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batwynn · 1 year

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Listen. I had teachers who treated me very badly, I mean openly and proudly mistreated me just because they could. I had teachers who outright abused me/physically hurt me. I’ve had these types of teachers through all of my childhood, and well into college. The American education system, itself, is a fucking mess and it needs a major overhaul. If anyone has a right to be angry about teachers, it’s me. But look. Not all teachers are the same, and we need to emphasize that rather than blame teachers like some kind of monolith.

We need to be more careful with these sweeping proclamations of ‘all teachers bad’, because there’s a distinct alt-right pipeline happening right there in front of us that not only relies on people turning their backs on education/educators but is literally packed with people spreading violent hatred for teachers and school. People are quite literally calling for teachers to be killed. This is a real thing that’s really happening, and people need to be careful about falling into these movements.

Teachers are important. Teachers are struggling to educate our kids in the worst systems, worst timelines, worst period of mass pandemic, just worst timing ever. Teachers are severely underpaid, mistreated, abused by staff and students alike, and have a very high chance of being shot and murdered. Are there bad teachers out there? Yes. But please, please, please try to avoid making statements that feed into the alt-right’s fight against eduction and teachers. They want people uneducated and angry. They prey on angry kids and teens who were let down by their parents, the education system, etc. That’s been in their game plan since their first rise to power, and they’re not changing it up all that much. It’s right there in our history.

So let’s try to remember the good teachers, people out there trying to keep education truthful and helpful. Teachers crying as they pack up their libraries in Florida because of the massive book bans. Teachers who want us to learn about our histories, even the bad parts, because it teaches us how to grow and be better. Teachers who use the right pronouns for their kids, who support their queer and questioning kids, who protect them the best they can. Teachers who support their Black students, and stand up for them in a system built against them. Teachers who want these kids to thrive, even in the face of literal life-threatening dangers from every side. Please remember them, and please try to avoid sweeping statements that feed into alt-right programming.

#teachers #education #teaching #American centric #american education #important

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scoutpologist · 3 months

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You are NOT sensitive. Obviously most people in Florida would agree with you, but more importantly the only reason ppl hate Florida is the racist old people and if Florida drowns where do they think they’re gonna go? 🤨

Florida has a important beautiful diverse ecosystem and provides so much for the country.

Maybe this part is ME being too sensitive but just joking about the water rising from climate change/glaciers melting is just never smth i found funny

sorry to get to this so late anon i've been busy </3

and yeah, for clarity i am people from florida. i've lived here my whole life. and people saying they hate florida because we're all crazy (ie florida man), or the wildlife is scary, or it's too hot, or the bugs... i don't care lmao and sometimes it's even funny, cause no one actually hates florida for those reasons.

a lot of people hate florida because we have a supremely shitty government and assume that like... everyone thinks this way. but not everyone thinks this way. there's a huge community of progressive people in florida.

and sidenote, it's kind of strange to see a bunch of people talking about how you should NEVER visit florida as a trans person because. like, your concerns are 100% valid, and if you feel like you're in danger, do whatever you have to to keep yourself safe. but also we still live here LOL like i can be semi-open about being nb with 0 issues and i know a lot of trans people who are medically transitioning. i brought hrt up with an endo who doesn't specialize in that and she didn't bat an eye, she even recommended me a place that could get me hormones.

i promise we're still here and thriving!! we have some of the biggest pride centers in the country!! i attend a HUGE pride event yearly where everyone is happy and loud and openly queer. i'm lucky to live in a beautiful and vibrant city like this and many of us don't fare as well, but we ARE here.

and you're not too sensitive, bc that's what i worry about all the time when it comes to ocean levels rising. i'm worried about the beautiful ecosystem i've grown up in being drowned by the salty ocean. our ecosystem is one of the most diverse and beautiful in the entire country and people have the audacity to say this state is ugly and provides nothing lmfao.

idk it's just a lot like it's not like it's as if floridians are oppressed but sometimes there's just this disconnect between people who live here and people who don't. it's mostly fine i'm just bitter that some people will stereotype a whole state and ignore the vibrant communities and beautiful ecosystem and go "i'm not worried because it's florida".

#ask #Anonymous

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hylianengineer · 8 months

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For some reason I have abruptly returned to being insane about Cabaret. It's a musical about the rise of fascism and the tragedy that is pretending everything is fine until it's too late. It's also a heartwrenching doomed romance. It's unusually direct and neutral-to-positive about its depiction of sex work given how mainstream it is. It's about vice and desperation and fear and horrible, horrible coping mechanisms. It gets the audience invested in not one but two doomed romances AND a doomed friendship that are all about to be torn apart by the impending rise of Nazism. By the end of the play the majority of characters have had their lives torn apart by this one encroaching evil and we have to watch it happen. We have to watch them make all the bad decisions in which they might have been able to save themselves, but they didn't, because they were human and fallible. Because they didn't want to see what was happening around them, or take a risk, or they just couldn't quite bring themselves to believe that getting a happy ending was an option. We can see all the ways it might have gone differently.

