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welshdragonrawr · 4 years

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I would love to distract you. If it isn't too much - how about all of them? Hope your days gets better, soon.

Thank you <3 I appreciate you dropping in, hope you’re doing well. I’ll keep these relatively short (for once). 1. Name one way you break the wlw stereotype. (Fat, trans, poc, autistic, etc)

Uh, does disabled count?

2. Who was the first girl you remember having feelings for?

TV: Trying to think who the very first might have been... Might have been Buffy tbh... Real life: I guess it was a school friend, not that we’re such friends anymore - yay, life - and I didn’t know what the feelings were back then; I thought it was normal to worship the ground your friends walk on and do anything and everything they asked to the point of detriment

3. What’s your opinion on the butch/femme labels? Do you think they’re harmful?

I’m not a big fan of labels in general. I think they can be extremely useful/helpful to some people, but also constricting and confusing to others. If you attach yourself to a label or want to attach one to you and it makes you happy/confident/etc then of course that’s totally fine! I do think there are some stereotypes that get washed around a lot with both of those, good and bad, which don’t always help things, but still.

4. Do you have a girlfriend?

Nope

5. Define love in 5 words or less

Inexplicable. Exquisite. Exhausting. Ineffable. Impossible. (This is probably not what you meant but it’s all I’ve go for tonight. I highly recommend this guys speech that covers it pretty well.)

6. What characteristics do you look for in a girl?

Kindness, compassion, warmth, y’know, that sort of thing...

7. Do you participate in LGBTQ clubs and events?

Now and then, I used to while I was at uni. Can’t so much now.

8. Are you out to anyone outside of tumblr?

Yes, most of my friends by now I should think.

9. Say some things you love about your crush/girlfriend?

How soft she is. How kind she is. I’m just a soft squishy gay underneath this miser of an exterior

10. Do you want to get married?

Maybe someday? I don’t know, I used to joke about it, but I don’t know if I can ever see it happening now. I’d just be happy to settle down with someone, with our books, and cats, and maybe a little cottage somewhere. Wouldn’t need a big day to shout it from the rooftops, when I can have all the little days to whisper it in her ear, or pass it along in another cup of tea instead.

11. Do you want to have kids?

I don’t know. It’s/would be pretty difficult (given medical circumstances). I’ve never felt confident around kids. And I’d be absolutely terrified constantly of fucking shit up and having them hate me or something so I can’t imagine I’d be very good... Can’t even take care of myself, let alone kids.

12. How would you describe the difference between sun lesbians and moon lesbians?

ABBA and Fleetwood Mac. Need I say more?

13. What’s your favorite song about lesbians?

Fixing Her Hair by Ani Difranco (which I realise is a sad af choice, - I remembered the wrong one and had to edit aha - but 1. it’s what I can think of off the top of my head and 2. it was one of the first I heard that was explicitly sapphic and not just some pronouns switched for lolz in a cover or whatever)

14. What’s your favorite book about lesbians?

Anyone who knows my knows how I hate this question because I could give a whole post just on its own of answers to this. For now I’mma have to say Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (lesbian vampire wives ftw).

15. Who’s your favorite lesbian character?

16. If you live in a country where gay marriage is legal, where were you when it was legalized? Did you do anything to celebrate?!

It was 2014 I think? Supposedly? Or 2013? I don’t know for sure. But knowing my luck at that time in my life I was probably in hospital so that’d probably be why I don’t remember it well...

17. If you could meet one famous wlw (dead or alive) who would you pick?

I’d love to have a chat and/or drink with Ms Paulson tbh.

18. Have you ever kissed a girl?

Yes.

19. Do you have any favorite wlw positivity blogs?

Can’t think of any off the top of my head... (sorry if I’ve forgotten anyone!!)

20. Who was your first real life crush? (as in not Dana Scully or Jessica Rabbit)

Again we talking actors or actual people in my life? Cuz I think I kinda covered it already? And there are too many actors to just drop a list in here...

