Just thought this pic was cool and wanted to share. I also should mention I found the pic is this thread which is pretty great: https://xcancel.com/ninejackrose/status/1836818649421861046

Was registering for my first 5k and put my gender down as NB. Then I found out it's not just basic info; there's like separate awards for men, women and nonbinary people. Been identifying as NB for a couple of years low-key irl, but I usually just pass as male out of convenience. I didn't know how it was going to so official.

Anyway, I'm going to be running as an official representative of the secret DLC gender that you only get after double prestiging a base game gender

help pls

no gender allowed

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3433723

This post was inspired partly by @khizuo@hexbear.net , thank u.

I had her famous-unfinished novel-manuscript Otros Valles on my to-read list since I knew it was a thing, (maybe five years ago) but only when I went to look for it did I realise the author had deliberately wiped her presence from everywhere, basically.

Back then I could only find a couple of her essays knocking around pirate sites, nothing more. Coincidentally they are here and here, with Mutual Aid Printing not being listed on her Goodreads page or anything like that.

I guess the question I have is whether or not making a post like this is a bad thing to do? If you read Mutual Aid Printing, the author's intent of wiping herself from the general record as a sort of form of protest is very clear. So I've never really known how cool or uncool it is to even talk about her work. Should I literally not read her stuff, or is the broad statement more the point, and whatever you find is whatever you find? I guess it's kind of semantics, but there's a twinge in my brain that says yapping loudly about Berrout's work may be a foot-in-mouth move.

The other thing, which Berrout also discusses in both linked essays, is that the writers' communities/interlinked social webs/who fucking knows, queer artist's collectives she ran in were often obnoxiously white. I think Ryka Aoki is the only published transfem poc I can think of? Binnie, Peters, Felker-Martin, so on... Please inform me if I've missed anything, I'm not a full historian, simply a dumbass.

So aside from the fact that Berrout represents a rare voice in the space, I like how Otros Valles contrasts and almost critiques Nevada. It has none of the dejected, self-deprecating artifice. I dunno if I'm fit to talk about it but it keeps biting at my mind, and I'm not really sure if I should yap. Thoughts? Opinions? Criticisms? Call me cringe? ✨

I found this video very fascinating and would love to hear all my fellow non-cishets feel about it. Personally I found it really cool and extremely informative, particularly the bit about "heterosexuality" particularly as an identity being fairly new concepts. Really makes ya think.

It is victim blaming, we are not the reason homophobia exists or that people become extremely homophobic. It is not oppressed people that cause their own oppression, we don’t in some way “deserve” it.

Some aspects of the identity of sexuality may be related to physical and things we cannot control, but at the end of the day it is an identity. If they do not see themselves as gay, they are not. It is not for you to assign an identity to someone, even someone you don’t like. Even if someone might identify as gay outside of these power structures, in here they aren’t. Even if they would be gay, they participate in our oppression because being straight is beneficial to them, not because they “are secretly gay”. If they did homophobia because they were “ashamed” it wouldn’t be helping so many of them get into positions of power

Someday we'll get on the level of the lesbians

Written by Labi Siffre for his long term boyfriend

Idk what to do. I might be trans, might just be someone who wants to look cute and I can't tell the difference anymore. Also permanently transitioning will come at great personal cost and might be a unique safety issue. Also I never had any dysphoric thoughts before 26-27y of age. I'm 31 now I've lived most of my life as a straight man maybe just keep going lmao. But I do have gender envy for days. Point being why now. Also it'll break my mother's heart if she so much as sees me in a skirt. Dad's too lol. Say what you will about 'that's on them, not your problem, transphobes bad' I can't help but love and care about them, they've really tried as parents. they're just heavily indoctrinated old ppl with calcified brains.

Sylvia Rivera, born on July 2 in 1951, was a Latina American queer rights activist, member of the Gay Liberation Front, and community worker from the state of New York.

Rivera, who identified as a "half-sister", participated in demonstrations with the Gay Liberation Front. With her close friend Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a socialist group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women.

