diannelamerc

Sooo, apparently the extremely tenuous and recent nature of the LGBTQ+ community's legal right to exist was not actually super widely known to a lot of people on Tumblr?

Which clarifies some stuff in retrospect. I have so often wanted to grab people by their lapels and shout, "Stop picking on someone for not meeting your entry requirements! We need everyone we can get, you asshole! DON'T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THEY HATE US OUT THERE?"

Aaaapparently... no, they did not know. Or they knew and were a conservative psyop preparing the ground for our loss of legal rights. Fun times!

So: Look, it is bad. Shit is scary. They really do hate us out there. You're not wrong.

But: This is what we've always fought. This boat we're in with its antique fittings and strange markings on the floor is a battleship. Work has always been going on in the basements, and when shit gets tough, we clear away clutter and roll out the cannons.

I found this chart a couple weeks ago and hung onto it because it felt like the map to my first 25 years on this earth:

[Image description: A graph titled "Same Sex Marriage: Public Polls since 1988." It is from FiveThirtyEight's NYT column. It records the percentage of US Americans polled who would say yes or no to legalizing same-sex marriage, from 1988 to 2011.

The two lines begin with roughly 10% saying yes in 1988, and 70% saying no; the two lines gradually draw closer over the years, until by 2011, the percent saying finally dips under 50%, and the group saying yes makes a tentative reach for the majority. End of image description.]

After some great social change has happened, when everyone has admitted that gay marriage is very cute and Pride is a colourful parade, hooray, people like to pretend that it was just natural and inevitable and happened on its own. People just became less prejudiced! Courts just decided on a case! Governments just passed a law!

In reality, it was a vicious fucking fight, every fucking time. Every fucking where. There are a lot of people who deeply, sincerely believe that a hundred years ago, society had good rules about sex and gender and intercourse and marriage, and that changing those rules has made the world worse. They don't always agree on the specifics, but they can work together far enough to fight anyone with new ideas.

This is why we are a community. Even when we don't have the same experiences of attraction or identity, even when we don't do the same things, even when we have wildly different ideas of a good time. Because when these groups take aim, we're all under fire, and none of us is responsible for why they hate us.

In some ways I think it's a miracle that there seems to be a generation that did not grow up, as I grew up, constantly glued to news reports about What Percentage of Society Hates Us this month. I can't imagine who I'd be if my brain and heart and soul hadn't been tied up, that whole time, in the political question of whether I'd get to dream of a decent future.

I think that it will give us strength to have people who can imagine a world where no one hates us. Who believe in it so strongly they can taste it. That's my prediction: If you didn't know this was coming, you'll be a boon to us, because we have always needed joy so fiercely, in this fight, to keep us going on. We have needed drag queens and punk bands and "her wife" and safe space stickers. Parade floats and wedding days and little dogs with rainbow collars, badges and banners and meetups, because more than anything else we need to fight our own despair, and our fear that the world will never get any better than this.

It will. We know it will. We can taste it.

Look up to the history, organizations, and people who've got us this far for information on what forms of activism will actually advance our political goals. Look to the side to make sure the comrades within reach are keeping their heads above water, and that you're keeping enough joy going to stay alive. Look back to see who's more vulnerable than you are that you might have forgotten or been tempted to leave behind. Look after each other. Look after yourself.

We can do this.

My role in the spitting was standing by a barricade. I wasn’t engaging at all, because we’d already been warned several of the counter-protestors had been attempting to incite riots, so we weren’t even LOOKING at the WBC. And apparently I just happened to be close enough to spit on.

