You Gotta Respect Italy For Sending Every Type Of Gay In The Lgbt Spectrum Within The Past Ten Years

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

for the love of god, do not use chores to punish your kids!!!! it's just going to make them struggle deeply to keep their houses tidy as adults since you made them associate necessary chores with punishment and suffering, and it's going to take years of therapy to undo. don't use chores as punishments!!!

Just read another post saying that kids shouldn’t learn algebra because they don’t need it and –

I mean, even if we pretend that the process of working your way through a mathematical proof and learning to apply seemingly abstract formulas to the actual work and going back and spotting errors and doing that kind of detail work is absolutely useless to the vast majority of us in our real lives (spoiler alert: IT NOT), you guys do realize that we are not in fact living in some kind of Brave New World dystopia where we are all put in color-coded jumpsuits once we emerge from our test tubes and only the children bred for high IQs are allowed to become scientists while the rest of us shovel shit, right?  We are all the same teeming mass of potential at eleven years old, and the only way to see which direction that potential is going to go is to feed the young brain a little of everything and see what it latches on to.

And also, ALSO, ALSO: 

Do you fucking get why minorities and women are traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields?  Do you?  DO YOU?  IT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE OFTEN DENIED A QUALITY EDUCATION IN SUBJECTS LIKE FUCKING ALGEBRA.  Because they’re not going into STEM fields anyway, so they don’t need it.  Because they’re not going to college, so they don’t need it. Because they’re only going to get married and have children, because they’re only going to be blue-collar laborers, because they’re only going to go to jail.  So they don’t need algebra, because they won’t use it.

Because in the absence of color-coded jumpsuits, we go with other arbitrary labels to choose who our scientists and mathematicians will be.  And I don’t think I need to fucking tell you what they are.

Mathematics is the language of the universe.  It is literally everything we are.  It is how we find our place in the spinning galaxy, our relationship to the sun and the moon and our fellow planets.  It is the smallest chemical reaction in the infinite cells of your body.  It is music, it is architecture.  It is how you know that if you set the cruise control to 80, you’ll be home in two hours (barring traffic).  It is the precise curve of your shirt collar and the humming electronics that allow us to speak to one another no matter where we are.

And you need this.  You do.  Because if you don’t have it, your ability to converse with the whole of creation is limited to “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “Bathroom?”

STOP LETTING PEOPLE TAKE THIS FROM YOU.  This is your birthright as much as it is anyone’s.  Seize that shit with both hands. 

Every student deserves a quality mathematical education that will take them as far as they can go.  We shouldn’t be eliminating algebra.  We should be expanding it!  We need to make sure every kid out there is getting the best damn math classes we can give them.  To teach them not to be afraid of numbers.  To teach them to be excited about it.  To show them the beauty!  Because what algebra can do, and where it can take you?  That’s the stars, man.  That’s the fucking future.

Better algebra.  More passionate algebra.  More enjoyable algebra.

Not less algebra, and definitely not no algebra. 

Let bi boys date girls

Women want me, fish fear me. Mermaids are conflicted

"I'm still here...I'm alive" I love Marco lmao

“Oh how do you stay positive when the world is so awful how can you stay positive when our lives are falling apart-“ SPITE!!!!! ITS SPITE GODDAMN IT!!! REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE ANGRY AT THE WORLD AS A TEENAGER?? THAT KID WAS RIGHT AND YES IT FUCKING SUCKS AND NO, ITS NOT FAIR, SO YOU HAVE TO KEEP TRYING TO MAKE IT FAIR!!!!

We all making grandpa cry btw