queer-hotcakes - Tumblr blog

[queer-hotcakes]

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

Dir. Beeban Kidron

[queer-hotcakes]

.... I'm sorry, the doorknob thing just fucking shattered my mind. Someone has really tried to argue male privilege based on "comfortable height" for a doorknob?

Dude, I'm 5'4". Cant say I ever felt the oppression of being 5" too short to use a doorknob. Also my mother is 6'. Does that make her an oppressor or does her gender somehow absolve her?

I grew up in a predominantly Italian American area. I know an overwhelming number of men who are shorter than me. Where do they fall in the doorknob oppression scheme?

The safety belt thing is a potential issue but last I read up on it other than being somewhat uncomfortable for larger chested people, safety belts are pretty much designed optimally for safety. The sad fact is there isnt a universal model that will work because bodies vary dramatically in size and shape across all genders.

TERFs really out here thinking that male privilege comes from like. The overwhelming aura of the penis and being told not to wear skirts as a kid, and not the fact that manhood is an in-group that trans women are absolutely stricken from.

[queer-hotcakes]

the biggest scam in history (pun fully intended) is that no one talks about how King Richard I - Richard Lionheart-

yes, that's the "good" and "real" King from Robin Hood!!!

was kinda fruity and probably had a thing with the french King Philip II (good for them tbh)

[queer-hotcakes]

^ that. Good rep does not become less good if it doesn't stick it to the cishets. That's all this reads as. Unless the media taunts the audience with their queerness, it doesn't count? That's a ridiculous metric.

See, I get a lot of messages like this, not just on that one post but on all kinds of posts all the time. They’re slightly more justified but basically the same song and dance as johnlock tinhatting.

Here’s the reality:

There’s the text as seen by you or me or the rest of tumblr. Good Omens features genderless celestial beings. Stucky reads like a romance. etc.

And then there’s the text as seen by 99% of the audience. Dude actors = dude characters. Anything other than a flashing sign means cishet.

My litmus test for media is very simple:

Who are you willing to alienate?

Not can it be read as a bit queer: have you explicitly told your stodgiest cishet audience that it isn’t cishet in a way they cannot overlook.

And while, yes, there’s a lot of willful blindness from audiences and not every piece of art benefits from “I am an [identity word]” on-the-nose dialogue, for extremely overt coding to count for this, it needs to be cultural reference points that are very current, mainstream, and unambiguous, not things only a historian or an in-group member would know.

Black Sails was willing to alienate people. Good Omens was not.

[queer-hotcakes]

Irish LGBT+ Content

These lists include LGBT pieces set in Ireland, LGBT pieces with Irish main characters and LGBT pieces created by Irish people, often they overlap but not always. Feel free to suggest things I ought to add or offer corrections for mistakes I've made.

Please note that the inclusion on this list does not mean I recommend the piece in question - I am familiar with only a few.

Television:

Eipic (2016) [gay, as G]

Derry Girls [lesbian]

Ros na Rún [soap, as G]

Fair City [soap, trans man briefly]

Film:

The Crying Game (1992)

Cowboys and Angels (2003)

The Blackwater Lightship (2004) [based off book below]

Breakfast on Pluto (2005) [trans f]

Handsome Devil (2017) [gay, mlm]

Papi Chulo (2019) [gay, Irish writer/director only]

Dating Amber (2020) [gay, lesbian]

Shorts:

Chicken (2002)

Lúbtha (2019) [mlm]

The First Saturday of May (2019) [trans]

Scene from the Men's Toilets at a Ceilidh (2019)

OUT (2020)

Candid (2020)

Books:

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) [wlw, Irish writer only]

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890) [mlm]

As Music and Splendour by Kate O'Brien (1958) [wlw, outside Ireland]

A Noise from the Woodshed by Mary Dorcey (1989) [lesbian, anthology]

The Kiss by Linda Cullen (1990)

When Love Comes to Town by Tom Lennon (1993) [gay]

Hood by Emma Donoghue (1995) [wlw]

Biography of Desire by Mary Dorcey (1997) [wlw]

Breakfast On Pluto by Patrick McCabe (1998) [trans f, bi]

Crazy Love by Tom Lennon (1999) [gay]

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín (1999) [gay]

The International by Glenn Patterson (1999) [bi]

At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill (2001) [mlm]

A Son Called Gabriel by Damian McNicholl (2004) [NI, gay]

The Master by Colm Tóibín (2004) [mlm, Irish writer only]

Stir-Fry by Emma Donoghue (2006) [wlw]

Landing by Emma Donoghue (2007) [wlw]

Map of Ireland by Stephanie Grant (2008) [wlw, Irish-American]

Falling Colours: The Misadventures of a Vision Painter by R.J. Samuel (2012) [wlw]

The Rarest Rose by I. Beacham (2013) [wlw, Irish character]

To Summon Nightmares by J.K. Pendragon (2014) [trans, mlm]

Carolyn for Christmas by Lucy Carey (2015) [lesbian]

The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (2015) [bi, lesbian]

The Green Road by Anne Enright (2015) [gay]

Wormwood Gate by Katherine Farmar (2015) [wlw]

A Good Hiding by Shirley-Anne McMillan (2016) [NI, gay]

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (2016) [mlm, outside Ireland]

Eelgrass by Tori Curtis (2016) [wlw, Irish myth inspired only?]

