Postcolonial societies are a mess when it comes to healthy understandings of sexuality on their own, but add an extra layer of religiosity that is rooted in ideas of sexual chastity and you’ve got yourself the recipe to fuck up a young queer kid’s sense of self for the rest of their life.

What Tamar Braxton’s comments about men not wanting sex reveal about compulsory (hetero)sexuality

Tamar Braxton has issued a non-apology following some recent comments in which she declared that men who lay beside women for several nights without initiating sex are secretly gay. On Instagram, she posted the following:

The text reads, “The truth is ladies that these dudes out here really do be gay!! It ain’t enough money, beauty, hair, babies in the world to keep them!! They want Dick!!…

There is a specific memory, one of several, which has been burned into my mind by virtue of how watershed a moment it was; at least, in terms of who I would later become.

We were drinking; we were always drinking, always partying, because that’s what you do when you live in the suburbs and all of your post-graduate dreams have begun to die, digging their own graves with shovels that they bought on discount at the Walmart your friend works at as a cashier, despite having graduated with a degree in history. Perhaps because he had a degree in history. I’m not sure. We all paid a heavy price for following our intellectual dreams. We’re all still paying.

A terrible act of terrorism that is surely also a mass hate crime.

May the family and friends of the victims and survivors find justice and peace.

"A suspected terrorist shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando has left at least 20 people dead, police have confirmed, adding that the attacker had been killed following a hostage situation at the club.

Shots were fired at the Pulse Club, in the early hours of Sunday. Staff at the venue posted on Facebook: 'Everyone get out of pulse and keep running' and there were quickly reports on social media of an ongoing attack.

Orlando police said the shooting was being treated as an “act of domestic terrorism” and had resulted in mass casualties, urging people to stay away from the area."

[Photo description: Outdoors. Nighttime. A busy scene on a public street. Many police cars with lit red and blue police lights on the roofs of the vehicles are on the, as is at least one fire truck, also lit with lights. Street lights, storefronts, and trees in the background and distance.]

(H/T Darian Aaron​)

#Terrorism #Queerantagonism  

Ace/aro people are not straight.  Non-straight or non-cis is the only requirement for using queer.  The word can be a slur, but it is also an umbrella term.  These two realities exist at the same time.  Ace/aro people can be homoph*bic and “SGA” people can be aph*bic.  Both groups deserve a space without that, so we have the ace/aro and “SGA” communities.  

The queer community, however, by no means requires “same-gender attraction”, a term that is essentializing and extremely uncomfortable to me.  It is not a community built around any specific identity, it should not have such harmful gatekeeping, it is for those who are Excluded elsewhere, which sure as hell includes ace/aro individuals.  

Many feel their oppression has not come from them being ace/aro but homoph*bia (which btw is an ableist term and erases the fact that heterosexist oppression operates in many different ways depending on people’s different identities), and many feel their oppression has been based specifically on their asexuality or aromanticism.  Both of these experiences are valid.

Cishet ace and aro people are not considered straight by straight people, so if we also exclude them where can they go?  Amatonormativity and heteronormativity work together to hurt all of us, but they do not function in the exact same way.  Within not-straight oppression exists heterosexism, allosexism, monosexism, more of the last two with “The Gays’” assimilation.

No one needs to be privileged for others to be oppressed.  Privilege/oppression is not a strict binary.  Privilege as a concept is almost never afforded as much nuance as it needs within these sorts of discussions.  Allosexuality and monosexuality don’t even have to afford privilege to mean that amatonormativity and monosexism don’t hurt asexual and bisexual folks.

I am nonbinary, queer, and quoiromantic.  I am not straight or cis, so I can be queer.  No one can really respect me who would not allow me the same agency were I only arospec.  I don’t want to be in any group that intentionally divides me from my aro siblings because they aren’t queer enough just like I’d hope my trans siblings would fight against me being named “not trans-enough”.

There is no straight/queer binary or cis/trans binary because they erase people’s lived experiences.  Straight is a defined point.  Cis is a defined point.  Queer and trans?  Absolutely not.  They are defined as Anything outside those two points, and Anyone who does not feel at home in those points gets to be a part of my queer community.