Queer Identity - Tumblr Posts

fucked up some people never even have to think about their identities. I’m like 3 weeks into a self-reflection to try and figure out if I feel love and they’re just out there. never thinking about that

short story? (fictional..I guess)

Tuesday, 1:45 pm

Today was a windy day on the East bay. My feet are crunching the blank ground beneath my feet. I’m wearing a jacket but it’s so cold! The wool socks I’m wearing are a bit wet, and that was when I remembered I had hot chocolate at home. As I was on my way home, I see these to people close together. What are they doing? Why are they kissing? Aren’t they a bit close? Are they friends? I don’t know what to think.

I spot someone else across the street, and I could sense their jealousy of the close two. Then I heard the the two say, “I love you, my sweet sunshine!”, at the same time, but it wasn’t exact.

They’re in love. Love! What utter bullshit. 

I hurried along the snow, almost frustrated. Okay, not almost, I was frustrated. I AM FRUSTRATED! Why am I so frustrated?! Oh I’m home. Great.

My stiff discolored hands reach for the doorknob. It’s so cold and metallic. As I open the oak doors to my home, I close it just as quickly. 

SIGH

My mind is carrying a weight that I don’t to be true. I can’t fall in love. Well, at least, I don’t think so. Oh how I wish I could feel those wonderful feelings.

I enter my disheveled room, not prepared for anything, so I collapse onto my bed in all my warm clothes. 

Wednesday, 3 am

I’m hungry. My eyes are a bit blurry, so I rub them, so I can see once again. It’s 3 AM!! My stomach hurts, so I go to the kitchen, and look at my fridge.

It’s empty. Great! Just great.

I spot a remote to left and pick it to turn on my tv, then I hear my ringer go off. It’s my best friend, Jean. Well, I have a few best friends, and I love them so much. It’s not romantic...is there a word for that? ...I mean there can’t be...can there?

I pick up my phone and this is how the conversation goes:

Me: Fitz?! Isn’t it a bit late?

Fitz: lol Jet lol, why r u up at this time?

Me: I...I couldn’t sleep. 

Fitz: lol same.

Me: Fitz, I need help? 

Fitz: okay bestie! what u need help with?

Me: Well...I think I’m broken?!

Fitz: WOAH THERE!!! Who are you and what did you do to my bestie?!

Me: pfft...OH GOD it’s 4 am already!!!

Fitz: 9 pm over here baBY!

Me: I can’t fall in love...is that bad?

Fitz: Bro...why’d u thing it was wrong?

Me: because I’ve been told that I’ll fall in love with somebody, but it is yet to happen.

Fitz: u could be...aromantic? #noromo

Me: I’ve gotta feel a little attraction...right?

Fitz: Mate, calm ya tits, and look the damn thing up!

Me: okay okay...I WILL :{

.....

...

Fitz: Good night Jet, you’re an amazing friend :O

Me: Thanks, gn

Fitz: ‘night

12 hours later

OH shit...I fell asleep with the tv on! And yesterday...oh GOD!!! I miss Fitz. They were such a good friend...and I guess I’ll take their advice...not that I want to. I open up my computer and start typing in “Signs I might be aromantic?” and “What does it mean to be aromantic?”, and lastly “Am I aro?”. I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, but OOO!

Th-that’s me...THAT’S ME!! Fitz was right...I am aromantic.... Wait there’s other like me. THere’s a whole spectrum?! ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!! WHY aren’t we taught this earlier?! If only I found out sooner...then everything would have hurt less. Well, it’s not like I can change much, so I guess I’m glad I came to this strange conclusion?

So yeah yesterday was cold, but now I feel a bit warmer knowing a bit more about myself. So HAH! Take that world! I’m gonna soar beyond and create my own path because I don’t need to fall in love to be human. Why is it shown so much though? The media is weird. Okay....a lot of things are weird. 

It literally took me Pokemon-ing the genders to realize “oh hey, maybe I’m not a panromantic asexual, maybe I’m actually aro/ace” and there’s nothing wrong with finding out that way, except that now every person I’ve dated has had the unifying experience of me coming out to them in increasingly limiting ways

Realizing you can like people aesthetically without it dictating your sexuality is so liberating tbh. Like, one can adore, even be obsessed with, the looks of someone of the same sex and still be straight. One can find people beautiful, and handsome, and fascinating, and still be asexual. I can like the physical appearance of someone of the opposite sex and still be gay. Finding physical beauty in people doesn't equal to being physically, or sexually, or romantically attracted to them. Human beauty isn't inherently sexual. Just wanted to put it out there.

I need help regarding my gender, does anyone have a website where I can read about gender identities?

idk can we stop…treating a.ce disc.ourse like it’s some haha funney cringe compilation or whatever the fuck because it fucking destroyed the entire ace and aro communities. there is no solid aspec community on tumblr anymore (which was by far the biggest number of aspec ppl). exclusionists took our community and fucking smashed it to pieces and y'all treat it as this fucking stupid joke when they traumatized, gaslit, and abused an entire group of queer people back into the closet. fuck every single person who doesn’t take that seriously.

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

Story of my life people. You know what’s real ? The struggle.

Happy Pride Month ♥

by an odd turn of events i no longer believe i'm just the classic "bisexual biromantic." pretty sure i'm bisexual homoromantic or like. idk. because i'm not men but i'm romantically attracted to men. but not to women. english refuses to english so this is all i'm saying