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So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

#queer

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Desolation Tim hnrhghghgh

#tma #the magnus archives #jonathan sims #timothy stoker

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some of my favorite replies to this tweet. happy lesbian visibility week!

#queer #queer joy

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flower symbolism my beloved

an entry for lukewarmtomatosoup´s dtiys on instagram (GO CHECK THEIR AWESOME ART OUT), i really like how it turned out so tumblr gets to see it too

#the magnus archives #jonathan sims

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You Should Draw Again

Pretty much all children draw at some point, and then one way or another, most of us stop. I think a lot of us stop because we just got old enough to look around us and feel self conscious about not being one of the kids who was "good at art", or if you had a past like mine, for worse reasons. But whatever the reason, it's a bad reason.

And overcoming it will help. Maybe your art won't be very good (and it certainly won't be at first), but you'll get practice in one of the most important things you can do: rebelling against the lie that you can't start what you're not already good at.

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archivist be upon ye

#the magnus archives #jonathan sims #tma

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I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

#science

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👁️

#the magnus archives #tma #jonathan sims

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porcelain prince

#art

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Ismark The Lesser, Burgomaster-to-be and professional yearner

#ismark kolyanovich #curse of strahd

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@wizard_bisan1 and AJ+ have been nominated for a Peabody Award for her coverage of Gaza. ⁣

⁣

For over 6 months, Bisan Owda has shown the world how life in Gaza has been through her eyes. She has told the story of Palestinian survival in the face of the Israeli genocide. ⁣

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Before Oct. 7, Bisan was making films about cultural life in her native Gaza for her own YouTube channel. ⁣

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In 2023, AJ+’s @denatakruri won a Peabody Award for her story “One Day in Hebron,” which gave a firsthand account of the Israeli occupation in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. ⁣

⁣

#current events

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Update: North Gaza Aid!

As part of his promise, Hussam sent 20% of your HelpGazaChildren donations ($4000) to Mahmoud AbuSalama for the 5th time now, including the earlier North Gaza Campaign (as location on our notion site) to buy food and necessary products for families still surviving the dire situation in North Gaza. The food package contains, as you see in the picture below: flour, lentils, canned food, formula, diapers, and women pads!

Please continue donating and spreading the word — every penny means so much! Feel free to share our campaign link to other platforms as well!

Donate to our GoFundMe which goes directly to Hussam, who manages camps in Rafah, with NO middleman in between!

HelpGazaChildren Notion Site || #helpgazachildren tag

GoFundMe Link

[Quick ID: The video is of Mahmoud speaking in front of bags of flour and a tumblr sign. There are captions to the video in english. The image below is of groups of packages of items in front of a tumblr sign.]

#current events

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my dead goth son and his friendly neighborhood personified concept of insanity

#the magnus archives #tma #gerry keay #michael distortion

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Check out my sculpture

#art

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When I say there are things that Israel will never ever take away from Palestinians I also mean the way the fight for Palestine is ingrained into every aspect of our lives, down to even the names we give our children who come decades and decades after our initial Nakba.

For example, Bisan is a very popular girls name in Palestine and it is the name of a Palestinian city that was depopulated by Israel in 1948. Girls with names like Bisan, Yafa and Jenin may not have seen these cities yet, but they carry them within them regardless.

Also, many Palestinians can identify with how our aunts and uncles have symbolic names such as A'ed or A'eda which mean returnee. These names were not chosen arbitrarily by our grandparents who were forced to raise their families in refugee camps. Similarly, there are names like Thaer (revolutionary), Bassel (courageous) and Nidhal (revolutionary struggle) that are very common to this day.

We are literally walking around carrying notions of Palestine and our struggle with us and planting the seeds of resistance within our children, we must be so frustrating!

#current events