#nonbinary week 2020

[skaiwrites]

when i think about what it means to be queer, i think about resting my head on my best friend's lap in the high school cafeteria when i was unbearably sick but had to come to school anyways because it was finals week, and i remember that a few weeks earlier he told me he might be bisexual because he thought me and Brendan Urie were really hot, and i remembering thinking this guy thinks i'm hot and here i am pale and sweaty, head in his lap in front of the whole school

when i think about being queer, i think about the time i had to present at the school science fair, and i started hyperventilating in my room looking at myself in the mirror wearing men's dress clothes; i think about my boyfriend at the time texting the head of the school's queer spectrum alliance club about it, and how 10 minutes later i had 12 different outfits from 12 different students to choose from to wear instead, no questions asked

when i think about being queer i think about getting so caught up in a make-out session in the woods with a friend that we lost track of time and i ended up being 10 minutes late to physics the day before our midterm and had to ask to borrow a pencil and paper to take notes. i got a 93 on that midterm btw

when i think about being queer i think about how i didn't want to watch a movie alone, and one 16 hour date and 5 years later, i'm engaged to one of the most incredible men i've ever met

when i think about being queer, i think about how in April of 2020, after being kicked out of my college dorms due to covid, i told my friend, a nonbinary lesbian married to a transgender man, that i couldn't handle getting misgendered at home anymore, in less than an hour i was in their car, on my way to the house they were living at, where they said i could stay as long as i needed

when i think about being queer, i think about how when that ended up not being true, when the owner of that house kicked me out, i texted my now and also then ex boyfriend, and again, in less than an hour, i was in a car, on my way to his house where i could stay as long as i needed.

when i think about being queer, i think about a few months later, sitting at his kitchen table, him calling me a motherfucker because i accidentally tugged too hard emptying his drains from top surgery. sorry about that, btw

when i think about being queer, i think about trying to give my fiance his first T shot and it turning into a multi day ordeal because the pharmacy gave him the wrong needles, but ultimately my sister in law was able to do it for him. i think about how for the past year i've driven him to Park West pharmacy, owned and operated by trans people, and they've given him his shot because he doesn't like doing it himself.

when i think about being queer, i think about the road trip i took a few years ago to visit my friends, and even though we're mostly all "queer content creators" to the outside world, we didn't end up creating any content at all; we hung out, i slept on their couches, they bought me food, we played games, and we were happy

[wolfnanaki]

Can you sum up the Goodbye Volcano High vs Snoot Game controversy? I don't know shit and you seem like the most knowledgeable person on it.

Okay. Summary time.

Developed by Canadian indie worker cooperative studio KO_OP, Goodbye Volcano High is a cinematic narrative/rhythm indie game about a group of dinosaur teenagers dealing with the impending end of the world from an asteroid. It features predominantly queer characters; the main character is an AFAB nonbinary pterodactyl named Fang.

GVH was revealed as part of the PS5 reveal lineup back in June 2020. From there, it experienced a few delays due to COVID, rewriting the story after the original writer was let go, and dealing with anti-LGBT harassment. It finally came out in late August 2023 to positive reception and some awards. It didn't sell a billion copies but it's been gradually growing its fanbase for over a year now.

A few days after GVH was first revealed, a group of 4channers, under the developer name "Cavemanon", decided they'd do their own visual novel using GVH's characters to spite GVH before it even came out. This VN, Snoot Game, came out in June 2021. It's a story where a featureless human male named "Anon" becomes Fang's friend and eventually boyfriend. It has an extremely anti-trans narrative, along with racist humor, promotes eugenics, has a school shooting ending if Fang doesn't detransition, and more.

Snoot ended up becoming very popular and spread around the internet, developing its own fanbase across social media. The worst parts of its fandom downplay Snoot's harmful rhetoric while harassing GVH's fans and developers. When GVH came out, they shared a pirated copy, called it the worst game ever, and encouraged people to support Snoot instead. I spoke out about all this and got doxed.

Snoot's success lead to Cavemanon hijacking a fan project from its original developers and making it into a spiritual sequel sold on Steam, called I Wani Hug That Gator!, released in February 2024. A few weeks after it came out, a former developer released a dossier speaking out about Cavemanon's working conditions, lack of compensation, and extreme right-wing views, to which Cavemanon responded with a hitpiece attacking everyone involved in the doc and linking my dox on Kiwifarms while mocking me for being trans.

To this day, mainstream gaming press outlets have refused to cover this story in any meaningful way, and Cavemanon has not faced any consequences for anything they've done. Wani has sold very well on Steam, and Cavemanon has opened their own web store and patron-supported developer blog, where they give terrible game dev advice and rant about "grooming operations" and the like.

So... that's it, really.

[mariacallous]

I'm sharing this because I think it's kind of atrocious. Hasan Piker *and* Richard Reeves?! And it gets worse from there.

By the time I landed at LAX and switched my phone out of airplane mode, Hasan Piker had been streaming for three hours. I put in an earbud and watched as I filed off the plane. Visible behind him were walls of framed fan art, a cardboard cutout of Bernie Sanders sitting in the cold, and Piker’s huge puppy, Kaya, taking a nap. Piker had already shown off his “cozy-ass ’fit” (sweatpants with kitschy bald eagles, a custom pair of platform Crocs), and recounted his experience the previous night at the Streamer Awards, a red-carpet event honoring A-listers on Twitch—the popular live-streaming site where he is one of the biggest stars, and the only prominent leftist. He��d begun the day’s broadcast by rattling off a standard opening monologue: “Folks, we’re live and alive, and I hope all the boys, girls, and enbies”—nonbinary people—“are having a fantastic one.” To anyone listening for shibboleths, this would have pigeonholed him as a progressive. Also within view, though, were three towers of Zyn cannisters, and a “Make America Great Again” hat, which he sometimes wears ironically. He has the patter of a Rutgers frat bro and the laid-back charisma of a Miami club promoter, both of which he was, briefly, in his early twenties. Now he’s thirty-three—so old, in streamer years, that his fans call him “unc.”

I ordered a Lyft, then flipped back to Piker’s stream. By then, he was talking about the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, which had happened overnight. I watched as he cycled from BBC footage to Wikipedia, pausing every few seconds to add a diatribe or a joke. The angle he was developing was that Western journalists seemed too eager to portray the leader of the Syrian rebel forces in a heroic light. “I’m very skeptical of the fucking former Al Qaeda guy,” Piker said. A little while later, his doorbell rang, and he leaned over to buzz in a guest—me. I looked up from my phone to see him standing in his doorway. He doesn’t run ad breaks, so whenever he needs to do something off-camera, like answer the door or use the bathroom, he plays a video and attends to his business quickly, before his viewers can get bored. “I’m live right now, but we can talk when I’m done,” he told me, already walking away. “Try and stay out of the shot.”

In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Party strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men, a group that Donald Trump lost by fifteen points in 2020 and won by fourteen points in 2024—a nearly thirty-point swing. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds,” John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a former adviser to Biden’s Presidential campaign, told me. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”

Candidates matter; so does the national mood, and the price of groceries. Yet some Monday-morning quarterbacks also noted that, just as 1960 was the first TV election and 2016 was the first social-media election, the 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, media that happen to be thoroughly dominated by MAGA bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trump—and to his running mate, J. D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Musk—before endorsing Trump on the eve of the election. “At no point was I, like, ‘Only I, a dickhead on the internet, am qualified to teach these kids why we need a functioning welfare state,’ ” Piker told me. “I just felt like no one else was really in these spaces trying to explain these things. Certainly not the Democrats.”

Piker has almost three million Twitch followers, and, as with most guys who talk into microphones on the internet, his audience skews young, male, and disaffected. At the peak of his Election Night stream in November, he had more than three hundred thousand viewers. He broadcasts seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day, usually from his house in West Hollywood, and he doesn’t use visual pyrotechnics to hold his viewers’ attention. Most of the time, what you see on his stream is an overlay of three things: a fixed shot of Piker sitting at his desk; a screen share of whatever he’s looking at on his computer; and his chat, where fans supply pertinent links, caps-lock shit talk, and puppy emojis, all surging in real time up the right side of the screen.

Although Piker hates Trump, he’s hardly a loyal Democrat. At bottom, he’s an old-school hard leftist, not a liberal. (On his bedside table he has some protein Pop-Tart knock-offs and a copy of “The Communist Manifesto.”) Many of his opinions—for example, that the “American empire” has been a destructive force, on the whole—would surely be off-putting to the median voter. But he is just one of many independent media creators with an anti-Trump message—in recent weeks, the political-podcast charts have included “The Bulwark,” “This Is Gavin Newsom,” and even a show called “Raging Moderates.” For a couple of weeks last month, a liberal show called “The MeidasTouch Podcast” beat out “The Joe Rogan Experience” for the No. 1 spot. “Corporate media, too often, has a both-sides perspective,” Ben Meiselas, one of the “MeidasTouch” co-hosts, told me. “We do not mince words about the threat to workers, the threat to democracy.”

One piece of fan art on Piker’s wall is a cartoon of him operating a day-care center, shielding a roomful of lost boys from the malign chaos of the open internet. “You gravitate to him because he’s just a voice you find relatable,” Piker’s producer, who goes by Marche, told me. “A lot of people don’t even put a political label on it, at least at first.” Piker gets up early every morning to work out, posting his daily stats so that his fans—his “community”—can follow along from home. He gives dating advice and motivational speeches. At a moment when there seems to be an ever-shortening algorithmic pipeline from bench-pressing tips to misogynist rage, Piker tries to model a more capacious form of masculinity: a straight guy, six feet four and movie-star handsome, who’s as comfortable wearing camo to a gun range as he is walking a red carpet in split-toe Margiela boots. Once viewers have come to trust him, they may be more open to his riffs on the rights of the poor or of trans people—delivered not as a primer on Judith Butler but in the register of “Bro, don’t be a dick.”

I pulled up a chair, just out of frame. Kaya ambled toward me, vetting my scent. Piker talked, almost without interruption, for four more hours, holding forth about recent internet drama, a documentary about the history of NATO, and the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.’s assassin, who had not yet been identified. Within reach of his rolling desk chair was a mini-fridge full of cold brew and Diet Mountain Dew. Some of his takes were too unpolished for prime time. (“Bro, these guys are so cucked,” he said, critiquing a clip from a rival podcast on the right.) Then again, a live stream isn’t supposed to be a tight, scripted lecture. It’s supposed to be a good hang.

“I gotta end the broadcast here,” he said, shortly after 8 P.M. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” After turning the camera off, he seemed to deflate a bit. Comments were still floating up one of his monitors—the thousands of fans in the chat had dwindled to a few hundred, the inner circle who were devoted enough, or lonely enough, to keep one another company after the feed had gone dark. “The Democrats are smug and condescending, and everything they say sounds fake as shit,” Piker said. “Trump lies constantly, yes, but at least people get the sense that he’s authentically saying what he’s thinking.”

