Latest Posts by ihavethoughtsomtimes - Page 5

remember when good omens (2019) came out and neil gaiman made it clear in no uncertain terms that angels and demons were inherently nonbinary, that angels and demons (and crowley in particular) can and Do have a variety of presentations that they choose for themselves, and that the story is a Love Story between two nonbinary entities fighting for their right to love each other openly in the face of religiously charged black and white thinking that’d forced them to hide and deny their love for each other at the threat of punishment.

and then instead of celebrating the openly queer, openly trans, openly fluid and neutral and non-conforming relationships and people presented by the series people were just Legitimately like “Wow, can’t believe neil won’t say that aziraphale and crowley are gay (read: Cis) men, looks like queerbaiting is alive and well 🙄“ and nobody stopped them

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

I love the fact that whenever I don’t feel okay, and I don’t have energy to do anything at all, I will just open tumblr.

It doesn’t make me happier, or give me energy, but I feel less alone and that’s wonderful.

🍵

Basically: WHY IS ALL THE PUBLIC OUTREACH ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE ALL "YOU HAVE TO GIVE UP ANOTHER PLEASURE OF YOUR LIFE TO FIX CLIMATE CHANGE" and not "SEE LOOK HOW WE'RE RULED BY A GROTESQUELY ILLOGICAL DEATH CULT"

froggos got you covered for those low spoon days.

idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+ 

He was an activist who inspired millions to fight for their rights. He knew what was wrong with our country and risked his life to help his people achieve equality.  In the society where black were treated like animal he did everything possible to change this. His brave soul, his will and courage changed the history of America , changed the people. He made us believe we can win this war. He payed for it with his life. He will always be remembered.

The Death Toll of the Earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria may have reached 20,000 people, and that’s outside of all those who are injured and lost.

If you could donate PLEASE do!!!

Here’s a post full of charities you could donate to, but I’ll add my own trustworthy ones here:

Islamic Relief:  teams are on the ground right now providing emergency food assistance, shelter, medical supplies to hospitals and clinics, as well as blankets and tents for those made homeless by the quake in Turkey and Syria

Molham: The team at Molham are currently on the ground helping displaced families in Turkey and Syria who have been affected by the earthquake   

Turkish Red Crescent: The team are distributing essential aid to those affected by the earthquake across Turkey.

The White Helmets: The team are on the ground in Northwest Syria searching for survivors and removing the dead from the rubble.

Turkey Mozaik Foundation: Attempting to provide immediate relief and medium to long term recovery to survivors of the earthquake. 

MSF: remaining in close contact with the local authorities in northwestern Syria and with the authorities in Turkey to extend their support where it’s needed. They’re providing essential life kits to displaced people in the region

please PLEASE reblog. Syria and Turkiye need our help!!!

shout out to ace and aro kids who are constantly bombarded with the opinion that sex and romantic love are directly connected to living a happy life.

the “pleasure to have in class” to overly active tumblr user pipeline

something about everything neil gaiman has ever done feels like the root of a broken tooth. sometimes it’s this sort of jarring delight: it’s being six and shoving the tip of your tongue into the hole where your tooth was and tasting the metal of your own pink, enflamed flesh. sometimes it’s viscerally horrific: it’s shattered bits of bone embedded deep in an exposed nerve that you didn’t even really believe you had until just now. sometimes it’s indescribable but somehow universally acknowledged: it’s the taste of your own mouth and knowing something only by feel and the exposure of the parts of you that weren’t ever supposed to know air. the situation adapts, the formats change, the experience shifts, but the core experience of it is always the same

Girlies! Remember on feb 1st a green comet will be passing by earth's orbit!!!!!!! Make sure u take a sneak peek at her bc she only comes around every 50000 yrs!!!!!!!!!!!! ☄️

tongue. if u put them on ur tongue.

idk what they’re called but if u put them on ur younger and say the alphabet they’ll drink ur saliva

platonic with a capital p

(yay for queer-platonic besties on the dash)

This is a story I've been trying to tell for a long time and every time I try, I find I don't yet have the words for what has happened inside me, because nothing has happened inside me, except that a door long locked has been opened.