I can't get over how incredible our university production of it was. I may be biased but I love it more than the Broadway version. For one thing, we had a nonbinary actor playing the Emcee, which meant that their romance with a Jewish woman came across as both Jewish and queer and like the biggest possible fuck you to the Nazis. But also, they were just such a good actor. The sad-and-terrified-but-forcing-themself-to-be-okay vibes in the final scene were so visceral and haunting. "Where are your troubles now? Forgotten? I told you so. We have no troubles here. Here, life is beautiful. The women are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful." They sounded so broken in this scene. The juxtaposition between the words and the way they said them was like being punched in the gut. I wish I could tell them this but I do not even slightly know this person.

The depiction of the Nazis is also amazing because it shows them as people. Not in a "oh we should sympathize with them" way, but in a "oh fuck they could be ANYONE and you'd never know it" way. As Fräulein Schneider says, they are her friends and neighbors. She expects her friends and neighbors to support her when she decides to marry Herr Schultz, a Jewish man, but as it turns out, some of them are Nazis and make it very clear that if she doesn't break off the engagement, they'll turn on her.

We LIKE the Nazi character, right up until he takes off his coat and shows off the Swastika armband. We had no idea he was harboring such nastiness in his heart - he seemed nice! He was charming. He was kind. He was Clifford's and our introduction to Berlin, and he made a damn good first impression. He was very pleasant to Herr Schultz right up until the he realized he was a Jew, and it was chilling to watch that scene unfold. I remember sitting backstage every night and waiting to hear everyone go dead silent at the reveal. Chilling.

The other thing Caberet does so well is the "why should we care about politics? what does that have to do with us?" angle. Sally says it outright - she'd rather know nothing about what's happening, and even when confronted with it, she doesn't care. She doesn't understand why Cliff won't help Ernst anymore after finding out exactly what those smuggled goods were for - as far as she's concerned, they need the money and the politics are irrelevant. The politics being Nazism, of course. She has absolutely no malice towards the people the Nazis are hurting - she's just incredibly, horribly naive. Doesn't it just make your blood run cold?

It's extra creepy to watch this play in the political environment of the last year or so - the way things have been getting progressively more and more scary for queer people. There were definitely a few times when I read some particularly awful news coming out of Florida and felt very much like Cliff grappling with the horrible realization that he needed to get out of Berlin yesterday. And trying to explain that sheer terror to my straight relatives did feel reminiscent of Clint's failed attempts to make Sally see reason. But it didn't affect her directly, so she didn't care. She had her own life and her own priorities and why should she care about things that don't affect her? I hope things here and now never get that bad, but the exact reason it's so disturbing is that people in early-1930s Berlin never guessed it would get that bad either.

And this is a story based on true events. It's fictionalized, but it isn't made up. Cliff is more or less an author insert for the very real person who wrote the book the musical is based on: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. And by the way, Christopher Isherwood was gay.

Tl;dr Go see Cabaret and have your heart broken in like fifteen different ways. But read the trigger warnings first.

#cabaret #cabaret musical #hylian rambles #i'm never getting over this one folks #holocaust tw #kinda #antisemitism tw #tw genocide #again kinda. referenced.#i feel like this needs more tws but i can't think of them #queerphobia tw

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tacticalhimbo · 11 months

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JUNE 7, 2023 — HRC National Emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans & Legal Rulings on Florida's Anti-Trans Laws

Today in queer news, the Human Rights Campaign has issued a state of emergency for all queer Americans. This declaration comes after months of horrific anti-trans legislature being passed across the nation, and a sharp increase in anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, no doubt thanks to the rising platform of the alt-right.

According to the HRC, "More than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law this year alone, more than doubling last year’s number, which was previously the worst year on record."

This comes as no surprise to the trans* community, as over 500 bills have been introduced regarding our existence alone. The Trans Legislation Tracker (as of the time writing this post) cites a total of 556 bills across 49 states, with 80 bills passing, 372 in active discussion, and 104 failing to make it into law.

The HRC provides a chart detailing the state of LGBTQ+ rights, including the presence of non-discrimination laws, conversion therapy bans, bathroom bans, LGBTQ+ erasure laws, and more. This chart is presented below, without text description.

Likewise, there are resources provided for those who want to take action (LGBTQ+ Americans Fight Back: A Guidebook for Action), or those who want to see the impact of this year's legislative session (LGBTQ+ Americans Under Attack: A Report and Reflection on the 2023 State Legislative Section).

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On the other side of the news, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle has put a stop to the enforcement of anti-trans legislation in the state of Florida.

EDITED NOTE: Judge Hinkle is also the individual who, in 2014, ruled Brenner v. Scott and found that Florida's "statuatory and constitutional bans on same-sex marraige were federally unconstitutional".

