Tag: history

Hey young ones

rsasai:

seekingwillow:

88linesabout44fangirls-blog:

prismatic-bell:

and-bisexual:

anamatics:

This is a request.

Learn your queer history. Learn about AIDS. Learn about how the leadership of this country looked away and did nothing to help our community for years. Learn about how they joked AIDS was god’s punishment for being gay. Learn about how, in the community, everyone was touched. Everyone lost someone. Learn how the AIDS crisis gave birth to the modern gay rights movement. Learn about how that crisis brought the community together after two decades of infighting. Lesbians took care of gay men who were dying. Found families were everywhere. Our history is too important to allow our politicians to sweep the horrible awful legacy of inaction under the rug. 

Learn your history kids. Think about the people who died to make your life now, as a young queer person in the world, a whole lot better than it was back then.

YES

Learn about how bi men were blamed for the epidemic by both straight and gay people, and especially for its “leap” to those innocent straight people.

Learn about how Newsweek publicly blamed bi men for the epidemic in 1987, calling them “the ultimate pariahs” and “amoral and duplicitous and compulsive.” How Cosmo did the same two years later, promoting the popular stereotype of bi men as dishonest spreaders of AIDS.

Learn about how bisexual activists like David Lourea and Cynthia Slater were at the cutting edge of safer sex education, bringing it into bathhouses and BDSM clubs in San Francisco in 1981, when doctors were still calling it “a rare gay cancer”. Or like Alexei Guren, in Florida, organizing healthcare outreach to Latino married men who have sex with men.

Learn about how it took two years of campaigning to get even the San Francisco Department of Public Health to recognize bisexual men in their official AIDS statistics (the weekly “New AIDS cases and mortality statistics” report),

Learn about the women who got HIV, both cis and trans, who often had no resources or support. And the incredibly high risk trans women faced for HIV even in the late 1990s, and how difficult it still was for them to access healthcare.

Learn about how bisexual activists like Venetia Porter, of the Prostitute’s Union of Massachusetts and COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), were the ones who first advocated for both cis and trans women, and injection drug users, with AIDS.

Learn about how Cynthia Slater, who by then was HIV-positive, organized the first Women’s HIV/AIDS Information Switchboard in 1985.

Learn about how bisexuals are still erased from HIV/AIDS history. How frequently we are told that we were not affected by the epidemic, that we are less oppressed as a result, that we did not participate in this movement or in the larger movement for gay rights. That we were not demonized, that only gay men were disowned or refused cemetery plots for having AIDS. How our erasure is used against us.

Look up the die-ins. Groups of dozens, HUNDREDS, literally laying on the steps of hospitals and breathing their last because hospitals wouldn’t take them and their families wouldn’t either.

Look up Ryan White, an 11-year-old boy who got HIV through a faulty blood transfusion in the days before reliable testing and was denied an education out of fear he’d infect other kids.

Do you know what AIDS was, in those dim days? My mom worked in a hospital. An AIDS patient was brought in and immediately put in the same isolation room they’d use for stuff like SARS, smallpox, and anthrax. Entering his room required that you enter another room first and take off all your clothes. A fresh set of scrubs would be given to you. Then you had to triple-glove, double-boot, double-mask, double-gown–yes, a surgical gown just to enter the room–and when you left you did all this in reverse and then got a decontaminant shower. Nobody knew how this disease was spread.

And the people. In charge. Did NOTHING.

When older queer activists speak, loves, LISTEN. Our history is short and foggy and all too often appropriated by straight people for brownie points. It’s not all the repeal of DADT and getting married.

Psychology today also did an article blaming bisexual men in the most scare-mongering way possible. This was a supposedly ‘objective’, semi-scientific magazine. I still remember reading this over 20 years later.

In response to the bit about the HAZMAT level procedures done with AIDS patients; I just want to add – Learn why it was SUCH A BIG DEAL that Princess Diana touched the hands of AIDS patients, sat with them, sometimes even fed them.

Like off the cuff it’d seem like a random thing to bring up. Except she was a Head of State showing compassion and demanding it, when elected officials were pointing fingers going ‘Plague’.

And yes, also, that marriage rights for queer folk came about because of estranged parents and blood relatives swooping in to take all a couple had built together, because a partner, sometimes even a sick partner who needed funds for their OWN health, wasn’t ‘legally connected’.

It was supposed to be about protection, and then became about exclusion of certain parts of the community and respectability politics of others. Even when those same ‘fringes’ initially had been caretakers and support.

Lastly, up into the damn 00′s they were still ‘blaming bisexual men’. There were a lot of articles about ‘black men on the down low’ or ‘prison sexualities’ and claiming that was responsible for things in the US blowing up among the AA community. And not enough stress on safe sex education in general and how the virus spread.

And realize that even worse, we have come to a time where people have slowly forgotten everything in regards to HIV/AIDS. An entire generation of young men and women was wiped out of existence; we do not know what world they would have created, but we can feel their loss even now. Teenagers and young adults are not being taught how to properly care for themselves to lower the chance of transmission, which is slowly increasing.

