A wonderful and topical column from a respected queer columnist! How refreshing!!!
I would give the link but you know how Tumblr hates links.
I personally find the pulled quote "I am not entitled to a perpetual state of comfort" to be a) the wisest most comforting shit I've heard all year and b) a maliciously abdicated concept in most young reactionary gays. Also known as tenderqueers, or purity police, or puriteens. So here I go.
JP is an immensely cool guy. We went to college together (generally, not personally). He doesn't play in fandom, or at least doesn't write much about it, so we are now seeing fandom purity culture bleed into "real life" asks and columns and I for one am exhausted. The sheer ignorance of gay history is the bulk of the problem and I don't know how to make younger queers understand that we've always been kinky, we've always been weird and outside and rejected, and while ITS COOL THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE THAT NOW(?), you have ZERO rights to try and cringe-cancel and sanitize a culture of survivors triple your age. Because of les uncomfix, or anything else.
(TW: small fandom-centric story involving trauma dumping re: sexual abuse and incest)
It reminds me of when I received a comment on a chapter of Bandages and Bravado, accusing me of (here we go) promoting/adoring incest for? Midnight making a joke that Aizawa needed a "daddy".
That was it. I also tagged for it. It was a joking sort of tag, because it was ONE SENTENCE, ONE THROW AWAY CONCEPT, like ha ha we are referencing living/classic gay culture in a story about stupid Japanese heroes.
This person was deeply upset and triggered and trauma dumped, semi-graphically, in the comments on a BDSM-centered fic with nearly exhaustive tags, about how their father sexually abused them and how they have to walk through life knowing that people do this thing that I referenced, and why would I ever do that. This thing that, according to the level of their deep grief, I invented (???) and wrote into a very unrelated story (????) for callous and ignorant laughs.
There is so much wrong with this ahistorical, ignorant, unhealed and reactionary approach to kink and sex and I am still so very sorry that this person stumbled upon that one sentence, or concept, and it was enough to provoke that kind of pain.
I also know that it had little, if nothing, to do with me.
I said (paraphrased), "I am deeply sorry you had to live through that. You should probably not be reading this fic. While it is still your choice, I would not recommend it, because the fact you didn't expect to see basic gay kink content/context in a themed fic overly tagged as such probably means you're not mature enough for the complicated contents to come. It will probably lead to more distress, and I don't want that for you. I will be deleting your comment within 24 hours, due to the fact that others have not consented to your graphic descriptions of your very real abuse. In sharing in public spaces, you may trigger someone else, and I'm certain that was not your intent."
And I did. I was shaken, and sorry, and mad, mostly at the idea that young people (I'm assuming they were young) are irresponsibly barging into pieces of fiction and destroying themselves like this. And, in terms of their comment, possibly harming other people who had come into the space responsibly and weren't at all expecting to encounter an accusatory first hand account of incest and abuse in a story actually WHOLLY unrelated to such things.
I'm just tired, y'all. You are not entitled to perpetual comfort. You are entitled only to maintain your own sense of comfort and your ability to enter and exit spaces that you believe violate your comfort. You cannot do this at the expense of others, and not everything on this green earth is engineered to harm you. Some things simply are.
And if you metaphorically walk up to a rock in the middle of the road and bend over to bash your head into it, not even have the excuse of TRIPPING on it, then you need to take some time with yourself and figure out how to effectively champion your own internet safety. It's your most important responsibility out here, and if you show up with gushing head-wounds more than once, you may not have your own best interests at heart.
Enjoy the good. Block the bad. Curate your feed. BUILD YOUR BUBBLE. MAINTAIN YOUR ARBITRARY CONCEPT OF SAFETY.
And please, PLEASE stop self-harming on my, or anyone's, accurately tagged content. Because did you know? That's what you're doing.
