photography | art | few TV shows| lgtbqia+

What a strange looking cabbage.

This whole new trend of labeling people by their races disguised as positivity. And I’m not talking about celebrating the accomplishments of someone despite racial discrimination. I’m taking about the posts that go ‘Look at this black girl who did a thing! And she’s black! Black is beautiful! No one will ever talk about this!’. The unnecessary comments on posts of beautiful women or successful people, ‘Black don’t crack. Glorious melanin! Black bitches getting shit done!’ and the incessant adding of political agendas to normal posts.

You see pictures of beautiful successful women and the comments are all about how that person is black. You see a man who has done something breaking in science and the comments are all about how he’s black and that black people can do things too and black lives matter, etc. etc. etc. People reblog post after post boiling down successful people to the fact that they’re black. Not that they’re smart, or beautiful, or talented, that they’re black. They aren’t beautiful because they have great complexion, or mesmerizing eyes, or beautiful hair, they’re beautiful because they’re black. That’s the only remarkable quality about them.

No one is even allowed to have any sort of accomplishment without it being some sort of political statement. No one talks about what makes them special. No one talks about the things that they’ve done. Everyone just marvels at the fact that they did that while being black. They were smart and black. Pretty and black. Successful even though they were black.

It’s not even defying stereotypes anymore, it’s feeding into them. It’s almost become a stereotype on its own. It’s saying ‘wow this person did something great despite not being white!’. It’s saying that being black is a handicap and celebrating anything black people do as extraordinary because they overcame this handicap instead of the fact that they did something genuinely amazing.

‘yeah like people’s race usually makes up a large part of your identity and often times culture too’

‘people’s race usually makes up a large part of your identity’

No. Honey, no. I won’t argue that culture is important to some people, but a person’s skin color is just a skin color. Making how black you are the center of who you are and not thinking of yourself as an individual and but one piece of a black conglomeration is not healthy. The fact that you think that it is is kind of worrying.

Every year during pride they pull out the GAYtm’s around the country that are good fun

I need you to stop and read this for a second. 

My best friend and I are creating an app to help closeted LGBTQIA+ kids in abusive situations. 

The app is finished, and we plan on submitting it to the Technovation competition in April. 

But there’s one problem. 

We can’t get the app to help people if we don’t have the data. 

The competition states we must source our own data through a survey, and if we don’t get enough participants, we can’t submit or release the app until we prove that there’s a need for it. 

We already polled our school’s relatively small GSA, but that gave us biased answers that weren’t enough to successfully draw a conclusion. 

Please, take this survey. No matter your sexuality, gender, preference, race, or anything of that matter. We need data to make this work. 

More importantly, we need you to make this work. 

The difference between this app helping people, and sitting in a trash folder on my computer is the amount of data this survey collects. 

The “full” acronym at one point was “GL”, after lesbians fought against male homosexuality being the “face” of the movement (i.e., the Alliance for Gay Artists (AGA), founded in 1982, was renamed the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists shortly thereafter; and the Gay Activists Alliance never included “Lesbian” in their title).

The “full” acronym at another point was “LGB”, only after bisexual activists campaigned fiercely to be included, and is often still not even included in acronyms

The “full” acronym at yet another point was “LGBT”, only after trans activists campaigned fiercely to be included

Queer was added to the acronym after it was reclaimed and re-politicized by ACT UP off-shoot Queer Nation in the early 1990s. LGBTQ has been a thing since the 90s.

ONE Archives, which is the largest repository of LGBTQIA+ materials in the world and was founded by some of the principle members of the early (1950s-60s) homophile movement, which led to the gay rights movement post-Stonewall, uses the full acronym LGBTQ on their website and also freely uses the word “Queer” interchangeably.

As of 2014, NOW (National Organization for Women) agreed to switch to use of the full LGBTQIA acronym, and it likely isn’t the only large social rights organization to have done so

Many LGBTQ+ magazines use LGBTQ, including One (which has existed in some form since the 1950s) and The Advocate, use LGBTQ or LGBTQIA as the full acronym and regularly use “queer” as a phrase (and, in fact, some articles have welcomed asexual people and their narratives as part of the queer experience).

as if trans people don’t already have to deal with their oppressors (cis people) being in their community

as if LGBTQIA+ people of color don’t have to deal with LGBTQIA+ white people in the community

as if LBTQIA+ women don’t have to deal with GBTQIA+ men in the community

as if disabled LGBTQIA+ people don’t have to deal with able-bodied LGBTQIA+ people in the community

the LGBTQIA+ community is huge and consists of people with multiply-overlapping identities and privileges. we all (unless you’re a cis, able-bodied, wealthy, white gay man) have to deal with a member of our oppressing class in the LGBTQIA+ community

black-ish made television history last night