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olderthannetfic · 3 years

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hi hi history-non again, sorry I know it's a very

ahem wide and girthy ahem

ask, and i'm sorry for not narrowing it down farther my brain is smooth as butter and the dart board, so to speak, is. big. i feel like im throwing my dart in the ocean of 'what i don't know' and trying to spear a fish who might speak to me like the queer elder i never ha d ;lkasjd;flkas damn you small conservative town ANYWAYS

i guess okay maybe do you have any favourite figureheads? whats your fave pieces of lgbtqa+ media (like books or shows?)

thanks again and sorry for.

uh.

big.

Lolololol. Yes.... it’s so... big...

In the 90s, the writers of nonfiction who I found really inspirational were Susie Bright and Kate Bornstein. My Gender Workbook was a classic. I gather there’s a new edition.

I was a massive, massive nerd, so my actual favorite queer book as a 14-year-old is one that will be a bit... uh... much if you’re not feeling very intellectual. It’s Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. This thing is a massive doorstop of a book that collects academic journal articles on third gender roles from various cultures. I was obsessed with this thing. Again, it’s academic journal articles, not popular nonfiction, so expect that level of impenetrable prose.

I was also a giant weeb, so I read a bunch of books on the history of gay sex in Japan. It’s pretty interesting how much people assume the “m/m sex = sin” shit was worldwide and how much it just was not.

In terms of fiction, I’ve always struggled to find f/f media I relate to. I really like the tv adaptations of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet. Lots of fucked up problematicness and gorgeous visuals. Gotta love the lady with the strap-on and the gold body paint!

For other queer media, I was a big fan of Velvet Goldmine and of Pedro Almodóvar’s older films, which are full of every problematic kink you can think of. They also have a lot of het I like, like the lady being coerced into sex (that she enjoys) by the drag queen who impersonates her famous mother she has a lot of mommy issues about... except said drag queen is really an undercover police officer. Just... whut. (All the “straight” stuff in Almodóvar’s films is also bugfuck nuts and often kind of queer.)

I really, really, really loved Crash. Not the shitty one that won an oscar: the car crash perverts one full of weird UST. There’s a ton of straight sex in this too, along with every gender combo and a laundry list of upsetting kinks. It’s just every kind of weird perv thing. (”Weird art film full of sex and problematicness” is pretty much the defining feature of movies I liked as a teen. I loved Kissed, that het necrophilia movie too.)

Stage Beauty is probably my favorite film for bi vibes. It’s this meditation on identity as the English stage was changing over from having men play women to having actual actresses. It ends in f/m, but it’s definitely a very queer film.

If you want slice of life stuff, I guess you could try Dykes to Watch Out For (the comic that’s the source of the bechdel test) or the Tales of the City novel series. These will both give you a sense of what was going on in certain queer communities in the late 20thC. If you want something relatively fluffy, Maurice is a historical costume drama with a happy ending. I found it awfully slow as a college student, but it does have naked Rupert Graves (Lestrade from Sherlock), so...

----

See, this is hard to answer because I came of age and did all of my reading of that kind a long time ago. I pretty quickly moved on to fangirl media, which I have always liked a lot better than other arguably queer stuff. Back in the 90s, that meant Japanese stuff and fic. Later, I had access to more flavors of by-fujoshi-for-fujoshi media.

So my actual favorite m/m books are a bunch of “m/m romance” (i.e. American BL being sold as ebooks on amazon). If you want live action TV and fandomy vibes, you’re better off with Trapped (hot cop/mobster action!) or one of those Thai series about schoolboys or something than stuff made by cis gay men in the US.

I also came of age in an era when “queer” media was very Cis Gay Men And Sometimes Cis Lesbians with an occasional nod to bi people existing... maybe. Kate Bornstein and a few others were raising the profile of MtF transsexuals (the term in use at the time) who wanted surgery or even, gasp, maybe didn’t want bottom surgery in some cases. Anything about FtMs or nb/agender/etc. identities was practically invisible. I saw the term ‘genderqueer’ around a bit, but it was mostly in contexts that were very tryhard and unappealing to me.

(You haven’t given any details, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’re like much of tumblr and the flavors of queerness you relate to aren’t so much the Cis Gay Men Only culture that makes up quite a bit of queer history and older queer media.)

I can tell you what I liked as a teen, but not everybody is into fucked up art films that may not have happy endings. I can try to rec things about queer culture in the 90s, but I probably don’t have great recs for way earlier or later than that... unless it’s so much earlier that I’ve researched it while writing fic of some historical canon or other. A lot of how I learned about queer culture myself was from magazines or from reading soc.bi on usenet or just from living through the 90s--not typically from books that are easy to unearth and just hand to someone now.

I tend to just not like anything in the contemporary romance or slice of life genres, regardless of gender and orientation, so while I’ve watched/read a bit more queer stuff like this, especially in the past when I had less access to queer media, it’s not a space I’m great at reccing in. And that’s unfortunate because a lot of that type of art gives you a better sense of what other queer people were like in other eras and/or it’s a safer rec than some bananas crazy BDSM film.

I was, and am, very kinky (though pretty lazy in terms of actual practice), so a lot of my reading and media interest was bound up in that also. Obviously, I was quite interested in the drawings of Tom of Finland or the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, but are you going to be into photos of some guy shoving a whip handle in his ass? I love the movie Cruising... it’s about serial killers and leather and homophobia and is every bit as potentially traumatizing as that sounds.

I feel you on the problem of finding queer elders. There isn’t really an obvious way to go about this.

#queer history #queer media #Anonymous

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butch-bakugo · 3 years

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The ugly truth: yall hate bigender people.

Like really REALLY hate bigender people.

This is primarily a vent but tbh if your arent bigender/two spirit/ identify as both male and female, read it. Yall look over our experiences constantly.

I feel like theres this weird idea in the non-bigender communities that we are invaders or some shit. Its a very common experience to being bisexual in lgb spaces(obviously not to the extent faced by bi people but as both, i can see the sameities).

