ITS THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.

The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.

This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.

It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.

Like, fuck off?

Fuck off.

I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.

And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like

Fucking, why would I ever.

Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?

I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.

I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.

The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.

So yeah.

Queer as in fuck you people in particular.

And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.

I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.

My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.

but it’s fuckign not.

We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.

And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.

Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?

You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”

@alarajrogers hit the nail on the head with this: 

Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs. 

That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question: 

The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride. 

So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles). 

If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.   

I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts. 

#oh ABSOLUTELY#queer things#the SUDDEN BACKLASH against queer again is 100% from terfs#even back in like 2014 people were using queer on here without anybody batting an eyelash#and then one day all of a sudden in 2015 if you called yourself queer#suddenly you were getting a fucking 15 year old calling you ‘violently lgbtphobic’ like. lol what the fuck#(real thing that happened)#and yeah 100% on the ‘I feel like I’m being gaslit’#I TOOK QUEER THEORY COURSES IN COLLEGE#THEY DON’T FUCKING PUT SLURS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#THEY PUT ACCEPTABLE COMMUNITY TERMS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#like#oh my god#the rise of ‘q slur’ is honestly gaslighting that originated in the terf/radfem corners and spread until people thought it was the norm#it’s not 

Please note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.

HOMESTAR RUNNER: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE

The year is 2003. It is a kinder time, a simpler time.

Every single one of your classmates knows how to draw Trogdor the Burninator - first, you draw an S, then you draw a more different S.

“Everybody to the Limit” is a staple at middle school dances.

Your best friend’s little brother owns a plush The Cheat, and you can kick it, and it makes noise.

The year is 2003, the golden age of Homestar Runner.

Basically, every online content creator, every webcomic artist, every YouTube entertainer, owes Homestar Runner a shitload.

Once upon a time, Homestar Runner was the definitive Flash site, an online destination for kids and immature grown-ups alike, fielding millions of hits and thousands of e-mails a day.

Homestar Runner, the earnest athlete with a pure heart and a love for mankind, and his arch-nemesis, Strong Bad, a wrestler with a penchant for issuing snarky responses to fanmail, defined a generation through weird, surrealist Flash cartoons tinged with outdated pop cultural references.

Ten years later, there’s a new generation of Internetters who have never experienced the pure, unadulterated joy of H-Star-R, and that breaks my heart. 

So, here, I’ve compiled this beginner’s guide to Homestar Runner. Every cartoon on this list is shorter than five minutes. Get into it. Do yourself a favour.

STEP ONE: STRONG BAD E-MAILS

STEP TWO: TEEN GIRL SQUAD

Episodes #1-15 are available here. Watch them all.

STEP THREE: SHORTS

STEP FOUR: TOONS

Teen Girl Squad was always my favorite part of Homestar Runner. So good.

Educate yo’self.

it’s dot com!

Kids: educate yourself about one of the gems of the Internet’s Golden Age.

When I was 15, this was the height of comedy.

My best friend and I used to run around our college campus yelling the Trogdor song at the top of our lungs.

Are you fucking kidding me

BEES SUPPORT THE PUNCHING OF NAZIS

punching nazis is the dream

I like how people are all like "but free speech!" Yeah no. Free speech means the *government* can't punch you in the face for saying shitty things.. Doesn't mean we can't.

Most people I know had that one movie as a kid; that one movie that they would watch over and over and over to the resigned acceptance of their parents. I’ve always thought that movie says something about a person. What was your movie?

Deal News!

K.A. Doore’s debut fantasy trilogy, ASSASSINS OF GHADID, was acquired by Tor in a deal by Kurestin Armada!

HUZZAH THAT’s ME

Revenge

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war. I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism; I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table; I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies. With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars, my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck and your swastikas will not be enough to save you, because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming. You just delayed our coronation. We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday; we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business because it’s still nobody’s business; there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing, and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it: we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name, the buildings here are not on your side just because you make them spray-painted accomplices. These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck. Even the earth found common ground with us in the way you bootstrap across us both, oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles, and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them but I won’t, because they’re my family, in that blood-of-the-covenant sense. If you’ve never loved someone like that you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway. I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now; I haven’t heard my heart beat in days, I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through. But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us. We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder the longer they spend burning us, we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading, by refusing to die: what are we but a fire? We know everything we do is so the kids after us will be able to follow something towards safety; what can I call us but lighthouse, of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud. And of course it’s not fair but rest assured, anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight. This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw. You cannot deport our minds; we won’t hold funerals for our potential. We have always been what makes America great.

-e.c.c.

So I made an official Writerly tumblr, because apparently I’ve decided now is the time to create my social media presence as an author. Friend me! I’ll friend you back and re-bagel and send love from that account.

Right now, I plan to use it mostly to re-bagel book and writing posts as well as throw in intermittent inspo for my current WIP, which means a lot of desert-themed rebagels. I’ll also post any news I might re: my writing over there (although I always reserve the right to rebagel here). But, you know, follow there to see it first. I mean. Not that there’s any news coming. *COUGH*

Re-bageling for the evening crowd.

If calling the Rep's office scares you, as it does me, please know you don't have to say much.

All you have to do is say your name, identify your self as a constituent/concerned American, and say, “I am asking you to speak out against the appointment of Steve Bannon as Trump’s chief strategist. Racism and white supremacy have no place in an American presidential administration.”

It’s short and simple and does not take long to say. Others who are less phone shy can make longer and more eloquent pitches. The point is to be heard and counted.

This! And the person taking your call will appreciate the short & sweet and your opinion will be counted all the same.

Informative Ancient Egypt Comics: BROS

Our 1st place contest winner requested a Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep comic as their prize.

I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were. Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together. And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.

On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.

They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.

The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.

Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.

(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)

There’s a lot of bigoted historian dragging on my dash these days and it makes me happy.

Once again, more proof that we queers have ALWAYS been here, and it’s a CHOSEN narrative to erase them.

@temple-of-rah

I am reblogging this for the lols as well as a very accessible and engaging reminder that every historical narrative is created by human beings interpreting existing evidence and will necessarily reflect their biases, experiences, cultural norms and taboos.

Human objectivity is a myth, and until we have diversity present and speaking out in and across all disciplines, the truth will remain obscured.

You can make a donation to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence’s name and he’ll receive the certificate of the donation.

Office of Governor Mike Pence State House Room 206 Indianapolis, IN 46204-2797

I kinda want to do this

If you have Trump voters in your family and you’re not sure what to get them for the holidays, a donation in their name to the charity of your choosing would be lovely. PP or the ACLU, perhaps?

Needs more rainbows.

The Hues || Chapter 13: Surface to Air || Cover Read From the Beginning || Follow Us Like the comic? || Support TH on Patreon ❤ Reblogs appreciated! :D ❤

As a Florida girl living in Michigan: this is me.