I want to make sure that everyone knows: People who have HIV/AIDS are not a danger to you. They are people. They are not contagious–you can not get HIV from kissing, daily contact, eating after someone, using the same toilet, etc. You can spend your entire life with someone who is HIV+ and unless you share blood of sexual fluid, there is 0% chance of infection. 

If you are undetectable, meaning you are HIV+ and on medication that has lowered your viral load to undetectable levels, it is statistically negligible for you to be able to transmit HIV to a partner.

If you do not know your status or your partner’s status, be careful and use a condom. 

2.1 million people were infected in 2015. 

1.1 million people died of AIDS related complications in 2015.

24% of all infections are between the ages of 13-24.

44% of HIV young people in the US do not know they are infected.

The highest number of increasing HIV infections is young Gay/Bisexual men of color.

Only 16% of young people with HIV are on medication and undetectable.

Only 22% of young adults have ever taken an HIV test.

Get tested. It is free and anonymous. Go once a year, be responsible. And don’t only care about HIV/AIDS when it is World AIDS Day. There is too much riding on staying knowledgable.

Silence=Death

UNAIDS: Source

CDC* Source

Will always share this.

was fanfic any different in the Olden Days

glorious-spoon:

themarysue:

devildoll:

wtfzurtopic:

saathi1013:

some-stars:

actualvampireang:

OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:

– In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances. 

– Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.

– The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.

– Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.

– In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.

– Real Person Fic was like, not even discussed. It had its own mailing list where we kept basically all of it, and you didn’t mention it in polite company. Then suddenly in 2000-2001 all these legitimate people got into NSync fic. But before that, it was pretty taboo in a lot of fannish circles.

re: point one, there was also an enormous amount of time spent on characters agonizing over being attracted to other men. like, i was reading something a while back that was actually written in 2003 but by someone who’d been in fandom for a long time and obviously hadn’t changed their aesthetic much, and the first time the pairing started making out, one of the guys suddenly had to stop—and i thought it was gonna be like, traumatic memories, or just general intimacy issues, or whatever. but it was because it was ~all too new~ and he had to take a few more days to adjust to the whole gay thing.

oh and then along the same lines you had guys running out to try and have sex with women and fail, or have sex with women but find it so unsatisfying, before ultimately admitting that they wanted this particular dick. also, considering the prevalence of WNGWJLEO, it was oddly mandatory to point out at great length how much each character never really loved his previous female partners.

basically fandom now, at least the well-written part of it, is a million times less homophobic and biphobic and, believe it or not, misogynist. obviously there were always exceptions, especially with the really good writers, and especially as you move into the late nineties. but as a rule, so much improvement.

oh, and every love confession required a full name. Firstname Middlename Lastname, I love you. where does that even come from, seriously?

i will give them this—there was a lot less badfic that was technically bad, like, unreadable and full of errors. shit got edited back in the day. someone was gonna pay money to print five hundred copies of that and they did not want your terrible spelling to fuck it up.

oh, and not related to anything else, but: usenet! usenet was a super important venue for many fandoms. this actually continued well into the 2000s for certain fandom circles—not slash-focused media fandom in general, but there was a lot of overlap. i was reading alt.tv.angel during season two, and there were fic writers i recognized posting there. and of course earlier on, the alt.startrek.creative.* groups were central.

Random things I want to add based on my admittedly-hazy memory:

– elaborate ascii headers/footers/dividers on fic, which were mostly txt files (or bare-bones text-only pages to save archive space) I think?

– faking ages to get access to the adult stuff (which could get complicated depending on what country you were from and what country the admin(s) were from). This sometimes involved emailing an age statement to the owner of a mailing list and them deciding whether or not to trust you (or how much they actually gave a fuck) before giving you the password to an archive or authenticating your whatever to access the whosit, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked.  Because I was fifteen at the time. Of course.

– There were people who were very adamantly ‘gay stuff is okay in fanfic but immoral IRL.’  Don’t ask me how that worked out logically, but it was a thing.

– DO NOT FORGET THE BEFORE-TIMES when there was no google and there were scattered archives everywhere, from ‘archive of [specific mailing list]’ to authors’ personal archives to pairing- or fandom-specific archives and the way you found a lot of them was like hoping aol or yahoo search would turn up something new?  But on the other hand you had a fair number of folks who were twitchy about having webcrawlies being able to find their porn because fanfic was already kind of side-eyed and porny stuff even moreso.

– there were archivists who actively trawled mailing lists and authors archives and such to compile their own interest-specific archives, sometimes asking the authors if they could host a fic… and sometimes NOT asking.  Cue: wank.

– OR you navigated WEBRINGS (which are like tumblr ‘networks’ I think? I don’t grok tumblr networks but ya’ll have fun with them, I’ll be over here in my rocking chair mmk) where there was essentially a master list of websites catering to a specific interest, sometimes with details but sometimes it was just a name and a link so you had no idea what you were clicking on half the time, you just knew it fell under category [thing the webring was about].