He put his feet up and reached for a fresh Zyn pouch. “Young men, like a lot of Americans, feel increasingly alienated,” he continued. They can’t afford college or rent, they can’t get a date, they can’t imagine a stable future. “The right is always there to tell them, ‘Yes, you should be angry, and the reason your life sucks is because of immigrants, or because a trans kid played a sport.’ And all the Democrats are telling them is ‘No, shut up, your life is fine, be joyful.’ ” No one has ever accused Piker of being a moderate, but in this case he is trying to forge a compromise. “My way is to go, ‘Look, be angry if you want. But your undocumented neighbor is not the problem here. You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ ”

In 2015, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote that “white non-Hispanics without college degrees” were experiencing an anomalous spike in mortality from opioids, alcohol, and suicide. They later called these “deaths of despair.” In 2016, J. D. Vance, then an anti-Trump conservative, published a memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about the struggles of white rural families like his own. Promoting the book on PBS, he explained (but did not yet excuse) why such voters were drawn to Trump: “I think that the sense of cultural alienation breeds a sense of mistrust.” The first Trump Administration didn’t deliver many material gains to the rural poor—deaths of despair continued to rise, and wages continued to stagnate—but at least Trump spoke to their anguish and seemed outraged on their behalf. In retrospect, the question may not be why so many non-urban non-élites became Trump Republicans but what took them so long.

Around the same time, social scientists started to notice an overlapping crisis. The statistics were grim—twenty-first-century males were, relative to their forefathers and their female contemporaries, much more likely to fall behind in school, drop out of college, languish in the workforce, or die by overdose or suicide. The title of a 2012 book by the journalist Hanna Rosin declared “The End of Men.” The following year, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan published a paper called “The Trouble with Boys.” In one survey, more than a quarter of men in their teens and twenties reported having no close friends. When Covid hit, men were significantly more likely to die from it.

“In the fifteen years I’ve been looking at the statistics, the outcomes for men have not changed,” Rosin told me. “What did change, tremendously, is the culture.” The last Democratic Presidential candidate to win the male vote was Barack Obama. When Bernie Sanders ran for President, he had a zealous male following, but many top Democrats treated the “Bernie bros” less like a force to be harnessed than like a threat to be vanquished. A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call raised millions for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but it would have been anathema to her base if she’d given a speech about what she planned to do for white dudes. This was, meanwhile, a key part of Trump’s appeal.

In a 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men,” Richard Reeves, a social scientist and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, blasts Republicans for exploiting “male dislocation” and misogynist fury at the expense of women’s rights. But he also lambastes Democrats for “pathologizing masculinity.” He gives an example from his sons’ high school in Bethesda, Maryland, where boys passed around a spreadsheet ranking their female classmates by attractiveness—behavior that Reeves describes as “immature,” even “harmful,” but not worthy of an international incident, which is what it became. He writes that “indiscriminately slapping the label of ‘toxic masculinity’ onto this kind of behavior is a mistake,” likely to propel young men “to the online manosphere where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong, and that liberals are out to get them.”

At some point between Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and Hillary Clinton describing potential voters as “deplorables,” the Democrats came to be perceived as the party of scolds and snobs. Liberals used to be the counterculture; today, they’re the defenders of traditional norms and institutions. This may not have been the best political strategy at any time; it certainly isn’t now, when trust in institutions has never been lower. It’s impossible to know how many young men fit into this category, but there is clearly a kind of guy—the contemporary don’t-tread-on-me type who demands both the freedom to have gay friends and the freedom to use “gay” as an insult—who resents the idea of his morality being dictated by the family-values right or his speech being curtailed by the hall-monitor left. When pressed, many of these young men seem to have bought the pitch that, of the two parties, the Republicans were the less censorious. This may have been a miscalculation—the current Trump Administration has already banished dozens of words from government websites and, just last week, arrested a former Columbia student for what seems to be protected speech—but you can’t convince voters that they’ve been misinformed simply by lecturing them. The lecturing is part of the issue.

“Democrats got used to speaking about men as the problem, not as people with problems,” Reeves told me. “But of course men do have problems, and problems become grievances when you ignore them.” He knows a lot of well-connected Democrats in Washington, and for years he has urged them to campaign on men’s issues—“not in a zero-sum way, certainly not taking anything away from women, but just to show boys and men, ‘Hey, you’re also having a tough go of it, we see you.’ And the response I always got was ‘Now is not the time.’ ”

Rosin told me about a husband and wife she’d met in Alabama, in 2010. The husband lost his job, and the wife became the breadwinner, an arrangement he experienced as deeply shameful. “She would put the check down on the kitchen table, she would sign it over to him, and he would cash it, and nobody would speak about it,” Rosin said. “But then ‘man-victim’ became a viable identity.” As Rosin stayed in touch with the man, he started exhibiting a more “mischievous” expression of men’s-rights sensibilities, wearing a T-shirt that read “My Cave, My Rules.” This coincided with the rise of Trump, the man-victim’s patron saint. He didn’t offer detailed policy solutions to any of the underlying sociological problems, but, again, he addressed them directly. (“It is a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump said in 2018.)

Like most internet terms, “manosphere” is vague and protean; it has been applied to Ben Shapiro, a father of four who delivers conservative talking points in a yarmulke, and to Andrew Tate, a Bugatti-driving hustler who has been charged with human trafficking. In 2016, after a reedy Canadian professor named Jordan Peterson refused to use gender-neutral pronouns, he was taken up as a folk hero, like Galileo standing firm against the Inquisition. Peterson has almost nothing in common with, say, Dave Portnoy, another mascot of the bro-sphere, who mostly just wants to be left alone to eat pizza and drink beer by the pool. Yet they all seem to be meeting a demand in the cultural marketplace, one that could be as simple, at its root, as a dorm-room poster of Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or Johnny Cash flipping off the camera.

Last month, Richard Reeves was a guest on a popular podcast hosted by Theo Von, a formerly apolitical comedian who recently went to Trump’s Inauguration. Von, an infectiously affable guy with a mullet, presents himself as a curious goofball with essentially no prior knowledge on any topic. At one point he spoke—without much nuance, but also without apparent malice—about the plight of the white man. “I’m not speaking against any other group,” he said. “I’m just saying . . . you can’t make white males feel like they don’t exist.” Von grew up poor in a small town in Louisiana. “Yes, I know there’s privilege, but if you grew up with nothing you didn’t fucking feel any privilege sometimes.”

If Von had made this observation at a Trump rally, or on X, he might have been led from just-asking-questions guilelessness to more overt white aggrievement. If he’d made the same point in a liberal-arts seminar, or on Bluesky, he might have been shouted down. (When I got to this part of the podcast, I have to admit, my own inner hall monitor was on high alert.) But Reeves, looking a bit trepidatious, tried to thread the needle, introducing some academic caveats without coming across as a scold. “The U.S. has a uniquely terrible history when it comes to slavery,” he said. But he also noted that low-income white men were at particularly high risk of suicide. “Two things can be true at once,” he said.

The hallmark of social media is disinhibition born of anonymity. On the internet, no one knows whether you’re a dog, a Macedonian teen-ager, or the Pope wearing a puffer jacket. Podcasts, on the other hand, are built on parasociality: Michael Barbaro isn’t your friend, but, after making coffee with him in your ear a hundred times, you start to feel as if he were. And then there’s the world of always-on streaming, in which the temptations of parasociality are even more acute. The inputs are both aural and visual. The hosts respond to your comments in real time, at all hours. You can remind yourself not to bond with the pixels on the screen, but you may fall for the illusion all the same, like a baby chick imprinting on a robot. Piker treats fans in a way that can be confusingly intimate, giving them avuncular life advice one minute and thirst-trap photos the next. His Twitch handle is Hasanabi, “abi” being Turkish for “big brother”; his fans are called “Hasanabi heads,” or “parasocialists.”

Even as most of his fellow-streamers have drifted to the right, Piker has remained a staunch leftist. His explanation for this is that he is from Turkey, where “the idea that American economic and military power runs the world—that was, like, ‘Yeah, duh.’ ” He was born in New Jersey and grew up mostly in Ankara and Istanbul, in an upper-middle-class family, spending summers with relatives in the U.S. and watching a lot of American TV. (He speaks English with an American accent.) His father, an economist, is “more of a neolib, World Bank-loving type,” Piker told me. “We argue about it all the time, but it’s not heated.” His mother, an art-and-architecture historian, is more aligned with his politics. “The inequality is just so blatant,” she told me. “It was never fair, but now we have the internet—everyone can see it.”

Despite Piker’s brand as a brash outsider, he is, in an almost literal sense, a nepo baby. After graduating from Rutgers, in 2013, he moved to Los Angeles and got a job with his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur, who happened to be the founder and host of “The Young Turks,” one of the biggest left-populist talk shows on the internet. The show had a considerable footprint on YouTube, but Piker helped it adapt to punchier formats that were better suited to Facebook and Instagram. “You’ve got to understand, I remember when this was a pudgy kid and I was changing his diapers,” Uygur told me. “Now, suddenly, he’s this handsome man, he’s dynamic, he’s killing it in front of the camera.” Piker hosted a recurring video segment called “Agitprop,” and picked fights with the right-wing influencers of the day, such as Tomi Lahren and Representative Dan Crenshaw. He got himself in trouble—“America deserved 9/11” was not a particularly good take, even in context—but he also expanded his name recognition. In 2017, BuzzFeed dubbed him “woke bae.”

Although he made some of the outlet’s most popular videos, he didn’t own the I.P. (Even when the boss is your uncle, you can still be alienated from the means of production.) So, in 2020, he decided to go solo, on Twitch. His mother joined him in Los Angeles, and they formed a pandemic pod in a two-bedroom apartment. “He was on there non-stop, shouting about video games or sex advice or whatever,” she told me. “His fans would see me in the background, cringing, and they would send me earplugs in the mail.” That year, he spent forty-two per cent of his time live on camera. (Not forty-two per cent of his waking hours—forty-two per cent of all the hours in the year.) In a call-in segment called “Chadvice,” Piker coached men through the small terrors and triumphs of daily life. One twenty-eight-year-old from Finland described himself as having an Asperger’s diagnosis and an “abject fear of rejection”; Piker, with solicitude and just enough amiable ribbing, spent half an hour talking him through the social mechanics of a first date.

When Twitch first launched, it was a niche platform where bored adolescents could watch other adolescents play video games. In 2014, Amazon bought it for nearly a billion dollars—an eye-popping amount, at least back then—even as mainstream analysts knew almost nothing about it. “My demographic hem is showing,” the columnist David Carr admitted in the Times; still, he concluded, “there is clear value in owning so much screen time of a hard-to-reach demographic of young men.” One article referred to Twitch as “talk radio for the extremely online.”

I first met Piker in February of 2020, on Boston Common, while covering a rally during Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Most of us travelling correspondents were youngish reporters from oldish outlets, wearing blue button-downs and carrying notebooks in the back pockets of our Bonobos. Piker wasn’t much younger, but he dressed as if he were from another planet, in black nail polish and cargo pants that, at the time, struck me as incomprehensibly wide. He carried an “I.R.L. backpack,” a portable camera setup that streamers use (I learned) when they venture out into the world. Admirers in the crowd kept interrupting him and asking for photos, a nuisance that, for whatever reason, didn’t afflict the rest of us. I still didn’t get why viewers would hang around on his stream all day when they could get an unimpeded view of Sanders’s speech on YouTube. Obviously, my demographic hem was showing. You might as well ask why a fan would watch a football game at a bar when he could concentrate better alone, or read a summary of the game in tomorrow’s paper. Piker’s followers wanted to watch the rally through his eyes because they wanted to be his friend.

In October, 2020, Piker spent a couple of hours playing the group video game Among Us with some special guests, including the congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They occasionally mentioned the ostensible purpose of the event—getting out the vote—but mostly they made easygoing small talk. On Election Day, Piker streamed for sixteen hours straight, chugging energy drinks. His mother made several onscreen cameos, delivering him plates of home-cooked food. “I wouldn’t do it for this long if it wasn’t for you,” he told his viewers at the end of the night. “Love you bro!” a commenter typed. “See you tomorrow.”

