I would like to invite you all to embrace the ancestors you never knew.
As members of the queer community, we are in a unique space in that our marginalization is not always shared with our biological family. So we are often left with a feeling of separation to our community and our history, and I want to take a moment to encourage you all to try and bridge that gap within your minds. Think of the queer people who came before us as your family, because so many of them lived their lives so that yours could exist in the way it does.
Think of Oscar Wilde standing in court admitting his love and rejecting the idea that is was shameful in front of his peers. Think of Magnus Hirschfeld collecting data and research so that he could find a path to freedom paved with facts. Think of Marsha P. Johnson, giving out cookies to other sex workers and transgender people on the street and her rage as she threw that shot glass and ignited a revolution.
These people are your family, they are your history, and they built a world so that you could live in it. You may not be related by blood but you are related by history, their lives are irreversibly connected to ours and I encourage you all to take time to hold that in your minds as you move forward today.
deleted a bunch of chronic pain and chronic illness posts from blogs they’ve left (like mine)
This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects.
The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.
ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers.
Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)
This is a fucking problem, let’s not blow it off.
I know some people are too young (or simply weren’t involved in fandom back then) to remember what went down with livejournal and a couple of other sites “back in the day”, but it all started out as “it’s okay, we’re just removing the nasty porn”, and then “okay well, just make sure you put your porn behind a cut, no, wait jk you need to host it externally, a link is fine, maybe” and pretty much devolved swiftly into “actually sweety, LGBT content is inherently NSFW by default because it might make the kiddies gay if we expose them to it, so y’all need to leave now byyyeeee”.
Like…that happened. And it took nearly a decade for the fandom spaces to recover and stabilize and to get to the point where LGBT content creators could host their content without being told “you’re not welcome here” and I’m just sitting here, watching as youtube demonetizes LGBT content creators, and Facebook flags up LGBT ads as “inappropriate” and now tumblr is going through the queer and gay tags and just mass blanketing it as inappropriate, while actual pornbots and nazis wind up in my recommended feed.
Like I am uncomfortable y’all. I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like “the olden days” where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone.
And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.
So yea, the sky is not falling, but the ice under our feet sure is making worrying sounds.
bu-bu-but I need my spoonie spaces, it’s the only place left where I get support and advice and feel less alone in the world… ughh…….
It ain’t over till it’s over, and this bisexual spoonie will be here until the lights go out. They’re going to have to come to my house and pry my phone out my hands to get me to stop shitposting. And hey, by then there will likely be new spaces to branch out into and cling to each other. It won’t be the exact same mind you, but fandom spaces and online communities have always been migratory in nature. We moved from fanzines swapped around in coffee shops, to coffeeshop AUs online. We’ll survive whatever the next jump is.
It’s just bullshit that we’re being forced to prepare to make the leap at all. But that’s what happens with corporate run sites in the end. Sadly.
But we’re not quite at doomsday yet, and even after the changes roll out on the 17th, we’ll still have a ways to go before the site is entirely gone. Hell, even LJ is still running….
And in the meantime it’s not a bad idea to look around and get the handles/emails of the people you’d truly miss if they were gone the next day. I still have friends I think about and miss from LJ.
@thebibliosphere do you post elsewhere? I’d love to follow you on a different platform
Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.
Why can’t we have a movie about him?
He was often called “Sempo”, an alternative reading of the characters of his first name, as that was easier for Westerners to pronounce.
His wife, Yukiko, was also a part of this; she is often credited with suggesting the plan. The Sugihara family was held in a Soviet POW camp for 18 months until the end of the war; within a year of returning home, Sugihara was asked to resign – officially due to downsizing, but most likely because the government disagreed with his actions.
He didn’t simply grant visas – he granted visas against direct orders, after attempting three times to receive permission from the Japanese Foreign Ministry and being turned down each time. He did not “misread” orders; he was in direct violation of them, with the encouragement and support of his wife.
He was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, a year before he died in Kamakura; he and his descendants have also been granted permanent Israeli citizenship. He was also posthumously awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania (1993); Commander’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1996); and the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2007). Though not canonized, some Eastern Orthodox Christians recognize him as a saint.
