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[blacktealcritter]

In contrast with professional drag queens, who were only playing at being women onstage, [Esther] Newton learned that the very bottom of the gay social hierarchy was the province of street queens. In almost total contrast to professional queens, street queens were "the underclass of the gay world." Although they embraced effeminacy, too, they did so in the wrong place and for the wrong reason: in public and outside of professional work. As a result, Newton explained, the street queens "are never off stage. Their way of life is collective, illegal, and immediate." Because they didn't get paid to be feminine and were locked out of even the most menial of nightlife jobs, Newton observed that their lives were perceived to revolve around "confrontation, prostitution, and drug 'highs'." Even in a gay underworld where everyone was marked as deviant, it was the sincere street queens who tried to live as women who were punished most for what was celebrated-and paid-as an act onstage. When stage queens lost their jobs, they were often socially excluded like trans women. Newton explained that when she returned to Kansas City one night during her fieldwork, she learned that two poor queens she had met had recently lost their jobs as impersonators. Since then, they had become "indistinguishable from street fairies," growing out their hair long and wearing makeup in public-even "passing" as girls in certain situations," in addition to earning a reputation for taking pills. They were now treated harshly by everyone in the local scene. Most people wouldn't even speak to them in public. Professional drag queens who didn't live as women still had to avoid being seen as too "transy" in their style and demeanor. One professional queen that Newton interviewed explained why: it was dangerous to be transy because it reinforced the stigma of effeminacy without the safety of being onstage. "I think what you do in your bed is your business," he told Newton, echoing a middle-class understanding of gay privacy, "[but] what you do on the street is everybody's business."

The first street queen who appears in Mother Camp is named Lola, a young Black trans girl who is "becoming a woman,' as they say'." Newton met Lola at her dingy Kansas City apartment, where she lived with Tiger, a young gay man, and Godiva, a somewhat more respectable queen. What made Godiva more respectable than Lola wasn't just a lack of hormonal transition. It was that Godiva could work as a female impersonator because she wasn't trying to sincerely live as a woman. Lola, on the other hand, was permanently out of work because being Black and trans made her unhireable, including in female impersonation. When Newton entered their apartment, which had virtually no furniture, she found Lola lying on "a rumpled-up mattress on the floor" and entertaining three "very rough-looking young men." These kinds of apartments, wrote Newton, "are not 'homes.' They are places to come in off the street." The extremely poor trans women who lived as street queens, like Lola, "literally live outside the law," Newton explained. Violence and assault were their everyday experiences, drugs were omnipresent, and sex work was about the only work they could do. Even if they didn't have "homes," street queens "do live in the police system."

As a result of being policed and ostracized by their own gay peers, Newton felt that street queens were "dedicated to "staying out of it" as a way of life. "From their perspective, all of respectable society seems square, distant, and hypocritical. From their 'place' at the very bottom of the moral and status structure, they are in a strategic position to experience the numerous discrepancies between the ideals of American culture and the realities." Yet, however withdrawn or strung out they were perceived to be, the street queens were hardly afraid to act. On the contrary, they were regarded by many as the bravest and most combative in the gay world. In the summer of 1966, street queens in San Francisco fought back at Compton's Cafeteria, an all-night venue popular with sex workers and other poor gay people. After management had called the police on a table that was hanging out for hours ordering nothing but coffee, an officer grabbed the arm of one street queen. As the historian Susan Stryker recounts, that queen threw her coffee in the police officer's face, "and a melee erupted." As the queens led the patrons in throwing everything on their tables at the cops-who called for backup-a full-blown riot erupted onto the street. The queens beat the police with their purses "and kicked them with their high-heeled shoes." A similar incident was documented in 1959, when drag queens fought back against the police at Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles by throwing donuts-and punches. How many more, unrecorded, times street queens fought back is anyone's guess. The most famous event came in 1969, when street queens led the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. Newton shares in Mother Camp that she wasn't surprised to learn it was the street queens who carried Stonewall. "Street fairies," she wrote, "have nothing to lose."

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

[blacktealcritter]

cis women do not feel safe around you i promise lol do you know how many cis women plan on voting for trump this time because they cant stand people like you

BWHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA

[blacktealcritter]

[blacktealcritter]

A.2.4 Are anarchists in favour of “absolute” liberty?

