#liamgate

Lena is going to retroactively come after those of us who have harmed him even before she succeeded in trademarking him :P

They wouldn’t, not in person. Liam was still giving thumbs up to rainbow flags yesterday, and Harry ran across the runway waving an American Rainbow flag. Please have a look at the meetups planned for your concert so you can find like-minded souls who you can team up with and find support from.

It’s totally understandable that you feel little and hurt and lost after the Attitude article delegitimized our LGBTQ+ support by saying the flags were really only about Larry and therefore we’re all crazy and driving the boys nuts.

Please remember that Liam was reading out “Larry” signs from stage around that time even if it were true that it was all about Larry, it’s not true that it’s driving him nuts. Please further remember that Liam tweeted “real eyes realize real lies” before the article came out. Please also remember that he thumbed up rainbow flags the day after the article came out, and what Harry said about “Love is Love” yesterday, in the name of all the boys - so the rainbows are not bothering them either.

Most of all though: they cannot put away all our LGTBQ+ support as Larry tinhattery. Rainbow Direction flags are and were always about the LGTBQ+ fans and whoever claims otherwise is not assuming best intentions - why would they do that other than to serve their own narrative?

You know your LGTBQ+ support is genuine, you know how much it means to LGBTQ+ kids in the closet to see a rainbow flag, and you know you deserve to have fun with Rainbow Direction at the concert. It would be such a pity if you sold yourself short because some Attitude editor sold themselves to serve the interests of 1DHQ rather than what really matters to real LGBTQ+ people.

Oh dear - this was information I did not have and I do find it despicable. I believe this would have been an ideal action for Takemehomefromnarnia’s Twitter team to tweet each individual perpetrator and ask them why they did that, trying to engage them in conversation about how homophobic and hurtful to lgbt people that is.

Still, in terms of which celebrity the mod should have targeted first and foremost, given the limited time and resources available at the time, I stick to my guns and say it was Liam - one apology from him would have made most perpetrators from the fandom  see sense. The reason why “the fandom” felt entitled to do that was Liam’s meltdown, after all. When you are short staffed - as we were back then - choices have to be made: what will have the most impact when you only have five minutes to spare to write up an action. And that would be: try to get Liam to apologize via one of our Tumblr “Today’s Action“‘s. That said - given more time and resources a supportive Tweet for Tyler and an educational Twitter action targeting individual transgressors would have been avenues to pursue.

So - in summary: we can only do what we have the time and resources to do, responsibility and impact are deciding factors in those cases. Liam was responsible for this - and an apology from him would have been the most impactful.