Erin Reed, aka erininthemorn, reports that "In a significant legal ruling, a federal judge put a stop to Florida's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The lawsuit, originating in the Northern District of Florida, challenged both the medical board's prohibition of such care and SB254, a bill which entrenched this ban into law, while extending its reach to adult trans care. Today's scathing decision, delivered by Judge Hinkle, asserts the ban as likely unconstitutional, thus blocking its enforcement. His 44-page ruling, though initially limited, is anticipated to broadly apply to trans youth who need care in Florida, paving the way for the resumption of such care in the near future." [SRC.]

While the entire decision is a breath of fresh air, here are the five vital sections that will likely be referenced in all future proceedings regarding DeSantis' (and the country's) horrific laws:

5. Bias In Medical Organizations: “The Pot Calls The Kettle Black”

4. Lawmakers Statements Come Back To Bite Them: Calling Trans* People Mutants and Demons

3. Regret Is Rare: Florida Could Not Even Produce A Witness Regretting Care

2. Parental Rights Arguments Support Trans Care

1. “Gender Identity Is Real”

To once more quote Reed, "This is a profound and impactful statement. If gender identity is real and if trans people are indeed telling the truth about this being an integral part of who they are, then discriminating against transgender people is firmly unconstitutional. The judge, later in the order, held the defense’s feet to the fire, stating:

Any proponent of the challenged statute and rules should put up or shut up: do you acknowledge that there are individuals with actual gender identities opposite their natal sex, or do you not? Dog whistles ought not be tolerated."

#txt #important #florida politics #trans #lgbtq

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lexablackbird · 1 year

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What's it like being a gen x trans woman?

This one has been sitting in my inbox for a while because I've never been asked that question, and there's a lot to think about in there. And more specifically, I'm a late-transitioning trans woman, in large part due to the generation I was born into.

For one thing, I grew up in a time and place where there was so little trans visibility - I hadn't even heard such a thing was possible until my highschool years. Until that point I thought I was just some sort of freak for being so uncomfortable with the expectations that came with being considered a boy yet feeling like I wasn't like one at all. I had no frame of reference to understand I was actually a girl.

So I learned how to become invisible, to fade out of people's awareness so I wouldn't be confronted, so I could just be in a corner and read and usually be left alone. The times I was noticed ranged from uncomfortable to traumatic, very clumsy attempts to seem like a boy and fade away again.

By the time I had heard of trans people, we were living in a small town in central Florida, and queer folks were reviled and ridiculed, especially if they were trans. So I hid that even from myself, not understanding what it really meant when I looked at other girls and longed to be one of them.

It took me decades of subtle and even blatant hints in my life to realize I was trans, because of all this.

I am so glad that kids these days can grow up with more awareness that trans people exist, and can see positive representation in media, and that trans people of all ages can more easily find one another and have far more resources available than when I was girl (who didn't understand she was).

I'm also very, very worried about the rising wave of hate against us in recent years - a "best of times, worst of times" era where despite all the amazing progress we've made, we're also in more and more danger.

I could go on a lot longer about various aspects of all this, but that's some things in answer of your question, at least. Thanks for asking!

#trans #trans stuff #lgbtqia+#gen x trans experience

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mariacallous · 1 year

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The tragic shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ club in Colorado, is the latest event to transpire in a year marked with a jump in anti-LGBTQ legislation and sentiment, according to LGBTQ advocates.

The shooting, the deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in the U.S. since the Pulse shooting in 2016, occurred on the eve of this year's Transgender Day of Remembrance. Just days earlier, the National Center for Transgender Equality released a report finding that at least 47 transgender people were killed in the past year.

And research is painting a bleak picture when it comes to the lives of LGBTQ Americans: The rate of suicidal thoughts among LGBTQ youth is also on the rise, and is particularly affecting both queer people of color and trans youth.

Meanwhile, across the country, legislators introduced more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills across 36 states in the past year, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group.

Some advocates say violence can be the end result of political efforts geared toward removing protections from LGBTQ Americans.

"You tolerate hateful language, it leads to hateful legislation and it leads to hateful violence," Kevin Jennings, the CEO of Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ civil rights organization, told NPR. "This is not an accident."

In Florida, legislators passed the controversial so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill into law, with Alabama following suit with its own version. In Virginia, the education department's new policies reverse the rights of trans students in bathrooms.

And in the courts, the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade is putting gender-affirming health care in jeopardy.

The year of political action was a strategic move, according to some advocates, ahead of the year's midterm elections.

"It is so cynical, but it is true," Sam Ames, the director of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, said. "LGBTQ youth, particularly trans youth, have been identified as a very effective wedge issue in a very contentious electoral season."

A year of gains and setbacks

But the year has also been one with other milestones, including a "rainbow wave" of openly LGBTQ candidates who ran — and won — this election year, including the first out trans man to elected to a state legislature.

The number of people identifying as LGBTQ also rose to 7.1%, according to a Gallup Poll, from 5.6% in 2020.

"One thing we've seen is the number of queer and transgender people who feel comfortable and safe to come out continues to grow even in the face of an escalating and violent backlash," said Gillian Branstetter, communications strategist at the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project. "That's because people see more hope in living an authentic life than in living an inauthentic one."

Some advocates say backlash is a standard response.

