I love being queer. Queer is my favorite identity label; no other words capture the reality of my gender and sexuality so completely. My gender is queer. My sexuality is queer. I am queer. In addition to all of the other beautiful things that I am, I am queer.
I am proud to be queer. Queer is a fact about who I am. When I identify as queer, I am connected to a community and history of great strength. I am inspired by my queer ancestors. I am moved to fight for my queer siblings.
My queerness is a source of pride and courage.
My queerness is not shameful. My queerness is not unspeakable. My queerness is not dirty or harmful. My queerness will not be erased or denied or censored.
My queerness is radiant, defiant, loud, proud, beautiful, freedom.
No one and nothing can ever take this away from me.
This was exactly my reaction when, in 2015, a 15yo on Tumblr came and sent me a load of hate for being “an OMG ACTUAL ADULT” calling myself ‘queer’ and using ‘queer community’.
Like, how to put this. In Australia since the early 90s, ‘queer’ has been the accepted term to call that community. It’s a mainstream word. We say ‘queer theory’, ‘queer community’, ‘queer organisations’, etc. Another Australian who words for the government said it’s a perfectly acceptable term to use in policy documents and funding applications. Here, in Australia, queer hasn’t been a slur at any point in my life. The only Australians I’ve ever come across who think it’s a slur are people who spend too much time around American youths on social media.
I did a post about the international queer community, it got 5-7k notes (ish) and people from at least 10 other countries said ‘queer’ is not a slur in their country and it’s just the word that’s used for the queer community.
This is why it drives me nuts when a 15yo from South Carolina, USA assumes:
1) Her experience with ‘queer’ is the same as everybody else’s
2) A small number of people having a bad experience with ‘queer’ is an acceptable reason to deny and police usage by the entire wider international queer community
The short of it is that it’s not acceptable. Many older queer folks have used this word for decades – it’s been in common use since at least the 80s. In the past 3 years it’s become very fashionable (mostly only on Tumblr, but on pockets of social media elsewhere, too) to treat queer as this Big Bad Slur (forgetting that there are many other slurs and most of our language gets used as slurs at some point by various people) and to pop up on every fucking post that mentions queer like “UM EXCUSE ME IT’S FINE FOR YOU TO CALL YOURSELF QUEER BUT IT’S LITERAL ABUSE FOR YOU TO USE IT FOR OTHER PEOPLE LIKE AS AN UMBRELLA TERM AND YOU ARE A BAD PERSON!!!”
like. babe. I’ve never met you in my life. You live an entire world away from me and you can’t tell me what language I’m allowed to use for myself and my own community. If you don’t like the word, you have trauma associated with it or whatever, I accept that. I feel for you, I have trauma about some words, too. USE XKIT BLACKLIST. Your trauma is your problem, just like my trauma is my problem. Yes, really. Get counselling. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to change their identities and language because of your trauma. That’s not a lack of empathy from me, that’s a hard life lesson you need to learn about the world not revolving around you. I am not abusing anyone by using the language I’ve always used about my own community.
It’s not the end of your world, though. You’re not doomed to read ‘queer’ all over tumblr forever. There are many many many tools available for you to protect yourself and avoid triggers. You should be responsible for yourself and your experience online and protect yourself from seeing things that upset you.
“BUT I’M A MINOR!!”, you cry! okay, true. Get up from the computer, go directly to your parent or guardian, and let them know you’re not old enough to police your own internet usage and ask them to do it for you. It is not my responsibility to take care of you. It is no one else on Tumblr’s responsibility to take care of you. The internet is not just for kids. If you can’t take care of yourself, your parents need to help you do that.
The short of it is if you’re old enough to know the word ‘queer’ upsets you, you’re old enough to download xkit blacklist and add ‘queer’ to the blacklist words. If you’re not doing that, I have to assume you’re actually trying to pick fights with queer people and it’s more of a power struggle to you than anything about semantics.
“BUT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO USE XKIT! IT’S AN EASY CHANGE FOR YOU!” Dude, you’re asking me to change my whole identity. You’re asking me to change my lexicon for you. It’s not an easy or fair change for you to ask me to make. Xkit is a quick and easy solution for you (and now, you can use the tumblr innate tag blocks, too). If that’s too much for you to do, I have a feeling you’re just looking for a fight and not actually traumatised by ‘queer’.
NEVER. NEVER. Come onto a queer person’s post and start telling them anything about how to use their word. Queer folks get policed and oppressed enough by cishet folks. We don’t need people from our own community trying to police our language and language we’ve used for decades and continue to use in many countries and in many parts of the US.