(…tbh, this was probably how I found out about slash, because of some X-Files or Pretender or maybe early SG1 webring, I don’t even know. I just saw “[fandomname] slash archive” and was desperate for new fic in [fandom] and hey presto “boys?? kissing?? GIRLS? KISSING?!! YOU CAN DO THAT? Ship things that don’t match what canon would expect you to ship?? oops now I have an exponentially greater amount of ships than I did before”)(given that description, it was probably stargate because there was a LOT of pretty to go around okay)

– let me TELL you about the recurring firestorm of wank that would rush through every goddamned fandom for at least a 5- to 10-year period there where someone would be like “all same-gender shippy stuff needs an NC-17 warning because that stuff is not okay for kids” and other folks would be like “can we not equate handholding to explicit PIV intercourse solely based on the genders of the participants” and holy jesus it was the EXACT same ugly nausea-inducing merry-go-round in at least six of my fandoms, which is why I am zero percent impressed with ‘family’ networks caving to that bullpockey because My People already hashed that out, get with the times, thanks.

– fanfic archives without search functions, where everything was just listed by date posted and sorted by pairing IF YOU WERE LUCKY.  One sentence summaries with no tags, no warnings, sometimes no ratings.  Sometimes no lengths (see above regarding length measured by filesize).  Because everything was coded in early html and some folks just didn’t want to (or knew how to) code all that.  This is why I give money to ao3, people.  I REMEMBER THE BEFORETIMES.

– oh, and finding That Reccer whose tastes ran similar to your own and posted like 10+ recs a week?  Like Santa and Baby Jesus came down from on high and showered glitter all over you before kissing you gently on the forehead and then disappearing in a double rainbow.  (You think recs help you filter wheat from chaff NOW, it was all the moreso when you had to do all this hunting just to find stuff TO sort though)

– yes this was also before lj and wordpress and basically any kind of rich text editor-enabled blogging platform.  Hand-coded html pages hosted on geocities with terrible font color choices and pixellated blinky tiled gif backgrounds, aw yus.

>midlevel-bofq jazzhands<

Accessibility stuff like the broad, daily use of trigger-warnings or tags of ANY KIND is a relatively new fandom behavior. Like 5-6 years ago, people were still having wars about if trigger warnings were ruining free speech or not (hint: they weren’t).

DISCLAIMERS

Your super elaborate headers usually stated that you did not own anything having to do with your canon and that you made no money off your fan fiction etc etc.

(I still own about dozen Yahoo mailing lists, one of which is fourteen years old and still gets a dozen or so posts a year—a sharp drop from its heyday but the corpse is still twitching so I keep the lights on over there.)

Know your history.

Oh god, this brings back memories. Badly coded geocities memories, aka, ‘is this fic REALLY GOOD and worth reading even though it’s light blue text on a pink background with sparkly line breaks?’

*gruff old man’s voice*

In MY day, we ate subtext for tea and WE WERE GRATEFUL.

excessively-english-little-b:

coto524:

coto524:

saethwr:

coto524:

as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan

and please, enough with the “keyboard smashing” jokes. not original, not funny.

“

#okay but can any of y’all even pronounce your own town names tho? #bye”

yeah, we can actually because the spelling is phonetic. meanwhile english folks have placenames like bicester or keighley or beaulieu, which you have to learn the pronunciation for individually because the rules are so inconsistent. i mean people can’t even agree how to pronounce marylebone but sure welsh place names are the weird ones

“#But are you aware your language literally looks like a potato rolled across a keyboard”

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet – just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know – and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

fun fact: the english have been taking the piss out of welsh for years, just like they’ve been doing for irish, and scots gaelic, and cornish, and british sign language, and a hundred and one other languages, because evidently the fact that the whole world isn’t anglophone and monocultured and Still Part Of The Empire is a problem, and something that needs to be corrected

Literally people stop making shitty jokes about non-English Brits. Why would you think they couldn’t pronounce their own damn language?

Wales, Ireland and Scotland have suffered terribly at the hands of the English and people need to start learning about that.

was fanfic any different in the Olden Days

jenroses:

gryvon:

kaesaria:

glorious-spoon:

themarysue:

devildoll:

wtfzurtopic:

saathi1013:

some-stars:

actualvampireang:

OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:

– In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances. 

– Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.

– The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.

– Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.

– In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.

– Real Person Fic was like, not even discussed. It had its own mailing list where we kept basically all of it, and you didn’t mention it in polite company. Then suddenly in 2000-2001 all these legitimate people got into NSync fic. But before that, it was pretty taboo in a lot of fannish circles.

re: point one, there was also an enormous amount of time spent on characters agonizing over being attracted to other men. like, i was reading something a while back that was actually written in 2003 but by someone who’d been in fandom for a long time and obviously hadn’t changed their aesthetic much, and the first time the pairing started making out, one of the guys suddenly had to stop—and i thought it was gonna be like, traumatic memories, or just general intimacy issues, or whatever. but it was because it was ~all too new~ and he had to take a few more days to adjust to the whole gay thing.

oh and then along the same lines you had guys running out to try and have sex with women and fail, or have sex with women but find it so unsatisfying, before ultimately admitting that they wanted this particular dick. also, considering the prevalence of WNGWJLEO, it was oddly mandatory to point out at great length how much each character never really loved his previous female partners.

