making our way back: reclaiming queer space in the SPRING of 2021//LGBTQIA+ Vaccine ed.

Left, there's a whole generation of young people who know a lot about gender but nothing about kink or fetish culture, and they think that because they're more enlightened in the former arena that they have any insight into the latter. They don't, and that's fine-- I just don't think they should be making rules.

that makes sense. not saying anyone needs to like kink or that it defines queerness or that it's always unproblematic or anything. but it would be nice if these people would at least learn something about the history of the movement(s). and it's v sad seeing them (whether they realise it or not) sharing targets and talking points with the far right and the anti-trans crowd. even though i'm not explicitly the target in this case it's like part of a general wave of repression that seems to be coming from all directions right now, i hate it, i internalise it anyway

My thing is that I have always thought of Pride as being a celebration of sexuality and, as such, there will likely be things seen there that you may not be ready to talk to your kids about

My other thing is that I get irrationally angry at people who whip other people for pleasure in public because the main way that has impacted my ancestors has not been associated with sexy fun times and it’s gross to me that people are bored/privileged enough to want that done to them

I solve this dichotomy by not going to Pride

This is the most ghoulish conversation!

kink is weird, i probably don't get 90% of it. i've realized i'm pretty vanilla for the most part. someone loving my emotional side is my kink haha. i do get off on some power dynamic stuff but i switch that off pretty fast when sex is over. my fetish these days is the smell of cottonwood trees fruiting idk.

My fetish these days is smelling fruits.

i am troubled by some things about kink/fetish culture as i understand it but i do kind of want to be hurt in ways that i worry perpetuate the kinds of power dynamics i know should be dismantled and i'm unconvinced by the arguments that it's some kind radically free space where this stuff doesn't apply or is necessarily deconstructed or just make believe... at the same time "normal" sex whatever that means also perpetuates a lot of shit so idk where i'm going with this. i started off souding pro-kink and now i sound anti which i'm not really and i'm also worried about playing into the lines i was bothered by to start with from the anti-kink-at-pride crowd which seem to be in line with a broader repressive agenda (like how many of these people also support police action against sex workers i wonder). not that i care about pride myself but some people i care about do. i have confused myself now more than usual and this post doesn't make much sense probably i'm very drunk

Lol ♥️💙💜💗🖤

Well, I can get into some kink. It's embarrassing, it's like I become a totally different person. Of course afterward I'm ready to cuddle with my teddy bear and watch murder she wrote. I'm in the middle of a 20 year long identity crisis.

Speaking of being gay and abusing substances, I had a strange experience with coke recently. I hadn't done it in a really long time, and then I got some for a party and it was in my house for a while after. Well I quickly found out that working from home with coke in the house is quite eventful. I guess it got out of hand because for a couple of days I just wasn't really eating, and then one night I started drinking and getting drunk by myself and taking selfies. which was all fine until I woke up on my back in the street in front of my house shaking violently not knowing how I got there. I skinned myself all over and was bleeding but I recognized that I was at least in front of my building so tried to go in, as one does. Well then I found myself on my back again in the vestibule, shaking violently and clutching my phone which I had cracked on the sidewalk. Super trippy! Finally, my diner order got there because that was the one smart thing I did b4 I blacked out, except they forgot my donuts. So I guess I learned my lesson. Coke = no donuts. Anyway, dumb is as dumb does. Hoping i at least get some gnarly scars out of it.

No judgment, but I will say that coke is a nasty drug that turns people into nasty people, ime as both a former regular user and now observer...

There are problematic aspects of BDSM culture, absolutely. I just don't think that arguing with some 20-year-old enby whose never been in a leather bar is worth it, because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Everyone's opinion is valid, but not everyone's opinion is worthwhile.

I will also say that it is rich that these sorts of arguments are taking place around an event that has been so thoroughly corporatized that it is essentially toothless. Afaic, if you can't take some dudes dancing around to bad house music wearing leather and flashing whips during a parade, then I don't give a fuck who you are, you need to grow up. (I think DJP's comments and those of people like Bersani against aspects of leather and BDSM culture are the most salient, whereas the often younger queer's argument follows the logic of safe spaces which has been shown to be so easily recuperable as to be dangerous to subversive behavior and thinking)

yeah i don't know why this has troubled me so much, it's not really my thing and pride at least here is now thoroughly commodified, a celebration of capitalism imperialism etc none of which is threatened by BDSM or anti-BDSM sentiment i guess i feel an irrational affinity for both parties here in an broad sense in as much they can be called parties. way beyond the pride context or BDSM context. and maybe i am more like 20 year old enby more than i am 50 year old leather daddy which gives me some cognitive dissonance here, like maybe enby has legitimate reasons to be wary. including of the notion of invoking 20 year old enby as hypothetical kid who doesn't know shit. even (especially?) if they don't in this or any case. because niether do i

drugswise i have no right to advise shit but would gently suggest to go easy on the coke it sounds a bit scary. however i am coming up on edibles and mushrooms and i do appreciate the ♥️💙💜💗🖤 they are very nice thank you. in fact i can repeat them ♥️💙💜💗🖤♥️💙💜💗🖤♥️💙💜💗🖤♥️💙💜💗🖤♥️💙💜💗🖤 and it just goes on like that forever

do i need a therapist to tell me why i never come on the queer thread sober

surm i'm just glad you're ok tbh.

