People…can’t live with them…that’s all I got.
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Yup. A cabin in the middle of the woods looks better the older I get.
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This brings to mind a game kids I knew sometimes played called “Smear The Queer”. I hated that name possibly even more than I hated the game itself since I was never an athletic kid.
It was a very simple game too: one kid would have a football–that would be “the queer” and everybody else was supposed to tackle him.
Only now it occurs to me that at some point every player would be in possession of the football, so maybe it was more enlightened than I realized.
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You can always stop by Kathy’s down the road for a cuppa or glass of wine when the cabin fever sets in.
Call first. I don’t do drop ins!
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I’ll bring some goats milk cheese and eggs! 
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I know so many bisexual men. My husband and I would actually be both bi/pan. However it’s easier to round up to gay because explaining that to both straight and gay folks is a pain in the ass. My buddies that are bi don’t hange with the lgbt crowd at all. They hang in the poly crowd, even when monogamous. In our area bisexuals get a lot more acceptance in that subculture.
I’ve seen the whole bi erasure thing happen. For me, everyone insisted both my husband and I were straight before I transitioned, and now they all insist we are gay. Weirdest thing ever.
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I like how queer is a synonym for odd.
People should remember that, and employ a broad definition for it, IMO.
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Not enough likes for that.
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I’m straight. I love women. Absolutely prefer them 100%.
And yet, on rare occasion, I will meet a guy I find attractive. Once or twice, I’ve acted on it. I don’t identify as bi, I think “fluid” is a stupid description. If people ask, I just identify as straight but open-minded, or occasionally, “I’ve sucked enough dicks to know I prefer women.”
While I have plenty of gay friends, I’m not really part of that world. I do spend a lot of time with kinky and poly folks, who don’t seem to think it’s that weird.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve seen the Rocky Horror Show 380 times. Who the fuck knows.
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Quick point… not all queer identities are based on orientation. One can be straight and trans, or straight and asexual, to pick the first ones that pop into my head.
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A lot of this thread talks about how people police other people’s ideas sexuality and gender. Bi/pansexuality erasure or exclusion, arguing about other people’s gender self-assessments, arguing about whether we ought to say “bi” or “pan” because somehow that’s a big issue.
For a long time I struggled with the idea of self-identification being the end-all because it personally left me in the dark. I think that manifested in negative ways. Recently I’ve realized that if I don’t know what gender I am then it’s fine that my gender is, “I don’t know”. And that makes me neither homo- nor hetero-sexual, and I’m not bisexual, so I’m just I-don’t-know-sexual.
And there are people who would look at me and look at my family and look at what I’ve just said and say, “Fuck you for appropriating queerness for yourself, you are straight and cis.” Like they’ve decided that policing other people’s sexuality and gender is sometimes a really good idea.
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There are unpleasant people in most, if not all, communities.
I have seen homophobia from trans people, transphobia from LGB people and biphobia from trans and gay people. I’ve even seen transphobia from trans people because their targets were not acting in the “correct way” for their gender or they had a non-binary gender identity.
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This is the best thing I’ve read all day. Or week.
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Some people also include BDSM as a queer identity.
I’ve been thinking that we should use words to describe more what we are attracted that aren’t gender based. Words like gynephilia, androphilia and ambiphilia. Is this making sense?
If asked, I generally say I’m agender and pansexual.
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I mostly talk with lesbians so I hear more about that than anything else, but there is a certain anti-lesbian discourse going on wrt to trans-acceptance that goes something like “if lesbians don’t want to date/have sex with transwomen they are transphobic and/or bigots” and there’s a lot of lesbians getting yelled at for not wanting to have sex with someone with “male” genitalia. Its really odd… people are allowed to be attracted to whomever they are attracted to but apparently not lesbians?
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I believe you.
It is not acceptable, but I also know of trans women (Although as some of them are post-op they may not identify as trans anymore) who have been ostracised from lesbian communities after their gender history has been found out. I have the misfortune of losing access to a support group as a result of one of these purges (the people at the group didn’t have a problem with me being there but other people connected with the group did).
As someone who has problems coping with their own male genitalia I have sympathy for the lesbians in question. Besides, what is being asked for is sexual coercion, which is obviously never acceptable.
On the other hand, if the person is post op and the other person has shown attraction towards them then it shouldn’t be an issue, but unfortunately it is for some people.
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I don’t have the book handy but I remember Dorothy Allison addressing a similar subject in Skin. She discusses being called a “traitor” by other lesbians because she enjoyed being penetrated.
It seemed both strange and enlightening to me to read about such intense policing of one person’s sex life within a community that had been so repressed.
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Bingo.
As late as the 1990’s you could still regularly find serious and heated discussions in the Australian lesbian press on the subject of “are dildos a tool of the patriarchy that should be rejected by all right-thinking lesbians?”.
Oppression does not automatically create better people, unfortunately.
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