You are 12. You’re at the library looking for some generic young adult fiction novel about a girl who falls for her best friend. Your dad makes a disgusted face. “This is about lesbians,” he says. The word falls out of his mouth as though it pains him. You check out a different book and cry when you get home, but you aren’t sure why. You learn that this is not a story about you, and if it is, you are disgusting.

You are 15. Your relatives are fawning over your cousin’s new boyfriend. “When will you have a boyfriend?” they ask. You shrug. “Maybe she’s one of those lesbians,” your grandpa says. You don’t say anything. You learn that to find love and acceptance from your family, you need a boyfriend who thinks you are worthy of love and acceptance.

You are 18. Your first boyfriend demands to know why you never want to have sex with him. He tells you that sex is normal and healthy. You learn that something is wrong with you.

You are 13. You’re at a pool party with a relative’s friend’s daughter. “There’s this lesbian in my gym class. It’s so gross,” she says. “Ugh, that’s disgusting,” another girl adds. They ask you, “do you have any lesbians at your school?” You tell them no and they say you are lucky. You learn to stay away from people.

You are 20. You have coffee with a girl and you can’t stop thinking about her for days afterwards. You learn the difference between a new friendship and new feelings for a person.

You are 13. Your mom is watching a movie. You see two girls kiss on screen. You feel butterflies and this sense that you identify with the girls on the screen. Your mom gets up and covers the screen. You learn that if you are like those girls, no one wants to see it.

You are 20. You and your friends are drunk and your ex-boyfriend dares you to make out with your friend. You both agree. You touch her face. It feels soft and warm. Her lips are small and her hands feel soft on your back. You learn the difference between being attracted to someone and recognizing that someone you care about is attractive.

You are 16. You find lesbian porn online. Their eyes look dead and their bodies are positioned in a way that you had never imagined. You learn that liking girls is acceptable if straight men can decide the terms.

You are 20. You are lying next to a beautiful girl and talking about everything. You tell her things that you don’t usually tell anyone. You learn how it feels not to want to go to sleep because you don’t want to miss out on any time with someone.

You are 15. Your parents are talking about a celebrity. Your dad has a grin on his face and says, “her girlfriend says that she’s having the best sex of her life with her!” You learn that being a lesbian is about the kind of sex you have and not how you love.

You are 18. You are in intro to women’s and gender studies. “Not all feminists are lesbians- I love my husband! Most of the feminists on our leadership team are straight! It’s just a stereotype,” the professor exclaims. You learn that lesbianism is something to separate yourself from.

You are 21 and you are kissing a beautiful girl and she’s your girlfriend and you understand why people write songs and make movies and stupid facebook statuses about this and time around you just seems to stop and you could spend forever like this and you learn that there is nothing wrong with you and you are falling in love.

You are 21. And you are okay.

a thing I wrote after arguing with an insensitive dude on facebook all day or Things Other People Taught me about Liking Girls (via squidterritory)

I will never not reblog this.

(via vanguardvivian)

shiraglassman:

wastelandmae:

shiraglassman:

handsomejewishprince:

shiraglassman:

This holiday season, win a free paperback copy of The Second Mango. Feminism, femslash, and a friendly dragon are just around the corner!

It’s hard to find a girlfriend when you don’t know any other lesbians, so the young, nerdy Queen Shulamit hires the legendary warrior Rivka to take her around the kingdom on the back of her dragon in search of other girls like her. But the simple quest quickly turns into a rescue mission when they discover a temple full of women turned to stone by an evil sorcerer.

  • No “giveaway” blogs
  • Shipping will be free to any continental US address; anyone outside this range can opt to have the book mailed to a US friend or pay for international shipping
  • Reblogs will stop counting on December 16 at noon, Florida time
  • One prize will be awarded each night between December 16 and December 23.
  • Prize is one paperback copy of The Second Mango, except for the final prize, which will be both The Second Mango and Climbing the Date Palm plus a handmade rainbow pride necklace
  • You can enter as many times as you want
  • Likes do not count as an entry, only reblogs
  • Do not erase the comments below the picture
  • Tagging your post “signal boost” means the reblog doesn’t count, if you don’t want to enter, but it is still appreciated.
  • If this post gets less than 200 notes total, there will only be two prizes awarded (one 12/16 and one 12/23.) I want to get the word out!

 Illustration “I Love You a Latke” credit: yeaka

I love yeaka, and I love that pun!

And I love your URL 😛

Reading this now and it is super-ace and lovely!

Less than two weeks left! (And thank you.)

will5nevercome:

My super-conservative devout Mormon parents (and society in general) have made a lot of progress toward acceptance since I first came out 11 years ago, and I’m genuinely grateful and impressed. But at the same time, I still feel a lot of hurt, and anger, and frustration at how far they (and society) still have to go. Sometimes it can be difficult to find balance between those extremes. It’s been mostly anger this week.

I’m a queer woman who has been with my female partner for almost fourteen years, a whole year longer than my mother has been with her second husband. I was BIC, and pretty much all my family on my mother’s side is still in the church, and, yeah. This is really super familiar especially that first one. My mother has denial down to a really fine art. I mean, I can actually have a relationship with her now, rather than the screaming, hostile homophobia from the early years (giving the missionaries my address every time I moved was a classy act, mum), but I just know that even though we never hide that we’re a couple, I think she’s taken the sexual and romantic elements of my partnership and put them in a steel box and welded it shut. Recently (as in, in the last year, when we’re in our thirties and been a couple since age 19), she said to my partner, “You’re a really good friend to Ruth,” which I’ve accepted is the closest I’m ever going to get to her approving of and accepting my relationship, which on the one hand, is better than me having to not take bathroom breaks when I visited in case she cornered my partner and told her all about how wicked she was and how she was ruining my chance of marriage/kids, but on the other… it’s erasure. And like any kind of erasure of identity, it really, really sucks.