lightly, lightly

The point is, "queer" isn't a rigid box applying only to two men in love. "Queer" doesn't apply only to romance either. Sometimes, being queer even includes an explicit LACK of romance.

As a queer person who took seven years to become confident in my queerness because I felt like I was supposed to shove myself into a box to "count," the whole meaning behind being "queer" is that we're different from what the society thinks we ought to be. We're not "normal." And even as being queer and out becomes more common, it's STILL SOMETHING THAT MAKES US DIFFERENT. ITS STILL SOMETHING THAT CAN GET YOU OSTRACIZED FROM YOUR COMMUNITY. ITS STILL SOMETHING WE ARE HAVING TO FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO LIVE AS.

And this post is specifically about Wu. The fact that Pete and Niran aren't making out on your screen doesn't make it not queer. Trans rep? Check. A story about a boy who disappointed his grandfather because he wasn't exactly what his grandfather expected and wanted? He didn't behave how he ought? Well, that's something we in the queer community are quite familiar with. Group of outcasts coming together? I mean, come on, that's textbook queer allegory.

I HAVE FOUND MY FAVOURITE POST ON THE INTERNET

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

PSA @smallestflowtree (got stickers!)/ sorry for @femmeidiot / just start @bismuth-209 / I hope that @evignonita / meme made by anon and posted og on here / god grant me @leclercenjoyer / get weird @mildmayfoxe (they got stickers!) / every time @racketghost / twitter user ChimaAmlaDing / but if @criminalizegolf

Like, we find out incrementally that she's trans, a medium, and a spiritual advisor to a politician, something she chose to do that the wu community vocally disapproves of and shuns her for because she believes she can work within the system to manipulate things to the advantage of the people she cares for. And then we see it implied onscreen in the fog that her greatest fear is that the people she's fighting for hate her for it.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Happy Pride 2025. This post is 5 years old, and I’m in equal parts proud of it, and annoyed by how chaotic and tacky it is. So I’ve decided to make a new version: one where all the additions are in a single reblog, and with integrated image descriptions (thank you @oddler14 for providing most of these back then!). I would love it if people reblogged this version instead, even if I understand the previous version is much more widespread on Tumblr.

I am one of the people who, for a long time, didn’t feel queer enough. Specifically, as a nonbinary person, I struggled for a long time to believe I was trans enough to even deserve to label myself as trans. This post was the start of my journey unlearning that shame and guilt, which was caused in part by the gatekeepy rhetoric that was predominant in many online spaces. Today, I am confident and joyous in my trans, nonbinary, queer body and mind.

To my 20-year-old self, and to anyone else who might need to hear this: you are queer enough. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And always, always remember:

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.