Like... You pick and prod to find out our sex. You assume we are all intersex, fetishize intersex people or want to have a mixed sex body. When you call us out, you only refer to one side of us. You consider one of our genders to be more important than the other in " conveint" situations. You say you respect and want to represent all nonbinary people but the only nonbinaryhood you show is the lack of gender/agender or other gender/3rd gender experiences. You call us fetishizers. You call us whores and invaders.

Like... M/f bigender people can not exist in our own damn spaces.

I dont think its a coincidence that whenever people talk about nonbinary lesbians, they never mention bigender lesbians who experience both the experiences of being a het man and lesbian woman. We are ostracized in both wlw and mlm spaces.

Youre veiwed as " too much of a woman to be around mlm" despite being a man yourself as well as " too much of a man to be around wlw" despite being a woman yourself. No matter what, youre one too many genders. Even the people who claim to support nb people in wlw/mlm spaces and claim to support nb lesbians and nb gays draw the line with you. You feel like your not allowed to experience your own identity and have to constantly question yourself if your too masc leaning to be a lesbian despite your womanhood or too fem leaning to be a gay despite your manhood.

Its a constant guessing game and self check that causes so much needless anxeity and self policing that often drives nb people to just identify as nblw or nblm. Its not fair and its not right.

I dont think its an accident that when i talk about mysogny and my experiences as a victim of it, i only get refered to as a man by people who dont like my opinion. I only get called a man, a boy, a male, etc. Same as i dont think its an accident that when i talk about toxic masculinity in ftm spaces and how hard it is to relate to mlm experiences as someone with trauma around cis men, i only get refered to as a woman by people who dont like my opinion.

Bigender people's gender is not 2 peices. Its not a male side and female side. We are both. Our genders are not seperateable. Yes, some bigender people lean and flow between which they feel most but regardless thats not the only experience.

We are forced to be in constant questioning from ourselves and others. Others ask constantly if we lean a certain way or if we present even 1% in a direction other that equally male and female. As much as yall claim to be nonbinary supporters, you really hate bigender people.

Some of us dont even bother to say we lean one way or another and end up identifying as both a het man and lesbian woman... Because being both male and female while only being attracted to women(and related enbies) is a experience shared by heterosexual men and lesbian women that all depends on the male/mlw and woman/wlw sides of a bigender person. They experience both experiences, lesbian (especially trans) women's and het( especially trans) men's orientations and understandings of the intersection of gender and orientation are never, never have been and never will be muturally exclusive.

So what do we do? We identify as both and oh boy do yall transphobic pieces of shit throw fits. You imply that we are forceing men in lesbians sexuality (which totally dosent have any transmysognisitc undertones 🙄) or we are implying trans men can be lesbians( which totally dosent have manipulative, transphobic and Transandrophobic undertones at ALL 🙄🙄).

Like all the arguments about where bigender people can and cant be are completely tone deaf. You cant seperate our experiences from each other and your going to have to live with the fact that people will exist in every orientation space who identify as a man and a woman. Yall cant keep acting like your anti-bigender sediments arent litterally just enbyphobic and transphobic. Not to mention the underlying racism of it all considering most cultural exclusive are mixes of " male" and "female".

Bigender m/f people are in litterally ALL FORMS OF ATTRACTION. This isnt a debate. They always have been. They always will be. No amount of "but they are too female for me" when they are a whole ass man too crybabying will excuse the blatant enbyphobia yall let loose on them.

#levi speaks #enbyphobia #transphobia tw #transphobia #bigenderphobia #tw homophobia #btw i didnt just type this in 2 minutes #i had it in my drafts for abit because it needed tags and i didnt have spoons but we are good now

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woman-loving · 4 years

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The Emergence of a Lesbian Bar Scene in 1960s Sydney

Selection from Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History, Rebecca Jennings, 2015.

In addition to these social groups, lesbians were also beginning to join a much longer-standing gay male bar culture in significant numbers, reflecting a broader social acceptance of women and public drinking in the wake of reforms to the licensing laws in the late 1950s. Male narrators recall seeing lesbians on the commercial scene for the first time in the early 1960s, and lesbian narrators begin to discuss their participation in the bar scene from the 1960s onwards.[28] Lesbians socialised alongside homosexual men and drag queens in venues such as Chez Ivy wine bar in Bondi Junction and the Purple Onion coffee shop on Anzac Parade. Virginia, who first visited Chez Ivy and the Purple Onion in the early 1960s, went out on the scene in a group of male and female camp friends and remembers that: ‘It was very mixed. I hardly went anywhere where it was just for women. I think the women’s thing came later, yeah, the segregation side of it.’ She spent these nights out drinking gin and tonic, talking to her friends and dancing the twist, as well as enjoying the drag shows that were put on at the Purple Onion and Les Girls.[29] When Carolyn began to frequent Chez Ivy in the late 1960s she also remembered the clientele as very diverse:

“Chez Ivy’s was home to guys, girls, drag, bi, crossdressers and straights--I felt comfortable in this group and I would look forward to hitting ‘the Club’ each night and weekend ... The cat fights and tantrums were ongoing--this added to the fun of the night and drama. We had parents looking for sons and daughters, bomb threats, vice squad raids, scuffles with ex-lovers--but it was fun!"[30]

Chez Ivy closed at 10pm, but many revellers continue their night out at coffee shops such as Doddy’s on Darlinghurst Road and the Coffee Pot in Kings Cross, or at cabaret clubs such as Les Girls or the Purple Onion.

This picture of the 1960s as a period of transition from a predominantly male to a mixed camp scene is supported by accounts which suggest that lesbians, as newcomers, were not always entirely welcome at Sydney’s camp venues in this period. One reason for this attitude may have been the behaviour and image projected by some bar lesbians: a number of interviewees recall Sydney’s bar lesbians as being quite ‘tough’ or ‘rough’ in this period, in contrast to the more flamboyant drag culture cultivated by camp men. Lesbians were widely regarded as being prone to fighting and causing difficulty in bars with their behaviour. [...]