basically fandom now, at least the well-written part of it, is a million times less homophobic and biphobic and, believe it or not, misogynist. obviously there were always exceptions, especially with the really good writers, and especially as you move into the late nineties. but as a rule, so much improvement.

oh, and every love confession required a full name. Firstname Middlename Lastname, I love you. where does that even come from, seriously?

i will give them this—there was a lot less badfic that was technically bad, like, unreadable and full of errors. shit got edited back in the day. someone was gonna pay money to print five hundred copies of that and they did not want your terrible spelling to fuck it up.

oh, and not related to anything else, but: usenet! usenet was a super important venue for many fandoms. this actually continued well into the 2000s for certain fandom circles—not slash-focused media fandom in general, but there was a lot of overlap. i was reading alt.tv.angel during season two, and there were fic writers i recognized posting there. and of course earlier on, the alt.startrek.creative.* groups were central.

Random things I want to add based on my admittedly-hazy memory:

– elaborate ascii headers/footers/dividers on fic, which were mostly txt files (or bare-bones text-only pages to save archive space) I think?

– faking ages to get access to the adult stuff (which could get complicated depending on what country you were from and what country the admin(s) were from). This sometimes involved emailing an age statement to the owner of a mailing list and them deciding whether or not to trust you (or how much they actually gave a fuck) before giving you the password to an archive or authenticating your whatever to access the whosit, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked.  Because I was fifteen at the time. Of course.

– There were people who were very adamantly ‘gay stuff is okay in fanfic but immoral IRL.’  Don’t ask me how that worked out logically, but it was a thing.

– DO NOT FORGET THE BEFORE-TIMES when there was no google and there were scattered archives everywhere, from ‘archive of [specific mailing list]’ to authors’ personal archives to pairing- or fandom-specific archives and the way you found a lot of them was like hoping aol or yahoo search would turn up something new?  But on the other hand you had a fair number of folks who were twitchy about having webcrawlies being able to find their porn because fanfic was already kind of side-eyed and porny stuff even moreso.

– there were archivists who actively trawled mailing lists and authors archives and such to compile their own interest-specific archives, sometimes asking the authors if they could host a fic… and sometimes NOT asking.  Cue: wank.

– OR you navigated WEBRINGS (which are like tumblr ‘networks’ I think? I don’t grok tumblr networks but ya’ll have fun with them, I’ll be over here in my rocking chair mmk) where there was essentially a master list of websites catering to a specific interest, sometimes with details but sometimes it was just a name and a link so you had no idea what you were clicking on half the time, you just knew it fell under category [thing the webring was about].

(…tbh, this was probably how I found out about slash, because of some X-Files or Pretender or maybe early SG1 webring, I don’t even know. I just saw “[fandomname] slash archive” and was desperate for new fic in [fandom] and hey presto “boys?? kissing?? GIRLS? KISSING?!! YOU CAN DO THAT? Ship things that don’t match what canon would expect you to ship?? oops now I have an exponentially greater amount of ships than I did before”)(given that description, it was probably stargate because there was a LOT of pretty to go around okay)

– let me TELL you about the recurring firestorm of wank that would rush through every goddamned fandom for at least a 5- to 10-year period there where someone would be like “all same-gender shippy stuff needs an NC-17 warning because that stuff is not okay for kids” and other folks would be like “can we not equate handholding to explicit PIV intercourse solely based on the genders of the participants” and holy jesus it was the EXACT same ugly nausea-inducing merry-go-round in at least six of my fandoms, which is why I am zero percent impressed with ‘family’ networks caving to that bullpockey because My People already hashed that out, get with the times, thanks.

– fanfic archives without search functions, where everything was just listed by date posted and sorted by pairing IF YOU WERE LUCKY.  One sentence summaries with no tags, no warnings, sometimes no ratings.  Sometimes no lengths (see above regarding length measured by filesize).  Because everything was coded in early html and some folks just didn’t want to (or knew how to) code all that.  This is why I give money to ao3, people.  I REMEMBER THE BEFORETIMES.

– oh, and finding That Reccer whose tastes ran similar to your own and posted like 10+ recs a week?  Like Santa and Baby Jesus came down from on high and showered glitter all over you before kissing you gently on the forehead and then disappearing in a double rainbow.  (You think recs help you filter wheat from chaff NOW, it was all the moreso when you had to do all this hunting just to find stuff TO sort though)

– yes this was also before lj and wordpress and basically any kind of rich text editor-enabled blogging platform.  Hand-coded html pages hosted on geocities with terrible font color choices and pixellated blinky tiled gif backgrounds, aw yus.

>midlevel-bofq jazzhands<

Accessibility stuff like the broad, daily use of trigger-warnings or tags of ANY KIND is a relatively new fandom behavior. Like 5-6 years ago, people were still having wars about if trigger warnings were ruining free speech or not (hint: they weren’t).

DISCLAIMERS

Your super elaborate headers usually stated that you did not own anything having to do with your canon and that you made no money off your fan fiction etc etc.