There is absolutely no reason to derail posts being “””””””helpful”””””””” by repeatedly, constantly, aggressively spreading rhetoric that shames people for using language we have used for ourselves and our community for decades. Your problem with the word queer should not be my problem, so don’t make it my problem.
I am queer Welcome To The Black Parade, I am outside all your boxes.
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella – gay rights, gay marriage, gay community – when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y’all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
The pushback against queer is RECENT.
Look, kids. I’m officially Old. And when my little queer (bisexual, grey-asexual) arse was realising this, I was in HIGH SCHOOL. And you know when that was? This was before AZT use was widespread. HIV was a death sentence. You know who nursed those guys, ran their errands and sat with them as they were dying from AIDS? Well, me, for one (mostly I was just doing grocery shopping but I sat my fair share of deathbed vigils as a young teen) but it was the queer community. That was how we identified. And lesbian women and trans folk and people from ALL KINDS of orientations got together and cared for these people (mostly gay men and trans women, and a lot of sex workers in there).
We were queer. And we were, and still are, fucking angry. Betrayed by our governments, in lots of cases disowned by our families, all we had was each other. And we were queer.
And then later, we had queer studies and queer theory at uni. This is over 20-30 years ago. They do not name university courses after slurs. They named it after OUR IDENTITY.
So you children, who never nursed your dying friends want to come along and declare MY IDENTITY A SLUR?
FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU.
YOU ARE WRONG. YOU ARE AHISTORICAL AND YOU. ARE. WRONG.
Fuck you. Fuck your exclusionary politics. Gay has been used as a slur far more recently than queer. As has lesbian.
You want to police the queer community. You want to gate-keep. You want to exclude people like me, you want to define what a woman is, what genders people can be.
WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER. Get used to it.
Honestly, the way some people act it’s like. . You can’t reclaim slurs, but you can’t create new words without being branded the butt of a joke, so people who don’t feel like outlet labels fit them are supposed to just sit and suffer in silence.
If you don’t want to be called queer then fine, but don’t erase the history of those who used it, who fought for it TO be used as an umbrella term. If you don’t want it applied to you then fine, but don’t say what it should and shouldn’t be used for. I know that many people hear it as a slur and don’t want it applied, but to say it can’t be an umbrella term based on that doesn’t make sense. “Gay” is one of the absolutely most common slurs I have ever heard used in my life and it still gets used and applied to umbrella situations. If we went off of if things have been used against us as slurs then we wouldn’t have anything to call ourselves.
I’m here, I’m queer, and it took me a damn long time to get used to it and I’m not going back now.
This post has helped me. I am asexual, autistic, i have issues due to sexual trauma, i am agender… I thought i couldnt use the word queer. Thanks to you guys i feel welcome.
I am queer, thanks.
if you get no thing else out of this post (because i know its long) i suggest you at least try to get this:
It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
because it is fantastic
you can get a phd in Queer Literature.
enough of this terf shit. learn your history and stop being the private army of anyone who sounds offended.
@alienatedaugmenter Here’s a continuation of that conversation from before – said way better than I ever could, regarding the word queer and its history.
The most beautiful thing about this is the many good points with a short pancake interlude and then seguing back to more good points
before you ever even consider having a child you should be ready to handle a disabled child, you should be ready to handle twins, you should be ready to handle a gay child or a trans child
because if you’re not ready for your child to be anything other than one straight, cis, able bodied and able minded child, you’re going to end up neglecting and abusing somebody for years to come
and even if your child is all that, you might have a feminine boy or a masculine girl on your hands. so be fucking ready for your child to be a human being and not YOUR PRODUCT or PROPERTY or CREATION
fucking sort your shit out, i am so tired of shitty parental sob stories about how “hard” it is to “raise” (read: beat the divergency out of) an autistic child or whatever. do you know what’s harder? being the divergent child of parents who you’ve already let down by virtue of existing in a way they didn’t ask for. putting up with years of neglect and abuse because you’re just not good enough for them, you weren’t what they were planning for or expecting.
A comic about looking after yourself, your loved ones and your mental health during the tough times ahead. I started this last November, when people were hurting so hard it was difficult to function – I’m sorry it took me so long to finish it.
This is really important for those of us with chronic illness, mental illness, and disabilities, for whom marching is a dream, for whom calling politicians is an impossibility. I am queer, mentally ill and developmentally disabled. Any of these alone makes me marginalised in a society that lauds the healthy, the efficient, the successful, the conventional. Just by existing, just by refusing to pretend I’m anything but what I am, I am fighting. And by stimming in public, by wearing clothing that is both comfortable and reflective of my political beliefs, by holding hands with my partner, I am being the change I want in the world. I am carving a niche for myself and taking the space people would deny me. I am fighting for those who cannot do as much as I can.