After the 2024 election, Democratic strategists argued that what the anti-Trump coalition needed was a “Joe Rogan of the left.” There once was such a person. His name was Joe Rogan. “I’m socially about as liberal as it gets,” Rogan said earlier this month. He has a live-and-let-live attitude about sex, drugs, and abortion. (He is also extremely open to conspiracy theories about 9/11, J.F.K., and Jeffrey Epstein, an inclination that was left-coded until very recently.) In 2014, when Rogan was a fan of “The Young Turks,” Piker met him at the Hollywood Improv, and they sat and talked for two hours. (The topics included “weed, psychedelics, the state of media and girls,” Piker wrote at the time. “Top ten coolest moments of my life.”) During the 2020 Democratic primary, Rogan interviewed three Presidential candidates—Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders—and concluded that Sanders was his favorite. “I believe in him,” Rogan said. “He’s been insanely consistent his entire life.”

It’s hard to fathom now, but Rogan’s support was then considered a liability. “The Sanders campaign must reconsider this endorsement,” the Human Rights Campaign wrote, citing transphobic and racist remarks from Rogan’s past. In retrospect, this was the height (or perhaps the nadir) of a kind of purity-test politics that was making some swing voters, including Rogan, feel less at home in the Democratic coalition. In 2022, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify to protest Rogan’s vaccine skepticism; Rogan took ivermectin, which CNN mocked as a horse dewormer. “I can afford people medicine, motherfucker,” Rogan told CNN’s chief medical correspondent, adding that the medication had been prescribed by his doctor. “This is ridiculous.”

In 2016, every one of Trump’s baby steps toward normalization—doing a goofy dance on “Saturday Night Live,” getting his hair ruffled by Jimmy Fallon—was treated as a scandal. But by 2024 anyone with access to Spotify or YouTube could find hours of flattering footage of Trump looking like a chill, approachable grandpa. While interviewing Trump at one of his golf clubs, Theo Von used his free-associative style to great effect, prompting as much introspection in Trump as any interviewer has. (Von: “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie.” Trump: “And is that a good feeling?”) Trump invited the Nelk Boys, prank-video influencers with their own brand of hard seltzer, to eat Chick-fil-A on his private plane. He sat in a Cybertruck with the baby-faced, fascist-curious streamer Adin Ross, testing the stereo. “Who’s, like, your top three artists?” Ross asked. “Well, we love Frank Sinatra, right?” Trump said. Ross invited him to pick a song, and Trump, “thinking that it’s gonna come back under proper management,” picked “California Dreamin’.”

Collectively, these shows reached tens of millions of potential voters. Most were presumably young men, many of them the kind of American who is both the hardest and the most crucial for a campaign to reach: the kind who is not seeking out political news. Trump ended his parasocial-media tour by sitting in Joe Rogan’s studio, in Austin, for three hours. That’s too long for anyone, even a champion of rhetorical rope-a-dope, to go without gaffes—which was part of the point. While repeating his timeworn case that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump let out a shocking Freudian slip—“I lost by . . .”—before quickly trying to recover: “I didn’t lose.” Rogan laughed in his face. No one cared. On YouTube alone, the episode got more than fifty million views, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. “Unedited/uncensored interviews should be required of all candidates,” one of the top comments read.

Harris tried. She appeared on a few big podcasts—“Club Shay Shay,” whose audience is primarily Black, and “Call Her Daddy,” whose audience is mostly female—but she never made inroads with the comedy bros. (The closest she got was an interview with Howard Stern, a former shock jock who now seems wholesome, like Little Richard in the era of Lil Baby.) Harris’s staffers tried to get her booked on “Hot Ones,” the YouTube show on which celebrities answer innocuous questions while eating sadistically spicy chicken wings, but even “Hot Ones” turned her down. Her campaign staffers insisted that she wanted to do Rogan’s show, but that it fell through for scheduling reasons. Rogan claimed that he was eager to interview her, and that he was even willing to keep certain topics off-limits. “I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ ” he told Theo Von. “I feel like, if you give someone a couple of hours, and you start talking about anything, I’m going to see the pattern of the way you think . . . whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free.”

Imagine the set of a prototypical man-cave podcast, and “Flagrant,” co-founded by the comedian Andrew Schulz, wouldn’t be far off: four dudes lounging around, with a few plastic plants and a shelf of brown liquor behind them. Trump sat with them in October, and Schulz and the other hosts buttered him up, asking him about his kids. “Barron is eighteen,” Schulz said. “He’s unleashed in New York City. Are you sure you want to reverse Roe v. Wade now?” An hour in, they cut to an ad break. “Hard-dick season is upon us, and you gotta make sure that you’re stiffed up,” Schulz said. “BlueChew has got your back.”

“Flagrant” is taped weekly at a studio in SoHo. I visited one Wednesday in February. Schulz arrived just after noon, opened a fridge stocked with cans of tequila- and THC-infused seltzer, and grabbed a bottle of water. He sports a mustache and a chain necklace, and his hair is tight on the sides and slicked back on top. (During a show at Madison Square Garden, a fellow-comedian described Schulz’s look as “the Tubi version of Adolf Hitler.”) He’s a throwback to an old New York archetype: the melting-pot white guy who tells hyper-specific ethnic jokes with a sly smile and, for the most part, gets away with it. He did a crowd-work special that included sections called “Mexican,” “Colombian,” and “Black Women.” His newest special, about his wife’s experience with I.V.F., includes moments of real tenderness, but he still insists on his right to do old-fashioned bits about the battle between the sexes. “We all have feelings that are a little bit wrong,” Schulz said. “ ‘Take my wife, please’—that’s a fucked-up premise, but there’s a seed of a feeling there that’s real. It’s the comedian’s job to make you comfortable enough to laugh at it.”

Schulz grew up in lower Manhattan, where his parents owned a dance studio and he went to public school. “My family was super liberal,” he told me. “This was in the nineties, when being a liberal, to me, just meant ‘I don’t hate gay people or Black people’—normal shit.” He now thinks of himself as apolitical, and he acknowledged all the reasons to distrust Trump, but the word he kept using, whenever Trump came up, was “enticing.” “I still appreciate a lot of the policies Bernie talked about, universal health care and all that,” he said. “But culture-wise? Vibe-wise? When all you hear from one side is ‘That’s not funny, that’s over the line’—realistically, where are people gonna feel more comfortable?”

Trump is known for his bloviating, but Schulz suggested that his greater talent may be a kind of listening. “Democrats are tuned in to what people should feel,” he said. “Trump is tuned in to what people actually fucking feel.” Schulz noted that, as a boundary-pushing performer, this was also one of his own key skills: gauging micro-fluctuations in an audience’s reaction. When Trump appeared on “Flagrant,” he talked about being taken to a hospital in rural Pennsylvania after he was shot, and how impressed he was with the “country doctors” who’d treated him. “I laughed at that, ’cause I just thought ‘country doctors’ was a funny phrase,” Schulz told me. “He clocks me laughing at it, and in the next sentence he immediately says it again, and he watches me to make sure I laugh again.”

“Flagrant” bills itself as “THE GREATEST HANG IN THE UNIVERSE!” I spent the rest of the day watching Schulz and his co-hosts tape an episode (and then an extra segment sponsored by an online betting platform, and then an extra extra segment for Patreon), and I could imagine some places in the universe that would have been greater. One of the running gags in the episode was that the hosts kept pronouncing the word “prerecorded” as “pre-retarded.” At one point, a host volunteered how many times he’d masturbated in a single day, and his record was so formidable that the others looked worried for him. In fairness, though, even a solid hang can’t be scintillating all the time. One function of a long-standing friendship, including a parasocial one, is simply to while away the hours, even when there isn’t much to say.

When it comes to parasocial media, MAGA has had a long head start. Before Dan Bongino was Trump’s deputy F.B.I. director, he was a popular, blustery podcaster; after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as Attorney General, he announced that he would host a TV show and a podcast (his third). During the Biden Administration, about a dozen Republicans were both active podcast hosts and sitting members of Congress, while most Democrats hardly seemed interested in trying. Before the “Flagrant” taping, Schulz and I had been discussing which qualities the Democrats should look for in their next crop of leaders, and afterward he returned to the question. “They need someone who can really hang,” he said. “Obama could hang. Clinton, for sure—Bill, not Hillary. Trump can hang.” I ran through the shortlist: Pete Buttigieg? Schulz wrinkled his nose—too polished. A.O.C.? “When she’s being the working-class chick from the Bronx, I could see it,” he said. “But when she starts going on MSNBC and doing ‘We have an orange rapist in the White House’—then you start to lose people.”

Schulz said that he’d invited Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to appear on the show “numerous times,” to no avail. (The Harris campaign says that Schulz never sent a formal invitation.) He couldn’t be sure why Walz had stayed away from podcasts like his, but he had guesses. “If we’ve got on a guy who was in the military for twenty years, at some point I’m gonna go, ‘Cut the shit, Tim, you know how guys really talk,’ ” Schulz said. “And then let’s say we start busting balls, making gay jokes, whatever—does he laugh? If he does, he pisses off his people. If he doesn’t, he loses our people.” Walz was added to the Presidential ticket because he was able to talk like a regular person who could make the opposition seem “weird” by contrast. But, things being as they are, Schulz said, “the Democrats can’t let a guy like that loose.”

When Trump was on “Flagrant,” Akaash Singh, a co-host who refers to himself as a “moderate,” encouraged him to consider practicing self-restraint. “What we love about you as comedians is you shoot from the hip,” Singh said. “If you get elected, would you be a little more mindful of how powerful your words are?”

“I will,” Trump said. “And I’m gonna think of you every time.”

“Let’s go!” Singh said, jumping up and pumping his fist. “I might actually vote.”

Piker starts streaming at eleven every morning, so everything else has to happen before then, or at night. At 7 a.m. one day, he drove Kaya to a nearby park, to take her for a walk, then played basketball for half an hour. He saw me eying his car, a Porsche Taycan. “It’s not the flashiest model I could afford,” he protested, before I could say anything. “But yes, admittedly, it is a fucking Porsche.” When Piker is criticized by the right, it’s usually for soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party. (Piker is such a relentless critic of Israel that, last year, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism nominated him for “Antisemite of the Year”; when asked his opinion of Hezbollah, he once shrugged and replied, “I don’t have an issue with them.”) By the left, he is more likely to be dismissed as a limousine socialist who lives in a $2.7-million house. He has his own clothing brand, called Ideologie.

While driving home, he took a call from his manager. A major production company wanted to discuss a potential TV show, hosted by Piker, in the vein of “Borat” or “Nathan for You.” His manager asked if he wanted to be interviewed by Megyn Kelly on her radio show. “No.” A daytime show on Fox News? “No.” Buttigieg’s people had asked if Piker would interview Buttigieg on his stream. “Probably not, but I’ll think about it,” Piker said—too centrist. “If he’s thinking about running for President, I don’t really wanna be giving him clout.” In his kitchen, he took a few fistfuls of supplements: creatine, fish oil, Ashwagandha. Still on the phone with his manager, he sat at his desktop, skimming stories he might cover. Then, a few minutes before he went live, he started seeing news alerts: Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare assassination, had just been arrested. Whatever else he’d been planning to talk about was now irrelevant. “Holy shit, they got him,” Piker told his manager. “I gotta go.”

