#queer history

[theinternetarchive]

gay and transgender life in provincetown, massachusetts. chris korda, 1991.

[makingqueerhistory]

Punishing queer people for coming out as bisexual during Pride month is cruel and small minded.

Policing the limits of what kinds of sexuality can be expressed is queerphobic.

Fascism thrives when a community self-polices, and some of you are starting to talk an awful lot like cops.

[ninjakittycomics]

Folks. It mighta meant the debutante coming out to your community back in the day. (And you can still have that)

But dangit if the op almost sounds like "go back".(Tee hee, we don't need visibility anymore)

ACT UP, Harvey Milk, and many others (having a brain pain day, can't recall all the activists right now)

These are folks who explained through the AIDS crisis, that the Reagan administration had no problem killing off a faceless population.

We were begged to come out, to prove that everyone in the country knew at least one of us. That we were humans, that people loved, and we were deserving of life saving medicine, let alone, existing in public, alive.

It started in one place, but because we can't have nice things, it HAD to shift to another.

Don't forget that. Go look at our history, and dont forget it.

That aids quilt isn't just a pretty lawn decoration.

And the pride parades did indeed start from riots.

In ~these times~ it is important for queer people to be reminded of what "coming out" originally meant. "Coming out" did not mean telling all of your co-workers something super stigmatized and vulnerable about you, wearing your queer status on your sleeve in public, informing the police or government institutions about your sexuality, or even telling your parents. "Coming out" meant venturing out into the queer community; being among other queers as a queer yourself.

Coming out isn't about telling the entire world when doing so is not safe for you, it's not about arming your enemies with information they could use against you. No, coming out is about making a fulfilling queer life possible for yourself through participation in the queer community. It is about escaping the restrictions and dangers of the cisgender heterosexual world by rooting oneself more deeply into the queer one.

And you can always do that. No matter how oppressed we are. No matter how much the culture shifts and policies are enacted to terrorize us. We are always able to be ourselves when we are amongst each other. And living our queerness has always been a collective social project, not just a matter of personal exposure.

[bisexual-history]

[National Biways, Oct/Nov 1994]

[ergodyke]

Lesbian Subaru ads from the mid 90s/early 2000s

[queersatanic]

Happy birthday, Duane.

[slockblue]

And don’t forget… it was to fuck over Reagan too!💕

they're making secular nuns who do all that shit for atheist reasons

[i-add-sources]

This is partially true, partially unverifiable using publicly available sources

It is clear from interviews that he was a very kind man, and his colleagues liked him. It is a fact he cycled to work. The claim about the allergies and gas masks was found in a blog from 2009, which linked to a youtube video which is no longer online. He worked alongside Joan Clarke at Bletchley park. Unclear if this was a mentoring relationship. I was unable to find any sources for the claims regarding sugar rations and parties.

I will genuinely never forgive anyone involved in making The Imitation Game for their absolute travesty of Alan Turing’s story.

He was intensely autistic, and gay, and *kind*.

He mentored people below him in the programme - including women, who pretty much everyone else was crappy to.

He had terrible allergies and went cycling in a gas mask in the country to avoid then, and when he got overstimulated at parties he pulled incredibly daft elaborate “walking into a cupboard” leaving gags to handle them that left everyone screaming on the floor despite the silliness.

He got on really well with kids and never talked down to them. He gave his neighbours his sugar rations on their kids’ birthdays so she could always make them birthday cakes - even when he was being persecuted after the war, even when he was suffering horrible side effects from the tortures they put him through.

He was such an utterly, genuinely lovely human being, and he deserved so much damn better, and at the very *least* he deserved to be portrayed as who he was in the 21st fucking century instead of falling into a whole slew of horrifically harmful stereotypes that erased the fucking gift he was to us all over again.

[bisexual-history]

[The Bi-Monthly, Mar/Apr 1977]

[whereserpentswalk]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[makingqueerhistory]

Resisting Erasure

"National Park Service removed several references to transgender people from its website for the Stonewall National Monument[...]

Journalist Erin Reed reported earlier this week that multiple references to bisexuality had been deleted from the home page and “history and culture” section for the monument, which commemorates the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City that marked a pivotal point in the movement for LGBTQ rights."(Source)

Learn about transgender and bisexual people from queer history.

