to all the people saying this was an embarrassing time: I am 34 full years old and reading/writing these fics brought me so much joy and rereading them still does. embarrassment is a construct, cringe culture is dead, and the found family trope saves lives.

hey friends where is that picture of boromir with the gondor flag except its a pride flag?

oh my god i almost forgot to tell you all about how, while my dad was visiting, i had an infestation of every single kind of bug in my house that hasn't been a problem before or since. like i'm not kidding i evicted so many creeping crawlies that week and couldn't for the life of me stop mosquitos from stealing my blood, but as soon as he left they vanished. and i mean, sure, there's a perfectly rational explanation, because two people make more mess than one and he has a habit of leaving the windows wide open enough to fly a jet engine through day and night, but i can't help but think how symbolically on the nose it was. the ancestral rot at the heart of my family so gothic it's got ants and flies buzzing around its decaying corpse.

hey so update but i haven't been harassed by a single freaky little beast since my dad left even after leaving some crumbs on the floor as an experiment to see if they attracted any ants so i think my dad might just be bugs actually

love is a beautiful wonderful multifaceted nebulous thing that shouldn't be reduced to the strict bounds of Tier One: Romance and Tier Two: Friends. get weird with it. love your friends deeply, wildly, passionately and platonically. cowards

Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the "gay Taco Bell", but since I was coming from the "gay Howard Johnson's" I wasn't shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they'd worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the "gay Taco Bell" on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven't changed much in 20 years. I'm still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city's version of the "gay Taco Bell" is key to survival.

I like this site. Y’all just shotgunning counterfactual timelines

cant believe we’ll never know who ended homophobia because he was anon