Some weeks ago, I reblogged a gifset of Mark Hamill talking about gay fans headcanoning Luke as gay, and expressing his support for them feeling free to interpret his character that way if they wanted to. I replied, talking about the importance of this kind of acceptance by a creator of fan interpretation. The original post is here, but I’ll duplicate my comments here for context:
He gets it, gets why seeing yourself in a character is important, and that is so rare. Too many creators and authors and actors get wrapped up in what their intent was when creating/writing/performing, and don’t see that the moment the work is out there, it’s open source for head canons, interpretations, fanworks and meta. This is all the more important for people of marginalised groups. So of course Luke is gay, if you read him that way. The power is YOURS not Mark’s, and he’s not so egocentric that he misses that. This should be far more common than it is, this generous acceptance of fan interpretation and evolution of canon.
And, I didn’t think any more about it, until yesterday morning, when I noticed I had a PM from a total stranger who’d seen my comment on a reblog somewhere. They asked some questions, I formulated a reply, and then we had a conversation which I think is important because it covers the intersection of straight privilege, the desire and push for diverse representation, and respecting the boundary between creators and fans.
I will forenote this with the fact that this conversation is being posted completely with the consent of the person involved. I have removed all identifying information as to the user, fandoms and ships mentioned in this discussion and anything else I think is too identifiable. If you think you can identify specifics, please do not add them to tags or reblogs or badger me for confirmation. This is purely posted because the discussion is applicable to most if not all fandoms, and might help to enlighten those who don’t understand the nuances of fandom (and transformative works and headcanons) for minorities but WANT to understand.
anon:Hello 🙂 I love what Mark says and I agree with him that it is perfectly ok to have an active fantasy life about a character. But I’m not positive I agree with everything you said in your comment and I’d like to ask you something:
If I watch a show that is based on two gay characters and I want one of the characters to be straight and I ship them with another character in a heterosexual relationship – that’s okay? Even if they are written as gay, but I don’t see them as gay?
Also, is it okay for me to push that agenda on the actor who plays him or her and say, oh but you’re NOT gay in the show, you’re really straight – you just don’t realize it? Would I be welcome with this interpretation or would I be considered homophobic for completely denying these characters are gay?
I don’t believe that interpretation by an audience should reach the level that the artist is forced to completely deny their intent to make said audience happy. Then it is like fascism or some form of rule that allows one section of the population to decide but the other section better watch itself. If art is truly free, then the audience should not attempt to control the artist by intimidation – it should at least be polite and also allow said artist his or her interpretation.
Just up late and sleepless – not trying to offend but to understand if there is a double standard at play here.
iamshadow21: The difference is, queer people and other minorities are denied representation. We have to look into the subtext to find characters like ourselves. When someone changes a queer character to straight, the situation is different because straight people have all the power, all the representation, and 99% of media is full of people exactly like them. You take a dollar from a guy with a hundred bucks, he’s probably going to be fine and not care. You take a dollar from someone who only has a dollar, you’ve stolen everything from them.
As for ‘pushing agendas’ on the actors, there’s a difference between politely asking and pushing an agenda. Agenda’s a pretty loaded word that’s been used by heterosexual people terrified of queer empowerment and civil rights for decades – we have an ‘agenda’, we want to ‘steal’ their children from them and convert them and make them satan worshippers and paedophiles. The fact that you used the word agenda when talking about forcing an orientation headcanon on an actor was probably an unconscious choice on your part, but you should be mindful that it is a word with a history and is a word still used in the present to fearmonger and oppress a minority that a large amount of heterosexuals would prefer would cease to exist. They would literally prefer we died, and if you think that’s exaggeration, just look at the protest movement in the early years of HIV/AIDS. Google Act Up and the ‘die-ins’ held just trying to get powerful straight people to give a shit, if you want to educate yourself futher.
I’m of the opinion that with a lot of fandom stuff, you shouldn’t cross the streams. Don’t be creepy, don’t do or say anything that might make the creators uncomfortable. This includes forcing a headcanon on them in the manner you suggested, be it gay, straight or otherwise. But asking a polite question about a character’s orientation, a character that doesn’t have a romance onscreen? I don’t see a problem with that.