"In this country, we go two steps forward and we often end up going several more steps back," Ames said. "We have seen incredible gains made legally in the last 10 years, 15 years. And we're starting to see the backlash against those gains and backlash so often falls heaviest on the least powerful."

Jay Brown, senior vice president of programs, research and training for the Human Rights Campaign, said that it's typical to see "this kind of vitriol rise" during an election year, though it seemed less effective this time around.

"We saw millions of dollars be poured into anti-trans campaign ads during this election," Brown said. "Fortunately, many of those elected officials lost their races."

And that is enough to inspire others to keep going.

"People, as what happened in Colorado Springs last night, are literally dying because of our society's failure to do the right thing," Jennings said. "We can't accept that. And we have to keep moving forward. It would be disrespectful to the memory of the people who died."

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alarmist-nonsense · 2 months

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"Erin Palette, a trans lesbian from Florida, says she spent most of her younger years hearing that gun owners were “right-wing conservative males who hate queer people and want them dead.”

But after the 2016 mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Palette—who became a gun owner in 2010 and was already a member of Pink Pistols—began to collect names of queer-friendly firearms instructors, under the name Operation Blazing Sword.

The organization now has a directory of more than 1,500 volunteer educators—and in 2018 merged with Pink Pistols, where Palette is now the organization’s national coordinator."

#self defense #community defense

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firstyearseminar6 · 5 months

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Final Paper

Winning the White House With Hate (1616)

Today, political parties will do just about anything to get people into the voting booth. They know that if they can get their political base to get up and vote for anything at all, those people will end up voting for the party on every other issue that they don’t care about, hence the phrase “straight-ticket (republican/democrat)”. This has led to the rise of reactionary politics, most especially from the right-wing GOP. For example, a mildly democratic person might feel empowered to vote this year when they normally would not, only because they believe in abortion. Once that person gets their ballot, however, they’re sure to vote straight-ticket blue, because while they’re really only there for abortion as a single-issue voter, they still are a part of the Democratic political base, and are highly likely to vote in favor of the Democrats on other issues. These people are worth their weight in gold to political parties, who will do anything and everything in their power to convince them to go to the voting booth on election day. Democrats will campaign hard for abortion rights this year, because it draws support from across the country, including from those who do not usually vote. For decades, the GOP’s reactionary issue has been about blocking abortion, stopping immigration, and other classic right-wing issues. Now, the GOP has found a new target. In this essay, I will argue that the right is using identity politics as a way to scapegoat and delegitimize LGBTQ people, as well as take away their fundamental right to exist, all with the end goal of empowering the right-wing political base.

A good place to begin is the history of the GOP’s treatment of LGBTQ people. For decades, they demonized gay people, and fought tooth and nail to prevent gay marriage with laws like the “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA), which banned federal recognition of same-sex marriages. It was only neutralized in 2015 by the US Supreme Court ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges, which “concluded in the establishment that same-sex marriage was a fundamental right that must be granted and recognized by all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and other US territories.” (Stein-Alvarado). This meant that the right to same-sex marriage was immediately granted to Americans across the country, regardless of their own state’s local laws. It was stating that the constitution’s existing laws were enough to legalize gay marriage, and that all laws to the contrary were unenforcible. The DOMA was only repealed in 2022 by the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), which was heavily pushed by Democrats, especially Joe Biden, who previously voted in favor of the DOMA back in 1996 (GovTrack). So far, I have neglected the homophobic elephant in the room, and a GOP favorite, Ronald Regan. He is, of course, directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of gay men to the AIDS epidemic (Tumulty), as well as being the first person with Altzheimer’s to handle nuclear launch codes (Pilkington). In the years since the DOMA passed, acceptance of gay marriage grew, making attacking it today less of a winning issue.

Despite the current Democratic president, the GOP is hard at work delegitimizing LGBTQ people. Specifically, they have used the age-old argument of “won’t somebody think of the children?”. If you turn on Fox News, all you hear about is how children are reading books in school with gay people in them, as though that would somehow turn them gay. The campaigns aren’t limited to television, either. The rise of social media has given advertisers the ability to target advertisements towards narrow and exact audiences, meaning that many Democrats aren’t even seeing the full scope of the campaign the GOP is pushing. Much of the work is being pushed by Florida Governor and barely-candidate for President, Ron DeSantis. He has paved the way with law after law attacking queer people for simply existing, and has used the opportunity to run campaign ads celebrating doing so, using social media (ABC News). He has passed laws to out transgender students to their parents, and fought to censor the mention of any gender or sexual health topics in schools. This constant demonization of queer people to Republicans has really made me feel the target that they have taped to my back. 32 transgender people were murdered because of their identity last year in the US, and with the increasing calls for violence against queer people like me, I can’t help but feel worried (Schoenbaum).