No. Anarchists do not believe that everyone should be able to “do whatever they like,” because some actions invariably involve the denial of the liberty of others.

For example, anarchists do not support the “freedom” to rape, to exploit, or to coerce others. Neither do we tolerate authority. On the contrary, since authority is a threat to liberty, equality, and solidarity (not to mention human dignity), anarchists recognise the need to resist and overthrow it.

The exercise of authority is not freedom. No one has a “right” to rule others. As Malatesta points out, anarchism supports “freedom for everybody … with the only limit of the equal freedom for others; which does not mean … that we recognise, and wish to respect, the ‘freedom’ to exploit, to oppress, to command, which is oppression and certainly not freedom.” [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 53]

In a capitalist society, resistance to all forms of hierarchical authority is the mark of a free person — be it private (the boss) or public (the state). As Henry David Thoreau pointed out in his essay on “Civil Disobedience” (1847)

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

[blacktealcritter]

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

[blacktealcritter]

Your parents are not "narcissists". They're typical authoritarian assholes who treat you like their property because society allows them to.

Your ex boyfriend is not a "narcissist". He's a typical misogynistic douchebag who treats women like shit because society allows him to.

Your boss is not a "narcissist". They're a typical classist dipshit who thinks workers' entire purpose in life is to generate profit because society allows them to.

And even if they happen to be a "narcissist", that's not what gave them the power to get away with abuse.

So stop blaming mental illness and start blaming society's normalization of abuse. Stop acting like someone has to have a mental illness in order to do something cruel when ordinary people have been doing atrocious things since forever.

[blacktealcritter]

[blacktealcritter]

[blacktealcritter]

I love how to deny anarchism's validity people have to make up a "bathtub joe" who has total control over peoples medicine who can just kill people he doesnt like through denial or withholding of care, when, like, doctors already exist.

[blacktealcritter]

this article is behind a paywall but i'm obsessed with the headline + photo combo

[blacktealcritter]

Update Harvard students are walking out in solidarity with Columbia’s students

These are billion dollar for profit institutions that directly impact financial backing of Israel’s apartheid regime

[blacktealcritter]

me at the end of the bar hanging over a cup of black tea and a tumbler of laudanum: *bartender sets down a empty class* *i pull out the tea ball and pour the laudanum and tea together and take a large hot gulp* "fuuuuuck ing ow fuck me."*looks at you*"idve been a fuckin oracle back in the day you know that kid? theydve rrspectd my pain-then"*hot burp*"now its just-thishit" *holds up shaking hands then turns away sharply and stares at glass* "idve been anoracle..."

[blacktealcritter]

to me being trans is about embracing evil & living it shamelessly !!!!

[blacktealcritter]

No one can show you

the way out.

There isn't one.

I can't even show you

the walls if you aren't willing

to see them

or even

willing to listen

that they're even there at all.

[blacktealcritter]

not now kitten, daddy's about to have a mental breakdown from seeing the prices at the grocery store

[blacktealcritter]

If strip mines and strip malls are good I'm evil

If advanced interrogation and solitary confinement are good I'm evil

If the CIA and FBI are good I'm evil

Those with might get to choose what's right. I can try to play a moral game of recontextualizing the 'good' as being something other than the status quo but people still struggle to actually make that much of a separation. Why do I need to take back the ground of the "good" from them when all it is is a renaming of the high ground, of established territory? Why not aline myself with the entire outside of their rhetorical existence, openly? I don't feel the need to constantly fight to redefine terms, let them have their words. I can be an ugly evil terrorist just fine.

[blacktealcritter]

Buckle up, European and Foreigner Tumblypoos, because I'm about to learn you a thing about AMERICA.

You see these delectable motherflippers? These are called STATES. You stupid foreigners might not be able to wrap your head around this, but basically they're administrative subdivisions of the country.

And here's the thing: They are totally heckin' different from each other! For instance, New York:

Looks TOTALLY DIFFERENT from Kansas:

And they both look TOTALLY different from California!

So before you make fun of an American for not knowing where tiny third-world countries like "Check Republic" or "South Korea" are, maybe think about how much we have to learn about the unique regional differences in our OWN country. Maybe you should think about AMERICA more.