(I still own about dozen Yahoo mailing lists, one of which is fourteen years old and still gets a dozen or so posts a year—a sharp drop from its heyday but the corpse is still twitching so I keep the lights on over there.)

Know your history.

Oh god, this brings back memories. Badly coded geocities memories, aka, ‘is this fic REALLY GOOD and worth reading even though it’s light blue text on a pink background with sparkly line breaks?’

Omg I remember WEBRINGS!!!

It was a dark time. Let the struggle not be forgot.

I came into it about… 3rd season X-files? Ish? alt.tv.x-files.* and there are people on my tumblr that I know from there.

TWENTY YEARS AGO. Jesus.

At that point… badfic was something people sometimes wrote on purpose for lols. Setting your text file line breaks so they wouldn’t be nonsense short line/long lines was a Thing. We listed things in text file size because we were on like 14k  modems (or slower) and file length MATTERS. 

Slash was naughty and usually badly written by mostly straight women and I was NOT a fan. It kept getting progressively better though. In the X-files it usually involved a lot of noncon power shit because the main slash pairs were Mulder/Krycek (canonical enemies) and Mulder/Skinner (employee/boss). 

I took a long break from fanfic when I moved from advertising to graphic design because my job was using up all my create-ions. so that was 1998. When I came back to it was in 2007-8 ish when I was crashing hard from several early prediagnosis bouts of the chronic illness that would eventually disable me, with I-don’t-remember-which-first, JAG, Stargate and finally finishing my magnum opus for the X-files when the new movie came out and I rewatched the series. 

I ended up doing a writing binge every other summer or so for a while, and my own writing shifted from pretty much entirely het/gen to DECIDEDLY more poly/queer when I found Doctor Who in 2010. 

Then there was a bout with Castle which fizzled mid-fic, unfortunately, and then not much more between 2011 and 2015. I had a kid. I was busy. I had a massive project on the back burner and thought I’d never write fanfic again. 

Then Merlin, and a month later, Check Please, and never again would heterosexuality be seen in my writing, apparently, much. And all of that, every bit of it has affected how the original stuff I’m working on is playing out. Most of the main characters are lesbian, bi, poly, and/or nonbinary. Most of them aren’t white. 

The quality of fanfic has been incredibly variable for as long as I’ve been reading it. Much is unreadably weak. But the good stuff? The good stuff is better than most traditionally published fiction. I don’t apologize anymore for fanfic. 

EVEN the weak stuff…. is incredibly good practice for young authors. Because writing is a learned art, and requires practice.

veta-lopis:

ian-noble:

dendritic-trees:

fierceawakening:

decepticonfetti:

fierceawakening:

julesdrenages:

lordhellebore:

raccoonhi:

yourshipisfine:

magnusbene:

honestly I don’t even care why ao3 was created, if you defend their policy of not deleting horrible works, or are otherwise completely uncritical/forgiving of their mistakes because “but they’re by fans for fans”, you’re a piece of shit

horrible tropes and abuse have always been a part of fandom and fanworks, but it’s super gross that a bunch of fandom elders (who are most likely at least in their thirties) continue the tradition of citing “don’t like don’t read” as a good enough excuse to write child porn, abuse, rape, sexual slavery, etc. AND they collect thousands of dollars each year to fund this through donations

like. they are literally putting money into abusive content being published on their site. where people of any age, even pre-teens, can access it. for example, I could never report people posting alec/women stuff despite it being homophobic, because it doesn’t violate their terms. I can’t report pretty much anything, because as long as you’re not plagiarizing, it’s all good

yeah, ao3 is great as a concept, but allowing abusive, homophobic, racist, etc. material to be published on your site because “fuck the pc police/moral crusaders” is appalling and fuck ao3 tbh. not to mention they’ve had really disgusting people as members on their board, so it’s pretty obvious what kind of people are in charge of this site

If you do not like AO3′s policies, don’t donate to them, don’t publish your fic there and don’t read fic there.

AO3 was created because people were unhappy with the policies of other websites and fanfiction archives.

If you are unhappy with AO3′s policies, there is nothing stopping you from setting up a fanfic archive of your own where you can decide on the policies. 

As for pre-teens accessing the site and reading porny fic… yeah. They’re gonna do that. And you know whose responsibility that is? Those kids’ parents.

If I post explicit fic on AO3, it is my responsibility to categorise it as mature/explicit, to tag the relationships and to mention in the tags/summary that it contains sex. That’s it. 

The entire reason AO3 was created was to give all those “horrible” fics OP hates a safe place to be posted. Most antis seem to be too young to remember what it was like on LiveJournal. Hell, I’m too young to have been there but fandom elders are well aware of how difficult it was to have fandom communities anywhere after all that Strikethrough nonsense. What antis are doing is literally along the same lines, but worse. Strikethrough targeted the same types of works OP has a problem with, along with plenty of other things we would object to being removed. Instead of doing anything good, it just fucked people over. It literally infringed on their rights- and yes, depicting whatever horribly immoral things you want in fiction is, in fact, a right that everyone has.