And as a protestor whose future depended on not being arrested several hundred miles from home, I had only one choice. You’d probably like to hear that I beat the shit out of Shirley Phelps-Roper, and trust me, I wish I could tell you the Hollywood version of this story where I did that and everyone went “wow! This person was just standing there and got spit on! Clearly this is a sign bigotry is the wrong choice and we should grant full queer rights RIGHT NOW!” But that would be a lie. So instead I’ll tell you what really happened: with the words “trying to incite a riot” clanging in my head and the specter of jail time as a visibly queer person dancing in my mind, I smiled at her, and said “Jesus loves you, ma’am” and did not wipe her spit away until she was out of sight. I walked about a quarter of a mile with her spit drying on my cheek, to protect the thousands of people around me and the millions for whom we marched.

Less than thirteen years ago. If you’re just old enough to vote, you were probably literally in your kindergarten class when this happened. If you’re just old enough to drink, you were in third grade. A teacher might even have flipped on the TV to let you watch A Historic March, if you happened to be in a place like LA or Maryland (as we used to put on our signs in those days, Maryland, the Marry-Land, because it was the first state where same-sex marriage was legal). Most places certainly not, but perhaps in a few.

The battle never ended. But I want to leave you on a note of hope, not despair. And I want to underline what OP said about needing every person we can get.

I did not cry when Shirley Phelps-Roper spit on me. I didn’t cry when we started reciting the Constitutional right to assembly off the side of a building. I didn’t cry standing outside the White House, wondering if Malia and Sasha were seeing what was happening outside and if so, what their dad would tell them about it, or listening to any of the speeches. But I did cry that day, and thinking about what made me cry is bringing tears to my eyes again now.

It was a straight couple along the side of the protest route. Probably in their 40s or 50s. Black man, white woman, holding a sign they’d made out of a bedsheet.

It said “STAY STRONG 40 YEARS AGO OUR MARRIAGE WAS ILLEGAL TOO WE STAND WITH YOU.”

We’d been instructed under no circumstances whatsoever to leave our groups, because of the whole they-might-incite-a-riot thing and also because it simply wasn’t safe to be alone and confused and visibly queer in a city that wasn’t your own, surrounded by people who said you didn’t have the right to exist. So I couldn’t hug those people. But I waved at them, along with a whole bunch of other protestors, and they waved back at us.

It was a pair of allies who’d faced similar discrimination and hardship who’d made me feel hope. The other queer people around me were amazing, but that couple is the one that stayed in my mind. They represented a world where we could win, because they had won. And I promise you, not a single person around me was suggesting they didn’t belong there. I think we all fell a little in love with them, actually, for accepting the risk and putting themselves out there and finding a way into DC (which is no small feat even when there’s no protest on, DC transportation is horrible) to hold up their bedsheet and tell us they loved us.

If someone says “you have my gun and sword, let me help,” you don’t stop to ask what army they’re from or tell them they’re in the wrong uniform. You shove over a little and you let them get in line, and you ask how many bullets they have.

I’m tired. I don’t have all that much ammunition left. But you’ve got me as long as I can keep shooting.

For some perspective, here’s the current graph:

Yes, that’s right, 67% or over 2/3 of the population are on our side now.  25 years ago it was the opposite.

Another interesting tidbit, just for fun:

We need to hang together.

For a more immediate view, I’m going to ask my elder queers to provide some information on trying to see your hospitalized partner or correctly execute their estate. I’m just a little too young for the first-hand view of that.

But I will share this shocking fact I learned during my marching days, and it should explain a lot:

In the United States of America, OVER A THOUSAND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES are granted to married couples, but not to unmarried couples or domestic partnerships.

These range from hospital visitation to paying inheritance tax to how you do your income taxes.

I've been an adult longer than same-sex marriage has been recognized everywhere in the U.S. (2015)

I've been an adult longer than same-sex couples have been able to adopt children in the U.S. (2017)

I was barely out of the closet when the Columbia, South Carolina Pride March I was in almost got overrun by protestors. An older gay couple actually bodily blocked a Nazi swinging his fists from getting to me. This was during Obama's presidency too. That wasn't that long ago.

This wasn't that long ago.