21. What is one thing you think your school/ place of work could do to create a safe environment for LGBTQ people

Oh boy, we’d need a whole slideshow on what my university *should* be doing to create a safe environment for *anyone*, especially LGBTQ+ people, but let’s not open that kettle of fish...

22. Have you ever been to a gay bar?

Yup. Been to a couple karaoke nights.

23. Do you know a lot of LGBTQ people outside of the Internet

Not a lot, just a few. “We happy few”

24. Describe your ideal gaycation (a vacation that you, a gay, go on)

Anywhere where my significant other is/would be. Preferably with books, tea, blankets (fuzzy or picnic, either’s fine), even just in bed in a small B&B in the countryside somewhere, in soft sunshine or with a drizzling rain falling outside and the logfire going and their head in my lap (or mine in theirs), just enjoying each other’s company without worrying about the rest of the world and its anxieties for a bit. That’d be nice...

25. Not a question, I just want you to know that you’re amazing and beautiful and I love you. Keep up the good work.

Thank you for asking and being a little distraction for a bit.

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illbefinealonereads · 4 years

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Blog tour! I’m offering you information and an excerpt from Out Now by Saundra Mitchell.

Out Now: Queer We Go Again! By Saundra Mitchell On Sale: May 26, 2020 Inkyard Press YOUNG ADULT FICTION/Diversity & Multicultural | YOUNG ADULT FICTION/Romance/LGBT 9781335018267; 1335018263 $18.99 USD 416 pages

A follow-up to the critically acclaimed All Out anthology, Out Now features seventeen new short stories from amazing queer YA authors. Vampires crash prom…aliens run from the government…a president’s daughter comes into her own…a true romantic tries to soften the heart of a cynical social media influencer…a selkie and the sea call out to a lost soul. Teapots and barbershops…skateboards and VW vans…Street Fighter and Ares’s sword: Out Now has a story for every reader and surprises with each turn of the page! This essential and beautifully written modern-day collection features an intersectional and inclusive slate of authors and stories.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Out-Now-Queer-We-Again/dp/1335018263 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/out-now-saundra-mitchell/1133810272 IndieBound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781335018267 Books-A-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Out-Now/Saundra-Mitchell/9781335018267?id=4861510030088 AppleBooks: https://books.apple.com/us/book/out-now/id1481649552 Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Saundra_Mitchell_Out_Now?id=0SeyDwAAQBAJ

Saundra Mitchell has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture deliverer and a layout waxer. She's dodged trains, endured basic training and hitchhiked from Montana to California. She teaches herself languages, raises children and makes paper for fun. She is the author of Shadowed Summer and The Vespertine series, the upcoming novelization of The Prom musical, and the editor of Defy the Dark. She always picks truth; dare is too easy. Visit her online at www.saundramitchell.com.

Author website: wwww.saundramitchell.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Saundra-Mitchell/164136390442617 Twitter: @saundramitchell Instagram: @smitchellbooks Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52172088-out-now

Excerpt:

KICK. PUSH. COAST. By Candice Montgomery

Every day, same time, same place, she appears and doesn’t say a word.

Well, she doesn’t just appear. She takes a bus. You know she takes a bus because you see her get off the bus right in front of 56th Street, just in front of the park where you skate.

You know she takes a bus and gets off right in front of the park at 56th Street because you are always at the park, wait-ing to catch a glance of her.

She—her appearance—is a constant. Unlike your sexuality, all bendy like the way your bones got after yesterday’s failed backside carve.

Bisexualpansexualdemisexualpanromanticenby all bleeding bleeding-bleeding…into one another.

That drum of an organ inside your chest tells you to just be patient. But now, here you are and there she is and you can’t help yourself.

She’s beautiful.

And so far out of your league.

You’re not even sure what she does here every day, but you probably shouldn’t continue to watch her while trying to nail a Caballerial for the first time. Losing focus there is the kind of thing that lends itself to unforgiving injuries, like that time you broke your leg in six places on the half-pipe or the time you bit clean through your bottom lip trying to take down a 360 Pop Shove It.