i have the impression that bdsm / kink people are generally more experienced / better versed in establishing consensuality than most but i'm sure it varies enough irl to not actually hold true.

i feel like part of the discomfort with kink is that a lot of it (though not all of it) is essentially patriarchy or colonialism fetishized (dom/sub stuff, daddy/son, master/slave). the reality is that stuff has a huge affect on desire imo. when people discover that i think they're like wtf which is understandable. but i think a more powerful take is that like there isn't any pure, scrubbed-clean desire, like it doesn't exist. so exploring and playing with it, giving it articulation and space can be really liberating and healing imo.

like, do i want to exploit and make people miserable irl without their permission? hell no. do i want to enact the thrill of being someone's god in a context of mutually expressed pleasure? hell yeah. doing the latter can help eliminate the draw of the former imo. just my two cents.

i definitely think kink has pitfalls / drawbacks which is why i don't really latch on to one "scene" or another. there is too much object attachment and literalism going on for me in a lot of cases.

I definitely think repression is far more dangerous than allowing oneself to indulge in fantasy behind closed doors.
And yes absolutely RE edibles and shrooms. Got both in the spice cabinet RN. Shrooms r maybe the one thing I'v found that help with my social anxiety.
It may sound dense, but it took me years to figure out that some of my self-destructive tendencies had a direct correlation to my sexuality or the way I grew up. I don't like crutches, but I have found there is some truth to that. Sometimes helps to clarify things. but that isn't to say that I shirk responsibility for occasionally being a straight up moron.

we exist in a world that tells us as non-heteronormative people: that we are unacceptable, that we should be constantly vigilant of our own safety, that our narratives of struggling for peace and tolerance are so common to be entertainment tropes, that we are not worthy of being taken seriously or affording respect towards. I don't think it's self-destructive to feel challenged and defeated and nihilistic as a result of trying to navigate through a world that sometimes seems designed to set us up for failure.

Very much agreed. Lately I have been thinking about self respect, and what its ties are to one's experience in life. If u didn't go through life with the knowledge that you deserve respect and a fair shake, what is that journey like? How do you find your voice? I guess for me it's finding people "like me". I feel happy to have found some of those ppl in NYC, which is why I moved here in the first place. But it was years until that happened. Like 35 years. Which, u could say, is the origin of this thread, seeing as its first iteration when Dr Morbs was around was "I have like, no gay friends in town" IIRC. cycle of life. And I'll make sure to pour one out for Morbs tomorrow.

Y'all got coming out stories? I'll share mine.

I came out to my dad the night of my grandfather's funeral. His whole extended family had converged at my grandparents' house, and we were allotted a space to sleep on the floor.

He said, sympathetically, that he'd always worried that I might be, but hoped I wasn't. Because it meant that I was going to have a very difficult life.

I didn't know how he'd react. He was a volatile, moody and temperamental guy who could be incredibly tender at times. On other occasions previously, he'd told me that he always wanted me to have a difficult life. He'd also given me reason to think he'd take this particular news very poorly.

I don't think we ever discussed it again. A couple of years later he had a massive stroke and lived the rest of his life in a compromised state.

That night he was on the tender side, which was a huge relief.

I don't even know if i'm gay anymore, or wtf I am. Not that there is any interest in the opposite sex, more like I'm schizoid or something.

Not to diminish the struggles of others, which I've also shared in. But when I think of what my dad said, I feel like gay would have been a lot easier than whatever the fuck this is.

💜 I'm so glad you're posting here
I too have no idea where I stand on the sexual meridian anymore
Going single and getting started on the first years of my life as an independent and reinvigorated adult only to be sequestered off to an isolated existence while my x moves into the Brooklyn equivalent of a mansion with his new boof, while at this point old news, has put me in a limbo of sorts with sex, identity and whatever approximation of self actualization in supposed to be fighting for
You're not alone 💙

anyway, i know i'm among the youngest on here but....

any suggestions for coming out to the 'rents? within the next few days it is happening, and while i'm not too nervous at this point, they aren't the most...fag-friendly people around.

