takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
These snoop dog wine bottles at the grocery store came with little unsecured snoop dogg santa hats and almost all of them were stolen
The hats are worth stealing, the wine tastes like garbage juice.
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
making art is so fucking hard. wheres that defunctland quote
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
Sneeping
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
youre saying this radio gave you head ?
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
THE ORIGIN OF THIS IMAGE:
So in my etsy I sell a pin of some isopods having at a bag of doritos based on this photo. Today I was contacted by the person who took it.
I asked to share this info and he gave permission!
Here’s the picture of him working with isopods and here’s a link to their published research!
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
constantly devastated by the world we lost due to aids
The battles that rose out of the AIDs epidemic were access to marriage and military service. When once the Queer community was focused on creating the best art and living lives worth telling stories about, the 1990's brought on a new goal: How to best fit in. As the brilliant Fran Bebowitz has said many times, the first people who died of AIDS were the interesting ones. The artists. There's a reason that arts became Ghostbusters and Cats in the 1990s. Because all of the really talented artists were dying. The rule-breakers. The ones who weren't afraid to shake things up. And the audience died with them. "Now we don't have any kind of discerning audience. When that audience died- and that audience died in five minutes. Literally people didn't die faster in war. And it allowed of course, like the second, third, fourth tier to rise up to the front. Because of course, the first people who died of AIDS were the people who… I don't know how top put this… got laid a lot. OK. Now imagine who didn't get AIDS. That's who was then lauded as like - the great artists." - Fran Lebowitz So many of the gays left alive once the Clinton Administration came into being were, to be frank, the boring ones. Gays who knew nobody and who nobody knew, and they rose to the top of the community and therefore their priorities rose to the top of the community as well. And what did they want? Apparently, they wanted to join the army and have big gay weddings. General employment non-discrimination wasn't all that important to them. Making sexuality and gender identity a protected class, along with sex, race, and religion, wasn't that important to them. They wanted marriage and military. Because they were the good gays. Not the naughty gays who were sleeping around and dying of AIDS. Not the poor gays who couldn't make political contributions. They were the gays with families and commitment ceremonies and office jobs and houses. They were the good ones. The ones who would look fantastic and incredibily marketable when they were interviewed by CNN. They were the gays who straight people would look at and say to themselves: "Maybe they're not so bad after all. I still don't want my kid to be gay. But maybe it's okay if Bob and Henry got married." The gay rights movement shifted from 'Accept us for who we are' to 'We'll be whatever you want us to be if you accept us.' And it's kind of remained that way over the last thirty years. We've been trained to be offended by queers who step too far out of the mainstream. Plenty, and I mean plenty, of gays online were on edge when Billy Porter started showing up to awards shows in dresses. Lots, and I mean lots, of gays were unnerved and worried when trans people started coming out of their own closets. Some going so far as to disavow the T from LGBT because they were worried people who don't like trans people would lop in the gay men and women in with them. Who needs community when you've already got your house in the suburbs, right?
... what the fuck.
You know, you'd think that someone who wrote an essay about queer people selling each other out for cishet approval would agree with this, and to a certain extent, I do, at least in the outcomes and effects, but this excerpt contains a number of deeply wrong and deeply fucked up things to say.
The big pushes for marriage equality and military service were responses to things done to us. They weren't the malicious behavior of a bunch of second-rate, shitty gays (holy fuck, what the fuck, measuring people's artistic prowess and social importance by how much they got laid? James, what the fuck). The push for marriage equality got bigger and louder because of the AIDS epidemic. Because we were denied entry into the hospital rooms and funerals of our loved ones. Because sometimes all families left behind when they cleared out everything in a shared apartment was a fucking box fan. Because people lost their homes when their partners died. Because people were buried under the wrong names, or unclaimed by family and unable to be claimed by the people who loved them.
The push for military service equality? That happened as a pushback against active campaigns to out queer people and drive them out of military service. Like it or not, military service has become (by intent on the part of the Department of Defense) a way out of poverty for a lot of people, and queer people? Well, we tend to be poorer than others. Protecting people's ability to serve in the military meant protecting that path out of poverty for a lot of queer people, meant protecting health care, meant protecting housing, meant protecting lots and lots of things.
