#cool cool sometimes i spend so much time on queer dot com that i forget the shitty people actually exist

[neverendingford]

.

[venusdebotticelli]

Okay, gather ‘round, children, ‘tis storytime!

Once upon a time when I’d just recently moved to Manchester, I needed to go do some paperwork in London, so I went and spent a couple of days with my uncle, who’s been living there for quite a few years.

It was a couple of days of sightseeing and eating cool food and basically just ~*¡¡¡London!!!*~, which sounds really nice, in theory. Thing is, it was a couple of days with just my uncle as company. At the time I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, I thought it was a cool plan.

But here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I heard from him that weekend:

Autism is caused by drinking milk, and the government poisons the food in supermarkets so that only rich people can afford healthy food that won’t slowly kill them.

The government secretly murders all scientists who dare publicly speak out about this horrible truth.

All the abused women in the world deserve the treatment they get, because 100% of women (actual scientific statistic figure provided by him) always go for the assholes and ignore the Nice Guys™ like him.

The gays are horrible monsters who oppress the poor straights, because that one time he went into an Obviously Gay™ Gay Bar to have a drink on his own people gave him weird looks.

“I really don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now” -My uncle, to his queer niece, right after he said that we are horrible monsters who oppress the straights and have all the power in the world, because all the managers at his workplace are gay and very incompetent. (I’m pretty sure that means I was oppressing him with my stare, or something)

Apparently I just have a huge Victim Complex™, I like to victimise myself by seeing issues were there are none---says the aforementioned oppressed-by-the-gays-and-their-meanie-stares uncle.

This was around the time of the winter olympics in sochi, and when all the controversy about the Russian ban on gay propaganda was going strong, and people were actually getting arrested. One of the TVs at the pub we were at was broadcasting the olympics, and he thought it vital to inform me that the whole “gay thing” in Russia was just a ruse, a fake problem invented by the government to distract from the real truth of their shady dealings.

Apparently anything that affects the gays only is just a fake problem, because it’s not actually affecting anybody, y’kno¿? I’m guessing The Real Issues™ are just those that affect straight white men like him, everything else is just government fabricated distraction.

This is a very big secret, you know, highly classified information that he had confirmed by the obviously very reliable sources of his internet circles, so please read the next point at your own discretion, I don’t want the FBI/CIA/NHS kicking down your door in the middle of the night because you know too much: 

There is a very very very exclusive gay night club, called The Black Rose or something like that iirc, where all the world’s biggest elites gather together in secret, you know, george bush, david cameron, vladimir putin, the clintons, to name a few, and they all partake in super secret initiation rituals that involve gay things that he couldn’t tell me about because they were too dark and perverse for my poor sensible ears to hear. But ovbiously that creates this huge Gay Elite ruling the world behind the scenes and oppresing all the straights globally.

I’m pretty sure there’s more stuff I’m forgetting, after all, this was around three years ago already, but you get the idea. It’s obviously the kind of edifying, fascinating conversation you’d pursue when your queer, autistic, just-turned-19 niece visits you in a foreign city and has no choice but to sleep in your house and to spend the whole two days with you :) 

Perhaps a little unreasonably, my young self thought “Oh my goodness, this person is a little bonkers, maybe being a 50something year old man living on his own with no friends and the internet as his only company for years has slightly perturbed the waters of his mind¿? I feel a little alienated, I’d rather avoid his company in the future, whenever possible”. That is exactly the delicate way I told my friends about it in the next five hours of bus ride back to Manchester, fo’ sho’, no furious whatsapp ranting was involved at all :P

Anyway, as was my intention, I kept ignoring his existence, and only warily skimming through, and affording no response to, his emails full of links to conversation threads about the moral failings of letting beings like Conchita Wurst show their faces on respectable TV and similar topics. 

It’s been a few years now, and every once in a while my grandma mentions that when he talks to him he’s really sad I don’t keep in contact with him, and that he thinks I’m quite ungrateful, and that he’d like to know what’s going on with my life and for us to see each other every now and again, and that he’d like to help me out in this foreign country we’re both living in but that I just don’t give him the chance. My mum also asks me whether I’d like to get in contact with him and go visit, sometimes, though not as often. Today was one of those times, since apparently they’ve been talking lately, and he asked her about me, and my mum sent him some of the assignments I did for class, which I’m quite proud of. 

One of those is my poetry assignment, which includes five poems and an analysis of three of them, and the poems are quite personal pieces treating topics such as queer love, my mental illness and autism, and toxic societal ideals surrounding romantic relationships. His answer to that¿? He told my mum to look up the concept of “Generation Snowflake”, of all bloody things. Lemme just helpfully give you the definition of that here:

Generation Snowflake, or Snowflake Generation, is a term used to characterise young adults of the 2010s as being more prone to taking offence and less resilient than previous generations, or too emotionally vulnerable to cope with views that challenge their own. It is considered derogatory.

So now I ask of you, dear friends, to send me links to posts and articles giving good rebuttals to the utter bullshit that is that bloody baby-boomer concept, because I know I’ve read some very good ones here on tumble dot com, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to even begin finding them. Please help me out here¿?