All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (2017)

Forget Me Not by Kris Bryant (2017) [wlw]

The Art of Three by Erin McRae & Racheline Maltese (2017) [bi, polyam, Irish character]

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017) [gay]

The Spellbook of Lost and Found by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (2017) [wlw]

The Unknowns by Shirley-Anne McMillan (2017) [NI, bi m, bi f]

My Brother's Name Is Jessica by John Boyne (2019) [trans f]

Every Sparrow Falling by Shirley-Anne McMillan (2019) [NI, mlm]

The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth (2020) [wlw]

The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar (2020) [lesbian]

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue (2020) [wlw]

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (2021) [bi f, wlw]

Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar (2021) [bi f, wlw]

Not My Problem by Ciara Smyth (2021)

Nonfiction:

Love In a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar by Colm Tóibín (2002) [essay collection]

Outitude (2018) [lesbian documentary]

Queer & Celtic edited by Wesley J Koster (2013) [anthology]

[queer-hotcakes]

I need a complete list of your traumas, plus a genealogy going back at last five generations indicating the racial origins of all of your ancestors, plus essays on your personal relationships to religion, ethnicity, gender and sexuality before I can determine whether you're allowed to create this art. Until the paperwork is submitted, I'm just going to put you down as "Provisionally Problematic and Probably Appropriative". Please enjoy your complementary harassment while waiting for a judgement.

[queer-hotcakes]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I've been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don't even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you're somehow owed information about my sexual history. You're not! No one—and I can't reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don't feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you're traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can't sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can't talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that's good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don't have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don't owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They're yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they're probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There's a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren't failed lesbians. They're not somehow less good or less valid because they're attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I've checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who've had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I'm sorry to report that "I'm disgusted by a standard-issue human body part" is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I'm a dyke and I don't especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don't have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn't make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There's so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven't noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there's a whole pandemic thing that's been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you're worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people's genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it's always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to "solicit homosexual or lesbian activity", which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn't have to recognize them if they didn't want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who's older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn't be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that's worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You've capitalized it, like it's Weighty and Important, but it's not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don't have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

[queer-hotcakes]

please god i am so deathly sick of people saying like "how is this straight the writers are so dumb!" about literal actual gay media i don't know how to break it to you people but nbc hannibal is about two men who are attracted to each other. jennifer's body is about two women who are attracted to each other. i know you guys are used to only consuming captain america movies and the occasional mark zuckerburg biopic but there are writers who actually write gay people and they do in fact do so on purpose. you don't have to say "i can't believe the writers thought this was heterosexual" they literally did not

[queer-hotcakes]

Here's how tired I am right now:

I went down a rabbit hole today and found out that early sexologist Havelock Ellis, who wrote one of the first books arguing for gay rights, was ace. (The book was Sexual Inversion, 1896.)

It took a solid three hours for my brain to realize that that's actually kind of a big deal, given that bigots love to pretend they'd accept aces if only we'd always been here, fighting alongside them.

[queer-hotcakes]

I don’t want to detract from that post, but like- people not learning queer history is genuinely the source of so many of our problems in the queer community today.

It’s why people don’t understand the roots of the word “queer” in the first place, or why it’s important to so many people

It’s why people think “gay” is some apolitical neutral term with zero negative connotations, ever, for anyone

It’s why people actively feed into lesbian separatism, political lesbianism, and TERF movements without even knowing it

It’s why people think “LGBT” is some True Name that has never been changed, challenged, nor shaped over the years to better represent the community

It’s why people feed “who can reclaim which slurs” discourse without giving living human beings older than 25 any real consideration

It’s why people straight-up don’t know what the “drop the T” campaign was/is, or understand the troubled history between the trans community and the rest of the queer community

It’s why people don’t understand what “trans” used to mean, or how that meaning has changed over the years, or why

It’s why people don’t understand the differences between queer communities and identities by country, or often how they’re complicated by race

It’s why people don’t understand what “butch” and “femme” actually mean, the many definitions they can have, or how those labels have intersected across communities for decades now

It’s why people don’t understand the differences between the transfemme and transmascs communitys’ histories, or the differences in struggles they have- and then feed into those struggles without even realizing it

It’s why people straight-up recycle old homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, uncritically and unironically, as if they’ve discovered cool some new bigbrain hot take for the “super smart” gay kids 

It’s why people treat these complicated, contradictory-sounding, or lesser-known identities like “trendy new ways to claim you’re oppressed”- without understanding the history behind those labels, and those communities, and that they’ve been here longer than any of these people have been alive.

