really don’t like using “they haven’t experienced oppression like we have” as a reason to exclude fellow minorities for a lot of reasons, but probably a big one I don’t see much of is “if the one single thing everyone in our community has in common is the experience of being victimized, then who are we when we live in a world where we aren’t anymore?”
Aiming for a future where trans/homophobia doesn’t exist, and when we get there, start acting confused about why the the queer “community” is dissolving.
Like… you can’t build a foundation out of sand and wonder why your house is gone when the tide comes in
We’re supposed to be a family, not a museum curation of pain
I think part of the origin story of a lot of queer acephobia – and I’m going to stress this at the top and the bottom, I’m only interested in how dynamics like this come to be, I’m not here to absolve anyone of it, don’t be an acephobic weirdo, deal with your stuff – is that you are a filthy pervert and you aren’t entitled to sex it’s not for you is a massive pain-point for allosexual queer people. Any interest at all that we express in sex is deviant, obscene, a mental illness, destructive, offensive, and predatory; sex is what’s wrong with us, and the message kind of soaks in that if we could be ourselves but minus the sex, or at least the acknowledgement of sex, we’d be allowable. Even back in the Deep Darkness of the 90s, I remember hearing people say nobody cares what you do in the bedroom, as long as you don’t shove it in anyone’s face. Maybe the people saying that believed it and maybe they didn’t, who knows. But it was easy to believe, at least on some level. Maybe it wasn’t your personhood that was unbearable, but just some particular action or expression that you could mask or moderate, at least where the straights could see you.
So I think if you’re coming from a place where a lot of your journey to deal with your own sexuality starts with that specific trauma – like, I really can understand why the idea that asexual people are oppressed is hard to process. They’re doing what everyone told you you should do! They’re the ones who are being obedient and inoffensive and “safe” and “family friendly!” Of course that buys them approval. Everyone always told you that was what buys approval, and you went through so much, externally and internally, to come to a place where you could say you’d rather have the sex than the approval, but they never had to do that! They don’t even want the thing that was your monstrous flaw, how dare they think they understand what you’ve been through?
Idk, obviously no one story is everyone’s story, but whenever I hear an allosexual queer person being dismissive of the idea that asexuality is an axis of oppression, I get the strong feeling that I’m seeing the long shadow of someone’s internalized, visceral disgust of gay sex, manifesting as a resentment for people who never had to be disgusted by themselves in the same way. I have so much empathy for that, I honestly do, but it’s still not okay to be so wrapped up in your own trauma that you’re fundamentally incapable of listening to people who are traumatized in a different way from you. The way we’re treated isn’t fair, but it also isn’t the fault of asexual people, and the kicker is that straight people lied to us all along. They wouldn’t like us better or treat us with more dignity if we could just excise the sexual desire from our personalities – ask an asexual person about that.
that’s the unbelievable thing, for a lot of people who grew up with the ‘wrong kind’ of sexual desire: that you could be as sexless as you’re supposed to be, you could never even want to have sex with anyone… and then if you DO do what you’ve been told is RIGHT and GOOD and POLITE, you’re still treated as a profoundly damaged subhuman? you still grow up hurting and ashamed? what the fuck? there’s no winning this stupid game???
it’s hard to hear that the world is even worse than you thought it was, and people are getting fucked up in a way you never even considered. but it is, unfortunately, what it is.
I think also the reality of repulsed ace folks can feed into this, because that repulsion exists in response to pressure to engage with sexuality in a normative way… but when you have experienced significant heteronormative disgust and judgement for your own non-normative sexuality, it is very easy to parse repulsion or requests to avoid public performance of sex as more of that heteronormative demand to squish yourself into a box.