Sugihara was born in Gifu on the first day of 1900, January 1. He achieved top marks in his schooling; his father wanted him to become a physician, but Sugihara wished to pursue learning English. He deliberately failed the exam by writing only his name and then entered Waseda, where he majored in English. He joined the Foreign Ministry after graduation and worked in the Manchurian Foreign Office in Harbin (where he learned Russian and German; he also converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church during this time). He resigned his post in protest over how the Japanese government treated the local Chinese citizens. He eventually married Yukiko Kikuchi, who would suggest and encourage his acts in Lithuania; they had four sons together. Chiune Sugihara passed away July 31, 1986, at the age of 86. Until her own passing in 2008, Yukiko continued as an ambassador of his legacy.
It is estimated that the Sugiharas saved between 6,000-10,000 Lithuanian and Polish Jewish people.
It’s a tragedy that the Sugiharas aren’t household names. They are among the greatest heroes of WWII. Is it because they were from an Axis Power? Is it because they aren’t European? I don’t know. But I’ve decided to always reblog them when they come across my dash. If I had the money, I would finance a movie about them.
He told an interviewer:
You want to know about my motivation, don’t you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. Some Japanese military leaders were just scared because of the pressure from the Nazis; while other officials in the Home Ministry were simply ambivalent.
People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people’s lives….The spirit of humanity, philanthropy…neighborly friendship…with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation—and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.
He died in nearly complete obscurity in Japan. His neighbors were shocked when people from all over, including Israeli diplomatic personnel, showed up at quiet little Mr. Sugihara’s funeral.
I will forever reblog this, I wish more people would know about them!
I liked this before when it had way less information. Thank you, history-sharers.
Tucked away in a corner in L.A.’s Little Tokyo is a life-sized statue of Chiune, seated on a bench and smiling gently as he holds out a visa.
The stone next to him bears a quote from the Talmud; “He who saves one life, saves the entire world.”
I had no idea it existed until a few weeks ago, but it’s since become one of my favorite pieces of public art.
Chiune Sugihara. Original antifa.
PBS made a documentary about Chiune Sugihara in 2005. If you’re interested in him, it’s definitely worth checking out. (The PBS link above even has some interactive information to go along with the film.) Ask your local library if they have a copy/can order you one from another library. You won’t be disappointed!
(I’m posting this less to correct the timeline portrayed in Bohemian Rhapsody, which I mostly really enjoyed, than simply to share a beautiful story that shines light on who Freddie actually was, up to the very end, via twitter.)
In the bloodshed and chaos that is the battlefields of the First World War, hundreds of thousands of young Canadian men sign up to fight for their country overseas — but there’s one who sticks out from the crowd. His bravery and fearlessness are legendary. His fellow soldiers call him Peggy.
horrifying fun fact of the day: so greenwich village, which is the neighborhood in nyc where the stonewall riots took place and which was a v important gay center from like the 50s-80s, is now super swanky and full of touristy boutiques and expensive apartments and stuff. st vincent’s, the local hospital which had the first aids ward on the east coast, closed a couple years ago and is being replaced with luxury condos. all of this is sad enough, BUT i just found out that one of the reasons it’s so gentrified now is that the aids crisis was really awesome for real estate. ppl were dying in thousands and leaving empty apartments behind, which their landlords would then rent at higher prices until only rich ppl could afford to live there 🙂
elaphaia said: also during the aids crisis landlords would shut their heat off in the winter knowing it would kill ppl so they could then rent 4 higher 🙂
Reminder that the cishet dominated government didn’t just ignore the effects of HIV/AIDS because of how concentrated the deaths were in other communities because they hate us, but also because they materially benefited from it – because they owned most of the buildings, because our partners and other kin had no legal right to our possessions, and because they commodified and monopolized antiretrovirals to bilk us.