“Mamma mia!” he said, on air. “This is the first day where there will be no Italiophobia on this broadcast.” Already, his chat was full of spaghetti emojis and “FREE LUIGI!” Piker walked a fine line—celebrating Mangione as “hotter than me” and speaking in generally exalted terms about “the propaganda of the deed,” but trying to stop short of overtly glorifying murder, which is against Twitch’s terms of service. “We, of course, do not condone,” he said repeatedly. “We condemn.” (Recently, he was suspended from Twitch for twenty-four hours after musing that someone may want to “kill Rick Scott,” the Florida senator.)

In fact, he reserved his condemnation for the finger-wagging from the “corporate media,” as exhibited everywhere from Fox News to CNN. “Bro, they can’t let anybody have anything,” he said later. For six hours straight, his chatters sent him links to new information as it emerged—Mangione’s Goodreads account, his Twitter history, his high-school valedictorian speech. On my own, I would have been tempted to spend the day following the same bread crumbs, struggling to retrace Mangione’s path to radicalization. But it was easier to let Piker and the forty thousand internet sleuths in his chat make sense of it for me.

Many of Piker’s viewers come to him with inchoate opinions. He aims to mold them. But, he told me, of the stream, “at the end of the day, it still has to be relatable and entertaining.” One of his maxims is “Read the room.” In his case, this means posting many hours of content about nothing in particular. Stavros Halkias, a comedian and a friend of Piker’s, told me, “He’s built up enough trust with his audience that, if he’s being boring and academic for forty minutes, they’ll stick with it until he starts doing something more interesting, playing a Japanese dating simulator or whatever.” Some days, he puts on a Trump hat and streams as Hank Pecker, a “Colbert Report”-style satirical character updated for the MAGA era. In another room of his house, Piker records a weekly podcast with three buddies, an apolitical chat show on which one of the most heated topics of recent debate was proper manscaping technique, and another was whether one of them farted. Marche, the producer, was proud to tell me that the podcast’s audience is about sixty per cent male—“which sounds like a lot, but actually most shows in this space are eighty-twenty male, or eighty-five-fifteen.” One theory for this lopsidedness is that, given all the “End of Men” statistics, women have better things to do with their time, such as holding down meaningful jobs and cultivating lasting relationships, while men are stuck playing video games with their imaginary friends.

Recently, on a MAGA-bro podcast, Piker reached across the aisle, adapting “eight hours for what you will” to the current decadent moment. “Deep down inside, most people just wanna be comfortable,” he said. “They wanna have a roof over their heads, they want a fuckin’ nice meal, get some pussy . . . play Marvel Rivals.” In recent years, Piker has stopped using the word “retarded,” but he still uses the word “pussy,” even though it may sound misogynist, and “lame,” despite fans who consider the term ableist. “I don’t give a shit,” Piker said. “If you can’t handle it, then I guess I’m not for you.” When his commenters try to tone-police him, Piker will often single one of them out and say, “Congratulations, chatter, you’ve won Woke of the Day.” It’s not a compliment.

The day after Mangione’s arrest, Piker had back-to-back interviews with Lina Khan, then the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whom Piker called “the LeBron James of regulators,” and with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, promoting his new book. In the chat, a user named PapiJohn36 wrote, “Not to be parasocial, but I love this man.” Piker’s mother stopped by during the Coates interview. “Hasan, check your messages!” she shouted from the kitchen. Piker, grudgingly but dutifully, read his mother’s message aloud: “I got his book for the content and fell in love with his writing.”

“Thank you, Hasan’s mom,” Coates said. In the living room, Piker’s father was sprawled on the couch watching “Love Actually.”

Halkias, the comedian, showed up later that afternoon, with a bag of dirty laundry and a calendar featuring photos of himself posing in the nude. While many of Halkias’s comedian friends have taken a reactionary turn, he has stuck to his progressive principles, but he has never been a hall monitor. (He got his start on a podcast called “Cum Town.”) “Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and enbies,” Piker said, “we’ve got the left’s Joe Rogan here in the building!” In the “Rogan of the left” discourse, both Piker and Halkias are frequently mentioned as top prospects. Even if they were secretly flattered by the designation, the least alpha thing they could do—the least Roganesque thing they could do—would be to thirst for it. “Free Luigi,” Halkias said, taking a seat. “He’s too sexy to be behind bars.”

As a model for the future of progressive media, Piker checks only some of the requisite boxes. A while back, he was a guest on “Flagrant”; when I asked one of the show’s staffers about Piker’s performance, he gave it a middling review. “Good guy, clearly knows his shit, but he sort of comes off like he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.” Piker sometimes succumbs to the socialist bro’s cardinal sin of pedantry, and he can seem like a jejune know-it-all trying to reduce any societal problem to a one-word culprit, usually “capitalism” or “imperialism.” Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if “Rogan of the left” is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base.

On the scale of “whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free,” Piker is freer than most Democratic surrogates, Ivy League overachievers who sound like chatbots trained on stacks of campaign brochures. But he is less free than the average MAGA bro, who is unconstrained by the need for any consistent ideology. “He’s funny, but not that funny,” Halkias told me. “You can tell him I said that.” Halkias has his own podcast, on which he gives advice to callers. On the normier part of the spectrum are liberal influencers like Dean Withers and Harry Sisson, who have transferred the “debate me, bro” spirit of early YouTube to TikTok Live.

One afternoon, in L.A., I visited the office of Crooked Media, which was decorated with some Yes We Can iconography and had glass-walled conference rooms with cheeky names such as “Sedition” and “Conspiracy.” When the company began, in 2017, its three founders, former Obama staffers named Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Favreau, were treated as audacious upstarts challenging the media hierarchy. Now they are middle-aged bosses in Henleys and tapered jeans. We sat in “Legitimate Political Discourse.” A long table had been laid with LaCroix and PopCorners. “We have become the out-of-touch lib establishment,” Vietor said. Lovett added, “My, how time flies.”

Crooked now has more than a dozen podcasts, including its flagship show, “Pod Save America.” Vietor recounted a time, a few years back, when a friend invited him to appear on a show put out by Barstool Sports, a bro-y podcast network that leans right. Vietor, worried about guilt by association, turned it down. “Looking back, that was so stupid,” he said. “The ‘how dare you platform someone you disagree with’ era is over. Fuck that.” (He has since appeared on the show.) In 2018, Favreau was hosting a show called “The Wilderness,” about how the Democratic Party lost its way, and wanted to include a clip of Obama reaching out to the white working class. “A younger producer listened and went, ‘I’m not sure this plays well today,’ ” Favreau said. “And I went, ‘That’s part of the problem!’ ” After the 2024 election, Piker appeared on “Pod Save America.” Lovett got pushback from moderate fans, who objected to Piker’s anti-Zionism, and from progressive fans, who objected to Lovett’s next interview, with a Democrat who wants restrictions on trans women in sports—but he shrugged it off. “It’s a big tent,” Lovett said. “It’s got Dick Cheney in it. It’s got Hasan Piker in it.”

The “Rogan of the left” formulation isn’t entirely vacuous, but it’s easy to misinterpret. Rogan-like figures can’t be engineered; they have to develop organically. Their value lies in their idiosyncrasies—their passionate insistence on talking about chimps and ancient pyramids, say, rather than the budget ceiling—and in their authenticity, which entails an aversion to memorizing talking points. Many Democrats assume that what they have is a messaging problem—that voters don’t have a clear enough sense of what the Democrats are really like. But it’s possible that the problem is the opposite: that many swing voters, including Joe Rogan, got a sense of what the Democrats were like, then ran in the opposite direction.

The good news for Democrats is that the right does not have a monopoly on relatability. A week before his interview with Trump, Theo Von conducted an interview with Bernie Sanders while wearing a Grateful Dead shirt. “You ever see the Grateful Dead?” Von said, as an icebreaker. Sanders, apparently unfamiliar with the concept, frowned and said, “Um, no.” From any other politician, this would have been malpractice, but with Sanders the crankiness is part of the crossover charm. (“He literally just talks common sense,” one of the top YouTube comments read.) A few months later, Rogan interviewed Senator John Fetterman. “Trump is not polished, but you get a sense of who he is as a human being,” Rogan said. Fetterman agreed, alluding to a line from “Scarface”: “All I have in this world is my balls and my word.”

Reeves, the social scientist, told me, “There is a strong correlation between which Democratic lawmakers are in my inbox and which ones have the year 2028 circled on their calendar.” Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, read Reeves’s book in 2023 and praised it on X; many of Murphy’s constituents, including his fourteen-year-old son, took issue with his post. Nevertheless, he persisted, writing a follow-up on Substack: “We should try to do two things at once—fight for the equality of women and gay people, while also trying hard to figure out why so many boys are struggling and why so many men are feeling shitty.” Sanders and Fetterman share what could be described as populist instincts, but ideologically they are leagues apart. On the level of pure affect, though, they may represent elements of a style that other politicians could crib from. “Personally, I find the performance of masculinity to be totally boring,” Hanna Rosin told me. “But if that’s what fifty-one per cent of Americans need—someone who reads as some version of ‘gruff, manly dude,’ but whose heart is still in the right place—then I’m willing to go along with it.”

Twitch stars often appear on one another’s streams, hoping to pick up some new fans. One afternoon, Piker headed to Zoo Culture, a gym in Encino owned by a streamer and fitness influencer named Bradley Martyn, to do a “collab.” It would also feature Jason Nguyen, a twenty-year-old Twitch star from Texas who goes by JasonTheWeen. “Bradley’s a big Trump guy, and we talk politics sometimes, but mostly we just talk about gym-bro shit,” Piker told me. “Jason probably leans Trump, if I had to guess, but his content isn’t really political at all.” (“I dont lean towards anyone,” Nguyen wrote when reached for comment. “I dont want anything to do with politics 😭.”)

By the time we got to the gym, Nguyen was already there, performing for the camera by flirting with a woman on a weight bench. “Is Jason rizzing right now?” Piker asked Martyn, who nodded. “Is it working?” Piker asked the woman. She replied, “A little bit.” Before she left, she gave Nguyen her Discord handle.

“Bradley, I’ve got something for you,” Piker said, removing his long-sleeved shirt. Underneath, he was wearing a tank top with a Rambo-style cartoon of Trump and the words “LET’S GO BRANDON.” “I was coming into hostile territory, so I had to fit in,” Piker said.

“It’s perfect,” Martyn said.

Martyn, who is six feet three and two hundred and sixty pounds, looks vaguely like Bradley Cooper on steroids. (Martyn has taken testosterone supplements, which Piker once brought up in a jocular debate about trans rights: You do hormone-replacement therapy, so why can’t they?) Nguyen is much smaller. “My chat just said, ‘There’s three muscleheads in the gym right now,’ ” Nguyen joked, not even pretending to look at his phone. Piker roasted Nguyen with a fake comment from his own chat: “Jason looks like a twink.” They wandered from station to station—first bench-pressing, then deadlifting—as their cameramen followed. “We’re just here to have fun,” Piker said. Then, dropping into a mock P.S.A. voice: “And also reach out to the young men out there who are lost—who feel anchorless, rudderless—by lifting some heavy weights.”