You’re still tasting blood to this very day. So’s your skate-board. That one got split clean in half.

She looks up at you from underneath light brown lashes that seem too long to be real. She reminds you of a Heelflip. You don’t know her well but you imagine that, at first, she’s a pretty complicated girl, before you get good enough to really know her. You assume this just given the way her hair hangs down her back in a thick, beachy plait, the way yours never could.

Not since you chopped it all off.

That’s not a look for a lady, your mom says repeatedly. But you’ve never been very femme and a few extra inches of hair plus that pink dress Mom bought you won’t change that.

You hate that dress. That dress makes you look like fondant. Someone nails a Laserflip right near where you’re standing and almost wipes out.

Stop staring. You could just go introduce yourself to her.

But what would you say?

Hi, I’m Dustyn and I really want to kiss you but I’m so confused about who I am and how am I supposed to introduce myself to you if I can’t even get my label right, oh, and also, you make me forget my own name.

And in a perfect world, she would make eyes at you. She’d make those eyes at you and melt your entire fucking world in the way only girls ever can.

Hi, Dustyn, I’m in love with you. Eyelashes. All batting eye-lashes.

No. No, the conversation probably wouldn’t go that way. Be nice if it did though. Be nice if anything at all could go your way when it comes to romance.

You push into a 360 ollie while riding fakie and biff it so bad, you wish you possessed whatever brain cells are the ones that tell you when to quit.

If that conversation did go your way, on a realistic scale, she’d watch you right back. You would nail that Caballerial.

Take a break. Breathe. Breathe breathe breathe. Try some-thing else for a sec.

Varial Heelflip. Wipe out.

Inward Heelflip. Gnarly spill.

Backside 180 Heelflip. Game, set, match—you’re finished. That third fail happens right in front of her and you play it off cool. Get up. Don’t even give a second thought to your battle wounds. You’re at the skate park on 56th Street because there’s more to get into. Which means, you’re not the only idiot limping with a little drug called determination giving you momentum.

Falling is the point. Failing is the point. Getting better and changing your game as a skater is the point. Change.

But what if things were on your side? What if you’d stuck with that first label? What if Bisexual felt like a good fit and never changed?

Well, then you’d probably be landing all these 180s.

If bisexual just fit, you’d probably have been able to hold on to your spot in that Walk-In Closet. But it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit which kind of sucks because at Thanksgiving din-ner two years ago, your cousin Damita just had to open her big mouth and tell the family you “mess with girls.” Just had to tell the family, a forkful of homemade mac and cheese headed into said mouth, that you are “half a gay.”

That went over well. Grams wouldn’t let you sit on her plastic-lined couches for the rest of the night. Your great-uncle Damian told her gay is contagious. She took it to heart.

No offense, baby. Can’t have all that on my good couches. You glance up and across the park, memories knocking

things through your head like a good stiff wind, and you find her taking a seat.

Oh.

Oh, she never does this. She never gets comfortable. She’s changing things up. You’re not the only one.

Maybe she plans to stay a while.

You love that she’s changing things up. You think it feels like a sign. It’s like she’s riding Goofy-Foot today. Riding with her right foot as dominant.

The first time you changed things up that way, you ended up behind the bleachers, teeth checking with a trans boy named Aaron. It felt so right that you needed to give it a name.

Google called it pansexual. That one stuck. You didn’t bother to explain that one to the family, though. They were just starting to learn bisexual didn’t mean you were gay for only half the year.

You pop your board and give the Caballerial another go.

It does not want you. You don’t stick this one either.

If pansexual had stuck, you’d introduce yourself to the beautiful girl with a smaller apology on your tongue. Hi, I’m Dustyn, I’ve only changed my label the one time, just slightly, but I’m still me and I’d really love to take you out.

And the beautiful girl would glance at your scraped elbows and the bruised-up skin showing through the knee holes in your ripped black skinny jeans. She’d see you and say, Hi, small, slight changes are my favorite. And then she’d lace her bubble-gum-nail-polished hand with yours.

