#me emerging from the garage to write my lesbianism

[overweirdos]

Maybe a short Drabble with Dva and a slightly older (like 2-3 years I mean) fem!s/o who loses an arm in combat. Dva helping them when they’re afraid to touch her or are suffering with phantom limb pains. You guys are super talented at writing

This request was answered by one of our new mods!

Hi! I'm one of the new mods, you can call me Sombruh! I'm super pumped to work with all these talented writers to make awesome content for you guys! Some things y'all might be interested in knowing is I'm Canadian, I love animals with all my heart, and I'm a lesbian (so send those wlw requests in!) I do want to say when writing this, I did stray from the original request a bit as I didn't include phantom limb pains or a fear of touching D.va but I hope you enjoy anyways!

- Mod Sombruh

You take a sharp breath as the bowl of soup you were carrying crashes to the ground.  Four months ago an explosion had taken your left arm. Despite this, you would snap at anyone who gave you a sympathetic look or offered to carry things for you.  You were a soldier; not an infant needing to be coddled.  Well,  you were not allowed in combat for an undecided amount of time. But you were persistent. You would gladly give the rest of your limbs protecting the innocent.

That was one of the things your girlfriend, Hana Song, loved about you.  She admired your selflessness and refusal to give up. But you were impulsive and that scared her. She remembered so vividly the moment the bomb went off. The Mountain Dew-fueled nineteen year old was fighting at the time, but when the debris settled and the battle was won, she saw you lying, half under a piece of what was once a parking garage. The time you were in emergency surgery felt like an eternity. When you were out she was at your bedside in a heartbeat.

Hana had been trying to go about life as normal because that was what you wanted.  But she still found herself hovering, ready to rush to your side if anything happened. When she heard the crash, the lively girl jumped up from her desktop with no regard for the game she had been playing moments ago. You were more important, no question.

“Y/N,” she spoke softly, standing at your side.  "What happened?  Are you okay?“

That’s when you broke. You sunk to your knees, numb to the pieces of the broken bowl and still hot soup assaulting your knees. The younger girl took action, moving you to a chair with minimal difficulty. She was stronger than she looked.

“I’m sorry.” You say after a few minutes of silence. “I’ll clean it up-”

Hana took no time interrupting you.

“There is no reason for you to be sorry! You know it’ll take time to get used to it. Why didn’t you ask me for help?” You brush it off. Constantly being babied gets old real fast.

Hana sighed.

“I know you can do it yourself,  you are the strongest woman I know! But that doesn’t mean you have to deal with it all by yourself. Everyone can use a shoulder to lean on from time to time. Now, let’s get you cleaned up. That wasn’t a question.” She held out a hand for you to take and led you to the bathroom. And people called you stubborn…

Your girlfriend turned on the shower, adjusting the water so it was a suitable temperature. The two of you remained quiet as she handed you body wash and shampoo. Within fifteen minutes the pair of your were both clean, wearing the most comfortable PJs in the world,  and wrapped up in each other’s arms. Usually, you were the big spoon but tonight you let Hana hold you. Neither of you needed to speak a word, just the other’s company was enough. As you drifted off to sleep, you realized this was the best you’ve felt since the explosion. Maybe they were right,  things would get better in time. The last thing you remember before sleep took ahold of you was Hana pressing a gentle kiss where your shoulder ended.

[viralhottopics]

The Bishop Eddie Long I knew

Atlanta (CNN)I was hanging out with Bishop Eddie Long one day when he decided to surprise me.

He invited me to watch him work out. Wearing Air Jordans and a black Yankees cap turned backward, he walked into a gym and grabbed two 50-pound barbells. As he curled them, he watched himself in a full-length mirror.

“It helps in the board meetings,” he said playfully, nodding at his bulging biceps. “In the old days the deacons ran everything, so the pastor had to come into the board meeting pretty buffed.”

I placed that scene at the start of my profile of Long for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was a story about a preacher on the cusp of greatness. It was 1999; Long’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church would soon swell to 25,000 members, and he would become an internationally known televangelist who would meet with presidents and foreign leaders. This was a decade before his ministry was derailed by accusations that he pressured young men into sexual relationships.

But there was an odd encounter in the gym that I didn’t include in the story because it was too risqu.

“We’re not just a church, we’re an international corporation,” he said. “We’re not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can’t talk and all we’re doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. … You’ve got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that’s supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering.”

After the story appeared, everyone seemed to talk about that quote and the Bentley. Yet when I interviewed New Birth members for the story, it was clear no one knew about the charity or how Long had used the church’s money — nor did they care.

This is what I realized:

It’s easy to talk about unscrupulous pastors who get rich off of unsuspecting congregations and have absolute power. But we don’t talk enough about how some megachurches may be accomplices in that process. Members often don’t have a clue how their money is handled or how decisions are made.

I discovered this pattern at New Birth and plenty of other megachurches during 20 years of writing about religion. I marveled at how bright, educated people parked their brains — and their cars — in the church lot every Sunday morning. They wanted to be herded like sheep.

Long exploited that. He was a savvy operator when it came to amassing church power. His father, the Rev. Floyd Long, was known as the “cussing preacher,” a pugnacious man who built churches and left after clashing with the deacons — those members who traditionally ran Baptist churches.

Long wasn’t going anywhere when he arrived at New Birth in 1987. He conditioned people to not question his authority. Then he got rid of the church’s deacon board. He told the church he had received a revelation from God telling him a deacon board was an “ungodly governmental structure.”