As for your paralleling the desire and push for representation with art-crushing fascism, well. Wow. May I refer you to the first paragraph. We are awash in straight representation. Having gay characters and headcanons doesn’t diminish the plethora of them. But taking a canonically gay character and straightwashing them? You’re taking the dollar from the guy who only has one. As for attempts to force a creator to deny their intent, may I refer you to the paragraph on fandom and boundaries. There are, however, times when it is appropriate to push for greater diversity and representation in our media. For us to shout, because otherwise, creators forget we exist. They default to white/cis/hetero, because that’s the factory settings and unless there’s a vocal segment calling out for something else, that’s what we get. Yet another white bread sandwich, when all we want is one fruit salad.
If you really want to ship a canonically gay character with a person of another gender, I’m not going to flat out say you can’t. The joy of fandom is that your brain is a free place where you can imagine whatever the hell you want. You can create stuff based off it, too, though you might get shit for doing it, because when we get representation, it matters so much and we don’t like it being wiped out like it’s an inconvenience. One way to make your ship work without erasing the queerness? Consider whether your headcanon works if the character is bisexual. If gay people have a single dollar, bisexuals have fifty cents, and they mean you can have your ship without praying the gay away.
anon: Everything you said makes total sense and if there is one thing I wish for is that there is more representation and diversity so it’s not necessary to take a show that is written straight and look for subtext.
Apologies for using the word “agenda”. I wasn’t using it derogatorily against the gay community but just using it for lack of a better word that I couldn’t pull out of my head at 2 in the morning!
Anyway, let me explain a little more where I’m coming from on the artistic level, and you’ll probably understand why I asked you the question in the first place.
I meant to write to you from my main blog but accidentally sent from my secondary blog. My main blog is a [fandom] blog. Do you watch or know about the show? If you do, you will know what relationship I’m referring to and which actor I’m thinking of. Since season [#] of the show, [m/m ship] has been around. I don’t ship it, but I know many who do and many are very cool with it being fanon only and realize that it has not been, nor will ever be, declared canon. Show’s creator, writers and actors (well with the exception of one who in the past has liked to tease) have declared it not to be canon. However, there is a small part of the ship who are fairly vocal, and not always in a pleasant way. I have no problem with shipping, but I do have a problem when people who are disappointed that it has not been accepted as real, bully and bash the actors who have had to answer the same questions over and over at conventions. Even members of the ship find this behavior reprehensible.
Anyway, this is where I was coming from last night when I was wondering how it would feel to have the tables turned and have heterosexuals insisting – sometimes rudely – that two gay characters were straight. Shoe on the other foot kind of thing.
I’ve seen [actor] have to field these questions and I don’t envy him the task or the inevitable backlash that he is homophobic. He’s proven in his own life he’s anything but homophobic, but because he is being honest about what he sees his character (these fans think he is bi) as after [show run length] years, he gets penalized.
Anyway, the wheels of progress grind slowly, and over the years we’ve seen more and more gay representation on shows and in movies, and like anything else, it will take time. I hope TPTB in Hollywood will see the wealth of subject matter there and start producing more and more shows to represent the LGBT community and there will be enough artistic expression to go around. xo
iamshadow21: I don’t watch [show] but I’m aware of the popular ships, both in-show and RPF, and I can tell you without any hesitation that this is a case of fandom conspiracy theories/tinhattery and bad behaviour. It’s something that crops up in a lot of fandoms where people decide that their own headcanon is the only way and try to force it on the creators rather than being content to theorise and create transformative works. This isn’t really about the characters being gay or straight, it’s about a group of fans with an altered perception of reality and canon who are ruining it for the rest, and I’m sorry you have to deal with that in your fandom, but it’s very common. From [super threatening behaviour] in [other fandom #1] to the labyrinthine weirdness of [actor ship conspiracy theory] in [other fandom #2], every fandom has their subset of people who take it too far. That the ship in this case is a gay one is a peripheral issue, though it seems to you the primary one. It isn’t about representation at all.
anon: Your last sentence: that is so, so true…a friend of mine had some fantastic tags on one of the posts that recently dealt with another outburst of this fringe group and she really nailed it on the head (she is bi):
[I have removed the tag set because I didn’t have the OP’s permission to post it, but it covered the points that 1) she supported the actor’s stance 2) the fans in question were being inappropriate, threatening, and throwing shame on the fandom in general and 3) even if the actor did concede to their version to make them shut up about it, it wouldn’t be a true victory for social justice or diversity representation in media.]
But, no matter what forms of logic we use, it really never makes a dent in the delusion.
Well, thanks for chatting with me, it was interesting and I learned some things! xo
iamshadow21: Hey, no problem. Yeah, I was just going to add – ‘straightwashing’ in retaliation won’t change this subset’s mind because they are convinced of the verity of their beliefs, and only hurt those, like me, who long to see ourselves on the screen. So just step back and leave them be. Try and enjoy your fandom and don’t engage. Engaging never works. And they’re crying homophobia, but that’s just a word to them, a ‘reason’ for their reality not being real. It’s not the actual reality we live with. I mean, sure, without homophobia and queerbaiting, [ship] might be canon. But it might not. And the idea that it’s secretly coded into the show is magical thinking.
anon: Yes, I totally get that. And I think I forget sometimes and want to lash back, but you’re right, engaging never works. I really never do.
