oppression isn’t generational and trying to frame politics as “the old people are wrong and the young people are right” erases the fact that there are old people who have been fighting the good fight for decades and the fact that there are young people who are literally nazis
Plus while there might be less old people fighting the good fight it’s usually because they were killed or were part of the minorities that have poor living conditions that kill you early
it worries me so much that there’s been this (mostly unintentional) culture built up around coming out, to where young lgbt kids are putting themselves in danger at school and at home because they don’t want to “live a lie.” i just want to say, i came out when i was 15 and it created a lot of difficulties in my life that i could have avoided by waiting until i was older. it isolated me socially, it exposed me to homophobia from my parents, my family, my teachers, and my classmates at the most important developmental stages of my own confidence and sense of self… closeted people are not living a lie. closeted people are surviving. don’t let anyone pressure you to come out before you’re ready. don’t put yourself at risk when you don’t have to.
Historically, the importance of coming out was put forward by Harvey Milk as a tactic for normalization through representation; if your librarian, your postal worker and seven of the people in your local sports fanclub are all gay & you’ve been friends for years with no disasters, the rhetoric of queers as a monstrous unknown Other collapses. The thing is, Milk was mainly talking to other adults who had their own means of survival; their own incomes, their own houses.
Yes, homophobia has been used & is being used to eject people from their apartments & that is monstrous, & yes there are vulnerabilities which can cause you terrible harm as an adult, but when you are so much more vulnerable, your job is surviving. The closet is a survival tactic, & that’s all it’s ever been. It is not your job right now to be on the front lines of queer representation. Ellen DeGeneres & Laverne Cox are taking care of that so that you can be safe, & we’re going to need you to still be with us in ten years, ok?
You can find people who are safe to be fully open with, and you deserve to be able to do that but you do not owe the intimate details of the way you fall in love to people who would not treat you with basic human dignity.
People who will put you in danger have no right to your privacy, and no right to honesty from you, if that’s the way you want to frame it.
Also, you don’t owe this information to anyone. Even if you’re not in danger. Even if you just don’t feel ready, or just don’t want to.
Nobody is entitled to this information and if you don’t know what you want to do with it yet, you don’t have to do anything.
does anyone have a convincing explanation for why homophobia declined so precipitously
femmenietzsche said: Byproduct of making sex and marriage about individual fulfillment.
that doesn’t really feel sufficient, I mean yes it’s obviously correlated with all kinds of other social change, most of which boost the value of individual lives over traditional institutions, but we’re still going from mental disorder to officially sanctioned love-is-love within 20 years, few other changes seem this fast.
It’s namby pamby liberalism, basically.
You know that black guy who befriended the KKK to get them to give up their robes? Daryl Davis? It turns out bigots actually are reasonably persuadable if you can get in under their defenses. Not to go all Saturday Morning Cartoon very special episode and everything, but the power of empathy and brotherhood is real and just knowing a member of an oppressed group on a personal level makes it hard to keep oppressing them.
And gay people had advantages even Daryl Davis didn’t have. We could and basically had to remain hidden for a long time. Before we came out of the closet, we were sons and daughters, best friends and pupils, the kid on the debate team or the co-worker. The fundamentals of the situation required that the intense personal confessionals and bridge building to bigots happened naturally and on a massive scale. One agonizing conversation with family after another, one difficult decision about whether to hold hands at thanksgiving or invite grandma to the commitment ceremony at a time, we won hearts and minds.
The strategy scaled, and in fact was made easier and easier as time went on. Some people come out, which made it a little safer to come out, which let more people come out, and on and on until everyone had a daughter or a mechanic that they knew was gay.
It baffles me that this is supposed to make me a naive and unsophisticated when most of those same progressives yelling at me about it either were queer themselves or involved in gay activism when all of this as going down. I saw dozens of people go from bigots to grudgingly accepting people to enthusiastic advocates of gay rights, And I’m betting you did, too, so where the current pessimism about converting the bigoted comes from is a mystery to me. Sometimes the spiritually uplifting and optimistic answer happens to be the right one. And the attitude of the modern-day to conversion of bigots strikes me as an intentional decision to stick to comforting and politically easy facts when the truth is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the past 20 years.
yay for namby pamby liberalism!
I’ve seen people argue that Will and Grace was hugely influential, just because “prime time TV”. You see something weird and scary and unfamiliar, and nothing happens, and you see it again, and nothing happens, and after a while it’s not scary anymore.
But think about the famous judge saying he’s never met a gay person, and his clerk saying “uh, actually”. Back in the 80s, when a kid in my school came out as gay, it was a huge fucking deal. I saw one other kid openly claim to be bisexual, and… like, that was it. That was what we had for anyone talking about being gay or admitting to it or anything.