Although the majority of venues were mixed in the 1960s, lesbians increasingly made up most of the clientele at a few bars: the Trolley Car near Sydney University, the Sussex Hotel on Sussex Street in the City and the Park Inn opposite Centennial Park. Dennis worked at the Trolley Car, owned by Dawn O’Donnell, when it opened in 1966 and recalled the venue as a ‘long, old terraced house’ with a licensed bar downstairs until 10pm and an upstairs room which continued to operate illicitly after official closing time. The venue was popular with lesbians[...]. A significant lesbian clientele also mixed with drag queens at the Park Inn in this period. Karen went to the Park Inn in the late 1960s and recalled that ‘The majority that went there were women.’[35] Laurie, who had gone there for the first time in the 1960s with her girlfriend Helena and two new friends, also remembered:

“I walked in there and it was like seventh heaven. It was full of lesbians from wall to carpet to wall you know? And drag queens. I saw my first drag show there and that was it for me ... We went there every Friday night to Saturday night for the next ten, fifteen years I think?’”[36]

A number of the women who socialised in these venues adopted masculine dress codes and identities. Laurie recalled that all the lesbians at the Park Inn were ‘butch and femme. Three piece suits, cufflinks, ties, the whole bit.’ Laurie herself was introduced to this butch/femme scene by some lesbian friends, who took her clothes shopping in the men’s department of Grace Bros and then to get her hair cut into a ‘short back and sides’ before escorting her to the bar. Her girlfriend, Helene, retained her feminine dress and appearance, as she was adopting a femme identity. Margaret also described the masculine appearance of the other women clientele when she first discovered a camp venue in the 1960s. [...]

For some women, adopting a butch appearance meant potentially passing as a man. Colette recalled experiencing some confusion on her first encounter with a butch lesbian in the early 1960s:

“In 1964/65 I said to my sister, ‘We have to find some lesbians’ ... the only gay place at that time was a place called the ‘Hole in the Wall’, literally a brick circle had been made in the wall ... it was dark inside. It was in Kings Cross in the vicinity of St Vincent’s hospital. It was fully of very interesting people and after about an hour I noticed this very attractive blond boy, there was just something about him, and he obviously noticed me because he came over and spoke and her turned out to be a woman in fully drag so this was terribly exciting for me ... she looked like a boy but she was a girl, this was exactly what I was looking for. So we went home together and it was off with the frock for me and she unstrapped and stripped down to a t-shirt.”[38]

Colette’s reference to the girl unstrapping suggests that some butch lesbians in this period were binding their breasts in order to adopt a more masculine physique, in addition to wearing male clothes.[39] Some of the lesbians who frequented Ivy Richter’s venues in the 1960s were similarly capable of passing as young men. Ivy recalled one occasion on which gender ambiguity led to an altercation between one of her lesbian clients and a member of the licensing police. [...]

The extent to which femme women were a part of the Sydney scene in this period is more difficult to determine. While a small number of accounts refer to butch/femme partnerships and communities, many focus primarily on butch lesbians, suggesting that butch identities predominated. It is also possible that many femme partners of butch lesbians occupied a more transient position in the lesbian social circles of this period and were therefore less visible. Davis and Kennedy noted that, in the butch/femme community they documents in 1940s and 1950s Buffalo, ‘many fems ... became butch, others went straight, and others claimed to be too shy to be interviewed.’[41] A similar picture emerges in Sydney. In her account of a casual encounter with a butch lesbian at the Hole in the Wall in Kings Cross in the 1960s, Colette describes herself as removing her ‘frock’, suggesting that her own appearance was more feminine than that of her butch partner. Colette herself was a newcomer to the bar on this occasion and implied that she was not part of any coherent lesbian community at the time. Accounts of the Park Inn hotel in this period also suggest that the predominantly butch lesbian clientele mixed with other women as well as drag queens. Laurie, who had gone there for the first time in the 1960s, recalled that women of all classes mixed there and ‘there was one table that was reserved permanently for when the prostitutes came in, from Kings Cross, and they were all gay.’[42] The hotel owner, Ken (Kandy) Johnson, claimed that nurses made up a significant group amongst the more butch regulars and remembered one occasion on which he had received a call from the local hospital, attempting to locate one of their nurses, who was needed to assist on an operation. [...] Kandy’s account of this exchange suggests that camp women who identified as butch--wearing men’s suits and short hair--may have interacted with more feminine prostitutes in his bar. Whether or not some of the prostitutes had sexual relationships with women, Kandy’s account suggests that others may not have immediately identified them as camp, defining them instead primarily as ‘prostitutes’. How the women themselves defined their sexual identity, if at all, is even more elusive, in the absence of accounts by femme participants in this scene.

The possibility that femme identities may not have been clearly identified as lesbian identity model is also suggested by Elizabeth’s account of roles in her suburban social circle. Unlike the majority of women socialising in private friendship networks in the mid-century, who describe their roles and appearance as conforming to mainstream ideals of respectable femininity, Elizabeth recalled her private house party scene in the late 1960s as organised around a restrictive form of gender role-playing. [...] Despite her partner’s expectation that she adopt a feminine appearance, however, Elizabeth does not appear to have developed a clearly defined femme identity. Explaining the relationship between their respective roles, Elizabeth was unsure of the term for a feminine partner, commenting:

“You were a butch lesbian or you were a, whatever, I don’t know what you call it, but anyway, you were one or the other and that’s how it worked and I thought that makes sense.”[45]

Elizabeth’s ambivalence toward her femme identity was also apparently reflected by those around her, as she recalled attracting criticism of her appearance from a woman at a party. The woman commented that Elizabeth shouldn’t ‘think you can fool us wearing that dress’, suggesting that she regarded the adoption of a feminine appearance as an attempt to hide a lesbian identity. This account suggests that feminine lesbians may have been viewed with distrust in some Sydney lesbian circles, and perhaps not regarded as having an important or valued role in that community.

