An Ace of Fandom

Queer creators trying to make their project queer and being stopped or censored by their employers

Creators trying to make a deep and meaningful friendship between two characters and it unintentionally comes across as queer

Unrequited love stories where one character is canonically queer and the target of their affection is not (it's a disappointing and annoying trope, yes, but it's not queerbaiting)

Characters who are canonically queer but closeted and never get the chance to come out during the story (again, disappointing, but not technically queerbaiting)

Stories that are incredibly slow burns before you get to the queer representation, but that creators fully intend to include

always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”

feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important

justdeleteme.xyz - direct links to delete accounts

how a photo’s hidden exif data exposes your personal information

have i been pwned? - check if your accounts have been compromised in a data breach. CHANGE ANY ACCOUNT THAT USES THE SAME EMAIL AND PASSWORD

online harassment field manual

form for removing personal information from google (for the eu), see also: “remove your personal information from google”

extreme privacy: what it takes to disappear (personal data removal workbook)

filter lists for ublock origin, and more

restore privacy - online privacy resources center

privacytools.io

online spyware watchdog

how secure is your password?

defensive computing checklist

cloudflare dns

non-technical tips on staying anonymous

webrtc leak shield - chrome, firefox

web safety tutorials by the electronic frontier foundation

thank you, jodie whittaker, for being the thirteenth doctor 💙💙

The Purim story covers one woman (and her uncle)’s quest to save the Jews from imminent doom. This featuring of a primary female heroine, as well as some truly iconic lines, makes it my favorite Biblical story, and a beautifully unique one.

If you’re into lesser-known mythos, niche Biblical stories, or women, you should go read it now, either on the Wikipedia link above or with this Chabad.org link which contains the original text of all ten chapters translated with commentary (”Show Rashi”.) Simple 20-minute read. You can also hear it read in the original Hebrew on YouTube.

then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.

your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.

You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-

The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where I’m from:

Come spring the bees can't get enough of it. And birds love it too. Both to eat bugs that live on it or to sit on watch. Different species of birds too.

There will be plants that work where you are without needing to artificially prop them up but the local wildlife will love. And if all you can do is one plant that's better that none. And there will be people or resources for plants that work for your area without the need for constant care (mostly, climate change).

for a start, the English accent that is almost universally mocked is a working-class accent. light-hearted joking is fine, everyone does it, but the insinuation that the English are all uneducated, incapable of pronouncing things "correctly", or jokes about how they all have bad teeth and that's why they can't talk "right"? it's straight-up classist.

class divisions in England have not changed much since the Victorian era. a lot of it has been forced underground, but it's very much alive. people with working class accents are judged, unfairly profiled, and often lose out on job opportunities. certain fields are completely closed to them. there is an entire system within a system that ferries upper class people through private schools and elite universities, right into the highest jobs in business and government -- the ""sexy"" ~British~ accent that a lot of foreigners find preferable, and see as the "proper" English accent, is the accent of the upper class and is shockingly rare once you get out of London amd the surrounding counties. the accents being mocked are those of regular, working-class people, and historically, working-class English people have always been the first victims of British imperialist greed.

Feel jealous. Feel anger. 

When I say ‘dykes’, I mean ‘dykes’. As in: people who identify as dykes. 

In the post you’re refering to I made it quite clear that I was writing about dykes I  know and when I speak of these dykes I won’t erase or sanitize their identities by using a mainstream, tame, deradicalized word that denies the words they specifically chose for themselves to emphasize their identities and their struggles as queer marganilized working class proudly-perverted revolutionary DYKES. 

I forget the age range on this site runs only a little past the teens most of the time because nothing said here is in any way outside of LGBTQ history. 

But, you know, thats reactionary bullshit for you. Are discoursers all younger than 21 or something? Would that explain this nonsense?

It’s not a generation gap. It’s not just ignorance (though that plays a part). It’s not just TERF manipulation against the word queer (though that plays a part).

We’re seeing a young generation of LGBT conservatism: kids who want their civil rights but who don’t want all the mess and scandalousness of actual liberation. Kids who want to hold on to what has been won for white middle class binary identified LG kids and don’t want to thing about what’s happening on the margins on the LGBT movement. Kids who want glamorous LGBT celebrities on tv, not homeless LGBT youth in their spaces. We have kids into gay nationalism. We have lesbians longing for the time when we didn’t include bisexuals and trans women in our communities. We have LGBT youth voting for Tories.