One flat-screen TV showed Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk, on mute, with no captions. Two shirtless guys, between reps, compared crypto wallets. “During Covid, they let liquor stores and strip clubs open, but they shut us down,” Martyn told me. “And then all the inflation, all the wars—it’s not like I trust any politician, Trump or Kamala or anyone, to be a perfect person. It’s just—if we never try anything new, how can we get a different result?” Last fall, when Martyn interviewed Trump, he brought up “the deep state” and asked, “How would you actually make an effective change there?” It wasn’t a specific question, and Trump didn’t have a specific answer. “We’re changing that whole thing around,” he said. Apparently, this was good enough for Martyn.

The day after the 2024 election, Martyn appeared on Piker’s stream to explain his support for Trump. They started with small talk. “Why do you have so many Zyn containers behind you?” Martyn said.

“I fucking slam those bad boys daily,” Piker said.

“Look at us relating, bro,” Martyn said.

When they got around to politics, Piker said, “One side at least acknowledges that people are angry—the Republicans.” The Democrats’ proposed solutions were inadequate, he said, but Trump would only make things worse. Martyn smiled and replied, “You’re gonna have to say sorry when he does what he says he’s gonna do.”

They ended the gym session by daring each other to take turns sitting in Martyn’s cold plunge. Piker resisted at first—“I didn’t bring a towel, a bathing suit, nothing”—but he went in anyway, in his gym shorts, and his commenters went wild. “Hey, Hasan’s chat, I hope y’all are happy he took his shirt off,” Nguyen said, facing Piker’s camera. Then he checked his phone: the woman from the weight bench had already sent him a message.

“Wait, she did?” Piker said, with a grin. “You’re about to lose your virginity, I think.”

[bookish-bi-mormon]

hey! hope this isn’t offensive, but i was wondering what it’s like to be NB and bi in the Mormon church. Are you out? Does your community respect your identity? I’ve heard about Mormons sometimes being pretty bigoted so I was curious what that’s like for you.

Hey buddy!

Thanks for the question, definitely not offensive but boy howdy is this a complicated question to answer.

So, I've been out as bi since 2016, and out as nonbinary since 2020. I served a mission for my church and was very open about being bi the whole time, and I attended BYU (a religious LDS university) as a nonbinary person.

I wouldn't say either one was easy, but there were a lot of really cool people I met who made it easier.

I have had bishops who were very understanding, one in particular was a trained therapist and was well informed about queer issues, and hopes that gay marriage will be allowed in the temple one day. I had a lovely ministering sister (kinda like assigned friends???), an older lady who took me under her wing and watched queer eye with me and listened to me when I had to cry or vent about homophobia in the religion as a whole.

I gave a talk in sacrament meeting (in front of an apostle!?!!!!) where I talked about being queer and the pain I feel because of unfair church policies and I was hearing from people for months how touching and meaningful my talk was.

There was a lovely family who hosted gatherings once a month for queer latter-day saints to meet and find community and belonging. I'm now part of a small group of trans Mormons who meet up every other week to have our own Sunday school. There are so many queer Mormons on this website who have given me support and community when I've needed it. I'm part of an leftist organization called Mormons With Hope for a Better World, and many of the members are queer in some way.

I guess in conclusion: yeah, as an institution the LDS church is homophobic and transphobic and they keep instituting policies that aim to keep it that way. But there are many many individuals who are fighting for change, some in little ways and others loudly. There are many people who are willing to learn and be inclusive they just don't know where to start. I love my religion and I want to practice it in community. I know it's not everyone's fight, but for me it's worth it to keep pushing back and carving out spaces for queer Mormons. I won't let the cishets forget I exist. I have just as much right to sit in the pews on Sunday as they do.

[rjalker]

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbot Abbot, published in 1884, is public domain. That means it has no copyright, and belongs to everyone.

This post will have links to as many versions and adaptations of it as I can find, and will be updated whenver I find new links to add.

Feel free to copy and paste this whole entire post and make it a new post for your own blog too!

None of these links are piracy, because you literally cannot pirate what has no copyright. Anyone who tells you you must pay to read the original Flatland is scamming you.

The only time you should be spending money on Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is if you find a cool physical copy that you want specifically.

Check the original post before reblogging to look for updates if you are seeing this post days, weeks, or months after I originally post it.

____

Visual books:

Public domain:

The Original Novel:

Read online or ownload the original book in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg

Read or download from Standard Ebooks

Read and download from the Internet Archive. This also includes a computer-generated audiobook.

_

The 2024 translation:

Read online or download the 2024 translation in multiple formats from the Internet Archive. This also includes a computer-voiced audiobook.

Read the 2024 translation here on tumblr @flatland-a-2024-translation

-

The 2024 Summary:

You can read and download this from the Internet Archive in multiple formats, including editable documents. Or read here on tumblr.

You can also buy a physical copy here, or purchase the files from Itch.io.

___

Audiobooks:

The original novel:

Listen to the original book on the Internet Archive, read by Ruth Golding

Listen to the original book on the Internet Archive read by David "Grizzly" Smith

The 2024 translation:

Listen and read-along with the lazy audiobook of the 2024 translation on Youtube

(no audiobook available for the summary....yet)

___

Free visual media with full stories:

Here’s an animation from 1965. Contains some flashing lights.

Here’s a stop motion film from 1982 in Italian with English subtitles

Here’s an animation from 2006

The 2007 Flatland film by Ladd Ehlinger is free on youtube. Unfortunately Ladd Ehlinger is a virulently racist and misogynistic conservative who thinks feeding school kids is the same thing as slavery. His film is filled with almost constant flashing lights and spinning cameras that cause headaches, motion sickness, migraines, and seizures.

Here is a link to timestamps for these if you still choose to watch it.

The film ignores all of the politics from the original novel because the creator of the film agrees with the bigotry the novel condemned. You are much better off watching another visual adaption or reading the original or translated book.

Especially if you suffer from photosensitivity or motion-sickness, this film will make you want to throw up.

___

Shorter visual media:

In-universe

Part 4 of a Korean animation. from 2010. Haven't found parts 1-3 yet.

A short animation from 2020 showing an Equilateral being taken away from his Isosceles parents

Flatland Heist from 2013, A short animation from 2013 where the Narrator and Sphere team up to rob a bank :)

Flatland a Romance of Many Dimensions Alternate Timeline (without audio yet) 2024 Here's the version with audio

No Nonbinary Door 2024

A Visit to Lineland 2024

Up, Up, and Away 2024

Meta:

A short TED-Ed summarizing the math parts of Flatland from 2014

Another short animation explaining the math of Flatland from 2012

A long presentation (38 mins) about the math in Flatland. from 2017

Youtube Shorts:

A very short animation about the narrator meeting the Sphere

___

Related books by other authors, in publishing order:

Public domain:

An Episode of Flatland: or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension. With Which is Bound Up an Outline of the History of Unæa by Charles Howard Hinton. (1907) Public domain, unlimited reading and downloading. It's terrible. But you can rewrite it to make it not terrible.

The 4D Doodler, by Graph Waldeyer. Also on Youtube as an audiobook.

Other copyright:

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics by Norton Juster (1963) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. A short....poem? Nothing to actually do with Flatland.

The Incredible Umbrella by Marvin Kaye (1980) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. I have not read it yet.

Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe, by Dionys Burger. (1983) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. It's racist. Was intended to be a sequel to Flatland, but the author's racist and failed every lesson Flatland tried to teach.

“Message Found in a Copy of Flatland” by Rudy Rucker (1983) free to read online from the author.

The Fourth Dimension, by Rudy Rucker (1984). Can be read for free online from the author. I have not read it yet.

The Planiverse: Computer Contact With a Two-dimensional World by Alexander Keewatin Dewdney (1984) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. Good 2D worldbuilding, nonexistant plot and boring abrupt ending.

Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So by Ian Stewart (2001) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. it's useless crap that unironically defends the bigotry against Irregulars from the original novel by pretending it's just natural selection that's totally natural and not at all artificialy and violently upheld to uphold the supremacy of the Circles.

Spaceland by Rudy Rucker (2002) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. I have not read it yet.

VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) by Steve Tomasula. no copies donated to the internet archive yet. I have not read it yet.

A 2024 Summary of Flatland. Buy a physical copy here. Buy a digital copy here.

__

Neopronoun short stories:

The Breaking Point, a short story of a Line and Isosceles in another country of Flatland, attempting to deal with an abusive officer of the military who's invited himself into their home. Almost 4k words.

First Day of School, a young equilateral has zov first day at school, and discovers that the "specimen" they're supposed to be studying is someone zo knows.

Gaining a New Perspective, a short story of the Sphere contemplating everything that's happened after throwing the narrator of Flatland back down to his plane. Almost exactly 5k words.

Other short fiction:

[link me your stories and a short summary to go here!!]

__

Please feel free to add more links and I'll add them to this original post.

Here's the first masterpost I made which has fewer links.

[reasonsforhope]

"Spain’s Catalonia region rolled out a pioneering women’s health initiative [at the beginning of March, 2024] that offers reusable menstruation products for free.

About 2.5 million women, girls, transgender and nonbinary people who menstruate can receive one menstrual cup, one pair of underwear for periods and two packages of cloth pads at local pharmacies in northeast Spain free of charge.

The Catalan government said that the initiative, which is called “My period, my rules,” was meant to “guarantee the right to menstrual equity.” The regional government cited statistics that said 23% of women polled by Catalonia’s public opinion office said they had reused hygiene products designed for a single use for economic reasons.

Tània Verge, Catalonia’s regional minister for equality and feminism, called the program a “global first.”

Scotland’s government passed a law in 2020 to ensure period products are available for free to anyone who needs them. But in comparison with the Catalan program, in Scotland the products are for single use and are distributed through schools, colleges and universities, not pharmacies.

“We are fighting menstrual poverty, which affects one in four women in Catalonia, but is also about gender justice. We are fighting the stereotypes and taboos about menstruation,” Verge told The Associated Press. “And (...) it is about climate justice. We need to reduce the tons of waste generated by single-use menstrual products.”

The distribution of reusable products is also aimed at reducing waste. The regional government said that Catalonia produces about 9,000 tons of waste from single-use menstrual hygiene products.

The reusable products are acquired by the public health care system, which covers the entire population, and distributed by Catalonia’s 3,000-plus private pharmacies. The program cost the regional government 8.5 million euros ($9.2 million).

“I am completely in favor of this initiative,” 29-year-old graphic designer Laura Vilarasa said. “It will give women a product that is absolutely necessary to have for zero cost.”

Spain’s national government passed a law last year granting women with debilitating menstrual pain the right to paid medical leave."

-via AP News, March 5, 2024

[gemmahale]

Here's the thing. I'm in a red state, in a county that went red.

I knew that when I moved out here four years ago. (Yes, it was April 2020 and no, I do not recommend moving during a global pandemic.) I accepted that that would be part of it. I made my peace with it, and I do what I can to mitigate the effects.

I'm not scared for me (minus the bodily autonomy thing since my state now has a 12 week abortion ban, and the general fuckery of facists in power) because tbh, I'm white and cis-het passing.

I'm nonbinary and bisexual. Can't tell any of that unless I tell you, and I don't make it well well known. I use she/her at work, wear skirts and dresses, and respond to Mrs/Ms Gemma or Hale (actually folks use my legal first or last name 😉); though Dr. is preferred if I get the choice.

I fly under the radar as a quirky white woman. I'm relatively "protected."

In the wake of the election results rolling out, I'm apprehensive for:

Kallen, who is white-passing Cherokee and a disabled veteran. I've been party to how he's treated differently than I am - by the same checker at the store not more than 5 minutes apart. He moved out here after I established my career, so he had little to no input of where we moved to (other than "I want to be with you.")