But you changed your label after that, too. It was fine for a while. Your best friend, Hollis, talked you through the symp-toms of demisexuality.

No wonder holding the beautiful girl’s hand seems so much more heart-palpitating than anything else. A handhold. So simple. Just like an ollie.

You take a fast running start, throwing your board down, and end up on a vert skate, all empty bowl-shaped pools that are so smooth, your wheels only make a small whisper against them.

A whisper is what you got that first time you realized sex was not for you. Not with just anyone. This was…mmm, probably your biggest revelation.

It was like you’d been feeding your body Big Macs three times a day and suddenly—a vegetable!

Tic-tacking is when you use your entire body to turn the board from one side to the other. It’s a game of lower body strength, but also a game of knowing your weight and know-ing your board. You are not a tic-tac kind of girl.

You are not a girl at all. You are just…you.

That.

That one’s sticking forever. You know it all the way through to your gut.

You make one more attempt, which probably isn’t super wise because you are so close to the spot where she’s sitting that not only will she see you bite the dust, but she’ll hear that nasty grunt you make when you meet the ground.

You coast by.

The friction vibrates up through your bearings and you know you’re going too fast because you start to feel a little bit of a speed-wobble, that lovely, untimely, oscillatory behavior that means bro, you are about to lose control.

And you hate that word. Control. You hate that word be-cause it is so very rare that you have any. Over your life, your sexuality, your gender, your pronouns, your heartbeat when you’re around your beautiful girl.

But then you do.

You gain control. And you nail that Caballerial.

And the three guys who’ve been watching you make an ass of yourself all afternoon pop their boards up, hold them over their heads and let out wolf shouts.

And you’re smiling so hard. You get like that when you nail a particularly difficult one. You’re smiling so hard you don’t notice the someone standing behind you.

Beautiful girl. You don’t even want to control your smile here.

“You did it,” she says.

#blog tour #excerpt #out now #saundra mitchell

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njawaidofficial · 6 years

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RuPaul’s Version Of LGBT History Erases Decades Of Trans Drag Queens

https://styleveryday.com/2018/03/09/rupauls-version-of-lgbt-history-erases-decades-of-trans-drag-queens/

RuPaul’s Version Of LGBT History Erases Decades Of Trans Drag Queens

The author performing in Brooklyn, New York.

Rebecca Smeyne / Via the culture whore

After yearning to do drag for nearly two decades in hiding, I had my makeup done for the first time at a MAC counter on Fifth Avenue in 2012. I had religiously watched Seasons 1–4 of RuPaul’s Drag Race in secret from inside the closet, and from listening to the queens bicker while they drank cocktails, I learned that a queen just starting out sought out a mother to teach her her skills. So, newly out and proud, I found myself in the chair of a makeup artist to whom a friend had referred me: a giant, shit-talking, off-duty blonde drag queen named Sweetie.

Sweetie had pounds of mascara and permanently limp wrists, and was exactly the kind of gay who’d make my mom grasp my hand and pick up our pace when I was younger, were we to cross paths at the mall. As she painted huge shimmery eyelids on me, she gabbed about her life in New York, about RuPaul “before she was rich,” and the parties of the ’90s. She refused to teach me to glue down my eyebrows like I’d seen the girls on Drag Race do. By the time she got to my lips, I realized I was in the presence of New York drag royalty.

Before she finished, Sweetie leaned close to tell me that she knew about private clubs where girls like us could meet gentlemen who love us. Startled, I told her that I just wanted to do drag, not BE a woman.

“Honey, all of us want to BE women,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye and waving a powder brush at me like a magic wand, “or none of us would do this shit.”

That day, getting my makeup done by the late legend, I took my first glimpse into the world of drag as it exists outside of the Drag Race studio: one that predates Drag Race and the mainstream visibility of the art form by generations.

