Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

… campy?!

shaved balls, hairy balls, trimmed pubes, bushy pubes, honestly it doesn't matter to me. bodies are different and i love that

― marcos, Friday, May 13, 2022 11:49 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This.

all genitals matter

folks are we feeling like summer?

personally i just want a few weeks of jumping in lakes and stuff, i can pretty much leave the rest.

thank you map for your thoughtful posts and to others for sharing their insights. some random thoughts:

I’ve questioned my gender enough over the past five years to feel like i don’t have a firm grounding in “cisness” – words like genderfluid, genderqueer, nonbinary, or even just queer sometimes resonate more – but i think i also feel okay being a man, with being masculine sometimes. other times i do not. It is hard to describe, too, how my experience of gender correlates, or not, with my sexuality. I’m bisexual, but my attraction to men is very different from my attraction to women and so are the ways in which I relate to them sexually. I feel romantic and sexual attraction to both (my partner is a woman), and it’s not as simple as “with men, i bottom and with women, i top” but in terms of sexual styles, acts, roles, etc. i desire very different things with women than i do with men.

not that these correlate with gender in general or even my own internal experience of gender, but generally i’d rather look “cute” or “beautiful” than “tough” or “strong.” it is weird though. i have always been quite slight and thin, was called scrawny by my bulkier peers growing up, but now in my late 30s after a few decades of yoga and cycling i am in the best physical shape i have ever been in, strong even! I am still very small and thin but also wiry and a little muscular now. I love being in good shape, but i feel ambivalent about being more muscular. maybe i want to be more graceful and elegant. my mom commented on my “muscles” recently when looking at my arms and it felt super fucking weird to be perceived that way.

with men, i am much more attracted to “masculine,” “strong,” or “big” men than i am to “cute” or “beautiful” men. i want a daddy, lol. I want to be the pretty one. but gay sex for me is not just about wanting to femme out a little for a strong daddy, the whole idea of gay sex for me also feels super masculine in a sweaty and hot way that is very appealing and sexy to me. when i watch porn, though, i tend not to really watch gay porn. i usually watch bi or hetero porn (though how “hetero” is hetero porn really, what with all these big cocks these days lol) and fantasize about being both the men and the women. i watch the women and want to be desirable in the same feminine way they are. It’s that familiar “am i attracted to this person or do i want to be this person?” question that i actually ask myself seeing attractive people of all genders. sometimes i fantasize about being a woman, but i also love being a gay man. And i love being a gay man but i also really love being bisexual and having sex with women. I want it all, lol, a true greedy bisexual. overall though i feel like my having sex with any gender would still feel “queer” to me because i am queer.

It just hit the 80s here, so I’m already grumpy.

sorry for the long posts! just a lotta thoughts

we’ve all heard the “button question” on gender, which I don’t think is a particularly helpful or revealing thought experiment, but is still one i’ve considered numerous times – if i could push a button and immediately become and be seen as woman without having to take any steps to transition medically, socially, etc. would i? my answer has always been an immediate and resounding “yes, of course!” who wouldn’t? i would love to have that experience – both in relation to my own body/being as well as others.’ A lot of this is also mixed up with my mood disorder. I’m bipiolar ii and i’ve noticed my experience of gender and sexuality fluctuates depending on my mood. I’ve been reflecting over the past few years – how do i feel when i’m hypomanic? when i’m depressed? when i’m stable? When i’m manic i fantasize about getting gangbanged by a room full of ten dudes and i feel super gay. I feel hypersexual and desirable in ways that also feel both masculine and feminine, though. In one manic episode last year, i felt almost conclusive that i should transition. I eventually returned to stability and felt the opposite. when i’m stable i feel solidly comfortable in my body, in my bisexuality and the different ways my gender is manifested in it, and overall probably lean masc. But even if i did transition, ultimately i kinda think i would still hover around in that space where i am now, where masc and femme coexist and fluctuate in different ways internally, sexually, socially, phenomenologically. one might outweigh the other in my presentation or in my mind depending on my mood, company, music, environment. the blurry dyke/fag boundary, sometimes butch sometimes femme.

A lot of this of course is mixed up with my experience of having a particular body. I have olive/brown skin, black hair, a lot of very dark hair on my body – chest hair, leg hair, dark thick stubble covering much of my face, permanent shadow when i shave. I am in a comfortable place now, but over my life I’ve had a difficult relationship with my body hair. During my first gay sexual experience as a teenager – three of us at a sleepover – i was told by one of the guys that i had “too much hair,” and suddenly i felt very self-conscious and withdrew, while the other two white hairless guys proceeded to mess around in front of me. I felt rejected, but it was also hard to reckon that with the eroticism of watching them in front of me, and eventually the guy must have gotten over whatever aversion to body hair he had because we continued to mess around for years throughout high school. I did trim, however, whenever i knew we would be hanging out.