Getting the right-wing political base empowered and angry at LGBTQ people isn’t the only effect of this campaign. Transgender people themselves are being delegitimized and undermined as people, because just as banning marriage for gay people or banning gay teachers from schools undermined gay people’s legitimacy as people, banning transgender people from using the correct restroom or playing sports undermines their legitimacy as people as well. In addition, the banning of the mere mention of the existence of LGBTQ people to schoolchildren also undermines their legitimacy as people. If you didn’t hear about or see an entire type of person until middle school, you would certainly think of them differently than if you had simply seen and accepted them since birth. LGBTQ people moving out and fleeing states where GOP campaigns against them are occuring only helps improve the margins by which the right wins elections in those areas, though that’s more of a convenient side-effect than the end goal.

The GOP is looking to push their reactionary state policies on the nation. Despite the GOP’s constant criticisms of “democrats pushing identity politics”, they sure do campaign hard against LGBTQ identifying people. A huge battleground for this has been Florida, where laws targeting LGBTQ people have been very successful politically for their governor, who enjoys wide support among his constituents (Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy). During his campaign for president, he has boasted about his actions against LGBTQ people to potential voters. With the GOP attempting to push their anti-LGBT policies on the rest of the country, California could end up subject to the same discriminatory laws that Florida is under. Recently, Former Vice President and former candidate for president Mike Pence explained that he wanted to pass “a federal ban on transgender chemical or surgical surgery (sic) anywhere in the country” (Racker), which would effectively ban my existence, though Pence proved to unpopular among the political base for other unrelated reasons, and has subsequently dropped out of the race.

Part of the problem is that the spot for president looks ripe for the taking. President Joe Biden is really, really old. If you have watched one of his speeches recently, you’ll know that he talks and looks like a grandfather, and it’s looking like he’s going to be going up against whoever the GOP frontrunner is. Desantis is 45 years old, which puts him on the younger side of politicians in this country, which makes him very appealing to swing voters, simply because of his age. President Joe Biden was 25 years old when interracial marriage bans were declared unconstitutional, and he married his first wife at a time when 16 states in the country, mostly in the South, banned him from marrying a person of another race. Donald Trump is just 4 years younger than Biden, making him 21 years old when interracial marriage bans were lifted, though if you watch a speech from Trump compared to Biden, Trump looks far less like a grandpa. To say that we need younger leadership in the government would be an understatement, though that’s not to say that we need more people like Desantis. The democrats really should have pushed for a younger candidate this time around, though that ship has sailed by now.

If the GOP can get enough of their political base to go to the polls this year, they could win. The combination of using anti-LGBTQ laws as a method of empowering the right-wing political base, as well as the pushing of younger candidates has created a ripe opportunity for far-right candidates to push their own campaigns at the expense of the rights and legitimacy of LGBTQ people, and while this is nothing new compared to the historical moves of the GOP, it’s an especially pressing issue in the present day. By pitting their political base against the much-smaller LGBTQ community, the right is killing two birds with one stone by not only causing queer people to leave the state, but also by encouraging the right-wing political base to vote in favor of the politicians pushing these policies. The repeated demonization of LGBTQ people has done real harm, not only to those living in the states where these laws are passed, but also across the country due to the rise of social media allowing the influence of these actions to spread across borders.

In conclusion, the actions taken against LGBTQ people by the right, especially those vying for power, are harmful and dangerous. We can see this most clearly with presidential candidate Ron Desantis, whose anti-LGBTQ laws have followed in the footsteps of the GOP of previous decades (Eskridge 1337). In addition, his laws in the state of Florida have inspired other states to follow in his lead, with 22 other states having passed anti-transgender legislation recently (Gabriel). It all comes together to form a hostile political climate against people like me that I have never seen before, and the 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be a heated battle, one that affects me whether I like it or not, because if the GOP wins, their draconian laws aimed at delegitimizing queer people will impact every state, not just those ran by the right.

Works Cited

Atterbury, Andrew. "DeSantis Targets Trans Health Care in Florida Universities." POLITICO, 18 Jan. 2023, www.politico.com/news/2023/01/18/desantis-trans-health-care-florida-universities-00078435. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.

Chait, Jonathan. "Marjorie Taylor Greene Blamed Wildfires on Secret Jewish Space Laser." Intelligencer, 28 Jan. 2021, nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-wildfires-space-laser-rothschild-execute.html. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.

Drescher, Jack. "From Bisexuality to Intersexuality." Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 43, no. 2, 2007, pp. 204-228, sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/readings/Bisex2Intersex2007.pdf. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.

Eskridge, Jr., William N. "Sexual and Gender Variation in American Publiclaw: From Malignant to Benign to Productive." UCLA Law Review, 2010, pp. 1333-1373, sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/Eskridge-sexualand%20gendervariation-2010.pdf. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.

"Florida Advances Bill That Advocates Say Will Out LGBTQ+ Students." Advocate.com, 23 Apr. 2021, www.advocate.com/youth/2021/4/23/florida-advances-bill-advocates-say-will-out-lgbtq-students. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.

Gabriel, Trip. "After Roe, Republicans Sharpen Attacks on Gay and Transgender Rights." The New York Times, 22 July 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/us/politics/after-roe-republicans-sharpen-attacks-on-gay-and-transgender-rights.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.

