I really wish people would understand that there are other forms of queer rep besides two same gendered people kissing.
A queer character is queer rep regardless of their romance or a lack thereof even. Ace and aro people exist. Trans people exist. Bi people exist. Queer characters are rep by existing, not just by who they interact with. If a character is nonbinary, they are queer rep whether they kiss someone or not. A bi character in a relationship with someone a different gender is still queer rep because they are still bi. Queer characters can even just be friends with one another. They can be single! And still be queer because that’s who they are not who they do!
This whole trend of deciding if art is valid representation based on romance and ships is reductive and dismissive of identities existing within individuals. And of the communities that we all need.
Just please, stop reducing entire identities down to relationships. Its all good and fun to enjoy your ships, but you have to remember the community is bigger than just romances.
We have a Discord server where we play & talk all things D&D/TTRPG’s! This is a safe space for Queer Folks! Come to us, D&D friends! We have a lot of Witchy stuff happening too!
“Agree with most of this but would like to point out that a part of the push to make Pride less sexual is to make it a safe space for queer children and to help straights realize being queer isn’t just about fetishes.“
(The person is not tagged because I don’t want to send any hate to them, and the reply isn’t being responded to directly because Tumblr has made that near impossible)
When I came out, my mom told me I couldn’t tell my little sister because it was too sexual.
Later, I moved to the “Big City”, what I hoped to be a haven for queer people. I was with one of the first queer friends my wife and I had made in the city, we had just watched their wrestling debut, and had gone to their apartment afterwards with a group of strangers. Some this group our friend had told us behind the scenes were much more right wing causing our friend to keep parts of their queer identity under wraps.
Our friend suddenly turned to us and began scolding us, telling me and my wife that one of their coworkers at the city Pride Centre had approached them and told them that she had seen me and my wife kiss, and we needed to cut it out with the PDA.
I nodded in front of this group of strangers and when I could no longer hold my tears back I excused myself to the bathroom, cried and waited there until it was no longer obvious I had been crying. We hurried out.
The kiss in question was a goodbye kiss, as my wife went back to campus, and I don’t remember it. I have always been rather shy with PDA and don’t think it could have been much more than a peck. The coworker later told our friend that she was going through a bad breakup and our friend later explained that this was actually the reason for the complaint.
I have never felt safe in queer spaces since. Talking to the same friend later, they asked me and my wife to chaperone the Queer Prom and without thinking I assured them we would make sure not to hold hands or dance while we were there so it would stay “a safe space for children”.
When I was a child, I stumbled into a pride parade and was shocked and upset by the men in gold short shorts. My uncle apologized for letting me see something so sexual and awful.
Every single thing queer people do is “about fetishes” to people who hate queerness. Being less sexual is not going to change that.
I had seen short shorts before. I would see them again, and no one would apologize for that. The thing I was being kept “safe” from was not overly sexual behaviour, and considering there are already laws against indecent exposure, the same is true for children now.
Keeping theoretical children safe has been the justification for the continuing genocide against queer people all around the globe, so this rhetoric is not harmless. It has been used to put queer people in labour campsandslaughter them.
I have nothing to prove to “straights” and I was the “queer child” who was horrified by the pride parades. As an adult, the discomfort I felt at seeing queer people existing happily and authentically in short shorts, is not something I needed to be kept safe from.
This nonsense is nothing more or less than the same moral panic that has killed queer people throughout history.
fauncatboyhonum:a gender related to being a half-catboy, half-faun nonhuman
for anon! the first three stripes are from the faunhonum flag, with the brown and green stripe swapped both for symmetry and because brown can represent both fauns and cats, and the silver and blue stripe are for catboys.
flag id: a flag with 5 vertical stripes. in order, they are very light yellow-green, dark brown, brown, dark silver, and light sky blue.
my take on homoflexible lesbian and lesboy flags for tf2 anon! the left flags are based on this homoflexible flag, the right ones are based on this homoflexible flag, and the rest of the colors are from the lesbianandlesboyflags.
