely for telling queer stories.
Why?
1. Segregation is not going to work in our favor. We know how “well make your own, then” plays out when the other group has the resources and institutional power. Especially if there’s no one even making them pay lip service to “separate but equal.” It’s not going to be any better if the segregation is self-imposed.
2. Saying straight folks can’t make queer media gives them a convenient excuse to simply not include any queer characters at all in the majority of stories, and I thought we hated that? I thought that was explicitly a bad thing? We WANT straight creators to be doing their best to write us well so we’ll be represented in a full range of mainstream media. Saying they can’t do it right and shouldn’t try lets them off the hook.
3. It puts closeted queer creators in a bind. Either they stay closeted and be harassed by angry queer folks, they come out and expose themselves to harassment from bigots, or they simply never tell queer stories, their own stories. The world gets worse for some subset of queer folks and fewer authentic queer stories get told. Net loss.
4.It makes the small pool of out queer creators the arbiters of queer narratives, which sucks for people who don’t see themselves well represented. There is no single definitive queer narrative and the smaller the pool of Approved Creators the more we risk instating a false one.
5. It opens the door to further divisions within the community. If a straight person can’t possibly understand a trans person well enough to write about or act them, can a cis gay person? So should a cis gay man ONLY write characters who are cis gay men? Ridiculous. No, all queer people are not alike and do not have the same experiences. So either we need to overcome that to learn about and empathize with other people and stand in solidarity, or we’re all going to splinter off into our own little bubbles which, again, is explicitly bad for both our real-life community and our fiction.
We want people to write about others who aren’t like them. We want people to write about others who aren’t like them. We also want people like us to have the opportunity to tell our stories but making it an exclusive privilege can only backfire.
I am a Gen Xer, and I’ve been having some conversations about photography and selfies lately, and I want to share a little bit, because I think younger queer people don’t quite understand what things used to be like.
I have no snapshots of the era of my life in which I was smootching girls behind the tilt-a-whirl at a shitty traveling carnival in a dusty empty lot. In fact, I have no pictures of any of my friends from that era aside from yearbook pictures of the friends who were in my school. I was a little goth teenager and many of my friends were also punk queers. We could not take pictures of each other.
Why? Because pictures were taken on film. And film needed to go somewhere to be developed. And if there were pictures of people “being gay” then sometimes your whole roll would disappear at the photo processor. Or your 36 exposure roll would return only 32 pictures to you. Because the processor would censor it. And aside from that, you had to be cautious about whether a photograph would somehow be seen by parents, who could kick your friend out of their house. Just because someone was holding hands in the background of a photo.
Snapshots were for kids who did sports and wholesome activities.
A little later, I had a friend who took photography and had access to the school photo lab (the art teacher didn’t care as long as no one was developing nudity), and there were some photographers who hung out with the skater kids. But prior to that, there was a whole era of my life, people who were super important to me for a time, that I just don’t have pictures of. At all. Because it wasn’t safe.
I found myself recently explaining this to a younger coworker and another colleague in the meeting, a gay man about my age, was nodding along. This was an important facet of life if you were a queer teen in the 80s. You didn’t have pictures of your people until you knew someone with use of a darkroom.
Hey so I haven’t seen much about this on Tumblr, but the UK Government backed out of including Transgender people in the Conversion Therapy Ban yesterday on TDOV (Thursday 31st of March, 2022)
It was first stated that the ban would be dropped entirely, but a revision was made a few hours later, stating that it would go ahead for sexualities, but not gender identities - against the advice of the NHS (That’s the National Health Service, for those outside of the UK), even.
“Lesbian pulp fiction refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel (often conflated with pulp magazinefiction) with overtly lesbian themes and content. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 60s by many of the same paperback publishing houses that other genres of fiction including Westerns, Romances, and Detective Fiction. Because very little other literature was available for and about lesbians at this time, quite often these books were the only reference people (lesbian and otherwise) had for modeling what lesbians were.
Stephanie Foote, from the University of Illinois commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to feminism: “Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. The more they are read, the more they are valued, and the more they are read, the closer the relationship between the very act of circulation and reading and the construction of a lesbian community becomes…Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone.”[1] Writer Donna Allegra explained why she purchased them in saying, “No matter how embarrassed and ashamed I felt when I went to the cash register to buy these books, it was absolutely necessary for me to have them. I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival.”
Dorothy Arzner (January 3, 1897 – October 1, 1979) was an American film director. Her directorial career in feature films spanned from the late 1920s into the early 1940s. Throughout that time she was the only woman working in the field.
