Be Gay Do Crafts

The boycott is working, y'all. YouTube is panicking, trying to get people to buy Premium. They're advertising themselves on other platorms, when YT used to be the place to advertise. They're trying to bribe people with discount codes.

IT IS WORKING

Keep fighting the good fight

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some other argument of course, about how times have changed or how old people are inherently more conservative or how "outdated" language is "offensive", rich out of touch boomers etc, but it's just a distraction.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.

Friend: “hey my son can’t concentrate on his homework. He chooses to do literally anything else everytime. He said his head doesn’t feel like it.”

Me: “Did you give him music?”

Friend: “No! No tech until he’s done! He doesn’t need more distracted.”

Me:

“k, bring me the child”

*Go to her house*

*points to the obviously ADHD boy struggling with his homework*

Me: “so your head doesn’t feel like doing homework?”

Son: “yeah. It would rather do ANYTHING else.”

Me: *unwrapping earbuds* here, listen to this for an hour while you do it.

French voice: 1hr later

Son: “k I’m done! :-)”

Friend: “wow, what’d you give him? Concentra, Adderall, Ritalin‽”

In particular, I recommend the relax/study livestream radio. Or just about any of their mixes. Fantasic Music:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZyyXrEF2WCZbI653PFNBbA Both the Chill and the Jazz playlists are excellent.  Jazzhop Cafe:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi8wqezBudeAiTdKOX571ug

Their ChillMix videos are the best.  Jazzhop Cafe Archive:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKbD–QKXKosHmSXarqYUeg Name is self-evident.  I believe ChilledCow also has a livestream, but I honestly prefer Chillhop. YMMV https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJ4gkVC6NrvII8umztf0Ow

[ID: A tweet that reads "For my trans friends on testosterone, go check your lot number, there's been a recall due to bacterial contamination." The tweet includes a link to the news source detailing the recall and a screenshot from that source. The link to the news article is:

okay

that will require stealth trans men to out themselves in order to receive help

that will require closeted trans women to out themselves in order to receive help

that will require nonbinary people who don't ""look nonbinary"" because they look too masculine to out themselves in order to receive help

it will also alienate transfems & trans people who were AMAB who haven't realized they're trans yet from spaces that could provide them a safe place to explore gender & sexuality and be introduced to the idea of being trans

trans people are eventually going to get uncomfortable with your hatred for cis men, because people who were AMAB are gonna wonder if you secretly hate them for being "actually men" and trans mascs are gonna wonder if you hate them for being men at all

people attracted to cis men are going to feel uncomfortable when they try and bring up their love for men including cis men or bring their cis boyfriends/partners/friends to your spaces

there are cis queer men & queer men who blur the lines between cis and trans and they have just as much a right to queer spaces as you do

^ intersex men also exist including intersex cis men

there is never going to be a group of people who it is alright to blindly hate just because of circumstances of their birth or identity and every time you try you are going to end up hurting people. embrace compassion and nuance

i've just lost hundreds of docs and pdfs and i'm beyond pissed right now

okay so, gonna tell ya'll something awesome rn

google drive is a mess sometimes with its storage things and if you're unlucky it might delete some of your files and you won't realise until it's well past the point where they won't be in 'trash' anymore and you're fucked

all is not lost however!

if you're on drive via browser, hit the little ? in a circle next to the settings cog and select "help"

search for "file recovery"

it'll show you the ways to try and recover your files on pc, android, and mac etc

these don't matter

you need to scroll down to the bottom and just hit the "contact us"

you'll be logged out automatically

log back in

click the little box to give google permission to attempt to restore your files for that account

click "submit"

give them some time to work but it's an automatic process

i've got most of my files back in less than 10 minutes

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

February 1, 2022

I’m so so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

WHAT IS THE EARN IT ACT?

The EARN IT Act has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country. This is a bill that will make children less safe, undermine online safety and security, and trample free expression, because it carves out another exception to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230), which the ACLU describes as “foundational to modern online communications.” This has been the law that has let the internet grow into what it is today, we’ve had this law since the 90s. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of this law because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship. Platforms will be incentivized to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSEM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

If this bill passes, we're going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms, for fear of the liability that could come with ever accidentally hosting CSAM, as well as the erasure of end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms.

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal's EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please, (Right now, right wing organizers are catgorizing books about racism as ‘porn’ to ban them from schools) which is a cherished goal of organizations that seek to reintroduce obscenity prosecutions for content now protected by Free Speech jurisprudence. This will 1000000% be used to eradicate anything LGBT online.