My coworkers who already face harassment for being POC in the community (including foreign exchange students that come to do part of their PhD here because of the proximity to the university system). People have been chased out of their positions here due to the racism they've experienced.

My coworkers who would seek to have an abortion (I'm included in this myself).

The LGBTQ+ community here (remember - I'm not out out).

The immigrant and POC communities here

And folks beyond my immediate viscinity

A lot of the community operates on a "mind your shit" basis. But I have to look people in the eye with Trump 2024 caps on and answer their questions politely. I have to drive by trucks with religious bumper stickers and greet them and give them scientifically sound information.

I wanted to believe in a world that valued competency and skill; and then I remember: I was the only one that applied to this job in the boondocks, and we've struggled to get positions filled out here. And I know part of it is not because of the low cost of living or lack of proximity to major shopping centers/social options. 🙃

I'm poking around into what local groups I can get into and donate my time to. My job puts me in direct access with food security resources, so that's probably where I'll start. Perhaps tie into the LGBTQ community because I know there's an active group out here. (I want to get more involved in the community anyway.)

I have to swallow this fear I have of being connected to causes while in my position. Yes, my employer is technically neutral ground, but that doesn't mean I have to be. I am allowed to be civically involved, as long as I make it clear when I am working in a work capacity (branded gear, name tag, etc.) and as a private citizen.

I admittedly got spooked when I received a few letters (to my private address, mind you) stating that I was a poor representative of my institution because I didn't maintain my yard like I should when I first started. (It was a whole thing and got escalated up higher than it needed to and yeah. I still have those letters in my office.)

But folks are starting to know me, and I'm starting to know them too. I need to cast this fear I have aside and be true to my values - accessibility, inclusivity, equity, and justice.

[alicelufenia]

Today marks the fifth anniversary of my being on hormone replacement therapy (and almost the same time as coming out trans)

June 24, 2020, was the day I took my first dose of estrogen. I made sure to heavily document when I started hrt, cause I knew the anniversary was going to be important to me. Back then, I wondered where I'd be in five years and well, now's the time to evaluate that I suppose.

So, in the past five years since, I have:

Come out to everyone at work. Still at the same employer, and with the same people! I've been fortunate to have such welcoming co-workers. I came out to friends and family a few months earlier.

Had many difficult conversations with my parents, especially my mother, setting boundaries that I never had to before. I've been thankful for having a therapist guide me through that process, and we're all the better for that now, as she's avoided the worst of the transphobic pipeline since then. We are not estranged, and our relation has been normalized to where we were before my transition, which I will count as a win.

Spent long, agonizing hours updating every one of my legal documents to show my new name and gender. I owe my therapist and one of the nurse technicians at my hrt provider my life for providing the official letters that have smoothed the way toward getting a court ordered name change, and from there updating my driver's license, SSI account, passport, even my birth certificate (thanks to being born and living in a blue state).

Got to know my niece, and later my youngest nephew. I'm glad that they can grow up knowing me only as "Aunt Kaylin." I must be quite good with kids cause whether they're related to me or not, they always seem to want to hang out with me than anyone else if given the chance ^_^

Joined a raiding static in FFXIV, delving into high end content in my chosen game for the first time. Since then we've cleared every raid tier in Endwalker, and the first one in Dawntrail (we're still working on the second. Sheep haunt my dreams)

Said static has also turned into good friends that I've now known, online and offline, for years. I've hung out with them more by raiding 3 nights a week since December 2021 than I did anyone I knew in high school, with maybe two exceptions (one being my wife). It also is awesome that like half of us are queer, and 3 out of 8 are some variety of transgender/nonbinary.

Speaking of my wife, we celebrated our 17th anniversary this month (very apt that we wound up choosing Pride Month, even if that's not the original intent for the wedding date) My transition has been hard on her as well, and given that I'm aware how often marriages can fall apart after one partner transitions, I'm glad we've been able to stay together, to be there for each other, and now though our situation has changed we're closer than ever I think.

Read the Greek mythology-inspired fantasy novel and modern queer classic Wrath Goddess Sing, just a month or two after it came out in June 2022. More than any other single work, this book may have had the most positive impact on my life. It features trans Achilles, miraculous body transformations, a simultaneous celebration and lament to the feminine in the world of late Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures, and possibly the single greatest analogy to modern self-hating transphobic women in its radical interpretation of Helen (no one does it as an obsessive forever hater like she does!)

It's also the story that opened me up to exploring my buried desires for bottom surgery. The passages describing Achilles' joy following her transformation stayed with me long after the book ended. A year later and I started making serious plans for surgery. I'm now six months out of recovery from my December surgery last year, and I've never been happier, more confident, more clear headed than I am right now. For the first time since the start of my transition it feels like my best years are ahead of me rather than behind. At nearly 42 that's a tremendous feeling. To this day I do my annual re-read of Wrath Goddess Sing around this time of year (I should really share more from that book, it's seriously so good even past it being an amazing work of trans fiction)

Wow, that really is a lot now that I look back on it! I feel like I've finally reached a point where my transition feels like it could be at an end. Or, even if it's a subtly ongoing thing, at the very least I no longer feel like I'm stuck in a liminal space where my living as my chosen gender has this unreality edge to it. It seems bottom surgery really was the final piece of the puzzle, now my life just feels like it's clicked. Not to say that I can now start living for real, obviously I've been doing that for as long as I can remember, but it feels like my future isn't an abstract anymore, or a hypothetical that will never come to pass.

I put out these details of my story, not just for my own sake (though that's a huge factor of course) but to share with those also on their journey, or haven't quite started, to show that I'm living proof that there's life after the closet, life after transition. Everyone's journey is going to be different, but I need you to know that you can take that journey!

Happy Pride Month 2025

[thefawnandthebear]

This was just supposed to be rambling about death and grief but it also turned into me talking about my religious beliefs. It's just me oversharing but also I couldn't sleep and needed to write something down

My maternal grandfather passed away in February 2020, a couple weeks before my 15th birthday. In December 2019, he had been moved up to my aunt's house a couple hours from where I lived at the time. That was where he passed away.

The week he passed, my mom and I planned to visit them, as we knew he didn't have much time left. He was in a state of confusion, and as I had just come out as nonbinary with a new name that New Year's, I knew for sure I would be going by my birth name. Of course we didn't get up there before he passed away, so that never happened.

I love him so, so much. I regret every time I passed on the opportunity to visit, or spent the visit on my phone and not saying anything to him. There is so much I wish I could tell him now, and things I wish I had told him then.

But I struggle a lot with how he would perceive and think of me if he were alive. He grew up in rural Utah as a devout Mormon and farmer in the 50s, which from that I think you glean how he viewed the world and others.

Again, I'm nonbinary and queer. I have visible tattoos and multiple piercings. I even had a dream a couple months ago where I was sitting in the living room with him and my grandmother and I was trying to hide my nose ring from them.

So every time I think of him (which has been a lot lately) I can't help but wonder if he would love me the same as he did when I was young. I can't truly say what he would say to me (though he'd definitely talk about it to other family members, he was a gossip and couldn't keep his mouth shut for the life of him). It hurts to know that there are things I've done and become he would disapprove of if he were alive.

But I do believe that there's a Heaven after this life. I still have a belief in Jesus Christ and God, which is something that's a very confusing thing for me. But that's beside the point. What I hope for is that my grandpa is up there walking with Christ and Heavenly Father and learning radical love for me, despite the choices I've made.

I joke with my mom that him and my grandma are still shaking their heads at my tattoos and ripped jeans, though. I like to think that up in the afterlife Jesus brings out love and the best in everyone, despite that not being true here on this earth. So I have faith that up there, with my other grandparents and with Jesus and our Heavenly Parents he loves me despite what he would've seen as worldly choices. My grandpa's up there in the farm fields with a view of the valley. He's with my grandma and he gets to hear her sing and play the piano.

And they both watch over me. They love me because I was their granddaughter. I played the piano for my grandpa and the flute in my middle school band. I keep my grandma's cedar chest safe. Six years after she passed my grandma sang with me as I played the hymns on the piano. My grandpa sat in the church pews and watched as my cousin and I performed "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" at his funeral.

So when I remember my grandpa, I choose to believe in the radical love of Christ and a place where he's happy and is able to watch over me.

[i-am-grell]

Anime Poll - What Do I Watch Next?

I hope to finish Mob Psycho 100 today, so let's get a poll going for tomorrow's watch. If you're new to these I wanna watch a lot of anime, but I suck at finishing series, starting series, and making choices, so I leave it to Tumblr.

Since I'm leaving to go camping on Friday for two weeks, I will be prioritizing shorter series that I can get through in a day or two. All the choices this time are pretty short so I may be able to sneak another poll tomorrow, but we'll see.

As always, propaganda* (*my context-providing thoughts/ramblings) below the poll. You're absolutely allowed to reblog and bully your followers into voting for your choice - other peoples' followers: you don't have to know me, follow me, like me, or even like anime to press a button; go nuts.

Propaganda:

Horimiya: The Missing Pieces - Alt Miyamura with the hair and the jewelry was hotter, but he's a sweetie so he gets a pass. Anyway, this is for The Missing Pieces portion of the anime.

Ace Attorney - Finish up season 2. I was stopped somewhere in Recipe for a Turnabout by hearing J Michael Tatum's aph France voice. Can't jumpscare the Hetalia fans with that, my man...

Tribe Nine - Chronically last place, but I get it. It's no longer 2020. Among Us streamers aren't hip with the youth anymore.

SK8 the Infinity - Will the SK8 fandom win their 6th silver medal in a row? At this point probably. Sorry, bitches and bros and nonbinary hoes. I feel like in this poll you'll either lose to gay lawyers or gay assassins, but at least it's still gay. Love y'all.

Buddy Daddies - Rei Suwa is FINE. Hot DAMN. Between just seeing this man's picture and my love for Aizawa, I like 'em dark-haired and homeless-looking with the ability to clean up if needed.

Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! - Ngl I saw someone post some clips of literally one episode of the dub on TikTok and it looks both gay and chaotic (the dub. The dub is chaotic). And if there's one thing I love, it's queer shows with ridiculous dialogue.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

On Tuesday, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas announced a set of policy changes inspired by President Donald Trump’s recent anti-trans executive orders, including the derecognition of nonbinary people, the removal of pronoun options from digital workplace tools, and the elimination of materials promoting what she called “gender ideology.” Most alarming, however, was Lucas’ stated top priority: “defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work,” a signal that she intends to push for a federally backed bathroom ban in private workplaces.

The press release clarifies that Lucas cannot unilaterally rescind prior EEOC guidance from the Biden administration that affirmed protections for transgender people under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These protections stem from the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which determined that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is unlawful in the workplace. However, many conservative policymakers and activists have pushed to exclude gender identity from these protections, ignoring established legal precedent. Despite these legal constraints, the release states Lucas’ intent to push for the revocation of these protections and to establish transgender bathroom bans in workplaces. Lucas echoed these arguments in Tuesday’s announcement, stating, “It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests. And the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County does not demand otherwise: the Court explicitly stated that it did ‘not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.’”

Lucas has been a staunch Trump ally since his first term, having been appointed to the EEOC in 2020. Throughout her tenure, she has consistently opposed measures she labels as “DEI,” particularly those supporting transgender women’s inclusion in women’s spaces. Initially, her focus was on what she framed as threats to “religious liberty,” advocating for individuals with “religious objections” to COVID-19 prevention measures during the height of the pandemic. However, by late 2022, she had shifted her attention toward anti-trans politics, aligning with conservative judges to oppose transgender people’s right to use restrooms that match their gender identity.