So that kid came out in his senior speech, and said “you know, people keep saying they think I’m gay, and you know what? Yeah, I am.” And he got a standing ovation. And all the kids at that school got the impression that being gay was something that a cool person you really liked might be doing, and that it was hard on them when people were jerks to them.
And honestly, a big part of the reason it became a massive shift was precisely that homophobia was weaponized as a get-out-the-vote strategy. For a long time before that, the actual degree of active hostility was actually lower in most of the US; people just avoided the topic. So some of this was a result of the realization that this could be used as a topic to motivate people to vote. But that meant making it a major topic. And doing things like pushing for a law banning gay marriage, when no one had seriously been talking about it before that. (Almost no one. I know Quakers whose church was doing same-sex marriages in the late 80s.)
So suddenly it became a major thing people talked about, and it turns out that when it keeps getting talked about, and influential people keep saying “hey, this is… just sorta stupid really”, and stories about kids getting kicked out by their parents are heartbreaking and awful… People just kept moving over, and moving over.
One of my friends decided to come out as a trans girl at school, by showing up at a party in a dress and makeup. No one gave her a hard time about it. We asked.
But we asked “did anyone give you a hard time about it”. Not “was anyone okay with it”. Not “did you get seriously injured.” Because that’s where the question is, now, in most of our culture.
So, yeah, you can absolutely persuade bigots. It’s stunningly effective. And I know someone’s gonna jump in with “well, it wouldn’t work on the KKK”, but obviously it does; Daryl Davis has proven that.
And someone’s gonna say “okay, but it wouldn’t work on Aryan Brotherhood people”, but actually it can and does. One guy talked to reporters about it a fair bit; he went to jail, ended up with the Aryan Brotherhood, hated Jews, and all that. Got out, got a job working for a guy who was Jewish, was just dreading the Jewish guy stiffing him on his salary. First paycheck rolled around, guy gave him a bonus and said “you’re a really hard worker, you deserve this bonus, thanks for being a good worker.” Boom. Loyalty to Aryan Brotherhood: Gone. They lied to him and he knows it.
And someone’s gonna say “but it wouldn’t work on someone involved with Stormfront”, but it turns out the kid of the guy who founded Stormfront, who was active in promoting Stormfront, ended up getting outed at school, so some of the Jewish kids said “hey, let’s invite him to dinner since no one else will talk to him”, and now he’s actively speaking against white nationalism.
It’s not just that it works. It’s that it works extremely well, and most of the competing strategies backfire more than they work.
i think a lot of the panicky-hostile reaction against the idea of talking to bigots comes from people thinking “it works” means “you personally have to do it instead of any other thing” and they freak out because they don’t feel confident they can have a civil conversation with a douchebag without becoming a doormat.
folks, it’s fine if you’re not the one to do that. it takes social skills, luck, and guts. it also takes a lot of focus, so even if you have the ability you might not have the time/attention/energy.
(I’m not posting this less to correct the timeline portrayed in Bohemian Rhapsody, which I mostly really enjoyed, than simply to share a beautiful story that shines light on who Freddie actually was, up to the very end.)
Some dude bro on the internet talking about the new She-Ra reboot: Ugh SJWs are taking over cartoons and making them all preachy. I hate it when shows try to push an agenda on kids. Why can’t they be like they used to be, you know?
Original He-Man, looking straight at the audience: We had a lot of fun here today, but you know what isn’t fun? Judging others based on how they look. Not liking a person because he or she is a different race or religion is wrong. Also, plant a tree, and don’t do drugs.
Lou Scheimer was born to a German Jewish family and believed that his cartoons had a responsibility to teach children kindness and respect for everybody.
Back then there were also MILITANT divides between “boy’s” and “girl’s” entertainment but when he found out He-Man had at least a small following of little girls he pitched the concept of He-Man’s sister She-Ra and was insistent she be as tough a warrior as her brother. He saw that girls actually did like “scary” sword and sorcery and had a WHOLE NEW FUCKING SHOW made so they could feel acknowledged and have a heroine to look up to with her very own series.
Later he would help design a whole new sci-fi fantasy setting with the most creative control he ever had, Bravestarr, and was adamant that the hero be a Native American man, the first ever in a starring role on a kid’s action show. He also wanted Bravestarr to be a positive role model by being a patient, gentle, soft spoken man who abhors violence and avoids using guns at all costs.
These cartoons are remembered as schlocky toy commercials and they ARE entertaining that way but real love went into them by a guy who wanted kids to grow up more sensitive and caring. Some of these same geeks crying about THE SJW’S were raised by even more bluntly progressive media than we’ve almost ever had and they didn’t even know it.
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