Other accounts, however, suggest that both butch and femme identities were consciously adopted by some women as an indication of membership in a lesbian community. Laurie had been introduced to the butch/femme scene when she moved from Perth to Sydney in the 1960s and she she and her girlfriend Helene adopted butch and femme identities respectively. [...] After introducing them to butch/femme fashion, June and her girlfriend Karen took Laurie and Helen to their local bar and the new arrivals soon became regulars. Descriptions such as Laurie’s are reminiscent of postwar butch/femme lesbians in the US and UK, where the commercial bar scene fostered a highly nuanced subculture based around butch/femme role-playing, and new entrants to the community were expected to adopt either a butch or femme style and behaviour. This was often a highly conscious process in which new members chose an identity and experienced a rite of passage in which they adapted their image to fit the new identity. For Laurie, the decision to become a butch was taken by her new butch friend, June, on the basis that Laurie was a better pool player than Helene. [...]

Personal narrative such as Laurie’s suggest that, while a number of lesbian identity models in the 1960s were characterised by an emphasis on secrecy and discretion, others, such as butch/femme, were highly visible and confrontational. Butch/femme lesbians, like Laurie and Helen, forged their identities in social spaces which they shared with prostitutes, gay men and drag queens and as a result they understood their lesbianism within a broad, cross-gendered community of sexual minorities. Similarly, the shared nature of the camp social scene in the 1960s, meant that many more discreet lesbians in this period also defined their identity alongside gay men, in terms of a shared attempt to evade detection by mainstream society.

However, despite the presence of consciously butch women on the commercial lesbian scene in the 1960s, butch/femme did not represent a pervasive subculture in the Sydney camp bar scene in the manner described by historians of US lesbian subcultures. Oral history accounts suggest instead that butch lesbians coexisted with women of more conventional appearance, often sharing the same social spaces. This reflects the situation in Melbourne in the same period, where Lucy Chesser has found that:

“while there were sizeable lesbian social groups which organised around role playing in Melbourne in this period alternative models of lesbian relationship were often avialable to women from working class backgrounds ... In addition, butch/femme role playing appears to have deceased in importance as the 1960s progressed.”[48]

In Sydney, other lesbians who socialised both within and outside of the bar scene in the 1960s do not recall the early scene as a butch/femme culture and did not themselves adopt either a butch or femme identity. Virginia did not recall a butch/femme scene at Chez Ivy and the Purple Onion in the early 1960s, although she conceded that ‘some of them probably were pretty butch’, while Carolyn described Chez Ivy’s lesbian clientele as a relatively diverse culture group.[49] The fluidity of lesbian dress and identity on the commercial camp scene in Sydney in the 1960s reflects the predominance of small, private networks in the preceding decades and indicates the absence of a long-standing and developed subculture in the bars of this period.

Moreover, the ways in which women made use of the new pubic spaces becoming available to them continued to be shaped by private networks and patterns of socialising. Both the bar scene and the camp social groups in the 1960s were relatively secretive and enclosed, making it difficult for outsiders or the authorities to identify them. In the absence of any homosexual press, bars and clubs did not advertise and only a few individuals were lucky enough to stumble across them by accident. The mainstream press could occasionally give a hint but most women were introduced to the camp scene by friends from elsewhere.[50] Virginia first visited camp bars with friends from a North Shore ballroom dancing club she belonged to, and Karen began socialising with lesbians she met at a hockey club in the late 1960s. Carolyn and her girlfriend were first introduced to Chez Ivy by a lesbian couple they met by chance on holiday in the Central Coast.[51] The enclosed nature of the scene in this period also lent a secretive atmosphere to socialising, which some women remembered as exciting. [...] Lucy Chesser argues that the sense of belonging to a secretive lesbian subculture in this period played an important role in affirming women’s lesbian identities and giving women a sense of pride in escaping detection.[53]

Friendship circles continued to be important, not only introducing women to venues, but in the ways in which individual lesbians made use of the spaces available to them. Unlike the pattern of socialising in London’s lesbian venues in the 1960s, where each bar or club possessed it own community of regular clientele with specific behavioural codes and identities, venues seem to have played a less important role in shaping identity on the Sydney scene. Women moved more freely from one venue to another, but as groups rather than individuals. [...] In this sense, the commercial camp scene which emerged for lesbians in the 1960s reflected earlier patterns of socialising in the city. Women continued to structure their social networks around small, private circles of friends and simply extended the location of their social activities as new spaces became available to them. Sydney’s lesbian socialising in the 1960s was defined by one’s circle of friends, rather than a regular haunt, and as a result women moved easily between the social spaces available to them.

#lgbtq #lgbtq history #lesbian history #bisexual history #butch femme #australia #australian lgbtq history #sydney

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communistsans · 4 years

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Bi/pan lesbian is not a term you should use.

Let me be clear, I think the experience you're describing is real, but the term is offensive to bi, pan, and lesbian people. Bi, pan, and lesbian are separate sexualities. They cannot be put together because they are directly contradictory. And before you say "what about x sexuality and ace," that is different, because the terms bi, straight, pan, lesbian, and gay all define the romantic and sexual parts of attraction. Ace only describes a lack of sexual attraction, leaving the question of who they are romantically attracted to. So if someone says they are ace and bi, it works because from that you know that they are attracted to women/men, but only romantically. You wouldn't say, "I'm aromantic, asexual, and bi," because all those things overlap. You can't be attracted to no one romantically or sexually AND be attracted to men/women. Lesbian describes a sexuality that means women/fem aligned people who are EXCLUSIVELY attracted (romantically and/or sexually) to women/fem aligned people. Bisexual describes a sexuality that means someone attracted (romantically and/or sexually) to 2 or more genders. Pansexual describes a sexuality that means someone attracted to others (romantically and/or sexually) regardless of their sex/gender.

