a portrait of

why would you like media that is good if you can like media that is bad instead and pace around your room like an insane person thinking about What If It Was Good

citationless behavior

2023: missives from desktop tumblr suggest that per the latest update my mutuals are being hunted by some kind of grotesque clown. staff assure us this is driven by user feedback.

i’d get so much done if it wasn’t for the overwhelming urge to not do anything

the point of my masculinity and male positivity posts are to underline that masculinity and manhood are seen as a threat or in direct opposition to queerness, and that often times in order to be seen as queer you have to be partially or wholly feminine or gender neutral, or express your manhood in a feminine or gender neutral way in order to no longer be threatening, invasive, or a problem.

it is very difficult to exist in queer spaces as a hyper masculine person & a man. you're made to feel like you need to walk a tight rope feeling like you're inherently out of place, as if you existing and being masculine or a man in queer spaces makes others uncomfortable inherently.. just know that when i make positivity posts it is to remind us all that masculinity/manhood and queerness are not opposites and that you do not have to be a feminine man or masc person to be viewed/seen/heard as queer.

chasing men, masculine people, and masculinity out of queer spaces isn't helping anyone currently and won't help anyone down the line. please accept masc enbies, butches, bears, and masculine trans men with the same kindness, love, and passion that you do neutral and feminine people. that's the point when i make these kinds of posts. thank u

tags by @mac-n-cheese-flavored-arson

This is 100% thanks to the “No kink at Pride” people. Because?

They didn’t want these men at Pride. This is a leather daddy. (A rather covered-up leather daddy, because this addition doesn’t do anyone any good if it’s flagged into invisibility, but best believe that dude has hella abs under there, and a 50/50 chance of heavy tattooing.)

Here’s another. Again on the modest side for the sake of not triggering the automod thing, but you can see the interplay of queerness and masculinity—particularly a kind of forward, unashamed sexual explicitness, if you take a look at their crotches. That’s a kind of…for lack of a better term, mating display. “I have this and want to use it, or at least know there are men here fantasizing about me using it.” It’s akin to a woman wearing a plunge neck. You’re supposed to look, and if you’re a dude, he’d like you to like it.

These dudes (well, most of these dudes)? They’re bears. (I said “most” because the guy in the sunhat is technically a cub. He’s too young to be a bear.) The furriness and the beards and the age and the bellies ARE THE POINT. The name “bear” is an affectionate one. Literally “I’m big and hairy!” In the 00s there was a stereotype(?) that bears were also super-cuddly. I don’t know how true it is, but I can confirm every bear I’ve ever met gives amazing hugs. They will readjust your spine, your touch starvation, and your entire outlook on life.

None of this touches on the rather large queer kink communities around “men in uniform.” Military, police, construction, I can’t tell you how many strip nights I’ve been to at a local gay bar with a guy dressed as a sexy firefighter getting absolutely swamped with dollar bills and lap dance requests.

You aren’t seeing these men because they’ve been forced out of spaces THEY CREATED. One of the best things you can do is to help bring them back.

They’re not threatening, they’re not disgusting, they’re not somehow dangerous just by virtue of being open about their sexuality and sexual desire. They’re just human beings who human slightly differently than you.

But more importantly?

They’re family. And don’t you forget it.

Leather daddies, imho, are fucking around with hypergender performance as much as drag queens. It's two sides of the same coin. Leather daddies literally have beauty pageants.

Also, there's a solid 50% chance that when you talk to those masc-looking leather daddies and bears are just much femme sissies as more femme presenting gay men.

Sincerely, a genderqueer amab bear who dresses like a dad half the time

Your local leather historian here to add a little bit of context to the "this is the fault of the no kink at pride" thing.

The leather community has existed formally (in the United States) since the mid 50s. The Satyr Motorcycle Club was founded in San Francisco in 1954, it is still around today making it the oldest continously run gay organization in the country. This is 15 years before Stonewall. The first gay leather bar, the gold coast, opened in 1958 in Chicago. 11 years before Stonewall. Informally the leather community has existed since the end of wwii when men who had spent years wearing leather, riding motorcycles, and having gay sex came back home and kept doing those things.

Gay men have been arguing about whether or not the leather community belongs at pride since 1970. Since the inception of pride, or more accurately, "Gay Freedom Day." Because the leather community has heavt ties to the SM community. (Whether or not the Leather community is a sub community in the larger SM community, or there's just a lot of overlap is a conversation leathermen have always been having) but there has always been push back because of the tie to radical sex and because of accusations that leathermen are trying to "act straight"

In an essay in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice Leatherman Michale Bronski recalls hearing a lesbian tell a gay man "“Give me a break. You think that someone wearing chaps, a black leather jacket, a motorcycle cap, handcuffs on his belt, two different color hankies, and 36 inch high black boots looks Straight!”*

Which brings us to their presentation of masculinity. If you'll excuse me for becoming An Academic(tm) for a moment, if you look at these communities, Leathermen and Bears, what you find is that popular theories of masculinitu don't work when describing these men, at least not when they're in the spaces that the audence that their gender performance is for also exist. Queer masculinity is a performance for queer people, framing it in the lense of heterosexuality does not do anyone any good and erases the nuances of what is happening.

The leather communities are some of the oldest queer communities in America. To push them out of the queer community or suggest that they're toxic, or somehow harming the community as a whole is to ignore history completely, and engage with an argument that's half a century old.