So yeah, fuck the moral police. All this movement has ever done was hurt people. AO3 was created to get away from that. And if you don’t want to read something, you don’t even have to fucking see it. There are warnings for a reason. I’m really sorry OP finds it horrible that things they don’t like exist, but they and everyone who thinks like them needs to get over themselves and really think about what good it’ll do. Is it worth stealing resources from people who might need them? Is it worth taking away fiction survivors use to cope? Is it worth denying the fact that many abuse victims learned about their abuse through fiction and taking away future victims’ chance at realizing that the way they’re treated isn’t normal? If the answers to these questions is yes, congratulations, you’re an abysmal excuse for a human being and you’re actually worse than all the ~horrible~ people who write about abuse and other deplorable things. At least the people they’re hurting don’t exist.

how difficult it was to have fandom communities anywhere after all that Strikethrough nonsense. What antis are doing is literally along the same lines 

This. Back in 2007 with Strikethrough (link to the fanlore article here) it was conservative Christians targeting any works they found distasteful, these days it’s young “progressive” people clamouring for precisely the same censoring of fan content in the name of social justice. It’s the same kind of policing, the same conflation of fiction and reality, and although the arguments are different on a superficial level, the reasoning behind them is, in essence the same.

It’s not even a matter of putting things in the perspective of ‘means of coping’/’resources that someone might need to recognize future abuse’ and so on, in my opinion.

They are absolutely valid reasons for keeping those works where they are, of course, I’d never say the contrary.

But the core of the matter here is that I have the right to write whatever the fuck I want, for the sake of fiction, and I have the right to publish my work online, to share it with people who enjoy the same kind of fiction. 

In a system like AO3, with a very wide range of filters, tags and tools to narrow your access to stories, it is my responsibilty as an author to tag and classify my work sensibly, but what to make of those tags is up to you. I can’t and will not be held accountable for distressing you with a graphic depiction of assault if you willingly opened a one-shot of your otp tagged rape/non-con. 

As for minors stumbling on unsuited content: it’s still not my responsibility. As long as my work is marked as mature, if you kid lie about your age, browse it anyway and get upset over it it’s still not my fucking business. Not when you actively chose to not follow the rules. You wanna complain? I’ll have a talk with your parents, then.

You want a safe, sheltered space to suit your demands? Go build it yourself, or customize the already existing archives to your fancy, because guess what? You can do that.

(sincerely, an author that mostly writes harmless vanilla sex and has far more squicks than kinks)

Anyone who thought I was being weird with the “I think young people fail to understand why free speech is important because they’ve never had their speech targeted” post a few days ago?

Look at this, please.

I just don’t understand this whole attitude of younger fans in fandom telling older fans to GTFO because we’re old™? 

First off, the people making the book/show/movie/comic your into are also old™. Let’s just get that out of the way. With very few exceptions, the media you consume is made by bonafide adult individuals who will continue to make it while aging because they are human beings and human beings eventually become old™. Like it or not, fan fiction is an art form and like all art it should be allowed to encompass the entire range of human experience (or outside of human experience, for you paranormal enthusiasts, ghost kinksters, robots, and possible extraterrestrials). 

I, for one, find it rather gross that there are some artists out there who use period blood to paint self-portraits. But…they are free to express themselves that way and I wouldn’t dream of trying to stop them from expressing themselves. That’s what freedom of expression is all about! I also do not like the ship Reylo for various reasons, but I’m not going to go out of my way to yell at people for shipping it because it really doesn’t affect me whatsoever.

I’m rambling, but my point is that especially with AO3, their tag system makes it so that you find exactly what you are looking for. So OP, I’m sorry that you went looking for stories with your boy Alec in them and found that some of those stories featured him paired with a lady you don’t like. Maybe next time, if you’re looking for a specific ship with your boy Alec, search for who you ship him with instead of just running a general search for his name. That way you don’t trip up any entries of things that may upset you. Just like, you know…if I’m searching for fics with my main bot the great and glorious Megatron doing the deed with his old flame Optimus Prime in a pre-war time – I, being the savvy person I am, will search for Megatron/Orion Pax instead. 

You understand?

Secondly, there are a hell of a lot of franchises that became popular because people who are old™ like them!! The Anime you watch today wouldn’t have been translated or subbed our distributed in the US if it weren’t for us old™ people making the original imports so popular. Are you a fan of Star Wars or Star Trek or any Marvel/DC movie in existence? 

Those franchises were made popular and continue to exist because old™ people in fandom did fan things and bought stuff and wrote stuff and drew stuff and petitioned for de-cancellation of stuff and organized conventions to enjoy stuff. Your fandom is built on the shoulders of the fans before you, and you have the audacity to stroll in here and say we can’t continue liking it or writing stuff for it because we’re old™? 

Fuck that shit, I’m writing fic for the rest of eternity. I will continue tapping out fic until the heat death of this universe and when the new one is born from the ashes of the dead one I will through sheer spite generate myself into existence again to continue writing. Why? Because you said I’m too old™ to do so.

Thirdly, I wrote smut of Marik from Yu-Gi-Oh and my OC when I was in high school, set in during the battle city arc. Marik is 16 at that point in time and my OC was 14. You want to tell me I was wrong for exploring my sexuality that way, OP? That I was wrong for writing an abusive relationship? That I was wrong for not shipping Marik/Bakura? That I should have been banned from writing because you may not have liked one particular aspect of it? 