Those of us who work in drag were not surprised to hear RuPaul’s recent comments about trans inclusion (or in this case, exclusion) on Drag Race. In an interview with the Guardian this past weekend, she said that Peppermint, a trans woman and fan favorite who competed in (and nearly won) Season 9, had been allowed on Drag Race because she “didn’t get breast implants until after she left our show; she was identifying as a woman, but she hadn’t really transitioned. … You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body.” To imply that a trans woman isn’t really a woman until she has breast implants is to invoke the same mindset of ignorant conservatives who marginalize and demonize queer people every day.

Contestant Peppermint attends ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’- Season Premiere party on March 7, 2017 in New York City.

Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty Images

As RuPaul’s Drag Race was renewed season after season and its popularity heightened, the girls in New York began to notice that out trans women weren’t making it onto Drag Race — or if they did, it was only by sneaking by casting undetected. Rumors trickled down into the local scenes that being on hormone replacement therapy or having breast implants could disqualify you from getting your golden ticket to Drag Race fame. By the time the show made the jump to VH1 last year, exponentially increasing its audience, it was clear to us that Drag Race was choosing a specific and incomplete image of the art form to uphold. The drag queens favored most on the show weren’t only glamorous like RuPaul, witty like RuPaul, and meticulous like RuPaul — they were cis like RuPaul.

RuPaul is no stranger to backlash from the trans community. The show’s sixth season featured a mini challenge called “Shemale or Female,” in which RuPaul instructed the contestants to guess by looking at images of body parts whether those parts belonged to “a biological woman, or a psychological woman.” However, it wasn’t until RuPaul’s comments to the Guardian — which she later doubled down on in a tweet: “You can take performance enhancing drugs and still be an athlete, just not in the Olympics” — that she proved herself an outright transphobe. The ensuing backlash, which prompted responses from Peppermint and other Drag Race alums, led Ru to post a series of half-assed apologies.

As an art form, drag is a notoriously futile venture, but it also leads a lot of girls like me to discover our identities.

The problems with RuPaul’s comments are obvious and conspicuous. She told the Guardian that “drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.” Implying that men are capable of rejecting masculinity in a way that women are not is nearsighted to say the least, and her mention of “danger” is especially repulsive at a time when queer and trans women are raped and murdered in record numbers with every passing year. In what ways are drag queens who transform temporarily into women giving more of an “f-you to male-dominated culture” than trans women when they can at any time return to their place of privilege and power as men living in a patriarchal world?

If RuPaul sees her show as the Olympics of drag, she is thereby dangling her renown and prize money just out of reach of those she deems unworthy. Appearing on Drag Race has in fact become the only way to make a viable living off of drag. As an art form, drag is a notoriously futile venture, but it also leads a lot of girls like me to discover our identities. That’s what makes it especially frustrating that American trans women have been more or less disqualified from appearing at the Olympics — considering most of us who work in drag are about $100,000 away from feeling at home in our bodies.

RuPaul rose to prominence in drag at a time when there was less of a clear distinction between what constitutes a drag queen and a trans woman. Before the show made drag go mainstream, many drag queens’ lives involved a lot of staying home, their heads wrapped, gigantic sunglasses shrouding their bare faces, biding their time until their next chance to put on 30 pounds of hair and 50 pounds of jewels and own the fucking universe. It didn’t really matter how drag queens presented otherwise, or who their partners were, or even their birth names.

Dorian Corey, of posthumous Paris is Burning fame, was a Goddess in the ballroom, her gowns festooned with feathers and 10-foot trains. Without an adoring crowd hanging on her every move, she was somewhat of a hermit, her only daylight coming from the bulbs of her vanity mirror, and with only cats or visitors (or eventually filmmakers) to keep her company. In the decades preceding Drag Race, queens like Corey were only renowned for their feminine presentations, and to most people they would never be known as anything other than “she.”

Before the internet, you wouldn’t be able to see a queen out of drag unless you knew her intimately; as a fan, all you’d know about her would be confined to what she presented at gigs. If you were to ask a performer about her gender identity, you wouldn’t investigate any further than simply asking, “are you full-time?” Hell, Ru herself wasn’t seen out of drag onscreen until a decade after she’d achieved mainstream fame and commercial success, in 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader.

