no escape bring your tux

Equiping an armor tutorial

"Friends / Houses" Mug Mates mug (1985)

I haven't seen anyone talking about this and just wanted to make a quick post on here.

Akihiro Miwa recently passed away peacefully june 20th, and was not only a drag queen and a queer icon, but also the japanese voice of Arceus in the movie Arceus and the jewel of life, as well as the witch from Howl's moving castle and Moro from Princess Mononoke.

queer, particularly trans representation hasn't come all that far in 20 years. maybe there's less blatant transphobia, but there sure as hell isn't any widespread positive representation. we have multiple generations of trans women and men who were only able to explore their identities during adolescence in online spaces. and kids today are being stripped of that.

Nonbinary as in she is a fluid person and who he is and how they feel will shift and there is beauty in that.

Nonbinary as in the cradle you raised in him was made of barbed wire and he refused to stay a prisoner.

Nonbinary as in yellow stripe, where ve stands outside the binary and ve is standing strong against those who want to drag ver back in. Nonbinary as in white stripe, where she/he has multiple genders, maybe even seemingly contradictory ones, and shoving him/her into one box is a denial of half or more of them. Nonbinary as in purple stripe, they're kind of both pink and blue, but also kinda neither, they are what they are. Nonbinary as in black stripe, a- without- nul-, neutral, regardless of the binary, gender is a non factor and it's kinda exhausting that some people insist that it is.

Nonbinary as in staying closeted because there is no place for us in a binary world, and nonbinary as in picking up the hammer and nails and building it ourselves.

Hand us a multiple choice test with two options, boy or girl, but we scratch it out and write in our own, giving thousands of answers to an A or B question. Someone asked for a yes or no, but inside us there is an essay barely contained by our ribcage.

Nonbinary as in people are complicated, not just us, and we have to make space inside us to build respect for that, and not demand people simplify themselves for our own comfort.

What does nonbinary mean to you?

What will it mean for you?

There are no "exact color" of pride flags.

I see more and more sites and posts talking about the exact hex codes for the lesbian flag, or the right purple for the ace one, and how it should be more or less saturated and I just want to say: pride flags were meant to be sewn in your kitchen. To be spraypainted and to be recognised.

Lou Sullivan- FTM Pioneer in the US

Louis Sullivan (June 16, 1951) was a Milwaukee-born author and activist known for his work on behalf of trans men and the gay community generally. He is credited as one of the first transgender men to publicly identify as gay and is largely responsible for the modern understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity as distinct concepts. Sullivan moved to San Francisco in 1975 in hopes of finding community and medical support, although he was repeatedly denied hormones/surgery because of an expectation that transgender people should be heterosexual in order to ‘correctly’ transition. This contributed to Sullivan’s life work of bringing attention to the existence and needs of both straight and gay trans men.

Sullivan was a pioneer of the female-to-male (FTM) movement and was instrumental in helping individuals obtain peer-support, counseling, endocrinological services and reconstructive surgery outside of gender dysphoria clinics. Sullivan wrote Information for the Female to Male Crossdresser and Transsexual for this purpose. The second edition, printed in 1985, serves as a guidebook for trans men, providing definitions of identities, tips and tricks for gender presentation, and a list of print and film sources for further study. The selections shown here comprise the history of trans men that Sullivan pieced together and interspersed throughout the guidebook.  

Sullivan was diagnosed HIV positive in 1986 and died from AIDS related complications on March 2nd, 1991. Even after his passing, Lou continues to make a significant impact on the contemporary queer community. His papers can be found at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.

This book can be found in the Eldon Murray UWM Manuscript Collection 256, in the UWM Special Collections, and in UWM’s Digital Collections. 

- Julia, Archives Graduate Intern

and he paused for a second and then said, “when you’ve been taught from a young age that crying is weak and you should train yourself never to cry for any reason, you assume that everyone else has trained themselves too, so anyone who cries has to be doing it on purpose. it took me a long time to realize that wasn’t true.”