In 1982 leathermen founded AIDS Emergency Fund in San Francisco. Consistently through the first decade of the AIDS Crisis leathermen (and other radical sex communities) were promoting safer sex, and hosting all kinds of fundraisers to raise money for PWAs and reseach (a lot of leather beauty pagents popped up just for the purpose of rasing money.) All this while they were being told BY OTHER GAY MEN they were the ones killing everyone, they and their weird gross sex were the problem (never mind that a lot of what the leathermen were doing was already safer than monogamous anal sex)

Leathermen are your family, we're part of your community and have every right to be here, even if you don't understand our masculinity.

❤️🖤💙🤍💙🖤

*none of this even begins touching the surface of the discourse leather lesbians and feminists have been having since the 70s. It's tied to TERF rhetoric and the anti-porn movement.

Historic note on bears: the origin of the community is shouded in myth, but certainly by the late 70s the beginnings of the community were there. The AIDS Crisis shot the community to popularity. Because AIDS will cause incredible weight loss, the eorticization of fat bodies was the eroticiaztion of safe bodies. If you read porn written by bears in the 80s and early 90s you'll notice the use of condoms where in other erotica that is lacking.

RATING: NOT CUTE

this girl does NOT want to work. she wants to go back to bed because she is sososososo tiredd. she wants no responsibilities either please.

Portal 3 shouldn’t be about Chell but should be about another guy going through Aperture be it a combine soldier or human survivor or whatever else and GLaDOS is like Is that you rustling around back there. You know, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. followed by a long unusually heartfelt and vulnerable one-sided conversation with you. And then you reach her chamber and she’s like Oh. You’re not. And then she opens a trapdoor under you and sends you hurtling into the incinerator.

this is so funny to me

some of my favourite tags from this post lmao

will_graham_moan_mizumono_bass_boosted.mp3

nightcore has been invented for the sixth or seventh time

Check your privilege.

a cool thing about tumblr is that when an absolute dog shit dud of a post shows up in my feed i know it's not because of some nebulous algorithm, it's someone's fault and i can find them immediately

i will never care about the met gala beacuse i know in my heart if you gave a drag queen 45$ and three days they could make something completely out of this world that out every single celeb to shame

not proshipper not anti but a secret third thing (person who has a career in the media and, through covering legislative politics, has watched "associating with problematic fiction or entertainment is an indicator of moral degeneracy" rapidly become a mainstream GOP position that they are encoding in legislation to target the queer community under the guise of protecting children, thus coming to the conclusion that positioning the "can people enjoy things that would be immoral IRL in their fiction" debate as a proship v anti fandom debate is akin to pretending that "should we have the death penalty" is a discussion that only matters in Death Note discourse — the extent and manner to which fiction affects reality is an issue that is immediately relevant to today's US politics, and to summarize my opinions on the matter in fandom terms would be to diminish the ways this debate is affecting america Right The Fuck Now. and i have stopped taking "this person is bad for shipping the wrong anime thing and being horny about it" in any sort of good faith ever since I saw it literally used as part of a GOP smear campaign against a transgender state legislator in an attempt to defend the right from backlash after they used their supermajority in the Montana house to prevent her from speaking on the floor. Anyway I think everyone on this site, especially Americans, could benefit from ceasing to think in proship v anti vocabulary and instead developing coherent political positions on the nature of fiction that do not directly align with current fascist political tactics)

and yes, this does pretty much align with the "proshipper" position — to be clear, i'm firmly in the camp that it's literally fine to ship whatever and engage in fiction however you want and people are not morally wrong for making art that engages, even gleefully or pornographically, in dark topics. the reason i still choose to not call myself a proshipper is for a few reasons:

-there are so many different implications under that umbrella, and i resent the dichotomy that reduces so many different positions on so many different aspects of media studies to two different labels. such a framing actively stifles discussion and prevents people from having tough and thorny conversations about media with people they mostly agree with

-i think "proshipper" is only a useful positional label for people whos primary mode of engagement with media is through fandom. but as a journalist and queer person, the main ways in which the "does fiction affect reality and how" issue interfaces with my life have nothing to do with fandom, so it feels backwards to me to define my opinions regarding media in relation to the area that has the least relevance to my life

-i want my actual opinions to be the most visible part of how i engage with fandom, rather than a label that will cause everyone to draw nuance-stripped conclusions that vary depending on which "side" they fall on. i want people to listen to me, not project their expectations onto me and listen to a phantom of me they've created

-why should i? if people are willing to engage with me regarding media discussion, it shouldn't matter whether i choose to identify as a proshipper or not — they should treat my ideas on their own merits. and if people think that i'm a sick freak for "condoning" whatever is problematic these days, they're not going to care what i call myself, they're going to call me a sick freak anyways. and im kinda petty and want them to actually have to read my posts and rub two braincells together to interpret things and think critically about how to label me instead of seeing "proship" and slamming the cancel button

#reblogged already but— yeah#i use the label profiction when I use a label cuz i feel like it communicates that my opinions extend past fandom shit#but also. it’s stupid to act like an internet discourse label is the end all be all of the topic#the only use labels really have is to scare off ppl I Very Much Do Not Want Around#if you think this is just about like. fandom shit. you haven’t been paying attention. like that matters too if ur heavily involved in fandom#but that’s not remotely the entirety of it#discourse //#q

Mormons are the most unintentionally hilarious people. I love this.

Hashtag reblog if you're a sinner.

even if you're not a supernatural fan, if you've been on tumblr long enough you are, like, culturally. like cultural christianity in america except it's the cw's supernatural. you may never have watched an episode or set foot inside the tag but your regular life shuts down on their holidays and all of your world news is delivered through that point of view. something to think about