U.S. dismantles USAID memorial honoring Bangladeshi LGBTQ rights activist

Read about his story.

Most book ban requests are coming from organizations & officials. They’re targeting LGBTQ+ authors.

Read banned queer books.

Queer history is being erased in front of our eyes. Resistance can look different for everyone, but right now learning, reading, and preserving queer history is vital. It isn't light work. It can be emotionally challenging, practically difficult, and it almost always recquires community engagement.

What you don't protect can be taken. What you don't value will be lost.

Learn queer history. Help share queer history. Resist however you can.

[catastrfy]

all of this i'm 64 and no one is taking "queer" from me -- i embraced it during the aids epidemic in the 80s. i know plenty of people who still use dyke and byke. one of my chosen family reclaimed the hell out of faggot in the 80s. the phrases "q-slur", "d-slur", "f-slur" feel far more like actual slurs that queer, dyke, faggot, because they're being used to shame every person who reclaimed and uses them (or used, if they're late)

one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you’re going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you’ll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you’ll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar’s history, you’ll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as “guys” and “boys”, you’ll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have “he / him” painted on his chest, and you’ll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you’ll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how “problematic” it all was and it’s honestly tragic

[saveahorserideaneddie]

pride month has already passed, but i saw a few photos of gay pride parades from the past and it just kinda struck me in the heart with how far we’ve come that i felt the urge to put together this little slideshow/tribute video to our historic predecessors to a song that holds such an important message for any minority group- it’s not much, but i still wanted to take a moment to recognize and reflect on just how far we’ve come, and hopefully infuse a little hope in our current climate

anyway, i hope everyone reading this knows that they are loved and that there is a place for them <3

❤️🧡💛💚🩵💜💙

[poetry-written-in-blood]

• On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated. This is the match in the powder keg that ignites World War I.

• Soldiers living and dying in horrific conditions and in close proximity to one another means that diseases spread very quickly.

• One German soldier in particular contracts jaundice and is removed from the battlefield. This soldier is Conrad Veidt.

• Veidt is permitted to act in the army theatre until his condition improves and he is fit to return to battle.

• In 1917 he is deemed unfit to serve and is discharged from the German army.

• Conrad Veidt returns to the theatre and goes on to have an illustrious career on both stage and screen, gaining stardom by playing major roles in pictures such as Different From the Others (1919), the first pro-gay film known to exist, with Veidt as the lead; and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), widely regarded to be the first true horror film, with Veidt as a major antagonist under the villain’s control. He is one of few silent film stars whose careers last through the advent of sound.

• In the late 1920s, Veidt travels to the United States to star in a few films for Universal Pictures. One of these films is The Man Who Laughs (1928), in which he plays Gwynplaine, the titular Laughing Man, who was surgically disfigured as a child to set his mouth in a permanent grin. This film is adapted from Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel, L’Homme qui rit.

• On April 25, 1940, the Joker makes his first appearance in the debut issue of the comic book Batman. It is generally accepted that the visual design of the Joker is based directly on Conrad Veidt’s appearance as Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928). This is supported by the Joker’s creators, although their accounts of the Joker’s creation differ.

• The Joker goes on to become one of the most popular characters of all time, joining the ranks of characters of myth, legend, literature, and modern media whose stories will likely be retold and remembered until the sands of time have buried the bones of humanity forever.

• Enter tumblr user @the-muppet-joker (aka Croaker), who not only kins (mainly) the Joker and Kermit the Frog, but is also in a relationship with both of them.

• Tumblr user and YouTuber @strange-aeons makes a video delving into the twisted mind (and blog) of the Croaker.

• Croaker is angered by this, and so they schedule a duel to the death at @dashcon-two.

• They duel. Strange emerges victorious and is knighted by the Ball Pit Queen. Croaker dies and the funeral process is speedrunned with a heartfelt rendition of “Man or Muppet” performed by The Musical InterDudes. The singers held signs with individual letters spelling “KUNG POW PENIS”.

TL,DR: The Croaker owes his existence to jaundice and the 1914 assassination of an Austro-Hungarian noble.

And also Victor Hugo.

[charlesswolfgang]

Warm and slimy 🫦🍆 #pride

… LOOVE bunny goo ❤️

@bunnytrained4