Because that’s what happens, OP. 

You ban a thing for one specific reason, then all the other reasons someone might want to write that thing get caught in the crossfire. Want to ban stories with rape or rape mentions in them? Boom, you’ve now banned people writing for coping purposes. You’ve banned writing canon characters who have had that happen to them in the past. You’ve banned writing OCs that have had that happen to them in the past. You have banned writing about rapists getting their just desserts for being shitheads. You’ve banned writing about Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright successfully prosecuting a rapist. You’ve banned just writing a fic that’s based in an imperfect world like our own where it exists as a thing that can happen. All because you want to prevent a certain type of fic that falls under that category from being posted?

OP, if you ever sat through banned books week at school and wondered how the hell books become banned, it’s people like you.

It’s people like you.

So much this.

If youth who need safe spaces want to create MinorSpace for fic for and by people under 18, go for it.

If these youth want to tell me I am not welcome in fandom spaces created by people who are not minors? GTFO.

Yes. Exactly. AO3 tags explicit/adult content. If something is tagged wrong, or not tagged then there’s a report function if you don’t read/don’t pay attention to the tags and you see something that bothers you, then that’s your own fault.

honestly the one thing i’d like out of ao3 is a block tags function

but other than that shit’s fine, dont break it

You actually can blacklist tags on AO3! It’s called ao3dr, and it’s an extension you can download for chrome (I can’t link since I’m on mobile, and unfortunately it’s not available for mobile). It’s not a perfect solution, but if you read fic primarily on PC, it’s really helpful. You can also create your own bookmarking system too, which is also super cool.

Great thoughts here worth reading and passing on.

There are so many offensive things out there, but fiction is one area we can leave alone.  Get offended over policies that say a person can be considered ‘illegal.’  Get offended over real men allowed to rape and get away with it.  Get offended over police killing black people.  Get offended over news media and politicians portraying innocent Muslims as terrorists.  Get offended when LGBTQ+s are murdered just for who they are. Get offended when our leaders make up ‘facts’ so their corporate wranglers benefit from war profiteering.  

Get offended when a sleazy rich white male fraud tries to drag an entire country down with his sleazy campaign for power.  

There are better ways of expending your energy than seeking to ban works of fiction that you do not have to read or expose yourself to.

dominawritesthings:

prokopetz:

oudeteron:

miriamheddy:

oudeteron:

bustysaintclair:

18 years ago when I was coming out, y’all made the word “bisexual” so dirty that for years the only word I felt was accessible to me was “queer”, if I had any chance at having a community. 

Queer was widely used at that point among LGBT+ people to refer to ourselves and our community, and while you’d look askance at a straight person using that word, it was most definitely acceptable to call another LGBT+ person queer.

And now y’all are telling me “Queer” isn’t an acceptable umbrella term to use and it just feels like another way you’re using subtle language policing to tell me that really the only people you want in your community are gold-star LG folks. 

Those of us who like the word queer because it accurately reflects our misfit status are basically being told that this self-identifier is dirty and wrong, this is no longer the “queer community”, and the message yet again is that we don’t really belong.

I get it if someone doesn’t want to be called queer, and I would never call another person queer against their will but holy hell please stop acting like it’s common knowledge that queer can’t be used as an umbrella term for our community when it was for DECADES

“q-slur” is a very new concept, kids.

This is something
that’s completely overlooked, by the same people who fling the word
“ahistorical” at every viewpoint they disagree with.

When I first started
participating in any kind of LGBTQ+ stuff online (so, 10 years ago),
“queer” was by far the most common descriptor. It was pretty much
agreed it had been reclaimed enough to be safe (I mean, show me an
active slur that has academic disciplines named after it?) and people
seemed much more keen to explore the ambiguity the term offers,
rather than sticking with predefined categories. By “q-slur”
logic, we should’ve been much less accepting of it back then if we
simultaneously believe that LGBTQ+ rights are advancing over time,
but the opposite is true.

So I would say that the current
stigmatization of queer is based on two things: 1) reactionary
essentialism (seeing “queer” as too dangerous for the more
clear-cut categories), and 2) respectability politics.

Now by taking away
“queer”, we don’t have any other term that’s both catchy (no
version of the abbreviation is) and broad enough to actually be
inclusive. Gay is not an umbrella term. It always has a default
connotation that’s very specific. It only reminds me of all the time
I wasted on bad gay-only discourse when I was first questioning my
own identity, and for this reason it took ages to arrive at the
conclusion that I’m just attracted to multiple genders and also trans without dysphoria (because the other bullshit I had to
contend with was the truscum narrative of transness). So, gay is not a safe
term for me. It doesn’t describe me and if I used it, it would
actually misgender my own relationship. I’m not doing that for any of
you, sorry.

Do you know who the
majority of the people who still use “queer” are? Trans and MGA.
Yet again, we have a political line that privileges cis LG people who are fine with binary categories
over the most routinely erased parts of the community. Of course.