Like… yes, we’re moving forward now. Things are changing, and in many ways, it’s for the better! But we seem to forget that most of our community was lost in the 80′s and 90′s, and those folks left a massive, gaping chasm behind.

We don’t have the same easy, communal roots to our history that we used to. And in order to rebuild that, we- the entire community- is going to have to do some work to learn it and teach it and move forward with it in mind.

[queer-hotcakes]

Thankfully there is not finite space for stories and no one is saying that it's one or the other.

"does it have to be queer"

yes, next question, unless the next question is "why", in which case I am pulling the lever

[queer-hotcakes]

"does it have to be queer"

yes, next question, unless the next question is "why", in which case I am pulling the lever

[queer-hotcakes]

Historical Trans Men

1. Dr. James Barry, 1789-1865, military surgeon

2. "One-Eyed" Charley Parkhurst, 1812-1879, stagecoach driver

3. Ralph Kerwineo, 1876-1932, clerk

4. Harry Allen, 1882-1922, vagrant and criminal

5. Amelio Robles Ávila, 1889-1984, military commander during the Mexican Revolution

6. Victor Barker, 1895-1960, restaurant proprietor

7. Zdeněk Koubek, 1913-1986, track athlete

8. Billy Tipton, 1914-1989, jazz musician

9. Willmer "Little Ax" M. Broadnax, 1916-1992, jazz musician

10. Jim McHarris, 1924-?, auto mechanic

[queer-hotcakes]

Absolutely correct. It's also too vague. Terfs and those like them cant police who is and isnt allowed in their club if they cant examine your credentials in minute detail.

I'm queer. That's really all you, a stranger, needs to know about my gender and sexuality and the very complex relationship between them.

queer is literally a slur. like you’ve never been called that in a derogatory context like most lgbt people? you think your experiences escaping homophobia make it okay to justify the use of a homophobic slur?

queer is an identity.

it has also been used as a slur. there is no denying that. but using a word as a slur does not make it a slur. because before queer is a slur it is an identity. before it is derogatory it is a label. the use of queer as an identity is infinitely more important than the use of queer as a slur because the people who identify as queer are infinitely more important than the people who use queer as a slur.

say a lot of people decided they hated me. despised me. were disgusted by me to the point where my own name became a slur. would you tell me not to say it? would you tell me i could no longer be helena, and instead must come up with a euphemism for the name that belonged to me decades before it belonged in the mouths of bigots?

because that would make you an enabler.

you would tell me i can’t say my name anymore because some lowlife decided he could use it to insult me?

you would tell a gay man that he can’t be gay anymore because some teens in the early 2000’s started calling everything they didn’t like “gay”, and now he has to say “same sex oriented male identifying individual”?

does that enrage you? because it should. that’s exactly how you sound.

you are telling me i cannot use my label. you are telling me that when my great-uncle shouted until his face was red and he spat tobacco and the word queer at my feet, he was right. he was right to insult me, and i was wrong to say my name.

you are shitting on every single one of our predecessors. you are slandering every person who fought for their rights to exist and and be tolerated and be celebrated in their countries, every person who was lost to the aids epidemic, every person whose country criminalizes love and gender expression, every child whose parents abandoned them for straying from the norm, every person who was born and will die in the closet longing to be themselves. the queer umbrella is a safety net, a security blanket, the comfort of being known without being pressured to tell. it is near and dear and important as fuck to every member of the lgbt+ community and you are a blight upon the earth you walk.

how dare you speak upon my experiences with homophobia. how dare you disguise your own homophobia as activism. and how fucking dare you have the audacity to come to my blog and hide behind an anonymous ask and preach to me about how i’m oppressing myself. go look at the fucking wikipedia page for queer and read about how 1980s lgbt+ activists, especially lgbt+ people of color, fought to call themselves queer in a world that still hates peculiar things. and here you are forty years later spitting queer back at their feet.

i don’t give a fuck if people start using my name as a slur. my name is still helena. i will not change it. i chose it, i like it, and it belongs to me. it does not belong to bigots no matter how badly they want it. your discomfort with my identity is not my fucking problem.

i am helena. i am queer. die mad & go fuck yourself

[queer-hotcakes]

As a reference for newcomers to my blog, here’s the rundown of my stance on popular topics in the community.