What this bill says it does on the surface is make platforms liable for their users’ activity if that activity involves sex and minors. However, because of 230, platforms are not liable at all about their users' activity. This has allowed platforms to grow and thrive and many niches online to as well. The bill also creates an unelected commission to create “best practices” to combat online child sexual exploitation. While these recommendations are nominally voluntary (so Americans have no decision on who gets to be on it), platforms that refuse to comply will be liable for criminal prosecutions and lawsuits should the government decide any of their users is engaging in online child sexual exploitation.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of "protecting kids" to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids.

The entire EARN IT act is based on *multiple* misunderstandings of the law and reality. It's a really really really bad policy that will do serious harm. But because Senator Blumenthal wants headlines, he'll pretend that it "helps protect the children." It won't. It'll do real damage. It will make CSEM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works -- without fear of liability for any "failure." Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on "obscenity" as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

NCOSE, the far right anti-LGBT hate group behind the global anti-sex legislations, is pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill?

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) along with a coalition of 26 civil society organizations urged the United States Senate to reject the EARN IT Act. Groups on the left and right, including the ACLU, Fight for the Future, EFF, and Hacking // Hustling oppose it. Because it threatens free expression online and will threaten marginalized people’s safety while being totally unnecessary and failing to fix the problem it claims to address. The EARN IT Act empowers states to give law enforcement access to users’ private conversations and force companies to create encryption backdoors for law enforcement. This is totally unnecessary. Platforms are already handing over CSAM to the federal government. It’s actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don't know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the "make child pornography worse" bill, but here we are.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

EARN IT Act was introduced yesterday! And it’s already scheduled to get marked up, which is the first step post-introduction. Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. IF YOU LIVE IN THESE STATES (IL, VT, CA, RI, MN, DE, CT, HI, NJ, and GA), CONTACT YOUR SENATOR AND HOUSE MEMBERS NOW. THIS IS URGENT. This is who gets first crack, and folks in all have Senators who are on the Judiciary committee.

I'm guessing this month or March is when the bill would be passed if there is no opposition 😭 The bill was re-introduced yesterday, already set for markup this Thursday. This feels like an attempt to fast track it this month. Additionally the current makeup of Congress favors those who want it passed. Back in 2020 it was mostly Senate republicans and democrats who are basically republicans (just like now, check the sponsors) pushing it with Ron Wyden using the filibuster to stop their efforts. The house dems didn't want to give Trump a win and needed to appear as pro-privacy/free speech for the 2020 election. Now the dems have the presidency, both chambers of Congress and if you've noticed have spent a few years repeatedly demanding social media censorship and desperately want to give Biden victories. biden isn't like obama who opposed sopa/pipa to appeal to younger voters. This is similar to how FOSTA passed with the group who made it happen last time back again. Far as I'm aware Wyden hasn't spoken about new earn it yet but even if he does oppose it, it's very possible there will be enough Senate democrats to join the republicans in passing it beating a filibuster. Then pelosi's band of house idiots pass it and we have to choose between breaking the law because they can't stop us from using encryption or being obedient sheep to a group who consider themselves above laws.

It already has a fifth of the Senate cosponsoring it. There is a very very very real chance this bill becomes law. This is an uphill battle that's going to happen fast and quick. PLEASE, FIGHT NOW.

202-224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

More sources to read about this bill:

https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-earn-it-act-is-anti-evidence

Fight for the Future’s Statement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=678EW8v09z8&t=1s

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220131/22423648395/senates-new-earn-it-bill-will-make-child-exploitation-problem-worse-not-better-still-attacks-encryption.shtml

EARN IT Act treats Myths as Facts.

https://surviveearnit.com/what-is-the-earn-it-act/ From 2020, but little has changed about the bill.

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/earn-it-act-back

Center for Democracy and Technology’s Statement

There was this post circulating around Tumblr a while back talking about how “useless” it is to try and call your senators. But, while it’s less effective than most of us would like and you should do other methods if you can, the main wrinkle to people pushing back against that is that it does matter if a bunch of constituents are complaining about the same issue in aggregate, notifying that it’s a widely held sentiment.

The point of supporting Jewish communities isn’t to piss off antisemites, it’s to support Jewish communities

The point of supporting Muslim communities isn’t to piss off islamaphobes, it’s to support Muslim communities

The point of supporting mentally ill people isn’t to piss off ableists, it’s to support mentally ill people

The point of supporting disabled communities isn’t to piss off ableists, it’s to support disabled communities

The point of supporting trans women isn’t to piss off TERFs, it’s to support trans women

The point of supporting the LGBTQ community isn’t to piss off queerphobes, it’s to support the LGBTQ community