At different times in her life, Rivera battled substance abuse and lived on the streets, largely in the gay homeless community at the Christopher Street docks. Her experiences made her more focused on advocacy for those who, in her view, mainstream society and the assimilationist factions of the LGBT community were leaving behind.

Rivera died during the dawn hours of February 19th, 2002, at St. Vincent's Hospital, of complications from liver cancer. Activist Riki Wilchins said this of her: "In many ways, Sylvia was the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement, a term that was not even coined until two decades after Stonewall".

• Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

• Remember the radicalism of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson

• “Our armies are rising:” Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
• ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2886858

I want to share with you all an essay that has been particularly influential on my way of thinking, kind of a skeleton key for how I think about a lot of issues of surrounding male sexuality, and one that might also serve as an entry point into people’s individual inquiries into theory generally or queer theory more specifically.

I encourage you to read the whole thing if you’re at all interested, but this is a work of literary theory. Sedgwick is interested in analyzing the literature of a time in which the conceptualization of homosexuality was changing, and drawing conclusions from them. It’s all great stuff, but I understand not everyone here may find extended analyses of Thackery and Henry James to be their cup of tea, so I’m going to restrict myself to glossing the first section which summarizes most of the key theoretical concepts that she uses in her analysis.

Sedgwick starts off by discussing the work of Alan Bray in order to situate the historical perception of homosexuality in England. Prior to the 19th Century, homophobia was intense, but also theologized, a manifestation of the ultimate disorder and the Antichrist, but simultaneously not something highly relevant to people’s everyday lives: “sodomy was … not an explanation that sprang easily to mind for those sounds from the bed next to one’s own – or even for the pleasure of one’s own bed” (Sedgwick 184). This began to change as the eighteenth century gave way to the 19th as a much more secular and psychologized homophobia began to develop. Readers of Foucault will note that he makes a very similar argument in The History of Sexuality, and indeed Sedgwick references him later in the essay.

This shift coincided with new kinds of persecutions. Gay men had long been subject to “‘pogrom’-like” legal persecutions, which had a disproportionate effect due to their random nature, but now, with this new secular homophobia, all men, whether gay or not, became unable to determine whether their bonds with other men were free of any homosexuality. Thus this relatively small-scale legal violence could now have an effect that ramified out through society at large. Sedgwick calls this “homosexual panic”: “The most private, psychologized form in which many … western men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail” (185). It is precisely because what is “homosexual” as a concept is arbitrary and forever shifting, unable to be pinned down, that a man can never be totally certain that he is clear of it and the consequences that come from being labeled with it. This is particularly true in the 19th century because “the paths of male entitlement required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds” (185). On one hand, society virtually mandated intense male bonds (boarding schools, the military, etc.), but on the other hand, absolutely forbade that these bonds cross over into homosexuality, ensuring continual anxiety on the part of men about their relationships transgression this invisible and constantly shifting boundary: “In these institutions, where men’s manipulability and their potential for violence are at the highest possible premium, the prescription of the most intimate male bonding and the proscription of (the remarkably cognate) ‘homosexuality’ are both stronger than in civilian society–are, in fact, close to absolute” (186).

If you’ve ever wondered why many all-male institutions (sports, the military, etc.) are on one hand virulently heterosexual and homophobic, yet, on the other hand, homoerotic or in some undefinable sense “gay,” this is why. These institutions mandate close bonds while absolutely forbidding them from being erotic in nature, in a way that casts a constant shadow of homosexuality over them. In turn, these institutions and the individuals involved must be at pains to constantly assert their heterosexuality to the extent that it in turn calls their straightness into question. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” All male relationships stand under the shadow of homosexuality by their very nature. The desire for intimacy between men, whether enforced or not, is always under the shadow of the prohibition of becoming too close. Meanwhile the constantly shifting and arbitrary nature of “homosexuality” keeps men from becoming to comfortable that they are safely outside boundaries of the dreaded gayness. Is wearing your hair long gay? Maybe! Dressing nice? Maybe! Washing your ass? Maybe! Having sex with a woman? Quite possibly! Who knows? Paradoxically it is only the openly homosexual man that is free of this double bind.