A friend of mine was expelled from the military under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He'd been in almost long enough to have a pension, and he pissed someone off who knew he was gay. When I talked to him about it when DADT was repealed, he was still bitter about it -- he and his now-husband couldn't at the time get VA loans or any benefits for his years and years of service. There are at least a hundred thousand people who were expelled from military service for being gay from WWII until its repeal in 2011. Most of those people still have their records showing an other than honorable discharge, and so they and their families are not receiving benefits to which they are otherwise entitled.
Again, this push was a pushback against an active Republican campaign to drive queer people out of public life, one which was used by Republicans in order to stir up their base into a froth over the concept of gays tainting the pure American way of life. There were accusations of gays attempting to undermine the military in the 90s, lots of talk about how the very presence of queers in that space would sully it immeasurably, ruin the American way of life. (Lots of talk about 'combat readiness' and I heard people talking about not wanting 'faggots in foxholes.')
Sound familiar?
Is there a problem with respectability politics in the queer community? Yes. Does that problem with respectability politics undermine our ability to make meaningful change? Yes, absolutely. But we need to refrain from this absolutely fucking asinine and totally untrue reframing of the narrative to blame respectability politics for decisions made out of desperation by people under attack, and we one fucking hundred percent do not need this gross "the survivors were the losers who didn't fuck" narrative, as if one's sexual prowess has anything to do with one's worth as an artist or a human being.
That's fucking disgusting, and James Somerton should be ashamed for even thinking that, much less putting those words in that order and putting them out into the world. My worth as an artist -- and yes, a queer artist -- has nothing to do with who I fuck or how much I fuck or how many partners I fuck. It says a lot about the art world and who gets to rise to the top in it -- the pretty, the popular, the fuckable -- that people think so, though.
Yes, the community has a problem with respectability politics -- I have been loudly saying so for years -- but the response to that can't be grading people by their transgressiveness and fuckability. It just creates a new metric by which you can be found a Worthy Queer.
And we sure as shit need to not reframe the desperate actions of people trying to protect their livelihoods, their homes, and their access to health care from an active and aggressive onslaught of Republican politicians using them as wedge issues as the petty and frivolous concerns of a bunch of no-talent suburban sissies. That shit is just as fucking exhausting. Authentic queer liberation must include the ability to be fucking boring if one desires without incurring whatever this dramatic and ahistorical bullshit rewrite is.
I'm still angry about this. I will eat his heart in the fucking marketplace.
"General employment discrimination wasn't all that important to them."
YOU FUCKING LIAR.
Executive Order 12968 was signed by U.S. President Bill Clinton on August 2, 1995. ... Executive Order 12968's anti-discrimination statement, "The United States Government does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation in granting access to classified information." responded to longstanding complaints by advocates for gay and lesbian rights by including "sexual orientation" for the first time in an Executive Order. It also said that "no inference" about suitability for access to classified information "may be raised solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the employee."
You can find this shit is fucking wrong on fucking Wikipedia, you goddamned rotten cabbage.
For clarity and conciseness, I've included only those advances made during the worst parts of the AIDS Crisis: 1982: Wisconsin: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1983: New York: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Ohio: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1985: New Mexico: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Washington: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1987: Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1988: Oregon: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1989: Massachusetts: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1990: Colorado: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1991: Connecticut: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Hawaii: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Minnesota: Sexual orientation protected in state employment New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1992: California: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Louisiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Vermont: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1993: Minnesota: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in all employment 1995: Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1996: Illinois: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Louisiana: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1998: New Hampshire: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1999: Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in state employment Nevada: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Ohio: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment Delaware: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity no longer protected in state employment Montana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 2001: Indiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Maine: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Rhode Island: Gender identity protected in all employment
Do you think all of those things were just magically fucking granted by the benevolent cishets? No. Each one of those advances came with long, tedious, brutal fucking fights, with people risking their careers, their livelihoods, and sometimes the possibility of criminal charges by coming out and fighting.