So that's why the term is nonsensical, but why is it offensive to lesbians and bisexuals/pansexuals? I'm bi woman, so take my lesbian commetary with a grain of salt.

I believe every sexuality has a bit of wiggle room, and also that that doesn't mean that a person can't use the term gay/lesbian. I don't think a straight man being attracted to one guy makes him gay/bi, I don't think being a lesbian and being attracted to one guy makes her bi/straight. I'm bisexual and people often ask me if they are bi because they are attracted to x obviously attracitve celebrity, and the answer is usually no. It takes more than being attracted to a couple of people of the opposite sex to be bi/pansexual. What makes you bi/pan is being able to be genuinely attracted to, date, fall in love with, and be intimate with people of the same and different sexes/genders. I think straight and gay people alike can have genuine attractions that do not align with their sexuality and still be that sexuality. However the key here is that those are exceptions. When 99% of your experiences are exclusive to one gender then yes, you are gay/lesbian. I don't think that genuinely liking your high school boyfriend because he was a sweet guy and you hadn't figured yourself out yet makes you not a lesbian. And I think to say that it does is also lesbophobic. Just to get the whole "sexuality is fluid" out of the way.

Relationships between women are so often devalued, and lesbians often suffer from people erasing their sexualities, or people assuming that somehow they must be attracted to men in some way. This is a fucked up and lesbophobic way of thinking, and it's stupid that they have to deal with that. Lesbians shouldn't be made to feel ashamed of personal experiences for fear of having their sexuality questioned/invalidated. Politically speaking, it is critical for lesbians to ensure the term lesbian means a sexuality of women exclusively being attracted to women, please do not interfere with this term. It is important to their communities that it stays that way. However I know what is politically convenient isn't always what is personally true. On a personal note, I think the distinction should be this: if you HAVE BEEN attracted to a couple of men in your life but could never see yourself being with a man and being happy, and can easily say that 95% or more of your attraction has been exclusively to women, you are a lesbian. If you ARE attracted to men and could see yourself being happy in a relationship with a man, you are bisexual or pansexual. As a bisexual person, I don't experience or see my attraction to either men or women as exceptions, they are both natural and part of my sexuality. I also want to note that it is unfair and lesbophobic to assume that because someone has liked one guy in their life it somehow discredits the rest of their experiences, especially when we dont hold gay men to the same standard. In fact, its usually the opposite! If a straight man has one experience with another guy everyone assumes he must be gay/bi, even though he has only ever been attracted to women. Ultimately, if someone says they are a lesbian, they like women and just women. End of story. Yes there could be different personal anecdotes, but lesbians are attracted to women alone. To say otherwise is lesbophobic. If you are attracted to men, you aren't a lesbian.

Implying that lesbians are attracted to men is lesbophobic, so why is the term "bi lesbian" also biphobic? Well because in addition to erasing the meaning of lesbian, it also erases the meaning of bi. Bisexuals are often believed to secretly be straight or gay. We are not gay or straight, we're bi. I get the term is trying to say that you have a strong preference for women; many bisexuals have a preference, however you are still bi. If this "preference" is that strong to the point where you basically are near exclusively attracted to women, then you are probably a lesbian. You are either a bi person with a preference for women, or you are a lesbian. You cannot be both bi and a lesbian. Substitute bi for pan here and the commentary is the same.

I've also seen people who say they call themselves bi/pan lesbians because they are attracted to women and also to nonbinary people. And okay, I see where you're coming from here, but that doesnt mean the term isn't offensive. Gender non-conforming and nonbinary lesbians are a thing and I'm not about to police nb lesbians; they have always existed and been important parts of the lesbian community. But if the only nb people you find yourself being attracted to are nb lesbians and other fem aligned people, you're still a lesbian. If you aren't comfortable with that because it erases some peoples identity, then use bi/pan, because those are the terms to describe attraction to 2 or more genders. Or use queer! I knew a couple in college who were a lesbian couple until one of them came out as trans masc. To not invalidate them, their partner said they were queer instead of lesbian.

Another person I have seen using this term is women who are basically bi/pan or even straight who for whatever reason have stopped dating men permanently, despite being attracted to them, and this actually has some historical precedent. During 2nd wave feminism these women called themselves "political lesbians," giving up dating men in order to free themselves from misogyny. If this is your experience, do what you want, but again, the term bi/pan lesbian is harmful to lesbians and bi/pansexuals and please call yourself something else. I think it's fine to call yourself a lesbian or gay for convenience sake if you really do never plan on dating men again. Please just understand that the lesbian/bi/pan communities need to have the integrity of these terms for political reasons. Lesbian is not an umbrella term the way gay or queer is. On a personal level, yes there is wiggle room, but on political level these terms need to have definitions.

Ultimately if you identify as a bi/pan lesbian, please stop using that term. It's problematic for lesbian, bi, and pan communities and frankly makes no sense. If you want a fluid term, you can always just say "queer" or "queer with a preference for women." Normally I don't care about what people identify as and I against gatekeeping, because in the end it doesn't hurt anyone. But this isn't about gatekeeping. The term bi lesbian is harmful, which is why I'm asking anyone defending that term to please reconsider. If you identify with this term, I'm not sending hate your way and I'm not trying to invalidate you. I'm just saying this term is harmful and there are plenty of other non problematic ways to describe your sexuality, like wlw, nblw, sapphic, or queer.

If I got something wrong here please tell me! I just think there is a lot of really hateful debate going on here and it's extremely unnecessary. But my final stance is that the term bi lesbian/pan lesbian is offensive, biphobic, and especially lesbophobic, and we should do better by the lesbian community, who are constantly being erased.

#bi lesbian #pan lesbian #lgbtq discourse #discourse

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vixianna · 6 years

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So I Just Figured Out Something Weird About Exclusionists...

So, I was looking through a few exclusionists blogs. Normally, I’d say that was purely a #mistake, but this time it was enlightening, especially about specific claims exclusionists make about asexuality.