RuPaul in But I’m A Cheerleader.

Lionsgate

This is what we mean when we say that trans women were the pioneers of drag. Before the advent of Drag Race, participating in drag required you to sacrifice your manhood entirely, whereas nowadays we have a rich vocabulary when it comes to queer and trans identities and their associated expressions. The categories of what we now call “drag queens” or “trans women” weren’t so clearly divided, because the spotlight of the stage bore witness to all. For instance, drag legend Lady Bunny would respond with a high-pitched giggle if you called her transgender, but you will never, ever see her out of drag. Legendary women like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, pioneers of the LGBT rights movement, would likely identify as trans women today, but identified fiercely as drag queens in the ’60s and ’70s. At a time when LGBT people were fighting just to exist, it made no sense to split wig hairs.

Here’s the gag: Most straight people still can’t see the difference between a drag queen and a trans woman. They see effeminate gay men, drag queens, and trans women — all “faggots.” In a straight man’s world, there’s no need to tell us apart.

At a time when LGBT people were fighting just to exist, it made no sense to split wig hairs.

Because drag used to be totally inaccessible to the outside world, and is therefore missing from historical narratives of pop culture, RuPaul now represents our entire diverse community to the straight people willing to listen. Those with an open mind, who don’t think we’re all condemned to hell, will therefore see the entire spectrum of femme presentation through the lens of his show. By virtue of her decades of celebrity, RuPaul holds an immense amount of power. She’s not only exposing us to the public who had no prior access or insight into our world; she is literally writing LGBT history.

.RuPaul’s Drag Race’s rising popularity over the past 10 years has coincided with the evolution of social media and the rise of online queer discourse. For the first time, we see the 360 degree view of a drag queen’s life: every detail of their mundane off-duty lives. As marginalized queer people found each other on the internet, so arose the language to categorize our identities — who is a woman, who is a man, who’s in between, and who’s outside. We began to talk about a drag queen “as a boy” once we saw them in the workroom, or saw selfies of them out of drag on our feeds.

Drag queens used to have to exchange their sexuality for relative celebrity. At the clubs where they worked, they belonged onstage, not commingling or cruising amongst the commoners. But in large part thanks to Drag Race, queens can now be considered gay men with viable capital in the sexual marketplace. When preparing to compete, they don’t only plan glam looks for the runway, but also pack cute outfits for their male presentations during the interview and workroom scenes that comprise most of the show. Drag queens aren’t quite queens anymore — they’ve stepped down from the throne to become common gay men who have the impulse and the skills to transform their bodies temporarily into women. The notion that a drag queen is actually a man is one that RuPaul created and established in the zeitgeist with her career, and later with her show.

Now, by drawing a distinction between queens based only on whether the silicone bags hanging from their chests are on the outside or inside of their bodies — and by withholding her spotlight from people who literally aren’t man enough — RuPaul is not only erasing present-day trans queens from the history of drag, but also abandoning the decades-long deification of drag queens into honorary womanhood regardless of their everyday presentation.

It’s not just that the the fame and success that comes to a queen after appearing on Drag Race is being withheld from trans women who want their slice of the pie. It’s that trans women baked the pie, and RuPaul sold it to straight people.

Ru would probably be the first to agree that the primary tenet of drag is turning gender into a fart joke. Her most famous aphorism, after all, is that “we’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” And yet somehow she can’t see that the diversity among drag performers — our different bodies, different lifestyles, different spirits — is what gives depth and breadth to our creed. To quote the reigning queen of Season 9, Sasha Velour: “That’s the real world of drag, like it or not.” The gender binary exists to enforce patriarchy and shackle queer people. By abiding by that binary so strictly in casting for the majority-boys’ club that is Drag Race, RuPaul purposefully erases the world she came from: a world that doesn’t categorize queens based on their body parts, and one where fierce trans women have always existed. ●

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