The thing I created this blog to oppose is, ultimately, a right-wing reactionary movement, and if you scratch even a little bit at the veneer of leftism, you find bootstrap logic, xenophobia, militarism, anti-intellectualism, the veneration of retributive justice, disrespect for bodily autonomy, and other characteristics of right-wing politics underneath.

Years ago, someone asked me to do a portrait of the social conservatism of decades to a century in the future and at the time I predicted highly limited and conditional acceptance of white, able-bodied, very gender-conforming, white-picket-fence, cis gay men and lesbians, who vote conservative. Maaaaaaybe also a limited acceptance of transgender people who medicalize and pathologize themselves out the wazoo, performing a constant show of ‘I’m just a good person who seeks the appropriate treatment for my medically-acknowledged condition, won’t you accept me, I promise not to rock the boat?’ and whose gender-presentation after transition is also very high in conformity to what the conservative mind thinks of as acceptable + again, support for conservative politics. 

Imagine how depressed I was when a large assortment of discoursers, transmedicalists and others along these lines basically confirmed a good deal of the above, here on Tumblr, decades before I thought it would ever become a thing! I started getting alarm bells in my head when I saw the vicious responses toward the concept of gender as a spectrum (and thus toward the existence of genderqueer / nonbinary, agender, genderfluid/genderfuck people), because after years of monitoring and seeking to understand social conservative communities, I knew that they consistently felt a deep, existential sense of threat from anything that challenged their rigid, binary views of gender. And here, on Tumblr, I was seeing young, so-called ‘progressives’ reacting in the same manner, as if threatened, by the concept that gender as a binary is a small and very reductive lens through which one can see the human experience. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conservatism with a gay hat’ couldn’t have been more apt.

And the thing is, this isn’t exactly something new for the community, the only thing that’s truly different is that an entire generation is now in the thrall of reactionary politics. Seeing sneers at queer people daring to (gasp!) describe ourselves as ‘proudly perverted’, as highly sexual beings, as kinky and unapologetic, reminds me what a massive impact radfems have had in shaping the Tumblr social environment and what a net contributor they’ve been to the aforementioned reactionary politics. Whenever I look at the notes of popular radfem posts, it’s always the same exceedingly telling image: usernames along the lines of ‘empress-vulvalini’ or ‘uter-person’ routinely interspersed with ‘tradcatholicnationalist’ or ‘jesus-is-my-savior’ (looking at the latter kind of blogs reveals that they’re Fundamentalist Christians to a one and I say this as a progressive Christian, lest someone accuse me of bigotry. It’s not the Christianity that’s my issue here, it’s the fundamentalism and the deep conservatism that comes with it). In the most darkly hilarious situations, I’ve found posts made by actual religious fundies (’sexual promiscuity and behavior characterized as ‘kink’ damages the inherent dignity of the person’, for one example) with the notes filled with radfems liking, reblogging and lauding the content.

1. I totally agree with you. We are erasing women by not listening to the voices of older queer women. Look at the leaders of LGBT communities and there is an overwhelming amount of (middle class white) older gay men and (middle class white) ‘inspiration youths’. Older queer women in leadership positions and as the visible faces of movements? Very rare. Older queer women as voices of aids activism? Even rarer.

2. We are erasing women by defaulting to the well known ‘nursing’ stories when we speak of women in aids activism. Women had so many more roles than that. Women organized protests, women blocked roads, women fought cops, women did the research to call medical officials on their bullshit, women were a big part of every aspect of aids activism.

3. We are erasing women by not speaking enough of women who died of aids. A lot of women died during the AIDS crisis. Women still live with AIDS. Very hard hit were trans women and queer women who did sex work. Women also faced unique challenges. Women often had no access to health insurance and the health care it paid for. HIV positive women often went undiagnosed for far longer because doctors and the general public considered AIDS a ‘gay men’s’ disease. HIV positive women often died from untreated symptoms and were not diagnosed with AIDS because the symptoms that were recognized were based on how men got sick. Women were often denied benefits and told they were ‘not sick yet’ until the last days of their lives because their symptoms were not recognized.

United in Anger. A History of Act Up, (GREAT documentary) features a lot of women and goes into detail on the campaign for women from 58:00 onwards, I really recommend watching it.