feature image by Zackary Drucker for The Gender Spectrum Collection
Are you feeling tired? Run down? Falling asleep at your desk while you listen to Lisa Loeb? Try Eating Grapes!! It’s so easy, almost anyone can do it! You just need grapes and then a mouth to put them in. Try it today!
Queer as in F*ck You
Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Live in This Perfect Place? Womyn’s lands, established in the 1960s as lesbian utopias, have failed to attract a new generation of members. Should they be saved?
Why Are Queer People So Mean to Each Other?
Missouri Attorney General Challenges Nationwide Expansion of LGBT Rights by the Courts
And Where Do Our Youth Turn: The Need for LGBTQ+ Community and Learning in the Black, Rural South
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I Loved Planning My Queer, Disability-Friendly Wedding — But It Wasn’t Easy
For Black Lesbians, Artificial Nails Can Be an Important Signifier
Lesbian Parenting in ‘Good Manners’
Seattle’s Queer Artists Are Redefining Tattoo Culture
Istanbul Authorities Ban Third ‘Queer Olympix’ Because of ‘Social Sensitivities’
Rockies Apologize After Employee Tells Lesbians Not to Kiss
Lavender Country: All Disillusions Behind
How to Handle (And Learn From) Being Called Out
Saw This, Thought of You
In Men, It’s Parkinson’s. In Women, It’s Hysteria.
Althea Gibson, Tennis Star Ahead of Her Time, Gets Her Due at Last
Do Plants Have Something to Say? Think about it.
LOOK AT THIS COOL SITUATION FROM TEEN VOGUE:
The Eternal Sunshine of Harry Styles. Listen.
These Caterpillars Can ‘See’ Colors With Their Skin. Always always put Cara Giaimo’s work in a link roundup BYE.
Political Snacks
The Trump Administration Asked The Supreme Court To Legalize Firing Workers Simply For Being Gay
ICE Shut Down a Hotline for Detained Immigrants After It Was Featured on ‘Orange Is the New Black’
The Decisions and Inaction Behind Newark’s Lead Water Crisis
I hope everyone reads “Why Are Queer People So Mean to Each Other?” and Kai Cheng Thom’s other recent piece, “So-called accountability processes are tearing my community apart. What can I do?”
We really need to do better. There is no way we will survive the apocalypse if we continue treating each other this way.
https://www.dailyxtra.com/so-called-accountability-processes-are-tearing-my-community-apart-what-can-i-do-161146
We do need to do better, but how do we do that when some of the people in our community is working against community interests. Like Peter Thiel, who LOG cabin republican or in smaller cases the lesbian on OkCupid who’s profile said, build that wall(even more perplexing as her profile said, Arab Jew).
“And Where Do Our Youth Turn” doesn’t have a link
thank you! fixed!
“Why are queers so mean to each other” is making me feel super confident about trying to make queer friends.
If it helps at all, in my own personal experience, mean queers tend to be a very loud minority. They’re a minority who sometimes encourage that behavior in others, but many many queers know what appropriate, compassionate behavior looks like. Make friends, make sure those friends are kind people, and treat them with kindness, and you’ll likely be fine.
That said, the frequency of mean queers ending up in leadership roles in various social groups and organizations is probably worth a think.
“Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Live in This Perfect Place?”
Because nobody wants to hang out with terves.
Love the queer disability focused wedding article. iirc, one time i saw KaeLyn use this term and it’s stuck with me ever since: “currently able”. i think all the time about how that could change, either gradually or or suddenly. who knows what state my body (or any of our bods) will be in down the road, so it’s cool to see someone else is also thinking about this in terms of important life events.
oh my god that piece from Deadspin jeeeeesus
“In Men, It’s Parkinson’s. In Women, It’s Hysteria” was what you can expect from ProPublica: excellent journalism.
Last week, John Oliver made a similar piece on Last Week Tonight:
“Pointing out that most tattoo artists are essentially appropriating Polynesian practices, MKNZ brushes off such “rules.”
There is amazing work being done by queer tattoo artists in a variety of styles. Focusing on this kind of a trend and ignoring the other artists in the area who have been working for years in the community is frankly off-putting. 😒
“Why queers are so mean to each other” makes some excellent points, but those points are spread thin between a nexus of faulty ideas:
1) Queers reproducing dominant ideologies are the problem – no the dominant ideology is the problem. We are not going to die off because we’re mean to each other. We’re going to die off because of outside threats. Claiming that we will be brought low by ourselves is misindentifying our biggest threat. Callout culture is a barrier to dialogue, but it is not a threat to our physical and mental safety the way hateful people who want to kill us and take our rights away are!
2) Queers are mainly “mean” to each other as a response to past trauma which is not actually coming from the person they’re addressing. “Mean”, what a dismissive word. Sometimes queers are “mean” to a person that has physically caused harm to them or mentally abused them. “mean” is not the word. It is not impossible to imagine that people who have been traumatised might develop a mindset where they go on to traumatise others, in the same way that many child abusers were originally victims of abuse themselves. When a queer person decides to address their abuser, it may well look like callout culture, but it doesn’t mean the abuser is not actually an abuser. What would we prefer? That somebody who has been traumatised regularly sees someone abusive, feels unable to tell anyone else, and re-experiences trauma every time they interact? Abuse in the community does not stop being abuse just because it comes from victims.