Just the Right Amount of Bitter

Explaining to straight adults that much of queer history happened within their lifetime and they were unaware of all the extremely important events and how many laws there were to prevent us from thriving because they werent part of queer circles themselves is like...

My dad LOVES learning about the Cold War. It's full of drama. Backstabbing, cross-double-cross, spy gadgets, secret identities. It makes for great stories and as a journalist he loves a good story.

Me: -explaining that the moral panic of the 50s slowed down in the 70s only to start back up again with the aids epidemic in the 80s-

Dad: okay heres a simpler question for you- what's with drag queens and Judy Garland and Barbara Streisand? I feel like every drag queen I've seen has a Dorothy costume in their lineup.

Me, ranting about queer history:

I feel like a lot of people don’t quite get what a butler is. The role tends to get rounded off to ‘male servant’ pretty regularly in some media, whereas actually butlers are typically not just servants but chief servants. The butler was generally in charge of either all male servants or just all servants, period, in the household of an aristocrat or other very wealthy person. This meant that butlers have often been fairly powerful and influential people, and sometimes even had a manservant or two of their own.

A barn rasing:  a collective action of a community, in which a barn for one of the members is built or rebuilt collectively by members of the community.

So there’s this huge dudebro in my class, who, yesterday, sat next to me. And I’m sitting there sweating because like… I’m wearing my shirt with the lesbian flag on it, and he’s the most popular jock in school, and always has this look on his face that say ‘I can and will kill you’. He looks me up and down, stares at me for a minute and then goes, “So. Girls in skirts and long socks, am I right?”

Oh! I forgot to mention! I saw him at lunch the same day, and he ran up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, pointed at this super sweet girl who comes to GSA and asked if she’s gay. I told him he should ask her because that’s not my place and he said he would.

So this isn’t lesbian/jock solidarity but I thought you guys would want to know-

Okay so today he asked me if I know how to help people having a panic attack and I was like yeah? And he smiled at me and then went “cool I think I’m having one”

Today at lunch we walked to the football field and laid in the grass and I told him thank you for being my friend (because I don’t have that many) and fistbumped me and said, “You always looked so nice and chill, how could I not want to be your friend?”