giddy10000-blog

[giddy10000-blog]

A bunch of mettas and frisks from my twitter!!!because i love them as much as mettaton loves himself

[giddy10000-blog]

Stress relieving by drawing the food in Undertale

[giddy10000-blog]

they’re rooting for your destruction!

[giddy10000-blog]

hippie culture is based in racism (◕‿◕✿)

No it wasn’t..

[giddy10000-blog]

I really like the idea of enchanted suits of armour powered by old magic and the souls of dead knights

[giddy10000-blog]

[giddy10000-blog]

do you always ask people you’ve just met what kind of toilets they use

is that your ice-breaker

where did you even learn that method of conversation

[giddy10000-blog]

[giddy10000-blog]

Where are we in the rainbow?

I’m 19, and this is my first time at Sydney’s infamous Arq nightclub. I feel like an Israelite before the Red Sea, except that I’m facing an infinite expanse of white twinks.

My friends have interesting notions of ‘fun’. One of them enthusiastically declares: “We’re going to tell the drag queen it’s your birthday!”

Oh, joy. I play along, and suddenly I’m up on stage with 4 other men. A drag queen is staring me down.

“What’s your name, love?”

“Fahad,” I offer.

“What was that?” she asks, holding a hand to her ear and a mic to my mouth.

I try again, pronouncing each syllable more deliberately. “Fahad.”

She turns to the crowd and pulls a confused face. “We’re going to have to skip you,” she insists, to the laughter of a hundred twinks.

This is not the height of the racism I’ve experienced in the gay community. It’s not even particularly egregious compared to some of the things I’ve faced. But I’ve decided to begin with this because it represents a truth which I’ve come to realise over the years: people like me, because of the colour of my skin, because of my name, don’t belong in the gay community.

I mean, ex-fucking-cuse me. Fa-had. And before you start, it is literally two syllables, neither of which are foreign to English. ‘Fa’ as in ‘fan’, ‘had’ as in ‘had’. I even deliberately pronounce it wrong to make it more palatable. No, my name is not difficult to pronounce. The only thing “wrong” with my name is that it is Arabic. There is no other reason my name should provoke a sense of aversion. It is not difficult to pronounce. And if it were? Uzo Aduba recounts her mother’s words: “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”

That observation holds within and without the gay community. But here is a basic fact: as a gay man of colour, I feel more secure within ethnic communities than I do within the gay community.

The gay community has a problem with colour.

People who have not endured racism cannot conceive what kind of effect it has on a person. It’s more than a concept - it’s an experience. It cuts right through to your soul. It eats away at all that which makes a person: their dignity, esteem, and sense of self. Racism leaves deep wounds, some of which may remain irreparable.

So when I go onto Grindr and I see people describing their preferences as “no spice, no rice, no Asians” - how am I supposed to feel? In what world is it sensible to describe people as “spice” and “rice”? In what world is it sensible to suggest that an entire race of people is sufficiently homogeneous that you can say with absolutely certainty that you will never be attracted to any given member of their race?

And here’s the thing: even gay men who have the good sense to avoid propagating absurdly racist stereotypes will suffer from some degree of bullshit. You’re either looking at me like an exotic piece of meat, or you’re not looking at me at all. Of course, this isn’t a universal occurrence, but it is common enough to be a safe assumption.

One thing this taught me that took so, so long to unlearn was the idea that somehow I was unattractive. That somehow my dark eyes, my full lips, my olive complexion, and my thick, unruly hair are unappealing. And that’s part of the power of racism - it teaches you that you are worthless, and over time you come to believe that this is true. You believe in everything negative that is said about you, you believe that every single piece of shit flung your way is deserved.

Racism can also be unspoken. You can feel it when you’re standing in a club and you just know that you’re invisible. There’s only two situations in which I’m ever approached in a gay bar: when someone has had enough white bread for one night and wants to sample some exotic cuisine, or when someone is looking for drugs and assumes that as the only brown man in the room I must be selling.

No, I’m not saying that all white gay men are racist. I’m not suggesting that that they’re all the same. But they all must take responsibility and stand up to racism when they see it. Everyone, including myself and other queer people of colour, must interrogate their assumptions, their biases, and even their desires. Why am I attracted to white people? Why have nearly all of the men I’ve slept with been white? Those questions are relevant to even people of colour because we too are victim to social conditioning and constructed ideals of beauty that are propagated every single time you turn on the TV or look at a billboard.

Think about it. Think really hard. What stereotypes do you hold onto, and what dynamics do you enliven that have the potential to hurt queer people of colour? Do you really think I’m going to be flattered when your response to my Arab heritage is to say “big dick crew”? Are you fetishing me? Are you seeing me at all? Does any other aspect of my personality come through?

Sex may be at the centre of it all, but there is so much more to this picture. How many leaders in the queer community are people of colour? I was once told that the queer community didn’t have a problem with people of colour, and by a “progressive” white man, no less, because I was once elected as a Queer Officer at university. This is made more absurd by the fact I was the first person of colour to hold the position for half a decade.

We’re little more than furniture in the queer community. Our voices are silenced and our concerns are pushed aside. We only hear lip service and we only see ourselves in images that fetishising, tokenising, or humiliating.

Any positive images of people of colour will be erased because they do not belong. The leaders and agitators at the Stonewall Riots were people of colour, but Hollywood has decided to whitewash our history and replace our heroes — Raymond Castro, Stormé DeLarverie, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and so many others on the front lines — with white twinks. I can promise you that a white gay boy didn’t incite the riots by being the first to throw a brick.

Often the hardest part of existing on the margins is having to force people to see you, and see you as you really are, unfiltered by the lens of cultural stereotypes and preconceptions of race. So yes, I’m fucking furious. Yes, I will cut your dick off if you try to fuck with me. I’m loud because I’m proud. I’m angry because we deserve better, as a whole. There is no reason for young queer people of colour to face higher rates of depression and self-harm than their white counterparts. There is no reason for gay culture to be completely devoid of diversity.

We’re here. We exist. We’re not going anywhere. And we need to walk together because the alternative is frightening. There is more than one colour in the rainbow.

Fahad Ali is a student of language and literature at the University of New South Wales.

[giddy10000-blog]

Fanimation by me. Garnet and Steven singing “American Boy” by Estelle.

cuz why not

[giddy10000-blog]

i would just like everyone to know that the modern disability rights movement in america would not exist without disabled black people like bradley lomax, chuck johnson, gary norris gray, don galloway, johnnie lacy, brigardo graves, and dennis billups, many addicts and felons from groups like delancey street, members of the chicano organization mission rebels, and the black panthers and their support from disabled black people overall (tw for use of the r-slur).

never forget the disabled black people and addicts who helped pioneer our movement. 

[giddy10000-blog]

“shoplifting hurts workers!”

the workers are already being hurt, compañero

[giddy10000-blog]

[giddy10000-blog]

me

[giddy10000-blog]

you should at least lay down a while

[giddy10000-blog]

and this is only the top of the pyramid! 

[giddy10000-blog]

an important scene from the help that white people seem to forget