Ghost Blog

Posts that Tumblr will blaze:

• Blatant NSFW that breaks community guidelines

• Christian proselytizing

• Vent posts

Posts that Tumblr won't blaze:

Hand holding. That's all it fucking took.

So catch me at Pride in a leather harness and holding a bat, because if hand holding is all it takes, we owe it to each other to stand together.

Call me a degenerate if you want. I don't care. It has always been the degenerates protecting each other when the cops raid our bars and inspect our clothing and haul us away for being cross-dressing, family-destroying, society-polluting, tranny dyke faggot freaks.

I know who I'd rather have on my side, and it's not the self-loathing pieces of shit who would rather destroy their own people than dismantle systems of oppression.

Yes, I enjoy scrubbing my fur with fancy soaps and being insanely fluffy.

You are not getting pushback from the older segment of the queer community because you are young.

It’s because you came into the spaces we built for you and instantly tried to kick us out.

It’s because we opened the doors for you and you walked in and demanded that everyone you don’t like leave. You demanded that the kinksters, the crossdressers, the freaks and the weirdos, the non-binary trans folks, the people with conflicting identity labels, the people who apparently don’t enjoy their smut “the right way” leave.

It’s because you have thrown yourself into queer spaces with all the fucking audacity of a straight white woman raging at a rainbow flag in a grocery store, wailing about how it’s not appropriate for children.

It’s because you apparently think that you have some right to tell us, and other queer people your age, HOW to be queer.

It’s because a SCARY number of you think that using the word queer is bad in the first place.

It’s because so many of you have come here drowning in radfem rhetoric, and your response to being corrected is to scream “pedo!” At any queer peer who disagrees with your puritanical approach to kink and fantasy.

It’s because so many of you think that being LGBT+ means you can’t possibly hold onto the conservative values you grew up with, and when you’re called on it you attack anyone and everyone in your way.

Us queer elders aren’t hating on you because you’re young. It’s because you have come into the space we built- a space that we built on from what OUR queer elders built. Which was built on what THEIR queer elders built. And so on, all held up by a foundation of fucking blood of the queers who did not fucking survive, who we lost before I was born, and continue to be lost.

"Queer" is one word. It's simple. Its meaning is broad. You don't have to argue whether this-or-that person is "queer." If they say they're queer, that's enough. If they're joining us in activism, in friendship, in the workplace, in home and family life - they get to say they're part of the queer community.

"LGBT+" is five fucking syllables, is not a noun (nobody says "three LGBT+s came to the meeting") (...pluralizing it makes it seven syllables), and it's exclusionary; nobody's sure where the boundaries are but it definitely leaves some people out.

Nobody says "I am LGBT+." They pick one of the four words, or they pick a label they claim is covered by the "+," and use that. "LGBT+" is a way for people to talk about us at a distance. It's useful for academics. For news media publications. It's a label with boundaries, one that separates people of some identities from the shapeless mass of All Of Humanity. It's deliberately othering.

But in our communities, in our homes, we are not separate.

And while we can be patient with young folks who are desperate to claim an identity of their own, one that marks them as separate from the intolerant family or the insensitive classmates or the patronizing coworkers...

Patience doesn't mean agreement. The them-vs-us distinctions are not as sharp as many people, especially young people, would like to believe. The edges are blurry and the centers are weird.

The communities we've been building for decades are queer communities. If you don't want to join those communities, that's fine. "Queer" is broad but it's not universal.

Shout out to the people who have a hard time at Christmas because they can’t be with their families.

Shout out to the people who have to spend Christmas with a family that they find it difficult to spend time with for whatever reason.

Shout out to all the people being forced to spend time with a family that they neither particularly love nor care for just because ‘it’s Christmas’.

Shout out to the people that have no-one to spend Christmas with at all and yet have to put up with all the festive advertising of all the smiling families.

Shout out to everyone who have lost people to the pandemic so Christmas is now a time of grief and sadness, not joy.

Shout out to anyone that just hates Christmas generally - it’ll all be over soon for another year.

You don't know what someone is having to deal with this time of year, so be kind.