I don’t think that the terms exclusionist and inclusionist really mean anything anymore. So here’s a rough outline of some of my more common hot takes:

gender non conforming people are not trans. being gnc is a behavior, not a gender in and of itself. gnc is not the same as being non-binary.

trans people have some measure of dysphoria. people, especially those on this website, need to have a better understanding of what dysphoria is. GENDER EUPHORIA IS THE RESULT OF THE ALLEVIATION OF GENDER DYSPHORIA. Not all dysphoria is soul crushing and all consuming.

Trans people who choose not to pursue medical means of transitioning, for whatever reason, are absolutely valid and deserving of respect.

Non-binary and genderqueer identities are absolutely part of the queer community but I do not believe that they are automatically trans by extension. It does not automatically exclude them either.

being trans should remain medicalized to ensure that trans people retain insurance coverage for their HRT, gender reassignment surgeries, and other treatments. I understand that transgender is not a medical diagnosis but there needs to be protocols and best practices in place to help transgender individuals navigate the expensive and complicated medical aspect of transition. Separating “trandgender” from the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is a disservice to the community and detrimental to the trans community.

being asexual is a yes or no question, not a gradient. you either experience no sexual attraction at all and are asexual or you experience sexual attraction and you are not asexual.

lack of sexual attraction or repulsion of sexual acts due to trauma does not make you asexual and is something that you should absolutely be seeking psychological treatment for. embracing symptoms of trauma as part of your identity is not healthy.

This does not mean that lack of sexual attraction is inherently bad or wrong, but especially if this is a new phenomenon it is worth considering why. Things such as trauma or complications from certain medications may be the cause.

the split attraction model is harmful and promotes internalized homophobia/biphobia as well as painting sexual attraction in a negative light.

mogai identities are inherently harmful to the community and the individuals who buy into them.

I will not police terms and identities that individuals choose for themselves, but I will debate the larger concepts in a respectful way. For instance, I strongly dislike the split attraction model and think it is harmful to the community, but I will never tell someone they are not allowed to use it for themselves.

Queer is no more a slur than anything else the community has used over time. Kindly learn some history before trying to say otherwise.

Pressuring people to choose an identity is wrong. The community, especially the younger ones, are too hyper focused on microlabels and are creating pressure on people to label themselves far before they are ready.

Being cishet is not a crime and the younger members of the community need to stop demonizing it and saying things like “why would you ever choose to be cishet”. It spreads harmful messages in so many ways.

[queer-hotcakes]

Someone replied to one of our recent posts:

“Agree with most of this but would like to point out that a part of the push to make Pride less sexual is to make it a safe space for queer children and to help straights realize being queer isn’t just about fetishes.“

(The person is not tagged because I don’t want to send any hate to them, and the reply isn’t being responded to directly because Tumblr has made that near impossible)

When I came out, my mom told me I couldn’t tell my little sister because it was too sexual.

Later, I moved to the “Big City”, what I hoped to be a haven for queer people. I was with one of the first queer friends my wife and I had made in the city, we had just watched their wrestling debut, and had gone to their apartment afterwards with a group of strangers. Some this group our friend had told us behind the scenes were much more right wing causing our friend to keep parts of their queer identity under wraps.

Our friend suddenly turned to us and began scolding us, telling me and my wife that one of their coworkers at the city Pride Centre had approached them and told them that she had seen me and my wife kiss, and we needed to cut it out with the PDA.

I nodded in front of this group of strangers and when I could no longer hold my tears back I excused myself to the bathroom, cried and waited there until it was no longer obvious I had been crying. We hurried out.

The kiss in question was a goodbye kiss, as my wife went back to campus, and I don’t remember it. I have always been rather shy with PDA and don’t think it could have been much more than a peck. The coworker later told our friend that she was going through a bad breakup and our friend later explained that this was actually the reason for the complaint.

I have never felt safe in queer spaces since. Talking to the same friend later, they asked me and my wife to chaperone the Queer Prom and without thinking I assured them we would make sure not to hold hands or dance while we were there so it would stay “a safe space for children”.

When I was a child, I stumbled into a pride parade and was shocked and upset by the men in gold short shorts. My uncle apologized for letting me see something so sexual and awful.

Every single thing queer people do is “about fetishes” to people who hate queerness. Being less sexual is not going to change that.

I had seen short shorts before. I would see them again, and no one would apologize for that. The thing I was being kept “safe” from was not overly sexual behaviour, and considering there are already laws against indecent exposure, the same is true for children now.

Keeping theoretical children safe has been the justification for the continuing genocide against queer people all around the globe, so this rhetoric is not harmless. It has been used to put queer people in labour camps and slaughter them. 

I have nothing to prove to “straights” and I was the “queer child” who was horrified by the pride parades. As an adult, the discomfort I felt at seeing queer people existing happily and authentically in short shorts, is not something I needed to be kept safe from.

This nonsense is nothing more or less than the same moral panic that has killed queer people throughout history.

[queer-hotcakes]

A comic adaptation of Zoe Leonard’s “I want a dyke for president” (1992)