Cicerothewriter's Blog

"In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when public queerness came with real risk, leather contingents marched anyway. They made banners, they made noise, and they made sure there was no mistaking who this movement belonged to. Remove that thread now and the whole tapestry looks wrong. You don’t edit the origin story of your own liberation because a few people prefer a narrow version of “acceptable."

PRIDE WITHOUT KINK ISN’T PRIDE

Remove leather, rubber, and the rest of the kink family from Pride and you don’t create a friendlier parade. You create a thinner story. You snip the thread that runs from the first marchers to the dance floor today. You tell a whole slice of the tribe that the way they survived, loved, and built community is something to hide. That’s not Pride. That’s PR.

Pride with kink, on the other hand, is honest. It shows the city the many ways we exist — romantic and platonic, playful and political, camp and stone-faced, glitter and matte black. It says: this is us. All of us."

- Darren Berlin

Baby, I'm yours And I'll be yours until the stars fall from the sky

I’d read the articles that young people have no privacy and have become so accustomed to it that they enact on themselves. Abstractly I knew this and had accepted it, but it’s only now that I’m seeing it become a major issues.

Obviously part of the problem is I need to become a trusted member of my new fandom. But fandom in general is becoming far more hostile to privacy than even just 5 years ago.

I’ve had to leave 3 servers that want to do age verification. And this is new. Not even 5 years ago when I started zines ppl just turning 18-20 were far more receptive to the ideas espoused by us older folks about not being surveilled. But now it almost feels like they *want* to be surveilled.

They’ve become so used to it from tiktok and their government that they crave it. I’d write a dystopia about it but unfortunately what even is there to say that hasn’t already been said?

If you’re 18-22 now and you’re reading this and willing to listen without immediately calling me suspicious: this is not normal. Age verification will not keep you safe and will not keep minors safe either. It will only lead to the normalization of further surveillance and erosion of your privacy.

I know it can be an unwieldy text especially if you’re not used to reading academic sources, but go read The Panopticon. Watch V for Vendetta or read the comic, read 1984. Watch The Lives of Others and understand the ways this modern era is not so different from the Stasi in the film.

Please.

Now recognized as the earliest surviving gay-themed British television drama, this ITV Play of the Week centers on Lt. Jan Wicziewsky, a guest on a wealthy family’s Deep South plantation as the American Civil War looms. Wicziewsky’s initial arrogance gives way to emotional disintegration when the arrival of Eric MacClure forces him to face up to his darkest secret: his love for another man.

I'm afraid they'll become engineers and sign off on bridge designs that collapse - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become medical professionals who don't know what they're doing - and people will die.