― the table is the table, Saturday, October 20, 2007 4:21 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

why in the next few days?

a) sick of them asking if i've met any nice girls
a1) sick of tip-toeing
b) it is fall break, and i happen to be at my parents' house for a few days

the thing is that my parents are very loving, wonderful people in a lot of ways, and i'm certain things will be fine within a few months. it's just that there were some...uh...'struggles' when i was younger about being gay, and we haven't talked about it since because i've been afraid of upsetting them. now i'm not. (i also figure that telling them last fall that i had been seriously thinking about killing myself was the upset of a lifetime). given this fact as well, i'm confident that they won't display too much upset for fear of upsetting me? who knows.

― the table is the table, Saturday, October 20, 2007 5:41 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

an update:

post-dinner, i told them. and after the expected conversation ("at least it's easier now," "you need to be safe," "how do gay people have kids," etc), we all went outside and smoked cigarettes and made jokes. and i was the only one who cried.

― the table is the table, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:48 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

so in other words, it was much better than i could have ever anticipated.

:-)

― the table is the table, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:49 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

it took me a long time to find that thread, but I did.

In any case, I didn't really need to come out to my friends. It was really my parents I was worried about.

I do think my mom still holds out hope for grandkids.

But T and I have been together for ten years, we own a house together, we have two dogs, under most metrics we're pretty "normal," lol...

WELCOME

I'm not a big fan of the concept of "coming out" in that it implies once I've done it that's it complete. Every time I start a new job or similar, I need to do it, and for all it's not fraught with anxiety and tension the way it was when I was 15, it's still something I'm cautious around. I might be secure in my own identity and I might know rationally that I should be telling anyone with a problem with it to simply fuck off, but there's always that element of risk that it's going to alter the way I'm perceived and treated.

When I started at uni, I became quickly aware that for like 90% of people I met, I was the first real-life gay man they had ever encountered. I was quite casual about it - I did all my horrible awkward stuff years before that - and learned to quickly treat as "oh by the way I like men" as opposed to making it a big deal. But... it still has to be done, doesn't it?

On my 17th birthday my friends gave me some joke presents and one was a copy of a gay magazine. I got home and tossed it under my bed and didn't think anything of it. My stepdad found it a few weeks later, hit the roof and threw me out for two days. I came home after my mother calmed him down. My parents stayed together for another year after it. He basically told me that I could be gay but not "in your face," to tone down my mannerisms and not to ever be seen with a guy or bring anyone home to meet them. He was more concerned with the embarassment of what his friends might think than any of the pain and shame and fear I felt. My mother stayed with him another year, I hated him even more than I did before and cemented my plans to move on as soon as possible. I'm nearly the age my parents were when this happened and it's only really as I get closer to it I realise just how shitty this whole thing was, I try not to be bitter and angry but it's a struggle.

I'm not a big fan of the concept of "coming out" in that it implies once I've done it that's it complete.

It does? No snark intended, but I know no one who thinks this way (even if the month enforces it).

coming out to my family was a slowly unfolding, years-long nightmare that i'd rather not go into. as documented elsewhere on here they're basically very far removed from my life at this point.

i understand what boxedjoy is saying, though it would make sense that it happens less and less when your social milieu becomes more or less settled, which it is for me at this point.

lots of dysphoria these days and no one is alone, hang in there everyone <3

I think that anyone who has lived the experience of being gay knows it's not an accurate narrative of in/out binary division, and I think straight people find it easy to understand once they think about it. It's just, they don't really have to think about it because they don't have to live it. Narratives about "coming out" (especially in mainstream media) still often frame it as a decision and a process, rather than an ongoing navigation through social situations.

I've known a lot of gay men who've been out in certain areas of life and closeted in others and exist in a weird liminal zone. Being out to family and friends is different to being out to colleagues and different to being out in the sense that you can casually refer to "my boyfriend" in everyday small-talk. I know that I push and pull myself in and out of my perceived sexual identity constantly. Just last week I caught myself referring to a "flatmate" instead of my boyfriend because it felt uncomfortable to do so in that specific situation but I wouldn't say I'm "not out."