[...] These rollbacks on transgender rights mark only the beginning of the Trump administration’s broader assault on transgender individuals. Less than two weeks into his second term, Trump issued an executive order targeting gender-affirming care for minors, attempting to strip transgender youth of access to life-saving medical treatment. He also reinstated a ban on transgender service members, branding their “lifestyle” as incompatible with military service and claiming they lack “honor, truthfulness, and discipline.” The fight over transgender rights is far from over. Trump’s executive orders will face immediate legal challenges, and activists across the country are already mobilizing in response. 

The EEOC pushing for a ban on trans people using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity in private business is an utter insult to common sense.

[bowtiepastabitch]

A Messy Love Letter To TikTok (yeah, I know, hear me out)

cw: mental health mentions, ED mention, religious homophobia, Covid

It's 2020 and I am 16 and I am not allowed on the internet or social media and I've just finished the last day of classes before spring break. I've hugged my best friend and brought my bassoon home to practice and figured out a weeklong sewing project to work on.

A few days later, my mother grills me on my straightness. I deflect, tell a partial truth, tell her I'm ace. Then explain what ace means. Then explain why being ace doesn't aaaactually go against the Bible. After she goes to bed, I cry and email my friend, because my mom reads my texts, and tell her I was almost outed as queer. It's on our school hosted email, so it should be safe, right? We can't sext or trade drugs on a school monitored email. Right? I'm required to leave it in the kitchen to charge overnight as always. In the morning, she needs to pick up a grocery order and asks if I want to get out of the house. She pulls into an empty parking lot and tells me she's read my texts and when she didn't find anything she read my emails, and she knows. What does she know? Nothing specific, but it's time for me to tell her. So, after three years in the closet, I break down crying and tell her I like girls. I'm ace and I like girls and also my mental health is not the greatest (general, low level depression, I say, though it's far from the truth. it takes some of the pressure off but not enough).

Spring break is extended another week. She forces me to tell my father what I'd told her. I don't remember much of the next five months, but we can put the pieces together easy enough. School never starts back. I am locked in the house with my father who now hates me and my sisters who I'm not allowed to tell and a shitty school-owned laptop that now contains my entire world. I hang out with my friends on zoom before and after classes when I'm allowed to be in the closet-turned-office with the door shut, I write a massive research paper on why the bible doesn't ban queerness for my father (who won't listen), and I work on my sewing project. I convince my mom that youtube isn't a real social media and that sewing content poses no danger to my spiritual wellbeing and start watching a lot of youtube. Start a channel too. Hard to make friends with just a youtube account and nothing else, but there's a sense of normalcy to watching Rachel Maksy's new video the hour it drops every week, almost like having a friend, and in responding to the rare comment that finds its way to my videos. I get my own computer at some point, another shitty chromebook but it's mine, and since I'm not allowed to have it in my bedroom anyway my parents never think to disable private browsing. In June, I start getting recommended queer tiktok compilations for pride month because of my obsession with Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, and I open them in a private tab.

It reaches a point where I'm watching at least an hour or two of queer tiktok videos on youtube every day. My parents are the "representation is propaganda" type, so youtube becomes the only access I have to be reminded that it's not just me alone. I get a job at the local grocery store, becoming a "front-line worker of the pandemic" during those odd six or seven months when people pretended to care about the working class, and I meet a queer adult for the first time in my life, one of the managers at the store, a gay man in his 20s. I don't really connect well with my coworkers, but my best friend is there sometimes, and I'm good at my job.

In the fall, I watch a TikTok video in the app for the first time, on my best friend's phone. They've graduated and moved away, but they're back for the homecoming game, and they show me all the cool gender non conforming people they follow on TikTok. I am entranced. It's less filtered, more real than the stuff that makes it into compilations. They come out to me as nonbinary on that day too, at some point. It's a good day.

I am 17 and it's the spring of 2021 and I am close to graduating high school. Finally, I am allowed to make an instagram account a few weeks before graduation. I write a bio I will not change for at least four years and follow all my friends. I start watching reels, most of which are, of course, recycled TikToks, but it's close enough. There are gay people in my phone and when I leave for college there will be gay people in real life and it will be enough.

I take a gap year at the last possible minute to fix my mental health. Medical reasons, officially. I spend a month and a half in a residential treatment center for severe disordered eating and depression. The grad students who do the menial tasks of staring at us all day are really nice, and one of them does the berries and cream dance for us one day during downtime. I'm extremely fucking confused, but a couple of the girls who got there after me seem to know exactly what's going on. By the time I get out of rehab, the berries and cream trend is solidly over again and the world has moved on to sea shanties. One of the friends I made there teaches me a TikTok dance I don't remember anymore, and it's not like I can ask her now. Aminah, if you're out there, I love you.

I make a TikTok when I turn 18 a month later, and once it realizes I'm not into whatever the MrBeast of TikTok is, the shit it shows blank accounts, it starts showing me strippers, counting their money or demonstrating tricks. I'm told this is normal. It's fun, I'm having fun. Of course, it eventually starts showing me gay people. That's when shit really starts getting good. Eventually I start making videos, because I miss youtube but it was too much energy, and TikToks are easy. I'd tried reels and hated them, but TikTok's setup makes it so easy. Mostly sewing stuff, some cute trends as the mood strikes me. Lots of body positivity and ED recovery stuff too, because that's where I'm at in life, and it shows the same to me in kind. I see beautiful people of every variety and it's all lovely. I learn what doomscrolling is. I learn to doomscroll. I get exposed to leftist ideas and kinds of queer I've never seen before. I learn that maybe the psychiatrist who asked if I was autistic but never tested me was probably onto something. I learn what that means and how to understand myself as an autistic person and meet my own needs. I cry the first time triggering content pops up, and then I block the creator. I spend a lot of time parallel scrolling with my girlfriend. Scrolling replaces aggressive wall-staring as the filler for my long sleepless insomniac nights. I try not to think about gender too hard, but the harder I try not to think about it the more cool trans people my fyp shows me. Happy trans people. Alive, adult, happy trans people. I try not to think about it. I start college, I start to make new friends again, I spend less time on TikTok but never zero. I get more effective news updates from queer creators on TikTok than anywhere else, and I learn which sources I can trust. I track anti trans legislation in the US that nowhere else is thoroughly reporting on.

I am 19 and going through a breakup and my TikTok still shows me wedding dresses. I cry a lot. It starts showing me fandom content instead, eventually, edits for the gay angel/demon show I'd finally caved and watched the month prior. It makes me feel better, weirdly enough. I open the empty tumblr account I'd never been able to really get into before and start posting about my new blorbos. I learn the word blorbo. My TikTok becomes overrun with fundraising for refugees and war news I can't cope with for more than five minutes and I stop visiting for long swaths of time. I start spending more and more time on tumblr. TikTok becomes something I check in the evenings for twenty minutes or so and that's it. My best friend sends me cute cat videos, and I smile. I eventually get them into the silly gay angel/demon show and then send them almost a hundred videos in a show about it that I had been saving.

I am 20 and then I am 21. The world changes and the world stays about the same. My best friend becomes my partner. They still send me cute cat videos, sometimes accompanied by "us<3". My mileage on TikTok varies wildly. I still find myself doomscrolling sometimes, but that's life. There is still good news and bad news. I get more comfortable with transmasculinity through seeing other people live it, in online spaces and irl. Life is pretty okay, really. I think we'll be alright.

It's January 2025 now, as I write this, and TikTok went down last night only to reappear with a shiny "thank you mister trump sir" message this morning. It's just an app, but it's also not just an app. They aren't banning it because of China or because it's bad for our dopamine circuits; they're banning it because it's a form of community and communication they can't control as thoroughly as they can Meta, which also makes them loads of money. Them being the Oligarchy that is the American political powers that be. Sure, it's had some pretty nasty effects on the way we interact with content especially for kids and younger teens that have unrestricted access way too early, but don't mistake that for it having no redeeming qualities. I don't know what happens to TikTok now, if they'll find a way to stop us from criticizing the government on there. Who knows. Trump takes office tomorrow. We have bigger fish to fry. But I just want it to be remembered that TikTok did matter. What we did matters.

[zerodimensionz]

⋆♱✮♱⋆THE ZERO DIMENSION ⋆♱✮♱⋆

now playing… persephone - cocteau twins

‼⋆˚࿔ 𝔃𝓮𝓻𝓸 𝜗𝜚˚⋆ the head head-vampire of shiftblr. goth girlthing that never grew up. creature of the night.

i'm a twenty-two year old ('02) nonbinary lesbian, they/them, and poly with multiple s.os. i've been a reality shifter since 2020, and have been applying loass/states since 2024. i'm a writer with more than enough drs and obsessions than i can count, and somehow, i'll always find a way to have more.

 —lover of blueberry Arizona, being called ‘delusional’ and 'crazy' by people who i'm sexier and cooler than on the internet, and morally challenged women.

my realities…

HVNZ ;  the biggest and brightest stars of korean pop music. five-piece girl group HVNZ is a global phenomenon of a caliber you've never seen before. taking the world by storm with their 2022 debut from/HEAVEN and on a collision course with fame ever since, RUBY, AERI, YUMI, JIA, and KEI are known by their massive and dedicated fanbase as THE ANGELS.  they've graced the cover of every magazine, debuted five wildly successful solo careers, swept the grammys, and topped the billboard charts with their braggadocious, sexy, and sometimes hedonistic brand of girl power. witness the greatest story never told – the highs, lows, scandalous truths, and rumours of the most famous –or infamous– girl group of all time. 

ALPHAEA COLLEGE ;  under the sign of the winx ~ coming soon!

BAD OMENS ; oh, the misery!

        ☾ – introduction : STAR AND SIN

DULLSVILLE, CT ; i want a romance i can really sink my teeth into. the year is two-thousand-and-three. the year of the camera phone, kill bill, and future social giant myspace. but for MISERY HENDRIX and RAVEN MADISON; 2003 is the year of polaroids, the underworld franchise, and the final year of high school before they can pack up and ditch their podunk town, Haven, CT for good. misery and raven have been best friends since kindergarten, and are the only people who really ‘get’ each other in a town where goth rock,  black clothing, and an interest in the paranormal are considered tools of the devil. But when a rumour passes through town that the old abandoned mansion at the crossroads was sold to a set of standoffish twins who are so pale they're almost translucent and only come out at night–  what are two best friends to do than take a look for themselves?    

NIGHT CITY ;  REX and PANAM's lives are constantly spinning out of control. The one constant? One another, and mad, stupid love. coming soon!

before you follow…

𓇼 i don't participate in shiftcourse, and i am neutral to whatever hypothetical situation of the week is making its way up and down the dashboard. i know what i do and what i don't do, and have no interest in minding other people's business.

𓇼 i'm an adult and prefer to interact mainly with 18+ users.

𓇼 same s/o can follow until it starts bothering me / i say otherwise. (dni if u shift 4 jinx arcane/league plz and thank u. all love.) 

 (layout ib @ jadeshifting + @ hrrtshape)

[yokyopeli]

Ace Week 2023 Day 7:

No one is watching my videos so here's some a-spectrum representation re: Finnish.

Aka Finnish literature with a-spec characters; literature and poetry translated to Finnish/by Finns; a film and a webseries.

Väki trilogy(2018-2020) Elina Rouhiainen: Bollywood, aro not ace, genderqueer, brown (Punjabi). Sense manipulation.

