caoimhinkellehers - Tumblr blog

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Crowley coded

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untitled

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the fucked up thing is how "Creep" by Radiohead will really get your ass if you hear it at the wrong time. that shit can be stupid and overdramatic or it can have the weight of an atomic bomb dropped on your heart it just depends

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I honestly have to wonder if the gay assimilationists understand what it's like on the other side. I was raised by Republican Baptists in Texas, homeschooled, heavily involved in youth group, and I was so devastatingly lonely because I could feel in my bones that I didn't fit in, that people liked me on a superficial level but kept me at arm's length because something was wrong with me, because I wasn't good enough, I wasn't like them.

It was only when I found words to describe myself in the queer (and autistic) community that I truly realized for the first time that nothing is wrong with me, that I can be accepted and loved the way I am and I don't have to force myself into a different shape to be good enough. I'd rather die than try to make myself "normal" again.

Like I'm just saying that as someone who grew up brainwashed in right wing ideology, I can't help but think the assimilationists must have no clue what a gift it is to be accepted in your abnormality. What it's like to have normalcy shoved down your throat for years, then finally spit it out and finally be fucking free.

Having broken free, I can't imagine ever trying to force someone else into that cage. I want to smash all the cages, not build new gay-shaped cages.

It's possible, but it's also possible that they come from a background like yours and they're naïve, hopeful, or afraid. Naïve enough to think their families will ever really accept them, hopeful enough to think they really can make a change (and good for them for the hopefulness, truly), or afraid and convinced that they can find safety in conformity.

And look - like - I need to be clear that when I say I'm anti-assimilationist, I don't mean that I think it's morally wrong for queer people to want to live in a nice little house with their spouse and send their kids to a good school and live a tidy, quiet, unbothered life. I think that's a fine and wonderful thing to want, and I think it has to be a fine and wonderful thing to want. I think it's possible to live that life and be in solidarity with other queers. I also think that being gay or trans doesn't mean you owe a movement anything. You don't have to live any particular kind of life, or do any particular thing, to be the right kind of queer.

Really, the only way in my mind to be the wrong kind of gay/queer/trans is to tell someone they're the wrong kind of gay/queer/trans, or to throw other queers under the bus for your own benefit.

So when I talk about assimilationism as a philosophy, and why I think it truly fucks us, I'm not talking about "living in the suburbs" or a certain amount of necessary visibility or radicalism. It's okay to live stealth or to want that quiet life. What's not okay is "you better behave or the cis won't respect us," which is, of course, bullshit, since what's not respectable about us is our queerness.

I watched Halston last night with Emet, and one of the things that really struck me was a scene of a fight between Halston and Elsa Peretti, one of his closest friends and models. They got into a fight at Studio 54, and Halston was being unbelievably cruel to her, and she to him. It was the sort of fight that you can only have with someone who knows you very well when you're both at your very worst.

What did she reach for when she was angry with him and hurt? What was the word she immediately reached for to summarize her disdain for him and his worthlessness, how much she despised him and felt him to be garbage? I'm sure you know.

That scene felt like... so... like I just want to shake people and show them it. Don't you understand? The problem with saying "but I'm one of the good faggots" is to them, you're still just a faggot, and they won't let you forget it when the chips are down. Who cares if you're a good faggot or a bad faggot? The reason you deserve civil rights and a life lived in peace is because you're human, not because you've managed to be a good enough and worthy enough person to earn off your faggotry. You can't escape them thinking that about you. You might as well own it and demand your rights anyway, because you're a person.

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Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

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

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

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

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

Never.

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

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

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

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

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fucker.)

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

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

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

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

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

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

[caoimhinkellehers]

now would be the absolute funniest time for tumblr to unban porn

[caoimhinkellehers]

lol

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MUSIC ASKS these are actually pretty fucking hard but why not.

1:A song you like with a color in the title

2:A song you like with a number in the title

3:A song that reminds you of summertime

4:A song that reminds you of someone you would rather forget about

5:A song that needs to be played LOUD

6:A song that makes you want to dance

7:A song to drive to

8:A song about drugs or alcohol

9:A song that makes you happy

10:A song that makes you sad

11:A song that you never get tired of

12:A song from your preteen years

13:One of your favorite 80’s songs

14:A song that you would love played at your wedding

15:A song that is a cover by another artist

16:One of your favorite classical songs

17:A song that would sing a duet with on karaoke

18:A song from the year that you were born

19:A song that makes you think about life

20:A song that has many meanings to you

21:A favorite song with a person’s name in the title

22:A song that moves you forward

23:A song that you think everybody should listen to

24:A song by a band you wish were still together

25:A song by an artist no longer living

26:A song that makes you want to fall in love

27:A song that breaks your heart

28:A song by an artist with a voice that you love

29:A song that you remember from your childhood

30:A song that reminds you of yourself

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From Mt. Fuji Japan with no filter

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"i only wanna eat things with ingredients i can pronounce" has always been one of the funniest moral positions of all time. literally just learn how to pronounce more ingredients then? truly undefeated in its celebration of ignorance

[caoimhinkellehers]

Johannesburg by  elsa bleda

[caoimhinkellehers]

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im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!

an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.

“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s credits have almost exclusively Japanese people in them; but one name sticks out:

By searching around, people have found this forum post from 2007:

Follow your dreams.