So, a good number of the posts I looked at were aimed at lesbian and gay people, which is like normal and nbd. They were about helping questioning people who thought they might be lesbian or gay and describing their experiences as lesbian or gay people. A large number of responses to asks were like “well if you feel lesbian/gay, then you probably are.” which super valid, that’s how it works for LGBT+ people. Except, a lot of the people I saw sending in questions, especially to like bottomsona’s blog, specifically expressed experiencing attraction to multiple genders, but were not at the moment interested in pursuing relationships with men. Most of the responses were tailored around "well, if you're not going to date men, you can just call yourself a lesbian if you are only gonna date women/women-aligned people", which is fine on its own, I’m not the label police.

However, this response was informed by the stance that that lesbian(or gay, or bi, ect) existed as a label to communicate who you intended to date not who you are attracted to. I bring this up because a really common and previously to me super goddamn weird obsession of exclusionists was focused on how "asexual doesn't communicate anything". “How can you be asexual and still date/have sex?” And it occurred to me after reading this that if exclusionists were using sexuality labels as a shorthand for “who I am sexually/romantically available to” and not “who I feel attraction to” without any implication of dating/sex/relationships/ect then all of their “asexuality is a modifier and also doesn’t mean anything and the definition keeps changing!” starts to make sense.

Instead of:

-Lesbian = woman who is solely attracted to women

-Lesbian = woman/woman-aligned person who is solely attracted to other women/woman-aligned people(this definition still has a lot of problems but it's the one that is closest to how they use it)

It's:

-Lesbian = woman/woman-aligned person who is solely interested in forming relationships with women/woman-aligned people

They mean it to communicate like availability, openness, to others about who they are going to form intimate relationships with. This connects with several inclusionists observations that exclusionists seem really fucking pissed about things that don’t immediately signal whether you are available to them or not. Or more accurately, whether you are available to what they understand to be “gay relationships” or not.

For example, this is why they feel asexuality is a “modifier” because in this case it would have to be a combination of “doesn’t desire sexual relationships” and “desires relationships with these genders”, and it’s why they are so obsessed with whether or not asexuals have sex, and with whom, and under what circumstances. Because obviously the only way asexuality means anything if it is communicating that you do not desire a sexual relationship with others.

This also explains why they are so freaked the hell out about anyone saying they are asexual, especially kids, because it would be announcing a specific aspect of your sex life (and why some of them keep comparing it to kinks?? For reasons that used to confuse me.) To them it is only communicating your desire to have sex or not(which is why they find ace spectrum sexuality especially confusing or “not real” or describe it as “just people being normal”.)

This means one of the bigger problems is them operating from the idea that sexuality labels are meant to communicate to others who you'd be open to fucking/being in a relationship with, and not a representation of like your internal experiences of attraction.

This is also one of the reasons why they are so hostile to the idea of “examining your attractions closely/at all” because it ultimately “doesn’t matter”, not if what really matters is who you’d be willing to be in a relationship with and everything else is “incoherent” and “not important”, because your label is supposed to communicate who you’d fuck/date. It is essentially why they are so hostile to a-spec identities, but it also spills over onto other groups.

Attraction, dating, ect are not so clear cut or easily defined for many members of the community, especially Nonbinary people. So a lot of our sexuality labels require more introspection as do our genders. Further, that’s one of the reasons behind the push for NBs to use alignment language(or even have it prescriptively assigned). If you don’t tell others if you are man/woman aligned(and often you have to pick either one or the other!) then they don’t know whether you are someone they could be attracted to/should be attracted to/are included in their attraction label. Or more exactly, they don’t know if you are someone who they would form a relationship with, whether or not they are personally attracted to you.

It is also ultimately, why they are so hostile to queer as a single label. Because while it, as an orientation label, definitely tells you this person is likely “sga” by their standards(which are highly flawed and cissexist lmao), it doesn’t inform you “who”/“which genders”/“how many of them” you are available to form intimate relationships with and so “is useless” and virulently attacked because of it. Never mind that it is often used by people for whom gender is a complicated subject, or picking out which genders they are attracted to is difficult or impossible(m-specs, Nbs, ect), it doesn’t communicate what they feel labels are meant to:

Who are you sexually/romantically available to?

Mind you, the claim that people are ID’in as queer in order to infiltrate the community is even more ridiculous than the one against ace/aro people.

Why?

By their own admittance, and concurrent campaign, queer is seen as a slur by straight people. The chances of some “cishet woman calling herself queer because she pegs her boyfriend.” as so eloquently described by hatetobreakittoyou, existing is literally nil. Like, in what universe are Real CisHets™ going to think "this person is really straight and one of us" about someone who describes themself as "queer"?

This means a person would be literally putting a target on their back...for what? Being an open member of a violently targeted minority group does you no favors. There is nothing for this mythical woman to gain by putting herself through the ringer pretending to be LGBT+!

It’s a coherent, if wrongheaded, expansion of their idea that identity labels need to be completely immediately clear and only exist to tell others if you’d fuck/date them, but it’s an ultimately destructive stance and ideology to have. It’s m-spec antagonistic, requiring that m-specs be both in “sga” relationships and have to be “sga” in order to be m-spec(which is you know also exorsexist). It’s hostile to ace/aro people. It’s hostile to queer people and others whose identity is far more complicated. It prioritizes lesbian and gay people(especially binary ones, and especially cis binary ones). It fractures the community, and it’s one of the main toxic tenants behind a lot of their garbage ass rhetoric.

You don’t have to be open to dating/fucking at every particular moment every gender you are attracted to to be m-spec. Your label says nothing about whether you are interested in dating or sex if you are a-spec. That’s not what these labels have historically or even currently mean in general usage, which is why there is so much cross talk when trying to come to an accord with exclusionists. They are working for radically different definitions of even typically understood sexuality labels.(bi to them means “same and others” and not “two+”, ace means “doesn’t want to fuck” and not “doesn’t experience sexual attraction/attracted to no one”, ect)

Has anyone else encountered these underlying beliefs and would be willing to talk about it? Because I’d like to get some dialogue going so that we can maybe more easily actually understand some of the underlying tenants of Exclusionism.