Never forget ACT UP NYC that consisted of marginalized members of the LGBT community, many of whom were dying of AIDS. All of whom fought hard and valiantly against AIDS and HIV/AIDS discrimination. Never never forget about the brave men and women who smuggled drugs for AIDS patients into the US because the FDA was taking too long to approve drugs here and people were dying.
Never forget that people were often kicked out of their housing because they were unable to afford rent and treatment, because their partner died, or because of outright discrimination.
Enjoy your luxury apartments. I hope you remember the men and women who died so you could live there.
Just remembered Mimi’s line in RENT. “It’s nothing/they turned off my heat/and I’m a little weak on my feet.”
Jesus. I know this was before a lot of tumblr’s time, but we can’t forget this shit.
Let’s also never ever leave race out of this conversation. It wasn’t just any queers who were the most targeted, it was Black trans women. It wasn’t just any queers who stood up and fought back at stonewall, it was Black trans women.
Dan Savage may be rich and well respected, HRC may be a corporate giant but who is STILL out there fighting to survive, getting murdered and locked up because they dare to exist and resist? BLACK TRANS WOMEN.
I see a lot of posts on queer history lately that don’t follow through to the presence. You know why we still talk about AIDS today? I’m sorry to say this but it has A LOT to do with the fact that not even cis heteronormative white men were safe. They were dying too and for the first time, they were forced to be lumped in with the type of brutality, ostrization, and public humiliation that we, as a culture, HAVE ALWAYS doled out generously to Black people, ESPECIALLY BLACK TRANS WOMEN.
Can we have a conversation where we connect the AIDS epidemic to forced medical experiments on Black people that the United States CONTINUES TO THIS DAY to perpetrate? Can we talk about how racists STILL blame the genesis of the AIDS virus on Africans fucking monkies so God punished them and the rest of the “heathens” with AIDS. Can we talk about how AIDS could be entirely controlled, if not eradicated entirely, if it weren’t for US imperialism and it’s world-destroying inhuman lust for greed and power? Let’s talk about how the AIDS epidemic IS NOT OVER! How it still rages strong in the US, especially in homeless communities, communities of color and other groups of people put white supremacist system has targeted for genocide. How it still persists in many, many other countries abroad and we pretend as if it doesn’t exist unless “activists” like Bono can capitalize on it.
I’m sick and fucking tired of these half assed discussions of AIDS, no disrespect intended to the original poster this is about white queers in general right now so if the OP isn’t white this isn’t about them.
White queers, DO BETTER. Stop fucking pretending that AIDS is about you!!!! Talk about how when we honor those lost to AIDS we MUST honor the Black trans women who were the very first to stand up and fight, who DIED so you can sit on your couch and shed a tear for all those fucking whitewashed Harvey Milk movies.
AIDS IS NOT GONE. AIDS IS NOT OVER. AIDS STILL DESTROYS THOUSANDS OF LIVES EVERY DAY AND THE FACT THAT IT HASN’T YET BEEN CONTAINED IS A STRATEGIC ACT OF IMPERIALIST, WHITE SUPREMACIST WARFARE.
BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER. BLACK TRANS WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN / ARE STILL THE BACK BONE OF AMERICAN QUEER RIGHTS AND WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THAT MORE. NEVER, EVER FORGET.
No discussion of AIDS should ever happen without also centering the lives and resistance of Black trans women. Period. The end.
NYC is a gentrified and hateful horror show that they built on the backs of the dying and dead.
BTW, the high five was invented in 1977 which means your parents probably didn’t grow up with it.
For real though Glenn Burke, inventor of the high five was a gay black player in the 70s, and the Dodgers tried to get him to marry a beard and their manager got mad when he befriended the manager’s gay son before being traded to the Athletics, probably for being gay. In Oakland, the rumors of homosexuality followed him and manager Billy Martin started using homophobic slurs in the clubhouse and homophobic behavior from other players lead to an early retirement for the promising young star at 27. After retiring from baseball he introduced the high five to the Castro district of San Franscio where the high five became a symbol of gay pride and identification. ESPN wrote a long form piece about it which I recommend reading, it’s got some homophobic slurs in it although not presented positively.
