Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.
have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.
and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.
black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.
if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you’ve ever met. it doesn’t have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don’t know much, look it up and learn about it together.
This is Juneteenth.
white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.
Everyone in your world can teleport within 10 feet of the person they love the most. Your best friend wonders how you always seem to be there just when they need you.
State Farm puts out a series of joking commercials. The punch line being that of all the people in your insurance agent’s life, you’re the one they care about most- you’re the person they can teleport to.
It’s bold of them to joke about something so controversial. After all, who your ‘port is can make or break a relationship. Study after study has been done on the ‘port between parent and child and psychiatrists are always analyzing your ‘port history.
The commercials are tacky, too. They make fun of the power inherent in a person’s greatest love. That’s what a ‘port is, after all, your love for someone being strong enough to take you to wherever they are. All in all State Farm’s “good neighbor” commercials leave people shaking their heads and laughing uncomfortably.
Caitlyn’s not laughing when a man brings a gun to her school.
Her class is on the yard and there’s no warning- he’s just there, with a gun, and her kids are frozen.
Mickey’s too close too close and not moving and the man is turning the gun towards him. Mickey’s only 8 and he drives her nuts most days. He cries and screams and he runs away and he makes things up and he loves his mom and his sister and he cried when Caitlyn got stitches and she loves him she loves him she loves him.
She feels a moment of disorientation and suddenly she’s between the man and the boy.
She doesn’t hesitate, just wraps herself around Mickey. Then she closes her eyes and reaches inside herself for the first-easiest-always, thinks I love you I love you I love you and feels the shift of the ‘port.
And her eyes land on Zeke, who is jerking to his feet in shock, and she feels a huge wave of relief. Zeke’s been her ‘port since they were months old and her aunt got up one morning to find two babies in the crib instead of one. These days they usually plan their visits and Caitlyn’s never brought a kid before, so Zeke has questions in his eyes.
Before he can voice any, she’s pushing Mickey towards him and gasping out “I have to go back-”
And she’s thinking of the next closest kid, Jasper, one of her rough and tumble boys, he’s so big, 8 years old and almost as tall as her, Jazz is learning to control his temper and his energy but there’s a sweetness to him that comes out at the oddest moments. It’s easy to declare I love I love I love and then she’s grabbing Jazz and sending herself back to Zeke’s shelter.
He’s a little more prepared this time, reaching out to steady her and guide Jazz away while she turns her thoughts and heart to the next kid.
And she’s gone and grabbing Topher, her sweet boy who listens and cares and tries, and they’re back to Zeke.
And she’s gone and grabbing Zornitsa, her scampy little comedian, and back to Zeke.
And she’s gone and grabbing Ariel and Kaho and Clarissa, her gymnast trio with their fierceness and their determination, and back to Zeke.
This time she thinks to shrug her backpack off and gasp out “There’s a list- in the emergency folder-”
And then she’s gone again.
When she reaches for Heidi, her zippy little miss who won’t touch fruit and loves worms and has grown so much, that she lands inside. She pulls Heidi and Adela into her arms and shifts back to Zeke.
Her kids are away from the man with the gun and she feels shaky. She takes a couple breaths, bracing her hands on her thighs. Then she thinks of passion-dedication-exasperation, guide and guidee, and wraps that all around her I love I love I love.
The next moment she’s in a closet turned office made all the smaller by the crush of people in it. She looks up at her boss as several kids stifle startled yelps and Colin looks back with wide eyes under his tangled mop of curls.
“What-” he starts to ask.
“Third grade was on the yard, there wasn’t time to get indoors, but I think I got them all safe,” Caitlyn tells him.
“How?” he asks.
“Like this,” she says, voice tinged with hysterical laughter.
She wraps her arms around Carmela, Elizaveta, Winona, and Joanna and reaches for Zeke. She drops the girls off and goes back to Colin, who goggles.
“I know you need to stay on site, but I thought you should know that I’m evacuating our kids,” Caitlyn tells him.
Colin shakes off his astonishment and squares his lanky shoulders.
“Can you get to kinder?” he asks, eyes lighting up.
“Yes,” Caitlyn says, “with Nancy there that will be easy.”
“Get them all out,” Colin says, “and tell Nancy to start listing who is safe, have her message me.”
“Will do,” she says with a nod. She grabs the three remaining kids and takes them to Zeke.
She thinks of Nancy then, they have different classes this year but they’re still brain mates, still the team, and it’s easy to wrap finishing each others sentences and communicating without words around her I love I love I love.
Nancy startles when she appears, and several of the babies scream. Team Kinder moves into action, hushing and calming. Nancy just waits, meeting Caitlyn’s eyes.
“Colin sent me, I’m evacuating you guys,” Caitlyn explains. “I can take as many as I can hold at a time. How do you want to do this?”
Nancy nods once.
“Start with Mr. Mason and Bashir and Rafael,” Nancy says. “I’ll have the next group ready when you get back.
Caitlyn nods and grabs them.
Things go pretty smoothly after that. Nancy sends kinder off a group at a time and then quickly takes control of the chaotic crowd that Caitlyn has already saved.
Caitlyn moves on grade by grade, finding her way to the colleagues she is so so grateful to work with.
By the time the cops secure the man with the gun, the school is empty, everyone 150 miles away.
When they ask later how she did it she looks right at them.
“Love is love,” she says, “there’s no such thing as more or less,” she shakes her head slightly, “it’s not quantifiable, there’s no scale that can measure it, love is.”
I want you to reblog this if you believe that two people can be very close and physically affectionate with one another, but still have a completely nonsexual, non-romantic relationship.
Even if the two people in question are capable of being sexually or romantically attracted to one another.
Because the friendship I share with someone I consider family in a way that transcends blood has been typecast as a romantic relationship ENTIRELY too many times, and I’m beginning to get sick of it.
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.
ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep
Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by
Magnus Hirschfeld
and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.
Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.
Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!
So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.
Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:
Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?
I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.
Stop and think about that for a minute.
Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.
TV Executives: “if the strike goes in, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”
Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.
Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.
It’s just hilarious that they’re trying to pull this whole “but your favorite shows!” nonsense.
Oh, you mean the shows you cancel after the third season no matter how good they’re doing to avoid paying writers residuals? The shows that get produced and then never aired because you found a nice tax writeoff? The shows whose writing suffers because the writers’ room got six weeks to write before getting booted and making the showrunner adapt all their scripts? The shows you straight up pulled from your streaming service to scam their crews out of rewatch money?
I will happily sacrifice my shows for the writers that gave them to me, no questions needed, but if anyone tries to say that the blatantly terrible way streaming treats its writers is somehow beneficial to shows, remind them of Infinity Train and Batgirl. That’s the ideal they’re pushing towards if someone doesn’t say no, and we should be thankful that the writers are doing that for us.