#ace discourse #aro discourse #ace exclusionist #nb discourse #bi discourse #it's sorta every discourse at this point #because it's like a basic difference #in how they define #sexuality labels and such

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thesoftcity · 6 years

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a trans woman told me the other day, it’s not uncommon for trans women to call themselves lesbians because ‘lesbian’ automatically implies womanhood - despite the fact that they were attracted to men as well. so it’s an identity claim about gender more than a description of their sexuality.

here I should note that I consider identities, and identity claims, to be the outcome of struggles. what an identity means, who can claim this identity, what are its boundaries - those things are constantly contested. this makes identity a dynamic process that is always in the process of redefining itself as people struggle to re-affirm or change the meanings and boundaries associated with them.

‘lesbian’ obviously is a great example of this - I don’t know enough about the historical use and variation of the term itself, but thinking about the 70s and radical feminism, you get ‘lesbian’ as a term available for the ‘woman-identified-woman’, the idea that any woman can become a lesbian regardless of past history with men, pushed to its somewhat logical conclusion in the form of ‘political lesbianism’.

then ‘lesbian’ seems to have become less contested, less politicised and controversial in the 90s/00s when as far as I’m aware it just meant woman attracted to other women and not to men. and perhaps at this time the narrative of it being a ‘natural’ sexual orientation that you are born with became the most prevalent one. I’m unsure when the ‘gold star lesbian’ narrative started to emerge (it seems incompatible with radical feminist / lesbian feminist politics) but that obviously is another claim on boundaries around that identity.

then fast-forward to today! when ‘lesbian’ is seen as an old-fashioned, regressive identity; exclusive in nature and closed-minded (hearts not parts, sexuality is fluid, biological essentialism). even worse than old-fashioned, it is seen as oppressive when not including trans women, if ascribing to the view that gays and lesbians are same-gender attracted rather than same-sex attracted. of course, with biological sex supposedly being ‘fake’ because subject to social regulation (surgical intervention on intersex babies usually being the main argument), same-sex attraction become an aberration, since sex does not exist and is merely an oppressive social construction.

therefore claiming a lesbian identity (if a cis woman) becomes harder and harder to do; it is seen as inherently suspicious, and needs to come with a hefty list of disclaimers (yes trans women are women, and i would date a trans woman, and i don’t have a preference for ‘female genitals’ which are not even a thing that exists because ‘female’ is a social construct, etc).

any spatial claims that lesbians as a group can make therefore become suspicious too - why do ‘lesbians’ need to get together? they’re not really oppressed anymore, are they, so why do they need a space to themselves? can’t they be happy with general LGBT spaces? are there even any people identifying as lesbians these days? who would come? wouldn’t it be full of TERFs? wouldn’t it be biphobic?

paradoxically, my friend talks about trans women making these identity claims, which of course don’t go uncontested, largely (and understandably) from cis lesbians/women. she didn’t seem to have an issue with this, and she (who considers herself bisexual) is dating a transmasculine person (also bi - but I've heard them say they sometimes feel they're in a 'lesbian relationship') (note that cis lesbians in her position are usually vilified and accused of transphobia.) what interests me is that some trans women seem able to make these claims over lesbian identity as a gender descriptor which does not actually match their sexual orientation or behaviour, thereby modifying the definition of ‘lesbian’ (getting rid of the ‘not attracted to men’ component); AND at the same time policing the boundaries cis lesbians put around their definition of lesbianism. I have no idea how any of this is going to play out and which claims will gain (or regain) legitimacy on the long term.

#I need to do more research on historical and contemporary identity shifts because I'm pretty sure some of this is #if not incorrect at least not doing justice to the nuance

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nottootypical · 7 years

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U know bi girls can't use the word dyke? it's historically been used against lesbians as a slur and it's not urs to reclaim

Obviously you’re on anon, and therefore I don’t know who you are, or how old you are. However, OP on the post you’re referencing is underage and I don’t really want to engage with them (or their partner, who reblogged my post), so I will take this opportunity to lay out my thoughts on the matter. I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not here to argue; I’m here to clarify my beliefs and educate those who are willing to listen. All sources for facts are linked in the text, as relevant.

First, I’ll address your claim that the word dyke has been “historically used against lesbians”: that’s only technically true.

You’re right, except that the term “bisexual” didn’t gain popularity until the 1960’s and 70’s. Up until this point, the term “lesbian” was applied comfortably to all women who loved women, including those we today identify as bisexual, because “lesbianism” was considered an act, not an identity.

As a woman, participating in the act of loving a woman made you a lesbian. Lesbianism as a sexual identity was invented later, with the advent of second-wave feminism.

The term “dyke,” on the other hand, has been around since the 1940’s, predating the change in definition for “lesbianism” by 20-30 years. Therefore, the term “dyke” applied to lesbians when “lesbian” applied to all wlw.

Lesbians who reclaim the term “dyke,” by and large, are inclusive of bisexual women. (last sentence of the paragraph).

Second, I’ll get into why historical context is unimportant here:

The idea of reclamation is to take back words that have been used against a community as a source of empowerment, and to take away the oppressive function of the term.

As I noted earlier, the term “dyke” originated in the ‘40’s, but as many words do, it has evolved since then.

In the past 70-80 years, it has been used against bisexual women in much the same way as it has against lesbians. If you’ll accept anecdotal evidence, I myself have been called a dyke by homophobes, although I have never identified as a lesbian.

Which brings me to my next point: many bisexual women once identified as lesbians. Saying that a bisexual can’t reclaim that word erases all the bisexual women who once experienced society as a lesbian would.

Finally, if you want to be picky about who can and can’t reclaim a slur because of its “historical” meaning, then “dyke” should be reserved for butches, since it was originally meant to describe masculine women.