A few appendices:
Although he was unceremoniously drummed out of Major League Baseball, Burke became the star shortstop for the local Gay Softball League, and even dominated in the Gay Softball World Series, as well as medaling in the 100 and 200 meter sprints in the inaugural 1982 Gay Games. Unfortunately, Burke also picked up a cocaine habit and had his leg and foot crushed in an accident. He spent much of his final years homeless in the Castro, and died from AIDS complications in 1995, but he was in the first class of inductees to the Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame, and his High School retired his jersey number.
The Dodgers Manager in question was Tony Lasorda, whose son “Spunky” died of AIDS complications in 1992 although Lasorda maintains that it was cancer. Likewise, despite the High Five becoming a symbol of the 1980 Dodgers team, Lasorda maintained and continues to this day to maintain to not know its origin. It’s possible that this isn’t a deliberate slight to Burke, but given his homophobia in other matters that’s a hard benefit of the doubt to give.
The Athletics have, in the years since, attempted to make up for some of the wrongs they committed in this story. When Glenn revealed publicly that he was living with AIDS, the As moved in and helped him financially. Burke was honored publicly at Pride Night at the park in 2015 and his brother was invited to throw the first pitch.
Burke was happy to see the high five catch on, spilling out of sports and into the small joys of every day life. He died believing that the high five was his legacy. Next time you high five your friend, remember that the high five came from Glenn Burke.
Npr has a dope story on it
What? Cool! Maybe I can find some of his baseball cards?
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury – because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education.
Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When
they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for
their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s
Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that
revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every
dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative
professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized
in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated
differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce
law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as
adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment.
Play college sports
Title IX of the Education
Amendments of protects people from discrimination based
on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal
financial assistance
It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs
The EEOC rules that
sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling
is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to
apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism – this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory.
I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school.
Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
REBLOG FOREVER.
reblorever.
This portmanteau was created from phrase ‘reblog forever’. Beep-boop. Portmanteau^bot^1
I have never slammed the reblog button harder in my LIFE, because I, too, grew up during the birth of the equal rights movement.
And I will point out that, nearly fifty years later, we STILL do not have an Equal Rights Amendment.
I also want to mention that the majority of men’s prevailing misogynistic attitudes – even now – can be laid at the feet of organized religions, the majority of which are male dominated institutions that have made the subjugation of women their mission since organized religion was invented.
When I started junior high, my mother had to march into the guidance counselor’s office and insist that I be enrolled in the industrial arts classes instead of home economics. I was one of two girls in shop class that year. It wasn’t that long ago.
The idea that women aren’t really people isn’t new, and yet it still catches us by surprise sometimes, having grown used to the idea of being people by, you know, the fact of being people.
When I was in high school (1972-75), girls were required to take home ec and boys were required to take shop. My ninth-grade science teacher laughed when I suggested that the rigors of childbirth indicated that women are physically durable. He encouraged all the boys in the class to laugh at me as well.
In 1974, my friend J. got pregnant. She went with her boyfriend, W., to have an abortion, and I remember how relieved we all were – for both of them, but of course especially for her. A year after Roe.
It makes me sick and angry to listen to young women disavow feminism. They have no fucking idea what feminism has done for them – what shit we went through, fighting for women to be recognized as complete and autonomous persons.
I will always reblog this.
In 1990 my high school guidance counselor automatically signed me up for HomeEc and couldn’t understand why I was insistent that she change it. She said, “But how will you find a husband if you don’t have any practical skills?”
In 1992 I was not allowed to take Advanced Computer Science because “their are boys that want to take that class and if we let you take it, you’ll be pushing one of them out”. Even though I got the highest grade in Intro Computer Science and scored a 100% on the final exam.
In 1993 when I got the highest score on the ASVAB in my school and place in the top 10% in the state, my guidance counselor as me why I bothered to take the test in the first place, since it wasn’t required for HS graduation.
Equality is something that, as a society, we still haven’t achieved. And that’s why I am a feminist.
Queer Fiction Writer 