Unquestioning submission to authority became a recurrent theme in his preaching and books. In “Gladiator,” Long warned parishioners not to get overly familiar with a pastor who is “God’s anointed” because “their insurrection kills their blessing.”

“A disrespectful or adversarial attitude causes otherwise good people to look for mistakes, weakness and flaws in their human leaders,” he wrote.

Why do people accept such autocratic leadership in a church? Part of it is fear, a woman whose church imploded after a scandal once told me.

“There is a suspension of common sense, a refusal to put two and two together,” said Sue Thompson, an author and professional speaker. “For a lot of people, [the pastor] is the man who gave them the keys to a whole new way of living. They can’t separate the good they received from the man himself, so they feel it would be a betrayal to turn on him now.”

But I think there’s something else going on besides fear, particularly when this type of autocratic leader emerges in the black church.

When I grew up in a black Baptist church in Baltimore, my congregation was poor but the pastor drove a Rolls Royce with a water fountain inside. I still remember how my aunt would talk with such pride about our pastor’s car.

In the black community, the pastor was often the only person who didn’t depend on white folks’ goodwill for their livelihood. He made his money through the support of his parishioners. Most parishioners felt poor and powerless, so they wanted to live vicariously through their pastor. They wanted that pastor to live large, have a huge ego, occupy the biggest house. I still remember “Rev. Ike,” a flamboyant black pastor who used to rule the pages of Jet magazine. He thrilled many poor blacks with his ostentatious lifestyle and declarations like “My garage runneth over.”

Yet a leader can exploit that type of need. Even when that leader is tarnished by one revelation after another, if he remains defiant in public and displays a little “I’m not perfect” humility, a congregation will stick with him to the bitter end. And nobody will be able to persuade them to leave that church.

I remember talking to a woman at New Birth who claimed there was nothing to the lawsuits by the four young men who claimed Long pressured them into sex. Maybe she was right. I then asked her if she would be willing to let her teenage son go on a field trip with Long.

She looked at me in horror.

Last I heard, she’s still a member of New Birth.

He was God’s scarred leader

Which brings us back to the encounter I had in the gym with Long years ago.

Whenever someone learns that I’ve written about Long, they ask me about his sexual orientation. Many assure me they already have an opinion. That’s what I encountered years ago when I went to the gym with Long. The woman who approached me wanted to share her conclusions on Long’s sexual proclivities.

I don’t know if Long was gay or how he died. Those kinds of questions, though, ignore another important point about Long and sex: The way he talked about homosexuality was destructive, whether or not he was closeted.

Lots of pastors preach homosexuality is a sin. Yet they and their churches still find a way to treat with respect those struggling with their sexual orientation. Like many churches, New Birth once offered ministries to “deliver” gay and lesbian people from their “sin.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, called Long “one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement.” The center said Long’s message was: “Hate the sin and the sinner.”

The center quoted from an early sermon Long gave entitled “Back to the Future.”

“It’s the most unattractive thing I have ever seen, when I see women wearing uniforms that men would wear, and women fighting to get in the military,” Long shouted to his congregation. “The woman gets perverted to turn towards woman … and everybody knows it’s dangerous to enter an exit. …

“God says you deserve death!”

According to the center, Long said gays and lesbians who don’t change will go to hell — and that those who say they were born that way are calling God a liar.

“Homosexuality and lesbianism are spiritual abortions,” Long says. “Homosexuality is a manifestation of the fallen man.”

In his book, “I Don’t Want Delilah, I Need You,” Long blamed some women for turning men into homosexuals.

“In a society where little boys are exposed to grubby, cursing, dirty, cigarette-smoking, road-construction-worker women, is it any wonder they stop chasing women and start chasing men?”

In the same book, he wrote that “men can look attractive when they’re dirty.”

“We see sweating, dirty, hardworking men on television all the time and we say to one another, ‘There’s a macho guy.’ But women were not made from the earth. God made women to be lovely, gentle, clean and beautiful on the inside and outside. They are to be strong in character.”

He did more than use harmful words against gays and lesbians. He invoked the legacy of black America’s most revered leader to deny their equality.

One of the most notorious controversies Long faced came in 2004, when he led a march in Atlanta calling for a constitutional ban against gay marriage. He carried a torch lit at the gravesite of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. while accompanied by the civil rights leader’s daughter, the Rev. Bernice King.

The march was widely denounced by those who knew King, like Rep. John Lewis and the Rev. Joseph Lowery. They pointed out that one of King’s closest aides was Bayard Rustin, an openly gay organizer who King refused to abandon when people pressured him to do so.

Consider how many people Long could have helped had he moderated the language he used against gays, says Shayne Lee, a sociologist at the University of Houston and author of “Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace.”

“Think of all the people who were suffering, who wanted to serve God, who wanted to tap into that spiritual power but were wrestling with their sexuality,” Lee told me after Long’s death. “Their angst is deepened by the very leaders they respect.”

Long was not always insensitive in the pulpit. He could be tender toward outsiders and achingly vulnerable. I remember watching him tell his congregation he thought about taking his life after he had experienced so much public condemnation. He once told me he thought of himself as “God’s scarred leader,” a man who knew rejection by his father and had been through divorce and career failure.

Yet it would be another failure on our part if we ignored the scars that Long inflicted on others. He wasn’t unique, and neither was New Birth. The religious landscape in America is filled with megachurches, prosperity theology and pastors who continually remind their cowed congregations to “touch not God’s anointed.”

What do I see when I look at the rise and fall of Bishop Eddie Long?

I see something that will happen again.

Read more: http://cnn.it/2kHMumv

from The Bishop Eddie Long I knew