Leonhardt, David. "The Right’s Violence Problem." The New York Times, 17 May 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/briefing/right-wing-mass-shootings.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.

Racker, Mini. "The Biggest Moments From the Second Republican Debate." Time, 28 Sept. 2023, time.com/6318154/second-republican-debate-biggest-moments/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.

Schoenbaum, Hannah. "Report: at Least 32 Transgender People Killed in US in 2022." US News & World Report, 16 Nov. 2022, www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-11-16/report-at-least-32-transgender-people-killed-in-us-in-2022. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.

Stein-Alvarado, Ray. "Final Paper." RaysFYSBlogWithAGreatTitle, 4 Dec. 2023, downloadfreeramtoday.blogspot.com/2023/12/final-paper.html. Accessed 12 Dec. 2023.

Tumulty, Karen. "Nancy Reagan’s Real Role in the AIDS Crisis." The Atlantic, 26 Aug. 2021, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/full-story-nancy-reagan-and-aids-crisis/618552/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.

ABC News. "DeSantis campaign shares video on LGBTQ rights." YouTube, 3 July 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECGtwu7h6qw. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.

G, Liv. "You May Kiss the Bride in Fifty-Six Years." Google Docs, 19 Nov. 2023, docs.google.com/document/d/1Mpw3UCNazBoKSU-QE9cD5EzTjkdXPDrz6coZ__2wZ2E/edit. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.

GovTrack. "H.R. 3396 (104th): Defense of Marriage Act -- Senate Vote #280 -- Sep 10, 1996." GovTrack.us, www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1996/s280. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.

Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy. "March 2023 Florida Poll." POLITICO, www.politico.com/f/?id=00000187-4a1a-d754-adef-6b7eed270000. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.

Pilkington, Ed. "Ronald Reagan Had Alzheimer's While President, Says Son." The Guardian, 17 Jan. 2011, www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/17/ronald-reagan-alzheimers-president-son. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.

Citizenship/Legitimacy

Historical events affecting the LGBT community

Contemporary LGBT rights controversies during (and with) the Biden Administration

Identity Politics/essentialism

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batw1nggg · 5 months

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no one understands hesitant alien like a southern raised queer listening to drugstore perfume on a night drive thru their homestate 10 million dead 100 billion misplaced. home is somewhere else but here will always be home. and so on

#im gonna be stuck here forever. i’m gonna miss home when im gone #FLORIDA QUEERS RISE UP !!!!!!!#hesitant alien #gerard way

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chaoticcosmos666 · 8 months

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Holy Fuck

TW- NAZIS (so yea... you know theres gonna be hatred and violence)

everyday i feel like i cant be more shocked but here i am... sitting in pure anger and rage, with no outlet to even put it out on. so here we go in writing. it is the year of our lord 2023... almost 2024. im gonna be 24 soon. and the one thing that childhood me never thought id see ever as a small lil history nerd? nazis. i never thought id see them ever. but they rebranded themselves as some bullshit that i wont list here out of sanity for myself and others. you can though read some in the article im linking here

so.... what is it that boils my blood? the fact that in motherfucking america we have asshats like these marching around when we had grandfathers and great grandfathers who fought this same ideology. im not the first to be like "oh trump this... trump that" but look closely at everything since 2016. like very closely. ill critique the previous presidents happily but right now isnt the time for that. we can go on about how obama caged kids first and how he drone striked innocents... but right now im focused on this. a president who has said there are "very fine people on both sides" after Charlottesville "Unite the Right Rally" and during the debate for the presidency recently when asked about these groups for the proud boys to "stand back and stand by".... that isnt really condemnation is it? In the wake of all this, the aftermath of chuds running up in the capitol, and now the rise of christofascism... how long is it gonna take??? when are people gonna stand up? florida is a full on fascist state now. if you are queer or a POC its highly advised to stay out of that hellscape. its like a cult of personality with these people. and now with neonazis... they wont hide their support for their love of trump and now desantis. they stand outside of a theme park for families screaming their shit. how did we get here? how can we stop this? honestly i dont even know... but im disgusted and angry and just... full of vitriol and seething hatred for these fucks. remaining blind to this wont stop it. simply voting blue wont stop it. hell the GOP nazis are trying to impeach do nothing biden for nonsense so whos to say the GOP wont try that for the next guy? we need some sort of action. Police wont do it, they protect these chuds. something has to give. we imprisoned people like enrique tario but theres people always ready to take his place. we let this shit go unchecked for too long.

#cosmos writes #tw nazis #tw fascism #tw violence #vice news #GOP nazis #charlottesville riots #chrtistofascism #florida #ron desantis #not a liberal #travel ban #honestly i think america needs to do what germany did and criminalize nazism

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kammartinez · 9 months

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By Hugh Ryan

I’ve always loved public libraries. They were my refuge as an isolated, nerdy queer kid in the 1980s. They gave me my first jobs, and were the first places I found information about queer history. Limited, sure—but still better than anything I’d gotten from school, or my family, or on television, or anywhere else.