She left Paramount in 1932 to begin work as an independent director for several of the studios. The films launched the careers of many actresses, including Katherine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Sylvia Sidney and Lucille Ball. In 1936, Arzner became the first woman to join the newly formed Directors Guild of America.
Dorothy Arzner was a lesbian, and well known in the Hollywood community though little attention was paid to it publicity. She cultivated a masculine look in her clothes and appearance.
She had been linked romantically with a number of actresses including Joan Crawford,Clara Bow, and Billie Burke, but lived much of her life with her companion, choreographer Marion Morgan.
During WWII the United States Military starting issuing “Blue Discharges.”
A Blue Discharge/Blue Slip was named because of the color paper it was printed on. These slips were used exclusively for dishonorably discharging soldiers accused of being homosexual. Once discharged, a serviceman could NOT receive any government benefits for his service in the armed forces and could be REFUSED employment by anyone.
Side Fact:
The government hired psychologists to find “the homosexual” recruits. When soldiers signed up for the service, they would be asked a series of questions with (code) words that were thought to highlight homosexual behavior. It is projected that for every one LGBTQ* individual who was detained, ten passed. By the third year of World War II, the United States Government told psychologists to stop screening. Every physical body was needed for deployment.
“Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you’re visiting this website.”
History generally speaks of the Stonewall Inn Riots as the first queer riot and turning point for LGBTQ liberation but before June 1969, two other riots broke out years before and some 3,000 miles away: The 1959 riot at Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles and a 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco.
Though knowledge of both has faded over the years, they provide an important illustration of where trans folk, queens and sexual outlaws figure into the modern LGBT rights movement and what led them to finally stand up to abuse and discrimination.
In the ’50s and ’60s, Los Angeles cops made a habit of screwing with queers: They would raided gay bars, marching the queers out in a line and arresting anyone whose perceived gender didn’t match what was on their ID. Occasionally, they’d even single out a few lucky victims for special attention in the form of insults and beatings. Entrapment was common: Attractively dressed vice cops would cruise gay bars, bathrooms and hook-up spots, pick up tricks and arrest them as soon their target leaned in for a kiss. In other cases, plainclothes cops would wait outside of gay hangouts, trail two men as they walked home and burst into their residence to catch them in the act.
As bad as gay men had it, trans people had it worse: With laws against cross-dressing on the books in California, police kept an eye out for them entering or leaving gay bars—any excuse to raid and shut the place down. (Many gay hangouts rejected trans folk for this very reason.)
Many in the trans community couldn’t get decent jobs (hell, they still can’t) and some resorted to hustling, giving the whole community the reputation of being prostitutes. The media often conflated homosexuals with cross-dressers, drag queens and trans people, making gay men and lesbians resent trans visibility even more.
So what better place to kick back than Cooper’s Donuts, an all-night eatery on Main Street in downtown L.A.? Smack dab between two gay bars—Harold’s and the Waldorf—Cooper’s become a popular late-night hangout for trans folk, butch queens, street hustlers and their johns.
Two cops entered the donut shop that night, ostensibly checking ID, and arbitrarily picked up two hustlers, two queens, and a young man just cruising and led them out. As the cops packed the back of the squad car, one of the men objected, shouting that the car was illegally crowded. While the two cops switched around to force him in, the others scattered out of the car.
From the donut shop, everyone poured out. The crowd was fed up with the police harassment and on this night they fought back, hurling donuts, coffee cups and trash at the police. The police, facing this barrage of [pastries] and porcelain, fled into their car calling for backup.
Soon, the street was bustling with disobedience. People spilled out in to the streets, dancing on cars, lighting fires, and generally reeking havoc. The police return with backup and a number of rioters are beaten and arrested. They also closed the street off for a day.
The Cooper’s Donut riot often gets confused with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot some years later: There were similar political circumstances leading up both riots. And like Cooper’s, Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was a popular all-night hangout for trans people (called “hair fairies” at the time), hustlers and assorted sexual renegades.
And both stories involve coffee cups.
In August 1966, a cafeteria worker called the police when some transgender customers at Compton’s became unruly. When a police officer attempted to arrest one trans woman, she threw a cup of hot coffee in his face. Within moments, dishes were broken, furniture was thrown, the restaurant’s windows were smashed and a nearby newsstand was burned down.
Trans people, hustlers and disenfranchised gay locals picketed the cafeteria the following night, when the restaurant’s windows were smashed again. Unlike the Stonewall riots, the situation at Compton’s was somewhat organized—many picketers were members of militant queer groups like the Street Orphans and Vanguard.
Also, the city’s response was quite different from the reaction in New York: A network of social, mental and medical support services was established, followed in 1968 by the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, overseen by a member of the SFPD. Directors Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker’s recount the historic two-day incident in their 2005 film, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.
