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uhtcearemorning · 2 days
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Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)
So I got this ask a while ago, and I’ve been lowkey thinking about it ever since.
First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 
Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don’t even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you’re somehow owed information about my sexual history. You’re not! No one—and I can’t reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don’t feel like sharing with you.
The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you’re traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can’t sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can’t talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.
This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that’s good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don’t have to justify yourself. You don’t have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don’t have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 
You don’t owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They’re yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they’re probably not someone you should trust.
Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.
There’s a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren’t failed lesbians. They’re not somehow less good or less valid because they’re attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I’ve checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?
Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who’ve had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I’m sorry to report that “I’m disgusted by a standard-issue human body part” is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I’m a dyke and I don’t especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don’t have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn’t make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.
There’s so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven’t noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there’s a whole pandemic thing that’s been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you’re worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people’s genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 
Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it’s always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.
Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.
Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to “solicit homosexual or lesbian activity”, which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.
I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.
In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn’t have to recognize them if they didn’t want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Every queer person who’s older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 
Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn’t be allowed to marry someone you loved.
Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.
Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.
This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that’s worth literally everything.
Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You’ve capitalized it, like it’s Weighty and Important, but it’s not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don’t have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.
The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 
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uhtcearemorning · 4 days
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If my wife handed me my ass in combat and then kissed me after pointing a katana at my throat, I would recognize the gesture as the peak of romance it is and would fall even more in love with her. Rip to that guy Mizu married for like a year but I'm different.
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uhtcearemorning · 4 days
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babygirl the way you forsake your happiness on your relentless quest to vengeance, your complicated relationship with gender and the way you're covered in blood have bewitched me body and soul
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uhtcearemorning · 4 days
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blue eye samurai + text posts 2/? mizu edition
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uhtcearemorning · 4 days
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Stop equipping every character with therapy speak and instead consider placing them somewhere on this chart
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uhtcearemorning · 4 days
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It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!
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uhtcearemorning · 5 days
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In 1982, quite by accident, a zookeeper at Izu Shaboten Zoo in Shizuoka Prefecture discovered that capybaras absolutely loved soaking in hot water, and the practice of providing them an onsen, or traditional Japanese hot spring, was born. Source Massimo; video @yu_haradakei.
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uhtcearemorning · 5 days
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you have to stay alive. you're going to be such a beautiful middle aged freak. young freaks will see you in the street and know that things can be okay.
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uhtcearemorning · 5 days
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People are talking about how reading Dungeon Meshi gives them an internal monologue Senshi for eating properly I think we all need to adopt an internal monologue Chilchuck at work. Like the boat is literally sinking and he's just watching it happen because he's on his lunch break.
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uhtcearemorning · 11 days
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they hated him for his elderly transmasc swag (the twelfth doctor)
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uhtcearemorning · 12 days
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Frodo: Sam hates Gollum, but that is what I shall become once I have lost myself to the ring… he’ll despise me… 
Sam if Frodo did turn into a Gollum: That’s a very nice fish you caught with your bare hands, Mr. Frodo, and its very smart of you to eat it raw, saves us the trouble of starting a fire. I knitted you a sweater in case you get cold running around in that loincloth of yours. Is the sun hurting your eyes? I’ll kill it if it’s bothering you. I’ll kill the sun
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uhtcearemorning · 14 days
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Nålhus aka needle houses aka needle keepers made with wool fabric, protected by a ceramic case. Stamped patterns with inspiration from plants and nature in general and the geometrical lines somewhat inspired by runes.
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One of these are still in the shop now at nymla.se
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uhtcearemorning · 14 days
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Might I just say that Gwen reminds me so much of Jon in this episode
Jon (when meeting a talking plastic mannequin): you don't sound Russian ...
Gwen (when presented with a horrifying murderous children's clown): Can he read?!
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uhtcearemorning · 19 days
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lesbian orc bars would be crazy
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uhtcearemorning · 20 days
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can't cope eating my toaster rn
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uhtcearemorning · 22 days
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the silmarillion is wild yall i love it finrod fucking felagund bites a werewolf to death, instantly dies, and not half a page later i am blasted with the knowledge of sauron's fursona
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uhtcearemorning · 23 days
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turkish spindle gang make some noise (imagine having to wind your singles off your spindle before you can start plying, couldn't be us)
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