The idea that "general employment discrimination was not on the agenda" is such a bald-faced fucking lie that I can't even see past the goddamned red mist in my vision. I highly, highly recommend reading that page if you don't understand what an ongoing fight antidiscrimination laws have been. Several states have gone back and forth several times on whether or not employment and housing discrimination is banned, making it especially fucking risky to get involved in those fights, but the boring gays did it anyway.
Fuck, I am angry. That is just a bunch of self-congratulatory bullshit, and it doesn't do fucking anything to talk meaningfully about what AIDS took from us.
Fuck James Somerton's shitty opinions.
imagine spending all that time and effort talking about how awful AIDS was and then in the same breath saying marriage wasn't all that important except to boring gays who wanted big weddings
like
my good bitch
the MAJOR FUCKING POINT of the push for marriage was because of the rights you get with it, like, I don't know, BEING ABLE TO BE WITH YOUR DYING SPOUSE IN THE HOSPITAL
Here's the thing though: I see a lot of these shitty opinions in Young Queers and zoomers who haven't met Old Queers and learned our history. Younger generations genuinely think marriage equality was something only rich assimilationist cis white gay men wanted.
So this history and these takedowns are important cuz current generations still believe this cuz they don't know their history
Honestly, yes, and that's part of the reason I'm so fucking pissed off at James Somerton - he's thirty-four fucking years old. He's too young to remember the AIDS crisis with clarity - he was six during the worst year of the crisis - but too old and too involved in the community to get a pass for Just Not Knowing.
And also, like, we're taking the words of Fran Lebowitz as meaningful?
This Fran Lebowitz, talking in 2010?
"Candy [Darling, a trans woman] was a man who wanted to be a female movie star," says Fran in the opening of the under-three-minute teaser. "And you know, fell into the clutches of Andy [Warhol] who told her she was."
"A 25-year-old man who becomes a 25-year-old woman is not a woman at all, because a woman first has to be a little girl. Candy was never a girl."
Or maybe this from 2021's Pretend It's A City?
"I said to this little girl, 'you are not a woman.' Now you can't say that to anyone. [derisively] If someone says, 'I'm a woman,' you're a woman, okay? You can be a three-year-old girl, a 70-year-old man, you could be a giraffe. You're a woman? You're a woman."
Or how she repeatedly compared being trans to having a headache?
Who you choose to cite and who you choose to view as an authority tells people a lot about how and where you've formed your opinions. James leaning into this garbage tells me a lot about him, unfortunately.
A lot of people in the notes of this post keep saying that those of us pissed off by this garbage "don't get it" or that those of us pissed off by the post don't understand bla bla bla creating systems of support of our own outside the system bla bla bla now people are just trying to fit in to the system bla bla.
And first of all, it's fucking exhausting to see comments like that from people half my fucking age who didn't live through this and don't know fuck all about fuck all. But second of all--
-- how do you create meaningful and durable systems of support in a capitalist society if you have no form of steady income or cannot be certain that if something happens to you that the resources you've built up will be passed to the people that you want it to go to rather than being stolen by people who hate you? How do you create stability for the next generation, how do you raise kids or provide shelter and stability for young people fleeing homophobic and transphobic bio-families, if you don't have a stable home yourself or if taking in someone you're not genetically related to can cause you to lose your home?
It pisses me off to have to grab people by the neck and say "fucking stop it, we were forced into this fight to protect ourselves," because there is a lot that we lost when we had our backs put to the wall by the AIDS crisis and by the endlessly aggressive Republican attacks of the 80s and 90s, and there are a lot of things we had to give up on as priorities because we were trying to protect our right to employment and a steady place to live, and still are! It fucking sucks that we have to do this. It fucking sucks that as a community we are going to look back in 20 years and see what we could have done if we hadn't had to spend so much time and energy protecting the basic right to bodily autonomy and continually re-fighting the same fucking fights. I know that it will because I feel that way about how shit was when I was 20, and I see history not repeating but rhyming the way that it does.
