Geeking Out of the Closet

But it was on enough land that I was able to get a farm permit at 14 which allowed me to drive to specific locations which included school, school related activities, work, and religious services. Basically, it was created so farm kids would actually come to school during planting and harvest times when their parent couldn't leave the farm. So, I drove to school as a freshman (9th grade/14 year old) and had an old car I shared with an older brother.

young queers hate anyone that isn't young.

i wish it was more complex than that. it's always couched in some other argument of course, about how times have changed or how old people are inherently more conservative or how "outdated" language is "offensive", rich out of touch boomers etc, but it's just a distraction. new young people enter the queer community and want it all to be fresh and new and sexy, they want to be the trailblazers, the first generation really pushing back, the first true radicals. after all, if the previous generations had done it right, they'd have defeated bigotry and oppression, right? so they must have been fighting wrong. they must have been bad queers - sorry, bad LGBTQIA+'s. so they should shut up and let us kids fix it.!

of course there will be black and white photos of "elders" and a sort of performed reverence for "history" and us "always being here", but only as history, never as contemporaries, as members of our continuous community that we should actively listen to. the voices of those that came before are only revered once they're dead and they can't argue back at teenagers wildly misreading and rewriting their lives... or maybe even worse, the fresh queers might discover their revolutionary new praxis system has actually been done before!!

the excuse i hate most though?

"we lost a whole generation to AIDS"

i am so fucking sick of hearing this, absolutely sick to my stomach of it. because we didn't! i am not at all going to minimise how horrific the aids catastrophe was to our community or how many it killed, because i have heard first hand stories of people that lived through it, who lost friends and families to it.

but that's the point. they lived through it. many queers did! depending on where you are, most queers did!

we have a living, continuous, unbroken line of queers spanning back all of living memory who we could truly embrace as elders of a community, to care for and learn from, so that we don't have to stumble through alone, but we don't. a "queer elder" is someone like me apparently, 35. i keep having people in their early 20's tell me how thankful they are for my "wisdom", like bitch, there are 60-80 year old queers out there, ready to tell their stories! they will know a fuckton more than me, and all of it is still relevant!

when i was in my 20's, and i was lucky enough to learn from some of them at the rare events where they were welcomed; 50yo's setting up casual evenings for anyone and everyone to come and talk and share stories and learn from each other. i had a therapist once that was a grumpy old dyke that came out in the 70's, and while we often had friction in our opinions on mental health strategies, her experience was invaluable for me untangling a lot of internalized hatred and self loathing. it broke my heart one day when she just straight up said "people would rather pretend we'd all died from aids though, than have to listen to what we've got to say".

but even in the decade since then, it's got worse and worse.

everyone i know my age who once had an active and thriving social network in the queer community has withdrawn into isolation. we live in small pockets with few friends. there's no space left for us. all ages events and gatherings are organised for the fresh and young, and they complain if we're there - we being anyone who dares to be a little wrinkly and saggy. any event that has a minimum age, 30+, 40+, 50+ etc, get flooded with hate for being "exclusionary", or "hoarding resources" like community is a 4X game. teenagers complain about "creepy old predators" having picnics at midsumma carnival. people in their 60's are told to go kill themselves for daring to use the same language they did 40 years ago - ironically right in the middle of the aids crisis that supposed cost us all our elders. horizontal ageist violence in the queer community is some of the nastiest emotional vitriol i've seen, and i've been hate crimed (:(:

so we withdraw into eternal loneliness, looking for scraps, being told our names and flags and core identities are as hurtful as the weapons of the oppressors. told we should either ovverhaul our entire experience of being queer to fit in with what's acceptable in this 3-year cycle of new identities and symbols, or stfu and go away.

but there's this pervasive fear and hopelessness you see among young queers, talking about how high our suicide rates are, talking about losing a whole generation to aids; because when we're made invisible, what are the youth supposed to think other than that we've got an expiry date, and they won't live past 29?

the elders are here and they need love and support too, or the cycle will just repeat, and those fresh sexy young queers will also grow up and be discarded, again and again.

there is a tendency to dispose of anyone who says a wrong thing, has a wrong kink, isn’t ideologically pure in the way the in-group is etc.

it is a sad way to be in community, if you can even call it a community, when everyone lives in fear of making a mistake and being ostracized as a “harm-doer”; and it is exactly what fascists and homophobes want—it serves their interests for us to eat our own.

Great news!

It’s done

“Sounds cool when exactly does the PvP start”

father!

Daveed Diggs was dressed like a black panther (black civil rights activists group, the beret and gloves are tied to that movement).

The King didn't say anything, just the "la da das".

"History has it's eyes on you" was there for a reason.

All of them were wearing black which is considered a mourning color.

While the King was dressed in red which is Republican's color. King George was portrayed as a tyrant, it's basically them saying that the republican party is tyranny.

Lights at the end represent the White House.

The "immigrants we get the job done" part wasn't there for a reason.

🧵 THREAD: This #PrideMonth, don’t forget that the fight for queer liberation didn’t start or end with marriage equality.

💪✨ We need to keep fighting for our rights.

Here’s are a few examples:

💋 Before the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, same-smex smexual activity was illegal in fourteen U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. military

👶 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t adopt in all 50 states. Before the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, laws varied wildly by state.

🏳️‍🌈 Before 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosmexuality as a ‘mental illness.’ In December 1973, a vote was successfully held to remove it.

🗳️ Before 1974, there were no openly gay elected officials. That changed with Kathy Kozachenko, who became the first openly gay American elected to public office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

🎖️ Before 2011, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” banned LGBTQ+ people from serving openly in the military.

💍 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t get married in all 50 states. At the time, laws varied by state, and while many states allowed for civil unions for same-sex couples, it created a separate but equal standard.

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

What?

What.

can we talk about the culture of tumblr and how it meshes with the dialect on here?

this is the committing to the bit webbed site, and we have got a specific way to express rethorical speech. that just. developed on here. like hold on a second am i the only one who sees the connection? and if not, what else is there?

this is also, coincidentally, the vagueposting site. and there are such obscure references that we just use in our vernacular, because?? we just do? it’s like normal on here? sometimes its to the point that it feels like we’re actually speaking Tamarian. we reference iconic posts to evoke moods, instead of using regular prose. the children’s hospital is for people overgeneralizing and ignoring context. it is also when people use a little too much red or there’s blood. we ask about the attendance to the devil’s sacrament to call out hypocrisy. we use hyperaggressive or cruel responses as compliments, like when we need to study someone in a lab, or rip someones work apart with our teeth.