Unfortunately, these days public libraries are embattled spaces. My hometown of New York City is looking to cut $36 million from the library budget this year, a devastating blow to an already overburdened system. Librarians across the country have been attacked as groomers and pedophiles for simply allowing queer books on the shelves. Perhaps most troubling, Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls seem intent on driving queer content from the public sphere entirely—out of libraries and off school syllabuses. Somehow, for people who never seem to have set foot in a library in their lives, they understand this crucial truth: Destroying our history is the first step to destroying our present and future. As a result, independent and private queer archives—which may once have seemed quaint, parochial, or no longer necessary in our age of acceptance—now feel like our one essential firewall holding fast against the genocidal ’phobic fantasies of anti-queer bigots.

For decades, long before this current round of attacks started, these indie archives and their dedicated staff have worked to preserve and protect queer history against exactly this kind of threat. You probably don’t know the name Paul Fasana, but read enough LGBTQ history and he pops up in book after book over the last three decades—not in the text itself, but in the acknowledgments: Pink Triangle Legacies (2022);Language Before Stonewall (2019); Greetings From the Gayborhood (2008), Becoming Visible (1998). From 1995 until literally the week he died in April 2021, Fasana volunteered as chief archivist for the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one of the oldest and largest independent queer archives in the United States.

As Pink Triangle Legacies author W. Jake Newsome told me, “Fasana has done more to provide access to our queer pasts than anyone else I’ve known … Paul listened patiently as I described my project and then pointed me toward sources that helped me answer questions that I didn’t even know I was asking. He didn’t need a finding aid; it seemed that he knew every document, box, and item by heart.”

A working-class gay man and first-gen college student, Fasana came out in the late 1950s, while getting a master’s of library science at UC-Berkeley (where he later established a scholarship for queer students). After rising through the ranks at the New York Public Library, he moved to Florida in the mid-’90s and began the herculean task of organizing SNMAL’s holdings. Since 1972, SNMAL has been a crucial safeguard of queer history—particularly queer Southern history—but like all independent queer archives, its fragile existence has long depended on volunteers like Fasana, passionate pencil pushers who perform the inglorious yet absolutely necessary day-to-day work.

By the time Fasana came on board, SNMAL’s holdings had grown precipitously, particularly as it rescued vast collections from men dying in the first wave of the AIDS crisis. Out of a jumble spread across three different warehouses, Fasana knit the collections together into one usable archive—an archive that has been powering queer scholarship and community in southern Florida and across the country ever since. Today, in honor of Fasana and his partner, Robert Graham, SNMAL’s collection is known as the Fasana/Graham Archive.

According to Hunter O’Hanian, who served as executive director of SNMAL during part of Fasana’s tenure, “More than any other single individual, [Paul Fasana] is responsible for the richness of the vast archives at Stonewall. Thousands of pages in the archive bear his carefully handwritten notes in pencil … Future generations of scholars and researchers will owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Just how big of an archive are we talking? Stacked vertically, SNMAL’s collections would reach twice the height of the Empire State Building. Counting just the paper files alone, there are six million pages of material. And SNMAL is just one of the queer archives working independently, at the margins of financial solvency, to keep our history out of the trash and in the hands of people like me, and you, and those who come after us.

How many such archives exist is impossible to say, but it’s not a large number. Our community institutions expand and contract over time, growing, shrinking, founding, floundering. Dr. Mahesh Somashekhar at the University of Illinois at Chicago has been using the archives of the Gayellow Pages to come up with an estimate, but the numbers fluctuate wildly: 16 in 1976, 56 in ’87, 20 in ’96, 80 in ’08. Today, who knows?

One of the first such archives in the world was founded in Berlin in 1919 by the groundbreaking queer researcher Magnus Hirschfeld. Called the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute of Sexology), it was burned by Nazis in 1933. Around 20,000 books up in smoke—we have only some idea of what all was lost. But we know Hirschfeld and the Institut were on the forefront of trans medicine, social science, and activism. We know why the reactionaries came for us then; we know why they are coming for us now. It’s amazing how little can change in 90 years.

Recently, the photographer Matthew Leifheit has been documenting independent queer archives, from the large players like Stonewall to tiny personal shrines like the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom in Brooklyn. Leifheit feels a gravitational pull to these spaces. With the photos, he’s not trying to document their holdings, but “to pass along some of the emotion and wonder of discovering things in the archive.” He sees them as akin to the relics of saints, sitting at the intersection of myth and history.

Leifheit arrived at SNMAL just after Paul Fasana died. It was so soon after, the chief archivist’s desk was still cluttered with the stuff of his life—the stuff of our lives. Look at them, look at them all looking back at you: the queens, the kings, the obituaries and unbroken hearts. They are our fragile, flammable legacy, and we can lay our hands on them only because of the work of people like Paul Fasana.