Finally, I’ll address some of the other points from the original post:

I stand firmly with OP, other lesbians, and most of the bisexual community in my disdain for bisexual women who say lesbophobic things. I’m a strong proponent of unity between our communities, and I will not stand for bisexuals who spew hatred for any other member of the LGBT+ community.

For that same reason, I don’t believe that just because a post is written by a lesbian, for lesbians, it can’t be relatable to bisexual women. Lesbians and bisexual women share a lot of experiences because of the way that society treats us, collectively. Unless a post is specifically about the lack of attraction to men, I can see no reason that a bisexual woman couldn’t relate.

Even then, many women who id as bi experience no attraction to men. For this reason, there’s actually a lot of overlap between the two communities. Many self-identified lesbians are attracted only to women and nb individuals. Many bisexual women are attracted only to women and nb individuals. Are we really going to get into identity policing for these women over whether or not they can reblog a post?

I’m not going to get into the butch/femme point, but see my earlier point about the history/timing of terms. Here’s a source on the timing and creation of butch/femme identities.

I’ll concede that perhaps OP is right, and that lesbians don’t have to “care about or cater to [our] relationships with men.” That being said, just because you don’t have to, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Nothing says I have to care about gay men’s relationships with men, either, but I believe in solidarity with other members of my community. No matter who I’m dating, I am a bisexual woman, and none of my relationships are straight. The way that I, a woman and a part of the LGBT+ community, navigate a relationship that expects me to conform to straightness and heteronormativity is an LGBT+ issue. Just because it’s not your LGBT+ issue doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

Anyway, I’m sorry that this is such a long post, but that’s just my two cents and how I acquired them. I’m happy to chat with anyone who’s confused or needs some clarification, but as I’ve stated, I’m not here to argue.

#lgbt #bisexual #lesbian #gay #lgbt issues #long post #Anonymous #ask #ok to reblog #alisa speaks

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elvesofnoldor · 8 years

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smh technically i should identify as bisexual right now....but....i don’t think i can ever own up to...being bisexual??? If i do, i’d write “bi” instead of “wlw” on my bio right now

obviously, being on a-spec really complicates things, I identified as demisexual first and came out as one because I thought demisexuality really helped me to understand why i can feel both romantic and sexual attraction towards women but I never really felt sexual attraction towards men. As time goes on, I realize that some demisexual are fucking straight, and i dont want LGBT+ folks be guessing im some straight person cause if i was i wouldn’t even think about identifying as demi! Demisexuality kinda becomes more of a personal identity than something I can use to explain my attractions to other people in a straight forward manner. Not to mention, not that long ago, an ace person literally tried to police me into only calling myself demisexual because mentioning being bisexual means “PEOPLE WILL THINK YOU ARE BISEXUAL NOW AND YOU ARE ERASING ASEXUALITY” well lol bitch I AM BISEXUAL, a bisexual on ace spec but a fucking bisexual neverthe-fucking-less, so, fucking stick it. Anyways, I don’t feel comfortable in the ace community, if there is one to begin with, and i dont think //demisexuality// can define my mode of sexual attraction anymore at this point.....

Also, I did not come to tumblr thinking I’m straight, I came to tumblr as “questioning” since I didn’t know that your sexuality can be fluid at that point and my parents tried to convince me i was just having a //phrase//.I had been in this questioning phase ever since I had that giant gay crush and stopped feeling attraction towards men for a while at the age of 15 (I signed up for tumblr at the age of 18 btw). I know bisexuality is a thing back in high school since I legit had a friend who identified as bisexual. She was like “girls are good and boys are good too!” and i was like oh so that is what being bisexual is like! But the thing is, it never worked that way for me??? Bisexuality is never a label that fits me perfectly. All the bisexual posts on here identified being bisexual as feeling similar kind of attractions towards men and women, or even more. Now, i know you can be more attracted to one gender than the other, but i never had that “boys are good and girls are good too!” mentality. It’s always just “ah i want a boyfriend and I have very occasional gooey and short lived romantic feelings towards real men!” or “i want a girlfriend and NO gooey unnecessary romantic feeling towards men!” (which is me for at least two years now). My sexuality is always murky water for me tread in and it’s frustrating.

Looking back, I was totally lesbian since i knew i was ONLY attracted to women, and I did not feel one ounce of attraction towards men for at least a year or so, that was also around the time I explored lesbian literature as well (not yuri though...but again i was never truly into yaoi anyways). This is the reason why I didn’t even think about being on asexual spectrum right off the back because I do feel both romantic and sexual attractions! I did and i still do. It’s just that I don’t think I ever felt sexual attraction towards real men I met, and my romantic attractions towards //real// men only happened three times in my memories--two of them happened before the age of 16 and one of them happened while I was in the first year of university, and none of them lasted more than a week, in fact, I couldn’t even remember two of their faces at this point. Tbh, I don’t think I ever felt any substantial sexual attractions towards fictional male characters or unattainable men anyways....Maybe i suppressed these feelings after the age of 16/18??? I don’t fucking know. I don’t fucking know if my attractions towards men are real or are they a result of compulsory heterosexuality or....both.

Gonna be honest, I really missed not feeling attraction towards men, especially now. I missed how freeing and simple it felt, even though crushing on my friend was not a fun experience cause i had low self-esteem about the way i look (i still do) and she was straight af. However, I know I just CAN’T identify as a lesbian right now despite the fact that I don’t really feel or desire attraction towards men in general, since there is ALWAYS that one fucking asshole with his STUPID dark/black hair and his BEAUTIFUL eyes, existing in some fictional universe and maybe somewhere out of reach in this universe at the same time. So far there have been two fucking assholes of this kind, I’m not sure about any fictional men I liked before the age of 16.

Why is there always that ONE FUCKING DUDE who wouldn’t let me be a fucking lesbian

#yolanda talks #me for ts #long post for ts #rant for ts #? i guess #gonna put this sensitive long post at night so only australians be reading my shit #i dont think i have a lot of australian followers eh

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