This essay is particularly influential in queer literary theory, because it provides a framework for understanding the queerness inherent in texts that are not explicitly gay. Wherever men are, homosexuality follows them, relentlessly, inescapably. Those characters, good friends, is it truly totally platonic? Those two enemies whose hate for one another consumes them, say Batman and Joker, is there not something a bit erotic about their all-consuming obsession for each other? The domain of queer theory, then, is not merely the ghetto of officially queer texts, but rather everywhere. The very act of censoring, silencing and excising homosexuality from art only ensures that it is paradoxically ever present and inescapable, and this is true of the world, not only of the text.

I’ve long been interested in trying to expose people to a broader conception of theory on here (I’ve been" threatening to write an essay on what "The Death of the Author actually says for a long, long time ). If this stuff is interesting to you, let me know.

This may be the single worst and most heinous cooption of Pride I have ever seen.

My sloptube feed is experiencing a dire lack of homosexuality, and its genders are too binary. Pls.

Bonus points if the channel is abt books

coming to the close of another (US) Pride month, and again we're still transfixed on Drag Queens being the only thing worth putting in the spotlight

nothing against drag, just generally tired that it's 2024 and it's still the same thing over and over again, and it wouldn't be so bad if it was just the tippy top of disconnected-from-culture corpos but even on the small scale the words 'Pride' and 'Drag' are treated as one-for-one interchangeable

i get why, Drag Queens present a personality and character that can more easily be attached to advertising, but still it's a drag (pun intended)

https://x.com/oldwitchsring/status/1802105054733664321

Back in the 00s, the anti-LGBT culture war targeted primarily gay people, and it primarily used religious arguments. The Bible condemns homosexuality, marriage is a sacred institution, it's a violation of Christians' rights to make their churches marry gay people, &c.

Clearly, it didn't work. During the 10s, when gay marriage was legalized, conservatives were dealt a pretty decisive blow on their anti-gay agenda, and so they shifted from targeting the LGB to targeting the T (they always targeted trans people, of course, but they really ramped it up during the 10s). With this change in focus came a shift in rhetoric. The right-wing certainly does argue for oppressing trans people on religious grounds, but you're a lot more likely to hear them use scientific-sounding justifications. They'll talk about chromosomes, about anatomy, about how "biologically there are only two genders," about "people trying to put their feelings above objective reality." They'll throw around words like "rational" and "reason." This of course ignores all kinds of actual science, such as the degree to which gender is culturally constructed, the existence of intersex people, how gender affirming care is the only dysphoria treatment shown to be effective, and a thousand other things. It's anti-scientific to its core, but it can fool a casual observer into thinking it's scientific if it's telling them what they want to hear. It's a bigotry for a materialist age, palatable to bazinga brains and nu-atheist Redditors, and maybe it's just anecdotal, but it seems to me to have more traction among a younger, hipper crowd than the religious arguments ever did.

I can't help but wonder if this pivot was concocted in some right-wing think tank somewhere.

Proven beyond all doubt by the recent survey

To run the HyperCard stack: Start up the page's emulated mac, open the "Disk" disk, and double-click the icon. I wasn't sure if this should go here or in games...

Programmed by CM Ralph in 1989, Caper in the Castro is likely the first LGBT game. It was distributed via BBS, and is 'Charityware', with the designer asking players to donate to the AIDS Charity of their choice.

You are the world famous lesbian private detective, Tracker McDyke. You are searching for a kidnapped drag queen, Tessy LaFemme. What you didn't count on was stumbling onto an even larger and more treacherous crime.

The game was changed to different locations and a heterosexual them released under the name "Murder on Main Street". This version is located here.

For more information about "Caper in the Castro": https://www.npr.org/2023/01/27/1151702216/how-the-first-lgbtq-video-game-was-given-a-second-life. C.M. Ralph maintains a website at https://www.cmralph.com/