did you know that in 1953 eisenhower issued an executive order which banned gay people from being employed in government
and it was specifically to root out lesbians who enjoyed the job security of government work
“To protect their careers, lesbian government workers moderated their behavior to avoid suspicion. They refused to socialize with other lesbians in public, attended social functions with gay men as their ‘dates,’ and carefully chose their wardrobes and makeup to project a feminine persona. Male employees who resented reporting to a female boss could trigger an investigation into her sexuality.” – Robert J Corber “Cold War Femme”
this era was called the lavender scare and was both a direct result of mccarthyism and the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness during ww2. over 10,000 lesbians and gay men lost their jobs and as a result the daughters of bilitis (the first ever lesbian activist group in the u.s.) formed in order to protect themselves and gay men
a LOT of slasher flicks from the 70s and 80s strike me as sexually violent revenge fantasies against women’s growing independence at the time tbh
Siskel and Ebert beat you to it in 1980…. Part One
Part Two
I had also added in another chain that a lot of it is also a violent revenge fantasy and/or demonization of LGBT people as a backlash against the growing visibility of the LGBT community at the time. Look at how many killers and victims are horrible stereotypes meant to demonize LGBT people, and make the audience feel good when they get ripped up
…y’all ain’t gonna mention how those movies always kill the black people first? And the 70s and 80s were a time civil rights groups were unjustly painted as extremists and “black supremacists”. horror movies gettin revenge on everyone not straight male and white for wanting rights.
i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me – actually, many people have – that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex – sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think – but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” – feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
This is such a powerful post. Read it fully, and spread it around.
Not sure how true the bit about the reasons behind Lolita are. I’ve never read it as it squicks me. However, someone else noticed the type of website op mentions exists and I wanted to make sure the link was included with the post:
”The amendment appears on a funding bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. If it remains in the final bill, the amendment would cut 15% of federal adoption funding to states and localities that penalize adoption agencies that refuse to place children in families that conflict with the agency’s ‘sincerely held religious beliefs or convictions.’
The amendment also bars the federal government from refusing to work with adoption agencies that discriminate.”
During the 1980s, more gay men died in New York City during the AIDS crisis than all recorded deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. You need to know that.
This doesn’t show exactly what the caption suggests it shows.
In this scene, the lower pilot is dying. He had been captured, managed to escape, and stole a German plane to fly back. The upper pilot–his best friend and rival for the love of Clara Bow*–shot him down, believing he was the enemy. This is him kissing his friend goodbye.
“But that’s still slashy!” you can say. Yep, it is. “You can read this as homoerotic!” Yes, you can. “Why are you denying this? Is it because you think being gay or bi is shameful?” A thousand times no. I am pointing this out because I think this is an important piece of evidence about what homophobia has done to our society and to male expressions of emotion.
In 1927, the obvious reading of this scene, for audiences, was not that this was a romantic kiss. Audiences primarily understood this as an expression of friendship and love, because of course it was perfectly natural for non-romantically involved men to embrace or even kiss, particularly at highly emotional moments. Of course a dying man would want to be held during his last breaths. Of course a guilt- and grief-stricken man would want to kiss his friend goodbye.
However, not very long after this, the commercialization and commodification of homophobia became a powerful force. The market (including Hollywood) began drawing lines and graphs and boxes, declaring which emotions, expressions, habits, and even colors “belonged” to men and to women. This kind of touch, which would not necessarily have been sexualized during many eras or in many cultures, became forbidden to men in the US, Britain and Canada (and many other places, too) within the decade–and is still lost to them today. This scene–a far more honest expression of grief and affection than anything we’re used to seeing in today’s action films–became gay.
Now, if you strongly wish to write “Wings” slash, you can still do so–and not entirely by putting on your goggles! University culture of the 1900s-1920s definitely allowed for a far wider range of sexual behavior than frats do now, etc. I don’t want to police what anybody can and does find in “Wings.” But I think we should acknowledge what we lost when capitalism decided that, for men, kisses could only be sexual.
*You may recognize Clara Bow from that goddamned photo that keeps making the rounds of the internet captioned, “A sex ed class in the 1920s!” so everyone can hoot with derision at the shocked girls in their desks. The photo is actually a still from a movie, and the star, Ms. Bow, is front and center.
On Friday, Hawaiian lawmakers moved to Make America Gay Again and passed a bill which would make theirs the 12th state to ban gay conversion “therapy” on minors. Hawaii News Now reports that Governor David Ige is expected to sign the ban into law. Maryland lawmakers also passed a ban earlier this month and are waiting for Governor Larry Hogan to sign it.
The move reflects a sweep of state initiatives to ban the practice based on a growing consensus amongst the medical and mental health community that conversion is psychologically torturous and fraudulent. The bill cites the American Psychological Association’s finding that “change efforts” can cause “depression, suicidality, loss of sexual feeling, anxiety, shame, negative self-image, and other negative feelings and behaviors.” In January, a report from the UCLA School of Law estimated that 698,000 American adults have been subjected to gay conversion therapy, about half of whom were minors at the time.
Unfortunately, the text of the bill applies only to licensed medical and counseling professionals, not religious or spiritual advisors; California is now considering classifying conversion therapy as a fraudulent business practice, which could help.
For updates, follow the LGBTQ youth suicide prevention initiative the Trevor Project, which is tracking dozens of campaigns to ban conversion therapy nationwide.
I legit served a man at my last job who was fully covered in nazi symbols and shit. He was a proud actual real life nazi getting icecream in a family theme park and when he left I voiced my disgust to my coworkers on how security even let him in the gate wearing all of that. And you know what that bitch said? “Well some people are offended by your rainbow flag and you are allowed to wear it so he can too”. It’s not the fucking same. Don’t fucking compare the two
Nazis’ entire mission is to exterminate anyone who’s not exactly like them. It’s in no way comparable to “some people are offended”.
me: “I’d like to visibly exist without fear”
them: “I want to literally kill these people so that they stop existing”
centrists: “I don’t see the difference”
Oh wow I guess my addition to this post got spread a lot. I just wanted to add in another piece of important information. I live in Orlando. The location of the Pulse night club shooting. I was wearing a rainbow pin on my uniform because 49 people in my community died in a hate crime. I will never forgive anyone who tells me that my rainbow pins are the same as a swastika
I am willing to say that mostly they are just being obstructionist… but those first two… for them this was personal.
They do have a reason they voted against the bill change. It’s not a good reason, to be clear, but it is a justification not rooted in approval of bestiality.
Here’s the thing: bestiality is already illegal in Louisiana.
This new bill definitely strengthens the law, elaborates on what is illegal conduct (such as the procuring of animals for sexual purposes), and…and here’s the kicker…
Separates out the bestiality-is-illegal section of the law from the sodomy-is-illegal section. They used to be in the same paragraph, now the sodomy-is-illegal paragraph stands alone and a whole new paragraph (with subparagraphs) is there for bestiality.
To be clear, the sodomy-is-illegal parts themselves are null and void and have been since 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas, US Supreme Court). But they’re still on the books.
These ten Republicans are concerned that separating out the bestiality parts from the sodomy parts will make it easier to clean up and eliminate the sodomy provision altogether, and they don’t want to do that. (Again, that would only matter if Lawrence was invalidated somehow. But, well, they could believe that’s possible, too.)
So, yeah. They don’t want to change the law to expand on the illegality of bestiality specifically because that would make it feasible for a future change in law to eliminate a nonfunctional, homophobic section.
wupacing 