flag id: the top left flag has 4 stripes. in order, they are orange, light purple, dark red-pink, and very dark pink-purple. the top right flag has 3 vertical stripes on each side of the flag and 7 horizontal stripes in the center, with the third and fifth being larger than the rest and the fourth being larger than those. the vertical stripes on the left side are dark red-pink, red-pink, and white; the vertical stripes on the right side are white, orange, and red-orange; and the horizontal stripes are black, grey, white, black, white, grey, and black.
the bottom left flag has 4 stripes. in order, they are light orange, light purple, dark blue, and dark purple-pink. the bottom right flag has 3 vertical stripes on each side of the flag and 7 horizontal stripes in the center, with the third and fifth being larger than the rest and the fourth being larger than those. the vertical stripes on the left side are pink-red, light orange, and white; the vertical stripes on the right are white, soft indigo, and dark blue; and the horizontal stripes are black, grey, white, black, white, grey, and black. end id.
flag id: the right flag has 6 stripes. in order, they are dark blue, purple, yellow, light pink, cream, and turquoise. the middle has 5 stripes. in order, they are light sky blue, purple, light pink, cream, and light sky blue. the right has 5 stripes. in order, they are dark blue, light pink, faded purple, light pink, and dark blue. end id.
flag id: the left flag has 6 stripes. in order, they are red-pink, sky blue, blue-white, red-white, light red-orange, and bright red-pink. the right flag has 6 stripes. in order, they are sky blue, red-pink, light red-pink, blue-white, soft indigo, and dark blue. end id.
On par with the argument of Aziraphale and Crowley fitting so many different types of queer rep into them because they can be whatever we want to see them and that’s awesome… There’s an argument I always miss in this sort of “discourse”, and it’s that even outside of human labels and identities, they are absolutely queer characters? Like, even ignoring all the human stuff, saying they might not have gender for real, are canonically sexless, etc etc… Like, guys, they’re so queer when you just look at them as angels (demons).
Crowley’s presentation is continuously neat, tidy, fashionable and modern. He isn’t presenting at all the way other demons are. Demons are expected to be dirty, with old clothes, hair full of grease and blood and other gross liquids, sores on their faces, animals on their heads. Crowley doesn’t confirm to this presentation at all. We speak about his gender non-conformity in human terms, but his demon non-conformity is at least as important IMO. Crowley chooses how he wants to look, how he wants to be seen, for himself, even if it’s looked down on and met with scorn from the demons around him. (Does this strike cords with anyone else who’s gnc? Because it should.)
Likewise, Aziraphale doesn’t wear the tailored suits and the gold tattoos that are a normal presentation for an angel. He engages in a lot of unangelic activities, like hoarding books and enjoying meals, and he gets flack for it the same way any person who fails at having the proper interests for their gender gets flack from their environment, too.
Already on their own these characters are queer coded that way. And then there’s their relationship, their love for one another, the way they’re drawn to a member of a group they’re not at all supposed to be attracted to. They fall in love with the wrong person. The person they love isn’t the gender sort of angel they’re supposed to, allowed to love. Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Especially Aziraphale goes through all the struggles a lot of us queer folk go though. He tries to not see it. They’re just acquaintances, it’s nothing - okay, they work together sometimes - okay, they might be friends, but they can’t - oh fuck he loves Crowley, and it’s mutual, and he cannot live in a world that doesn’t have Crowley, but loving him puts Crowley at risk, they can’t let anyone see, ever. That’s, yeah, that’s just living in a homophobic world, y'all. It does that to us. And Crowley is more comfortable with his love in itself (and cares less for the approval of his family side), but he too is aware of the risks and aware of how difficult giving in to it is for Aziraphale.
Like, yes, the characters aren’t human. There’s analogies and metaphors and shit here, yeah. But their entire story is queer as fuck. Please shut up about the queer baiting.
We live in a society in which everything is sexualized, and yet heterosexuality is somehow decoupled from the sex part of it.