But this bullshit "we lost the artists because they were the Bad Boys who fucked and that's why it's sad" shit that also contains a lot of absolute fucking lies about what "the community" did 30, 40 years ago is just not the fucking way.
The human cost of the AIDS crisis is incalculable, but not because we lost the "radical artists" and everyone else who remained was the losers who suck (a pretty ironic thing to say when you're one of the ones who lived, Franny). It is horrible because people fucking died due to active attempts to use this disease to exterminate us, because of the malignant neglect of the people in power, because people fucking died.
Not artists, not radicals, not ... whatever. We didn't lose martyrs. We lost people.
And like... this bullshit about how addressing general employment discrimination wasn't on the table? Shut uuuuuuuup. I mean, look at that list. Look at Oregon alone. In 87, sexual orientation protected in state employment (you'll see this as a first step in many states as it is easier to argue and sets the stage for general discrimination to be outlawed). In 88, that goes away bc of opposition. It doesn't return until 1992, 5 years later. Go back further, and you see that Oregon went back and forth five fucking times on the question of whether it was legal to castrate or sterilize queers during the first half of the 20th century, during which time almost three thousand Oregonians, many of them women, were either castrated or had oophorectomies performed against their will for being "moral degenerates or sexual perverts."
Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care in a society that will forcibly remove parts of your body for being queer. Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care when you can have anything you establish ripped away from your hands because your job is gone, because you're a pervert who doesn't deserve a job or the ability to rent or buy a home with both names on the deed or the ability to get a mortgage (because they COULD discriminate against your ability to sign a mortgage together, and if you don't have both incomes, you might not qualify and even if you do, if lightning strikes the property owner, well, now it belongs to their shitty homophobic family).
All of these advances in our basic rights that James fucking lies about so blatantly are the necessary ingredients for existing in this society as it is established. You cannot create these alternate family forms or alternate systems of care in a way that is stable, livable, and able to be protected without those basic rights, and the fact that so many young people take that shit so much for granted is both wonderful - because all of them have never really experienced the world that I and other older queers grew up in - and so so frustrating, because they really don't understand that all of those basic rights are written in blood.
I am deeply frustrated by the way in which a lot of the big rights organizations can be really really short-sighted and focused on the rights of cis queers, and I'm extremely frustrated by respectability politics. The solution, however, is not shifting the goalposts so that the "acceptable" queers are the ones who are sufficiently radical in visible, tangible ways. Like, what the fuck. The solution has to be actual solidarity between the radical gays and the "boring" ones, and you don't get there by lying about hard-fought history or quoting TERFy McTERFerson Fran Fucking Lebowitz.
Fuck's sake, kids.
Reblogging this because look, I know I am not a particularly political blog, but the AIDS crisis discussion in James Somerton's stuff made me so angry I got light-headed and I wanted to course correct it with this blogger's well-researched rebuttal
I realize a lot of people on this site are younger than me and don't remember it, but my mother worked with AIDS patients in the early 90s and instilled in me very early just how fucked-up everything about the crisis was, and hearing this flippant shit about the survivors makes me genuinely angry
James Somerton is like those neo-monarchists who think they'd be lords or kings, but for 1970s SF or NYC gay culture. "If I were alive then I would have totally fucked Keith Haring in a bath house and died tragically and beautifully."
Anyway that clip and this quote make me see red. Man cannot research, cannot write, and gives the most atrocious line delivery because I don't think he understands a word of what he's saying.
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
princesszeldazbyebye-deactivate
this is the funniest thing I’ve seen in any review ever
princesszeldazbyebye-deactivate
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
Source: pin.it
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
ok i finally understand where gen z gays on tumblr are getting insane ideas like "marriage equality was a waste of time and only of interest to rich white cis gays who wanted respectability" and "bob iger is pro-gay". it was fucking james somerton this whole time. "american GIs joined the european front purely out of envy for nazi bodybuilding" <<<< actual thing he said seriously in a video. and people were just like "yup sounds good" ?????
i was going to just edit this into my tags because it was an afterthought but its important enough im going to make a whole reblog:
i had literally never heard of james somerton before this whole thing. he apparently has an audience primarily of young queers who, through no fault of their own!!!!!! do not have the life experience yet to immediately clock this as bullshit. somerton is NOT unusual. people make shit videos about everything, even subjects that are much more recent and much less important than the history of gay survival. PLEASE assume everything you hear from youtube essayists in nonsense until you double check it. i mean everything. "ultimate creepypasta iceberg explained"? 9/10 of that type of video is just. bullshit. made up.