This, I imagine, is also
why so many bi/pan and trans/nonbinary people aren’t against aces
being included. Chances are most of us, at least those who are 25+ or so,

have experiences like this, with either being actively policed out
or just unable to find the right identifiers for ages because of the
stigma and general ignorance surrounding them.

And now you’re
telling us we HAVE TO use gay, which isn’t a functional umbrella
term, because queer suddenly isn’t acceptable based on this new logic?
Do you even hear yourselves?

–

“But!” I can already hear the gatekeepers protest, “This all
relies on a bunch of personal anecdotes!”

In which case,
buddy, I have bad news for you about the vast majority of all modern
LGBTQ+ history.

I first came upon Queer as both an umbrella term and a field of academic study. This was in the early 90s. There were queer studies, queer histories, “queering” of the text, queer theory…

And Queer, more so than other words, felt inclusive of people who, at the time, referred to themselves as “genderqueer” as well as people outside the binary, as well as bisexuals, who couldn’t claim gay or lesbian.

It was, at the time, being reclaimed at a time when all the words were being used as slurs, so there was a real reason to reclaim them.

I’ve problem with using words that people are comfortable using, but not at the cost of erasing parts of our history.

I guess now is the
time we’re hitting New Essentialism and Respectability Politics 2.0
from people who aren’t old enough to remember any of this.

Yeah, that’s something a lot of folks in the younger generation don’t get.

When you campaign against words like “queer”, to those of us in the older generations, what it looks like you’re doing is trying to roll the nomenclature back to the bad old days when cisgender gay men were treated as the only “real” members of the community, and everybody else was lumped together as this peripheral pack of weirdos who were expected to be slobberingly grateful to their betters just to be acknowledged at all.

Hell, I clearly recall a time when the leaders of mainstream gay rights activism would routinely castigate even lesbians as parasites and invaders – and be applauded for doing so. It’s difficult to overstate just how deep it went.

And, like, that wasn’t all that long ago – I’m only 33 and I’m old enough to remember that horseshit.

I’m never gonna stop reblogging this, so. 

Here you go. More queer history. 

Hey young ones

macabrity:

and-bisexual:

anamatics:

This is a request.

Learn your queer history. Learn about AIDS. Learn about how the leadership of this country looked away and did nothing to help our community for years. Learn about how they joked AIDS was god’s punishment for being gay. Learn about how, in the community, everyone was touched. Everyone lost someone. Learn how the AIDS crisis gave birth to the modern gay rights movement. Learn about how that crisis brought the community together after two decades of infighting. Lesbians took care of gay men who were dying. Found families were everywhere. Our history is too important to allow our politicians to sweep the horrible awful legacy of inaction under the rug. 

Learn your history kids. Think about the people who died to make your life now, as a young queer person in the world, a whole lot better than it was back then.

YES

Learn about how bi men were blamed for the epidemic by both straight and gay people, and especially for its “leap” to those innocent straight people.

Learn about how Newsweek publicly blamed bi men for the epidemic in 1987, calling them “the ultimate pariahs” and “amoral and duplicitous and compulsive.” How Cosmo did the same two years later, promoting the popular stereotype of bi men as dishonest spreaders of AIDS.

Learn about how bisexual activists like David Lourea and Cynthia Slater were at the cutting edge of safer sex education, bringing it into bathhouses and BDSM clubs in San Francisco in 1981, when doctors were still calling it “a rare gay cancer”. Or like Alexei Guren, in Florida, organizing healthcare outreach to Latino married men who have sex with men.

Learn about how it took two years of campaigning to get even the San Francisco Department of Public Health to recognize bisexual men in their official AIDS statistics (the weekly “New AIDS cases and mortality statistics” report),

Learn about the women who got HIV, both cis and trans, who often had no resources or support. And the incredibly high risk trans women faced for HIV even in the late 1990s, and how difficult it still was for them to access healthcare.

Learn about how bisexual activists like Venetia Porter, of the Prostitute’s Union of Massachusetts and COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), were the ones who first advocated for both cis and trans women, and injection drug users, with AIDS.

Learn about how Cynthia Slater, who by then was HIV-positive, organized the first Women’s HIV/AIDS Information Switchboard in 1985. About how bi activist Liz Highleyman started one of the first needle exchanges in the US in 1991, and bi author/activist Lani Ka’ahumanu and Cianna Stewart started the Safer Sex Sluts to do safer sex outreach to young high-risk lesbian and bi women in 1992.

Learn about how bisexuals are still erased from HIV/AIDS history. How frequently we are told that we were not affected by the epidemic, that we are less oppressed as a result, that we did not participate in this movement or in the larger movement for gay rights. That we were not demonized, that only gay men were disowned or refused cemetery plots for having AIDS. How our erasure is used against us.

Transgender History by Susan Stryker is a very good resource and covers trans history from the 1800’s to early 2000’s. best of all, Stryker is a trans woman, she knows what she’s talking about and is in the community.

All the above.  If you can, too, find Longtime Companion or And the Band Played On (based on the book by Randy Shilts whose journalism of the time is essential reading) – both films delve into the 80s AIDS crisis and what it was like for so many in the community.