Being straight is so ubiquitous, it’s somehow not thought of as a sexual thing most of the time. I think it has something to do with conflating sex and love, which is a whole other barrel of monkeys. But I think this explains so many homophobes and exclusionists’ views:
That simply being gay is seen as being openly sexual, even when the person in question is just kissing or holding hands with their partner, or even just mentioning their orientation
That an asexual person mentioning that they are asexual is “dragging people into their sex life”
Meanwhile, a straight person mentioning that they are straight, talking about their partner, and being openly affectionate in public with them is not seen as being unnecessarily sexual or corrupting the children because that’s just love
Related, that assigning children as heterosexual and joking about it is normal (onesies with “ladies man” and such on them)
If I may add; the casual tone that cishets will discuss how they’re “trying to have children” etc. Which is literally just sex like that’s sex. You can talk about sexual reproduction and how often you attempt it but GOD forbid my girlfriend and I share a milkshake at the park
one annoying knock on effect of queerbaiting is how it kind of kills actually good serialized queer storytelling because audiences will either a) assume deliberate relationship and character progression is irrelevant and ignorable until a really obvious beat then claim it “came out of nowhere” or b) go on the offensive and assume malicious intent. like if your audience won’t give the benefit of the doubt then you can’t have long term slow burn romances, gradual identity discovery arcs, or even standard breakup narratives because those could all look like “baiting” before the resolution episode comes out in three month’s time or something.
This conversation plays through my head any time I see a “queer is a slur” bullshit post on this site or anywhere, really.
(Homer’s Phobia, 1997 – guest star, John Waters)
Someone just liked this, so I want to add an important note:
“queer is a slur” is a common tool used by TERFs to poison young queers against their own community. They teach young queers that using “queer” is against the rules because “queer is a slur” and then young queers repeat it because the elders in their queer social circle told them so.
Why? Because if young queers understand that queer is a loving and welcoming term for everyone who is not straight or does not match their birth sex, then TERFs lose all their power.
Because TERFs don’t just hate trans and non-binary people. They also hate bisexuals and pansexuals for wrecking their view that to be a wlw, you only live women with vaginas and to be mlm, you must only love men with penises.
But also, to reject the use of queer, you must reject intersex people because TERFs base their entire view on what set of genitals you have, and because intersex people don’t have textbook junk, TERFs don’t like them either.
And you must reject asexual queers across the board because so much of TERF defense is “I just wanna fuck a woman with a vagina or a man with a dick!” And if you have zero or minimal interest in fucking anyone, you wreck their arguments about what queer people want.
You know who else TERFs don’t like? Questioning people. Because to question your sexuality and realize you are straight is a loss for them. To question your gender and realizes it matches your birth sex is a loss for them. Why? Because to question either of these things means you examine who you are beyond a base level, and if you go behind a base level and understand even a basic sense of the confusing and difficult nature of sexual attraction and how it does and does not affect your gender, you can more easily see the holes in TERF arguments, which are all based on stereotypes of gender and sexuality.
The only reason the “B” makes it into the TERF acronym of queer culture is because if they left it at “LG” their hatred of the entire part of the community who is most comfortable using “queer” is a six-foot neon sign.
And to any bisexual TERFs I haven’t yet blocked who want to argue they are bisexual TERFs, so my argument about the use of “B” as a political abuse is invalid: The monosexual TERFs will have you against the wall in a fucking second. You are the sullied allies they put up with until you step out of line.
Lastly, the gay man in this episode is voiced by John Waters. He is a gay legend for tacky film and also an activist for queer rights. When his joke of the Baltimore Museum of Art naming a bathroom after him finally came true a couple of years ago, it was a gender-inclusive bathroom. And he brought his longtime friend and trans activist Elizabeth Coffey with him.
I am certain John Waters would tell you not to fuck TERFs in the same way he has said not to fuck people who don’t have books in their houses. And I am certain John Waters–an out and proud gay man known for his beautiful trash cinema and love and support of trans people–would tell you that queer is not a slur.