#libraries #history #lgbtqia #paul fasana

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kamreadsandrecs · 9 months

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By Hugh Ryan

#libraries #history #lgbtqia #paul fasana

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airasilver · 11 months

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Independent bookselling expanded again in 2022, with new and diverse stores opening nationwide

By HILLEL ITALIE

yesterday

Owners Jessica Callahan, from left, Austin Carter, and Julie Ross pose at Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, Pa., on Sunday, May 21, 2023. The independent bookselling community continues to grow, with membership in the American Booksellers Association reaching its highest levels in more than 20 years. Callahan, Carter and Ross opened their store last year. (Sophia DeRise/Pocket Books via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Near the end of 2021, Jessica Callahan was living in Columbus, Ohio, working as a social science researcher and wondering if there was a better way to support herself. Her friends Julie Ross and Austin Carter had similar thoughts and a similar solution: Open a bookstore.

“I think a lot of people re-evaluated what was important to them during the lockdown and we realized the place we were always happy to be at was a bookstore,” says the 30-year-old Callahan, who with Ross and Carter last year founded the Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, close to Carter’s hometown. The roughly 1,000-square foot store is located on the main floor of a Queen Anne style house where Callahan and Ross live upstairs.

“We looked at our lives and thought, ‘Why not?’ Nothing else felt guaranteed anymore so why not just try to be happy,” she added. “We’re not getting rich from this, but we’re able to pay our bills and pay ourselves.”

The new direction of the Pocket Books owners helped lead to another year of growth for independent sellers, with membership in the American Booksellers Association reaching its highest levels in more than 20 years. The ABA added 173 members last year, and now has 2,185 bookstore businesses and 2,599 locations. Three years after the pandemic shut down most of the physical bookstores in the U.S. and the independent community feared hundreds might close permanently, the ABA has nearly 300 more members (under stricter rules for membership) than it did in 2019, the last full year before the spread of COVID-19.

“It speaks to a sea change coming out of the pandemic,” says Allison Hill, CEO of the trade association, citing an overall rise in book sales as people spent more time at home.

One longtime ABA member, Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books in Coral Gables and other Florida locations, says business has been strong the past couple of years and the customers have been younger, in their teens and 20s. Some are seeking books by Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry and others popular on TikTok, but many are anxious to buy other works.

“I feel like young people are re-discovering the bookstore and the importance of community after being locked down,” he says. “And you’re seeing interest across the board. The other day I had a young person come in who was interested in short stories and wanted to buy a book of Chekhov.”

The ABA also continued its recent trend of not just adding stores, but more diverse stores, whether the kinds of operations or who runs them. Independent stores these days range from longtime traditional sellers such as Books & Books to pop-up stores, mobile shops and one that began as an online store and Instagram account, Black Walnut Books, in Glen Falls, New York.

Once overwhelmingly white, the booksellers association added 46 stores last year that reported diverse ownership, among them Rooted MKE in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Black Garnet Books, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hillary Smith, owner of Black Walnut Books, is a member of the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians who is focused on queer and Indigenous titles and works by authors of color.

“I am a mission-based bookseller,” she says.

Another new store owner, Heather Hall of Greenfeather Book Company in Norman, Oklahoma, also sees her job as a calling. Before the pandemic, she had planned to work in the legal profession, but found herself thinking of other possible careers and was surprised to realize that she had the financial resources and enough of a potential local market to go into bookselling — a seemingly distant dream.

Hall is a self-described “loud mouth” who soon became active in countering the state’s book bannings. After a Norman high school teacher was criticized (and eventually resigned) for sharing the QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned Project — an initiative to enable students nationwide to access books banned in their communities — Hall decided to give away T-shirts with the library’s code.

“Being loud and obnoxious is a normal part of my life,” she says with a laugh. “I am 100% in with the ability to have a conversation about every aspect of books. I’m not talking from an ivory tower perspective. It can be romance novels, science fiction, genre fiction. I’m talking about graphic novels. These conversations are the things in my life that make it better and happier and more wonderful.”

Hill says sales appear “softer” in 2023 than in the last couple of years, but still anticipates further growth for the trade association, with 56 member stores added so far and 18 closing.

Prospective owners include 32-year-old Paullina Mills of Perry, Iowa, who had worked in education for the past decade until recent state legislation — including proposed restrictions on what books can be taught — made her consider a new path. This summer, she plans to open Century Farm Books & Brews, and have it live up to its name as a gathering place for drinks and books and bookish conversations.

“I wanted a place where people would come and get a glass of wine and maybe have a book club,” she says. “I think in general we have missed personal connections (during the pandemic) and this seems like a great way to fill a hole in our community. It seemed like a pipe dream at first, but then I found a building and it was like, ’OK, I’m going to jump in headfirst and see how it goes.”

People think actual books aren’t selling…they literally brought back Books A Million at Park City. Yes, it was because their rent agreement went out but still...we all thought it wasn't coming back and it did. It's smaller but seems to do much better (I've haven't been there for mobths but I know it's going good) than it was before.

Even Barbes & Nobles seem to be doing well.

Books (not eBooks or audio) aren't going anywhere.

#books #stores #barnes & noble #books a million #pennsylvania

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