The short version of the story is that 14 months ago, I rewatched Good Omens, and then watched it again another six times, and then read a lot of fanfiction, and then wrote a lot of meta. The short version is that six months ago, I watched Heartstopper, and then watched it another 24 times (I kept count), and then, after all that, I was bisexual.

The short version of the story is that for a long time, I believed so deeply that it wasn't meant for me, that it never occurred to me. Until stories asked, but what if it was allowed?

hes. hes wearing annabeths camp necklace. oh i am so fragile. i am going to shatter into a million pieces. im going to die

Know your history:

Gay:

Used to mean carefree

Then sexually deviant

Then prostitute

Then slut

Then sodomite

And THEN as we know it today but only as a slur

Reclaimed in the seventies

LGBT:

Invented in the nineties

Has faced constant backlash (from both straight, queer, and LGBT folks from being not inclusive enough or too inclusive)

Every year there are pushes to change to acronym

LGBTQ

LGBTQ+

LGBTQ*

LGBTQIA

Mogai

Alphabet soup

Queer:

Used to mean “other”

Became a slang term for “not straight” in the 1400s

Became a slur in the early 1900s

Reclaimed in the 80s.

Sudden push back from within the queer community to have it seen only as a slur in the 2010s, a push that can be traced back to terf ideology.

Is the only term that includes all non cishet people

Homosexual

A medical diagnosis

Used for decades to make queerness into a mental illness

Used as a slur for the latter half of the 20th century

Rejected by the queer community as an acceptable term for a brief period of time in the early 2000s before coming back into fashion.

Only describes the experience of cis gay men and cis lesbians

Think what you want, believe what you will, but every word we have ever used to describe ourselves is coated in blood.

mskingbean89 had more to say than literal god

For anyone who also cannot stop thinking about dead gay wizards

Here’s some fun and fresh facts for you

The Length of:

ATYD: 526,969 words

Choices: 624,187 words

Crimson Rivers: 720,011 words

The FUCKING Bible: 783,137 words

ALSO

50,000 words is about 200 pages

WHICH MEANS

The shortest of those works is

2000 FUCKING PAGES

We all need mental help

A co-worker of mine was standing outside with me during a break from customers to share a cigarette with me, and told me about how he had lost his brother that he was close with some years ago. He told me about how they used to be in a band together with some friends, and how ever since he'd died, he hadn't played any music because he'd been too scared and anxious. I told him about how I'd lost my brother to suicide some years ago.

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

I don't know what the meaning of life is or what my purpose is, but I do believe that love and human connection is one of the most important things in life. It's finding ways to tell strangers you love them and share experiences with others. I think it's all just about love.

What if there was an apocalypse but some people were really really in denial and optimistic and thinking everything will be back to normal soon?

Like they’d be foraging through the ruins of New York for supplies, shooting raiders in the face and saying “Man, this recession is really bad, huh?”

Someone on here made a great post about how Cassandra Brand is a clear reference to Greek mythologys Cassandra, a priestess who was doomed to only tell true prophecies but never be believed. Cassandra obviously warns Miles and her friends about what his new miracle fuel will do and is entirely disregarded.

I read this post and was like "oh that's so smart, you're so right." And then like, went on with whatever I was doing.

And then that night I'm laying in bed and my eyes snap open and my brain is like "her sister was HELEN."

Cassandra forsaw the fall of Troy and was not believed.

Helen caused the fall of Troy.

the restaurant I’m in has the tv on full volume and also music at the same time so obviously I’m on the verge of homocide

Unstoppable force (my desire to ramble) meets unmovable force (my desire to never say a word ever)

im just someones weird daughter

Here are 10 most interesting quotes from Art Matters, an essay in pictures, by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell, about why our future depends on books and libraries

(via Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell about books and libraries (quotes))