Tapa(a) books(2022-2023) J.S. Meresmaa: Nora, agender and asexual 130+ year old vampire. Sims enthusiast.

Mähän tiesin ettei täällä ole mitään (2022) Kuura Juntunen: Leeni, asexual girlfriend to nonbinary Helle.

Lukitut (2020) Salla Simukka: Vega, aro. Johannes & Meea, demisexuals. (Have not read yet)

Freestyle (2023) Dess Terentjeva: Kai, aroace dancer.

Kaapin Nurkista (2022) Eve Lumerto: multiple, mainly Jaro Elomaa & Alina Linnanen

Jenna Clare, Water Runs Red, Finnish American, asexual, poet and youtuber.

Amanda Lovelace, asexual poet. The Princess Saves Herself in This One

Alice Oseman, aroace artist. Solitaire.

Elizabeth Hopkinson, asexual, edits asexual fairytales and myths into collections. Miracle of Marjatta in Asexual Myths and Tales

Tytöt tytöt tytöt/ Girl Picture (2022). Reetta Rönkkö is possibly asexual. Directed by Alli Haapasalo

Ace & Demi webseries (2023-). Alyssa/Ace is aroace and Demetria/Demi is demirose. Laura Eklund Nhaga also wrote related audiobooks in Finnish and English.

[violetemerald]

Happy (belated) Ace Week, Gilmore Girls fans! 💜🖤🤍

So I started headcanoning Luke as heteroromantic asexual but of course he has no idea he’s asexual or what asexuality means. I also headcanon Rory as demisexual (hetero-demisexual) too. I can explain why… but it would be more fun maybe to explain in fic form. To analyze them from the characters’ own perspective instead of my perspective kind of a thing.

I genuinely would love to write a fic exploring either or both of these things! However… um…

*Sigh* so it’s hard to know how to broach this when Gilmore Girls was so queer-unfriendly of a show, even with a gay main character (Michel) who was in all 8 seasons (8 if you count the revival). The show avoided directly acknowledging his being gay for most of the show, while indirectly acknowledging it every chance they could and making his whole characterization one of mostly comic relief and the butt of all sorts of types of jokes. They very rarely took him seriously as a character. And he was sidelined; not a member of the town in any real way.

But I’m a queer person who has adored Gilmore Girls for nearly 20 years. I still adore so much about it. Started watching it when I was 14 years old and season 4 was wrapping up airing, and I’m 33 years old now. I didn’t know at the time that I was queer, or that my type of queer identity was even an option—I’m a sex-averse asexual but I’m also gray-panromantic, interested in dating people of all genders, and as a woman I have dated other women and a nonbinary person, and I have a lot of queer friends and acquaintances that span nearly every LGBTQ+ identity. This week during Ace Week 2023 marks the 10 year anniversary for me of coming out to myself as asexual. It’s hard to still be so attached to a show that is so cisnormative and heteronormative—and that’s not even mentioning all the queerphobia they wrote into the show via jokes.

During my most recent rewatch of the entire series around December 2020 into February 2021, when I got to somewhere in season 4 I decided to start taking notes of every time queerness is at all referenced, every transphobic and homophobic joke, etc. 

Part of me wants to find a way to salvage that Lorelai joked about liking women herself because actually she was bisexual, like this fits in as a headcanon that the reason she joked so often about it was because it was on her mind for other reasons. I don’t even know if she joked about it that often but fairly often. A lot of the queerphobic jokes generally came from her? But certainly not all. But her jokes sometimes include herself as into women and it just makes you think “What if she really was? All this time?”. Lorelai also teases many other characters, especially Luke quite often, but sometimes people like Sookie or Rory, and implies they are gay or queer in some other way. 

Rory seemed to be much less canonically homophobic and transphobic. She cut her mother off once when her mother was teasing her homophobically and calls the jokes “inappropriate” even and part of this is just Rory didn’t have the same kind of sense of humor as most of the other characters. She seemed less amused by life, by even their jokes, but especially her characterization was just being a person less likely to crack a joke herself. She did tease Paris in ways that evoked referencing queer things or lesbians but I’m not sure Rory’s humor crossed the line of being actually anti-being queer in any way. Some of this humor is more chuckling at double entendres in English rather than chuckling at the existence of queer people? Like Paris saying she’s sleeping with a girl and Rory bringing up The L Word in reaction.

Actually, though, looking back through my notes for season 4-ish till the end, a lot of characters don’t come up much, or the way they come up is in a different context. Jess actually… I don’t think he ever once cracked a queerphobic joke nor laughed at one. He was the butt of two in season 4 (both from TJ). I hadn’t been taking these type of notes in seasons 2 or 3. I have memorized most of Jess’ scenes and I just don’t recall the early seasons having him being queerphobic. I could be wrong though.

I wasn’t taking notes when Dean or Christopher were on the show much so idk if these men had any such moments. And as far as my notes show, Sookie is just the recipient of Lorelai’s teasing at moments, not queerphobic herself. Kirk is not gonna joke about that stuff, just seriously defend himself against being perceived as gay at moments. And the show frames certain things he obliviously says as a gay joke but he’s not purposefully making any. Maybe really the most homophobic characters are Lorelai and even Luke, and at a few times Emily & Richard. 

Logan’s style of homophobic jokes seem more playful and somehow less offensive to me. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that but there are ways to tease that aren’t based in as problematic of a starting place. It’s like he’s not afraid to include himself in it the most, so he’s not distancing himself from the queerness? Idk I’d have to rewatch to see if I still have that same impression. He’s also just… more worldly than some of the characters feel like to me. He’s experienced bigger city life more or travel and broadened horizons? He sorta seems like he has more friends than a lot of the characters is maybe part of it. But I’d have to rewatch those moments to see how I really feel about Logan’s gay jokes and if this headcanon of him being less homophobic really is valid.

Anyway, here we are…

I basically feel like in order to write a fanfic that feels genuine and actually includes asexuality/the word "asexual" without feeling forced, awkward, etc, it can’t jump to including it. These characters were SO far away from being able to talk about or process that term. These characters needed to grow and change in various ways before it would fit in the worldbuilding and characterization?

I think the only way to make this work is gradually, slowly. The only way is to showcase that these characters actually do have experiences that shape them into being more and more ready for asexuality to exist in their world. The only way I can make it believable is if I can figure out the missing steps on the bridge between where the show was, and where I want the fic to go. I think it’s not just one missing step. It’s not that simple.

I think Lane and Jess were never small towners. Jess came from NYC, then later as an adult moved to live in Philadelphia, both cities. They are the most likely to meet openly queer people and broaden the worlds of people like Lorelai and Luke as they themselves learn and grow. I think it isn’t a stretch to think of Lane and Jess as very much LGBTQ+ allies, and Jess isn’t likely to become the most vocal ally but he… in his own quiet way could very much be one. And he is very closely connected to Luke’s story, even more than Lane, although both of them are. Lane worked for him in the diner and knows him well. Jess and Lane are both extremely connected to Rory’s story. So for either the Luke asexual headcanon or the Rory demisexual one, Jess or Lane could be a key piece of their stories. Anyway I was saying Jess could sneak up on you quietly with his allyship. His would be maybe more casual and incidental perhaps. 

Lane though. Lane is loud. Lane is bold. Lane is the kind of girl the show could have easily chosen to write as queer herself in any number of ways. But the show didn’t. The show wrote her as very much straight. But she’d… RELATE to the queer experience deeply. She’d be drawn to become a vociferous ally, appreciating the LGBT plight because her upbringing made her feel like she wasn’t allowed to be herself, like she knows what it’s like to be disowned by her mother, for her parents to not approve of who she wants to date/who she loves—in her case because they aren’t Korean or aren’t Christian enough. And yes Lorelai lived a very parallel life in some ways to Lane, they are supposed to be mirrors in some ways, but there are key differences.

I feel like Lane, also in part because she’s younger, is easier to imagine as this kind of ally. A big difference between Lane and Lorelai is that Lane started in the small conservative mostly white town as an outsider racially, too. And she leaves to go on tour, to broaden her horizons and was never destined to stay in that small town forever. (I say screw the revival’s mistreatment of Lane.) Lorelai wasn’t raised in that small town, and instead Lorelai chose it for her adult self and feels at home in it. That’s a very different story.

Lorelai, however, has an interesting additional point for the start of some change or growth. Lorelai has Michel. She has been bearing witness to his life for basically decades as a close friend, theoretically. Michel could call her out on her bullshit at some point. He could tell her something she is saying is offensive, is crossing a line that isn’t hers to cross. 

Also if my headcanon about Luke is to come to fruition, then Lorelai is dealing with being in a long-term romantic relationship with a man who isn’t super into their sex life. The way I interpret his asexuality is that he’s… not really into sex. He’s having sex pretty much only because she wants to. His sex drive is low. He’s very romantic, but he’s not very sexual. She’s always initiating. Her sexual flirting is making him uncomfortable. And he’s just… idk. I have a lot to explore specific to this headcanon once I figure out the fic I’m writing. I just think Lorelai will be somewhat primed to believe in and accept the existence of asexuality since she’s been living with a complicated truth that neither her nor her partner understood—that Luke’s potential weirdness around sex/their sex life could be explained by asexuality. I’m not saying they never have sex. But it could explain why when the revival started something had held them back from actually getting married all those years. It could explain some of the issues between them. And it definitely works well alongside the fact that Luke spent so many years single.

I think in order to write this fic, I need to outline a plot that establishes a relatively gradual shift in these characters’ appreciation for the fact that not everyone is straight in the world. That there are more possibilities, make sexual orientation generally something that could comfortably be discussed in a Gilmore Girls style way, with tasteful humor sprinkled in but no longer punching down or ridiculing people who are gay or gender-nonconforming. 

I think I could do it. I just need to find or make the time for it. 

So. I was gonna write a short ace fic for Ace Week while it was still #AceWeek2023 and instead I wrote this meta essay adjacent thing and posted it slightly late. But I hope someone can appreciate this insight into my thought process. I hope it was interesting or fun for at least one of you. :) Thanks!

[manzneto]

THE BIG 5! - Trans Journey & Reflection

What's up! Haven't updated, but it's January which means I'll be 17 soon!

I first came out to the world in 2020 at the age of 12. Big doubts on whether it was a phase or not circulated me and my family's brains.

Well! 5 years later.... still trans lol.

I had a lot of ups and downs but mainly a TON of ups.

1st haircut, 1st time being called Kai, first time being gendered correctly by strangers, being called buddy at a restaurant... the list goes on!

You may ask: Did you always know you were going to be a trans MAN? Did you ever doubt or seek other labels?

And I did. There was an embarrassing time throughout the 5 years where for a week had convinced myself I was a "Nonbinary lesbian"... which is fine!... but I was NOT one, LOL.

But other than that minor mishap, I've stuck to my "He/Him Straight Trans man" guns.

All this to say, I'm surprised how normal it is for me. 5 years in and I can't remember the years before I was treated as a guy. Surprisingly, I'm also still passing as a pre-t trans guy too, which is insane! I mean IM GONNA BE 17! Isn't that crazy!

But yeah, I can't wait till I'm 30, with a girl, maybe a kid (BIG maybe) and I forget all about it. Just playing games, working, eating, living as a dude with a receding hairline and a sick ass beard. LOL.

I'll update this June, after my Junior year ends, but don't expect much else! Enjoy yourself gentlemen, life is fucking amazing.