PLEASE talk to older people. talk to people who are older than 40 and 50. the 20th century was not a long time ago, there are tens of thousands of people on this very website who were in their 20s, or older, on 9/11. ask them why marriage equality was important to the AIDS movement. ask them what their parents told them about the 1960s. ask them if "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" was considered shockingly sexual and improprietous when it was released IN NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE (another somerton claim that is so insane i cant even start to explain how angry it makes me).
and even more recent, smaller, stupider stuff! we were there when Slenderman was posted on Something Awful the first time. we know the full name and twitter handle of the guy who invented Smiledog.jpg. we know what the first SCP was and where and when it was posted. we know what "based" means and its entire etymology. we were there. just ask. these people are LYING TO YOU, because theyre making tens of thousands of dollars telling you bullshit that can be disproven with one trip to wikipedia. i sort of get it but i sort of dont, because im not a piece of shit!
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
My softness
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
Tummy time
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
There's been a poll bracket going on YouTube for a while now about who's the coolest Pokemon Gym Leader and the 2 finalists make sense but put together are fucking hilarious
Yakuza boss vs Greg from Sprint Mobile who will win
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
Israel has been making the population of Gaza evacuate to the South for the last month as they carpet bombed the North into dust (while also bombing the South every other day to mix things up). Most everyone had gone to Rafah as they had specified. With the ending of the truce on 1st December, they immediately began bombing the South. Yesterday they bombed Khan Younis, the Southwestern point of Gaza which was supposed to be safest, reducing eleven residential buildings to rubble. The new thousand families displaced have nowhere else to go.
The most popular and famous journalists who have been reporting from Gaza are now posting what feels like goodbyes.
Bisan posted:
Saleh Aljafarawi posted:
Translation:
God bears witness that I am very tired and I am grieving over all my pain and all my fatigue because I know very well that many people take their strength from me and I must not be weak because Palestine wants me still, but I swear I have seen so many things that I cry every night before - I cannot sleep and to the point that I have nightmares to the point that I have 58 Day 2 I don’t know anything about my family and I don’t communicate with them. However, I continue to post, but it seems that the world has finished and will not respond. God willing, you will wake up when we are all annihilated and cease to exist.
Motaz Azaiza is arguably the most famous journalist in Gaza right now. The freelancer rocketed to popularity for his kindness, dogged good cheer, ability to find rays of hope amid constant disaster and death threats. Middle East GQ put on their cover while he was begging the international community for help as he covered Israel's atrocities and watched his friends die one after the other.
He posted hours ago:
Translation:
"The stage of risking everything to bring you the news has ended, now begins the stage of trying to survive. I've brought you enough news, as god is my witness, in order to save my country. We are now facing an internal siege. We can't move north or south. Israeli tanks surround central Gaza on both the northern and southern ends. Our situation is more dire than you can imagine. Remember: we are not content for you to share. We are a people facing genocide, we are a cause attempting to stay alive, alone."
Plestia Alaqad reposted his story to her own Instagram and added:
alt included on all images.
No one who hasn't been following them understands how devastating this is to witness. They've become like family to all their millions of followers. The first thing I do every day is check if Hind, Motaz and Bisan are alive and ok. I'm not remotely exaggerating when I say these are the most heroic, indefatigable, determined people most of us have ever seen in our lives. I pity everyone who hasn't had the privilege to follow them. I don't believe in a God and yet the force of their faith has me praying that they survive too.
PLEASE SHARE THIS. VISIBILITY IS SURVIVAL.
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
Some Crow doodles 💙
takemebacktoconstantinople reblogged
What does it all mean?