Oh they are convinced of that!
iamshadow21: Yeah, so don’t engage.
anon: Which is why [actor] lately looked straight at the questioner and said “[that ship isn’t a thing in the canon]” and of course the shitstorm happened. Poor guy.
iamshadow21: Because every time you do, you reinforce that there are ‘forces’ trying to prevent their love.
anon:Nope, I don’t follow anybody that messes up my dash lol.
YES!!
iamshadow21: It’s a delusion, a shared delusion, which makes it stronger because the core believers reinforce it amongst themselves. It’s what happens in cults.
anon: Wow it really is a certifiable delusion isn’t it?
Absolutely.
It is a cult.
Well, that being said, there is no more to be said other than don’t engage 🙂
Thank you.
iamshadow21: Yeah. So be aware, keep out of the mess, and don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s actually about social justice and representation. It’s about false belief.
Thank you for listening to my answers. I really hope it’s helped.
anon: I will remember your words and re-read this thread whenever I’m feeling murderous haha
It really did 🙂
Today I faced up to the email that’s been sitting in my inbox for over a week, from one of my oldest and dearest friends, my first ever internet friend, my found family brother. I’d mentioned in a previous email that I was in autistic burnout, and in reply, in the nicest possible way, he asked, ‘so, this autism thing, what’s that all about? whenever if ever you’re ready to talk about it, ilu whatever, you know that’.
And I come out to people all the time, about my autism, about my queerness, about the abuse when I was a kid, whatever. But this was hard, because I wanted to write it right, and sequencing my thoughts is really difficult for me when I’m trying to lay out something as complex as my neurotype and its effect on my life.
He’s asking because he wants to understand, and that’s wonderful, but at the same time, terrifying because unlike some random whose opinion doesn’t matter, his opinion does.
As with my queerness, it’s never a case of you come out once, and that’s it. Every day you come out again to someone you’ve just met, to a friend, to a health worker, to a family member. And every time, you’re coming out for the first time. It never gets easy. It gets familiar, but never easy, because each time you do, it’s a risk.
Will this person be receptive? Will they reject what I’m saying? Will they try to cure me with suggestions of diet, yoga or meditation? Will they tell me I’m not as disabled as a ‘real’ autistic person they know? Will they ask me if I’ve found god? Will they ask if I’ve tried sex with men? Will they ask about my functioning label, my meltdowns, my stimming or my verbal fluency, or what those things were like when I was a child? Will they think it’s all a bid for attention?
While some questions are specific to my neurotype or my sexuality or the abuse, there’s a striking similarity to many of them, particularly when they come from near strangers. It’s curiosity, yes, but there’s a need to categorise, to feel out my edges and lines and push me into a box they recognise. It’s a hard thing to be on the receiving end of, but it’s also very human. As a person being questioned, you’re torn between being polite and enstating hard boundaries. As a person questioning, you’re often just trying to understand. That doesn’t mean questioning is benign. It can be intrusive, toxic and hostile. It can involve damning snap judgements that can leave the victim reeling for days, ‘helpful’ suggestions that can crush fragile self esteem. People don’t always have the best intentions, and even those who do, often don’t understand that their ‘help’ is unwelcome or harmful.
The point I’m trying to make is that coming out is HARD. Whether you’re talking to people (as I do) about neurodiversity or sexuality or abuse, or talking about race, religion, political activism, gender… whatever you’re taking the big step to talk about with another human, either in brickspace or on the internet or the phone, it’s one of the hardest things you’ll do over and over for the rest of your life. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. That doesn’t mean you’ll get it right every time, or that it’ll be received well, or that you won’t regret opening your mouth sometimes. That’s how life is. But the fact that you take that step with someone… that’s huge. And you should be proud of yourself for that.
He gets it, gets why seeing yourself in a character is important, and that is so rare. Too many creators and authors and actors get wrapped up in what their intent was when creating/writing/performing, and don’t see that the moment the work is out there, it’s open source for head canons, interpretations, fanworks and meta. This is all the more important for people of marginalised groups. So of course Luke is gay, if you read him that way. The power is YOURS not Mark’s, and he’s not so egocentric that he misses that. This should be far more common than it is, this generous acceptance of fan interpretation and evolution of canon.
knitting in the dark 