#sometimes they’ll cherry pick some of leslie’s work to support their shit and it’s like

[gatheringbones]

The more lesbian literature you read and the more authors you become familiar with, the more you’ll be able to see just how many of them are completely unacceptable to terfs, swerfs, and all of the other ghoulish bottomfeeders that have been flapping around since time immemorial, and just how much lesbian art and history they have to cauterize and denigrate in order to build their shitty little sandcastles.

Joan Nestle, founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives? Unacceptable. Adores trans people, trans expression, let trans women join the archives, did so much writing on lesbian as a third sex, goes into raptures when she describes the first time she heard Leslie Feinberg speak. Leslie hirself? Anathema. No one thought terfs were more full of shit than hir. Ze went to bat for Cece McDonald until hir dying day. Judy Grahn, dyke poet laureate, who wrote that being transgender was the beginning of “a vast evolutionary step”? Get out of here, traitor. Willyce Kim, the first Asian lesbian poet to be published in the US, with her glorious, punchy, powerful, genitally dubious erotica centered on the sacred history of sex workers in the lesbian world? Setting a bad example; traitor. Minnie Bruce Pratt? Delusional traitor. Ivan Coyote? Became a traitor as soon as they decided they were no longer comfortable with going by she. Jewelle Gomez, author and director of the Horizons Foundation? Traitor. Storme Webber, two-spirit poet and professor? Barbara Smith, who fought to include minority sexualities when the mainstream gay and lesbian movement left them behind? Guess.

And I love that long quote I found from Joan Nestle about Dworkin, it says it all:

“I think many of the women who turned into sex thought-police were truly concerned about violence against women, and had their own horrible experiences: a very deeply experienced vulnerability and a frustration with how to make this culture responsive to the well-being of women. Those are their best motives. But I think they took the wrong way. I think that what came in there was perhaps a lack of exposure to other sexual energies, to other sexual ways of being. And there were some women who just are fervent, who are arrogant in their sense that they think they know how to protect women. I'm thinking of women who make careers out of stimulating an anger we all feel, and that anger and that pain is where they've decided to make their culture. And I've decided to make a culture out of another side of it, which is sexual exploration and celebration. And I think both sides are needed. I felt the censorship coming from their side, not from my side. Andrea Dworkin's books are all in the Archives. I would never say, 'Keep her books off the shelf.' But they would say, 'Keep Joan's books off the shelves.'"

#lesbian literature #sometimes they’ll cherry pick some of leslie’s work to support their shit and it’s like #0/10 see me after class