Okay so I’m tired and sick, but I keep looking at this panel and at the risk of getting Meta, I want to explain why this panel is so important in terms of Tony Stark’s sexuality.
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.
today is bi visibility day. as such, bisexual people will be completely visible for the next 24 hours. this is a bad day to engage in bank heists, ghost impersonations, covert operations for vague yet menacing government agencies, and other common bisexual hobbies that rely upon our powers of invisibility.
reblog to save a life.
Two sailors ca. 1940-1945. An image featured in the “Love and War” exhibit at the Kinsey Institute Gallery. More info on the exhibit can be found here.
“The photo is usually seen cropped from the waist up, as it was in the 1980s when the activist organization ACT-UP used in it on a T-shirt in their Read My Lips campaign. But the print hanging in the Kinsey gallery is the original version. Below decks, the sailors’ flies are open, and they are, so to speak, crossing swords.”
I chose during that interview to discuss the fact that, earlier in my life, I had been in relationship with a woman. It was the first time I revealed this fact in a public forum, and I chose to do so for two reasons. One was that a woman whom I was in relationship with had died a few months beforehand and I felt, in the context of our conversation, it was safe and appropriate to bring it up. Many years beforehand, and well beyond our time together, this woman had called me out of the blue at the height of my television fame to say that she had been offered $60,000 by a tabloid to provide a picture of us together. At the time, for various reasons, not including shame, I did not want that information in the public domain and despite the fact that she was struggling to pay her rent, I asked her not to sell our story. She took what at the time I considered to be the high road. To this day I regret asking her to do that. That 60 grand would have had a greater positive effect on her life than a negative effect on mine. By discussing our relationship in Out, I felt like I was honoring her memory in some way simply by admitting its existence.
knitting in the dark 