And fortunately for us, the president currently in the White House supported us during that time, as Vice President, even when Obama didn't. Obama was still spouting "separate but equal," which I thought was a fucking irony, when Biden just straight out said, "Nah, they should have full equal rights. Come at me."

But we are fighting for a narrow fucking majority, you guys. We are not safe. It is not over. All the babies on here like to talk about how the first Pride was a riot -- they all are. And that is why we don't turn away kinksters, who have been with us (and who are us) from day one. This is why we don't turn away people who ally with us. Not only because there is plenty of room under this umbrella, but because we need every single person we can get.

It physically pains me to see people post awesome fanfiction to tumblr and nowhere else. Tumblr moves so fast! By tomorrow people who didn’t look in a tag at the right moment won’t know it existed. By next week even people who did read it won’t be able to find it back to reread. Finding anything on tumblr via search function is practically a fluke. For all intents and purposes, your hard work has a halflife of about a week at most.

PUT YOUR WORK ON AO3 WHERE IT CAN LIVE ETERNALLY, I BEG YOU

People who come into that fandom in a month, a year, even a decade will be able to find your work!

People can bookmark it!

People can rec it to others!

People can reread it into infinity! (and people like me can do that and comment every time!)

You can get comments & kudos until the endtimes because people will keep finding your work! (seriously I still sometimes get new people finding and loving my work from ~2013)

And best of all, people can SUBSCRIBE to your work so they will get email about new chapters and stories! (I’m seeing people do manual ‘Tag you in the next chapter’ lists and seriously, physical pain, this wheel has already been invented and it is rolling beautifully)

PLEASE LET ME BOOKMARK YOUR FIC I BEG YOU

“But I need an invite for AO3!”

Yes, and the waiting list is currently 2-3 days. That’s hardly worth not doing this for, right?

“But I only read fic, I don’t post it”

here is a post on why having an account just to read fic is also very worth it!

Lately I’ve been the tumblr person who jumps onto people who post cool fic to tumblr and going HEY HAVE YOU POSTED THIS TO AO3, YOU REALLY SHOULD, HIT ME UP FOR AN INVITE CODE and I hereby invite all you fellow fic readers and posters to join me into spreading the good word.

Is it really a better user experience when some piece of software you use for work gets completely reworked every three years and you have to learn to use it again? Even if some of the features are quicker to use?

Is it really a better user experience with better materials if the thing has to be replaced every year or two?

Is it really a better experience if you have to wait in line for half a day, or make reservations for every thing months in advance? 

The ideology behind solving problems in design - and I’m not sure if this is strictly of the designers at large, or the executives in charge, or both - often focuses so narrowly on solving the immediate problem that the cause of the problem is overlooked, or just new problems are created.

Wireless charging is a great idea in THEORY. Yeah you’re right no one really likes wires, managing cables, the cable not being long enough, having the wrong adapter, or whatever. But if your wireless charging pad still requires a wire, and requires the phone to be physically on the pad so that if you want to use it while charging you have to hold the entire thing in your hand…like if an alien from space came down to look at the two solutions, they’d obviously pick the damn plug.

We do this over and over. I remember reading a great piece of satire that talked about a “new” way to read ebooks. Permanent ownership, infinite battery life, no internet connection required, easily annotate and remember pages, beautiful art, ergonomic shape…they’re called printed books. 

Like I hope I’m not the old grandma shaking her fist at the cloud because change keeps happening…I think modern technologies are amazing, and we should fully be taking advantage of them. But idk can we like be thoughtful about it so we make the experience as a whole actually better? Rather than just better on paper? Sometimes its a better idea to refine existing ideas than just completely go for something new because it’s slick or ideologically pure. The problem with car dashboards wasn’t that they had buttons, it was that they were laid out in dumb, cluttered, un-useful ways. But it makes infinitely more sense to just have a little mechanical knob to point the vent in your direction then it does to have it on a screen, buried in menus, that you can’t access safely while driving, controlled by who knows how many servos and other additional needless gizmos.