Especially because, since humans are humans, requests/demands to accommodate sex repulsion often take essentially the same form as requests/demands to accommodate… heteronormative disgust/discomfort with specifically non-normative or queer sex. Someone who has been pressured to engageonly in heteronormative sex is going to be sensitized to things that signify to them that they are about to be pressured to engage in that kind of sex again; someone who has been pressured to engage only in heteronormative sex is going to be sensitized to cues that they are about to be pressured to notengage in non-heteronormativesex. When we experience strong social pressure to be and do something that feels bad, we often start carefully watching for cues that we are going to experience more of that pressure so we can avoid it. Unfortunately, this can really backfire if two groups who are marginalized in “opposite” ways don’t know that this kind of divide-and-conquer approach is happening.
I have an essay somewhere in there about why allyship is an action, not an identity, and that the reductive definition of “ally” to “straight person who doesn’t hate us” is a massive political mistake. All queer people have to engage in allyship in order to understand one another’s experiences and avoid creating more damage on one another’s pressure sores. Queerness is a coalition based in divergence, so it is patently silly to think that any one person can natively contain enough context to understand the experiences of all other queer people without making a conscious effort to speak to many different kinds of people and learn to understand their stories.
Part of allyship is learning to understand the many kinds of pressure that people have to push against in order to exist as their full selves, and learning to understand how to be yourself as you are without adding to the pressure trying to shove other people away from being as theyare. That understanding takes time, effort, and practice, but it is absolutely crucial to maintaining any coalition to keep ourselves safe–and our coalitions with one another are the only reason we have carved out as much safety this far as we have.
everyone is deleting the caption to this but this work is called “perfect lovers” by the gay artist felix gonzalez-torres. the piece is about the illness and death of his HIV-positive partner ross laycock:
ForUntitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), he synchronized two industrial clocks placed side by side. Inevitably, because batteries fail and things tend toward entropy, the clocks would slowly begin to advance at differing rates, out of sync, having moved, however briefly, perfectly together. (x)
“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain time in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time. We are synchronized, now and forever. I love you.” (Gonzalez-Torres, 1988)
Brad wondered what life was like in his parallel universe. Was it exactly the same? Like EXACTLY? Or was it like Australia where everyone was left handed and the alphabet started with the letter ‘z’?
One thing for sure, unwinding the design concept for these men’s winter 2022 Caribbean Resort Floral Swim Briefs would be a lot easier if came from the Spring or Summer Collection.
Who grows roses in the tropics anyway?!? UGH.
Brad pounded his hand on the mirror in frustration. Mirror Brad did the exact same thing. Growing roses in the tropics didn’t make sense to him either. For once, Brad felt validated without needing to exit a car park. That felt nice.
That’s when Chris yelled from the bedroom, “Maybe they meant Rose from The Golden Girls? She grew old in Miami.”
Later when Chris was in the shower, Brad would ask Mirror Brad if they might take up sign language. Obviously, privacy was becoming an issue.
Chris was pretty sure no one saw him wipe out on those damn algae covered rocks. They were slippery and that worm with the trashy friend on Sesame Street….Whats his head.
This photo is from my most recent project, In The Life. I’ve been working on it for the past year as a part of my final thesis at Parsons School of Design.
“In The Life” expands upon my exploration of my black queer identity and focuses on the exclusion of black queer life in photography. “In The Life” is queering black history by challenging the lack of visual representation accorded to queer identities. I am creating an archive of images that black queer people can look to for solace or inspiration. The photographs depict black queer people both in public and intimate settings performing everyday tasks. Extreme care is given to each photograph in order to elevate the mundanity and humanity of our collective lived experiences.
This photo is from my most recent project, In The Life. I’ve been working on it for the past year as a part of my final thesis at Parsons School of Design.
“In The Life” expands upon my exploration of my black queer identity and focuses on the exclusion of black queer life in photography. “In The Life” is queering black history by challenging the lack of visual representation accorded to queer identities. I am creating an archive of images that black queer people can look to for solace or inspiration. The photographs depict black queer people both in public and intimate settings performing everyday tasks. Extreme care is given to each photograph in order to elevate the mundanity and humanity of our collective lived experiences.