I didn't feel fully unclenched until I told my parents nine years after my bros knew, and even so, as my link explains, it took another four years for them to wake the fuck up, which took an ultimatum.

it's true, there are definitely people i don't want to come out to. i feel like if i don't have to see them again and they're obviously conservative or even predatory (like cops) then it's best to pass or leave it unspecified if possible.

i still get a little uncomfortable when we drive through small-town utah. i was pleasantly surprised when we stopped in a coffee shop in green river and the owners made a point of making us feel relaxed and welcome. (then a little less pleasantly surprised when they complained about the push to raise the minimum wage.)

my way of 'coming out' to conservative people i don't have to see again is being a grumpy bitch to them, lol

i still do the thing where if we're driving through small towns and we stop at a gas station, i keep a studied distance from my boyfriend.

so i never actually came out to my parents, in the sense of sitting them down and telling them "so, um, i'm gay." i love my parents and get along with them* but we've never really had a "sit down and have a heart-to-heart" kind of relationship. they ended up figuring it out for themselves when i brought a "friend from college" (ie my first bf) home with me for thanksgiving and my mom walked in on us cuddling. i later learned from my mom's now-ex-best friend that she spoke to her about it shortly after it happened, and i guess my mom expressed some worry, to which her friend countered "but even if he was gay, he's your son, and you still love him no matter what, right?" and she said "well, of course." my dad was more emotionally reticent and we never really explicitly talked about it but he was never anything other than welcoming and loving to my now-husband. to this day i feel i was a little bit cheated out of the experience, even if i know that i was relatively fortunate and that that process doesn't go great for a lot of gays (will always remember my college roommate's very turbulent coming out to his conservative texan parents).

before my parents found out though, i came out to my friends on livejournal when i was 17 lol

*dad's now deceased going on two years but couldn't think of a non-awkward way to refer to both my alive parent and my dead parent here

Thanks surm and everyone for the reassurance xx

Coming out for me was significant mostly in that marked the end of a long period of a sort of denial. There was a point where it became undeniable, and the reaction from friends at the time was "yeah, we've known that for years already, what took you so long?"

It's been about 6 years since I even halfheartedly looked for a date. There's no formal diagnosis, but it seems likely that I have ScPD. My insatiable need for alone time has strained relationships of all kinds. Most friends have given up calling me, at this point. I almost never wanna hang. There is still a yearning for some kind of companionship- I've developed a very animistic world view.

Good posts, boxedjoy. Ongoing navigation is OTM. I think it's okay to be bitter and angry. You're not wrong for what you feel.

Obviously have empathy for what y'all are talking about, particularly as I now have to navigate life with a sexual zone off-limits due to cancer, but while I don't mention it at first meeting or whatever, it hasn't been my experience to code-switch or that coming out is a process. Maybe I've just been lucky or maybe I just don't care, or maybe a bit of both. If someone has a problem with me being gay and married to my partner, then that's their issue.

I think the only thing that's changed for me in Philly is I don't dress like as much of a total slut, but that's also because I'm older and the east coast has very different mores about this stuff than the west, from my experience.

My coming out story involves me being shitty and my ex moving my kids halfway across the country after our divorce so I don’t really like to think about it

Although my parents are already much nicer and warmer to my new male partner than they ever were to my ex-wife so that part of things was not a problem, although I guess when your kid is about to hit 50 and has been effectively self-sufficient since graduating college, there’s not all that much you can do about how they’re going to live

xxp i kind of want to hear more about west coast vs east coast social mores tbh.

I always thought it was the other way around honestly, like I can tell you that New Yorkers on the whole are very eager to shed our winter layers, and will do so the moment the thermostat hits 72. It's like a cathartic thing, almost. Maximum skin exposure from the first nice day in April as a rule.

I haven't spent enough time on the west coast, but my sense is that in Southern California it's mostly just the tourists who dress that way in milder weather. Californians might have fewer opportunities to wear that favorite sweater or jacket.

I got ugly stares and called an ugly name when I wore my DICK BINGE shirt with cut-off sleeves on the east coast. I'd wear that shirt into shopping malls in conservative parts of California and no one would look twice. Sometimes I'd even get a compliment!

There are other personal anecdotal tales, I just find that people on the east coast are much more likely to straight up call me a faggot to my face if I dress a certain way, and I literally had that happen once, maybe twice, the entire time I lived in California.

That sucks :(
NYC isn't going to be the most representative sample of the east coast as a whole. New Yorkers are famously desensitized to pretty much whatever and anything more conventional than a bologna sandwich as hair accessory (at least 1 documented occurrence) is unlikely to turn heads.

I def experienced quite a bit of that in Long Island when I visited friends in the 90's, not that I wore anything too out there. But I later lived in a couple of pretty conservative towns in northern Nassau County (and one very small town that's really hippie) and it wasn't an issue. I don't know if times changed, or if it's the age difference.

So I know what you mean, it totally sucks, it's just been a while since I personally encountered that so maybe I've become overly optimistic about the state of things.

Actually living in these quite affluent parts of Long Island, my lifestyle and living conditions were very incongruous, more or less like a squatter. Car-free, at other times heat and plumbing-free also. I probably looked more 'different' than I realized at the time, but it was very conspicuous in other ways too, and I was constantly surprised at how tolerant the neighbors were.

To what extent I encountered resistance... It was mostly young kids who were obnoxious.