When I was manic and considering transition steps, I researched hair removal. But based on my early experience of rejection, i wrestled with the question – is this gender dysphoria or is this internalized white supremacy / western beauty standards? Do i actually hate my body hair, or was i made to feel as if i wasn’t desirable with it? As I returned to stability, I was able to acknowledge that usually I love my body hair and sometimes I don’t, but ultimately that i would rather keep it than go through any steps to permanently remove it. I keep my body hair now, lightly trimmed, but on my head and face I buzz it all off now. when i look at myself with a shaved head, i feel like i look both masculine and androgynous, which I like.

also like none of this makes any sense to me. gender is really confusing imo

amazing posts marcos, thank you!

Campy film references are usually lost on me, just not that kind of gay

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table),

lol weird that this Hollywood film is camp after this discussion

Hollywood can’t be camp?

And Last I heard, making references to films that are 70+ years old and expecting everyone to know them is either the height of camp or the height of snobbery

oh cool! I was waiting for you to fight me!

to be not camp enough or too camp is just fine, hon

Truly don’t understand what I’ve done to deserve your constant desire to provoke me, Alfred, but I don’t appreciate it.

map to answer your question I'm really not sure what this summer is going to be like for me - all I know is I'm going to order some ACs like nobody's business STAT
seriously considering making this - the summer of 2 ACs . . . . . . . . . . .
bye bye heat, hello electric bill!!

sounds like a good idea

I'm also going to be spending a good amount of time with my dermatologist this summer
just got done dealing with a thing that left me a bit worse for wear so it's the summer of the glow-up for me
watch out it's about to get all Judy Greer up in here

talk to me about your look this summer map. any new pieces? or tried and true?

so buzzing about Jake Daniels - 17 years old, professional footballer, looking a lifetime of being closeted and miserable, and saying "no thanks" - he's going to have such a terrible time on the pitch with the abuse but he must have figured that it couldn't be any worse than what he was facing already.

y'all with the balls talk, lol, i'm, like, in kind of a different place testicles-wise, i'm just gonna put it that way. marcos it's great seeing you talk about your experiences, hearing you talking about the place you're coming from.

your understanding of the "button question" is a really good one. it's not meant... i mean it's a bullshit question, yes? there is no button. it's a koan, it's there to break people's assumed thought patterns, and it sounds like you're past a place where you have those ingrained prejudices, like you're dealing with these things without the cisnormative bullshit a lot of people deal with. you're finding a way of doing things that's working for _you_, and i just wanna say you're fucking killing it. you're killing it, fgti is killing it, gender is lots of things and it's confusing and the way we learn is by _doing_.

when people think about gender diverse people, there's so much of the binary there, and when i talk to cishet people i deliberately avoid saying, like, that i'm a non-binary trans woman, that _most_ of us... lily alexandre did a video and it's a good video but you know, The Algorithms, it has this clickbaity title, "Do Binary Trans People Even Exist?". every once in a while someone comes into a particular trans group i'm in and says "i feel kind of non-binary, can i be non-binary and still be trans" and the facilitator does a show of hands and more than 50% of us at any given time are non-binary trans.

presentation is part of gender, it's important to gender, but you know, when someone says "wearing a dress doesn't make you a woman", yeah i fucking _agree_ with that. it's important and meaningful in ways that i don't... i don't fucking _need_ to describe, i don't need to _justify_ to anybody. getting to present femme helps me feel good about myself as a woman, but most women aren't high femme, and i'm not high femme either. some trans women are in fact butch, and with me, i don't think of myself as butch or femme or even futch, i just present different ways depending on the situation, and i have that _freedom_ as a woman and i never felt i had that freedom as a "man". for me a lot of my early tendency towards presenting femme was more not wanting to be misgendered; as soon as i could feasibly pass wearing a t-shirt and jeans i started wearing t-shirts and jeans again when appropriate. i don't think of t-shirts and jeans as being particularly male-coded, though different people have different takes on it. i have friends who are dogmatic about never wearing pants ever, and friends who won't wear dresses because they're terrified of being seen as a "man in a dress" (which is kind of a shame given how jealous in general cis women often are of how fabulous trans women's legs are; it's often one of our best features).

i think hormones do play a role in it too. i was never into guys until i transitioned and now i am, i _appreciate_ them in a way that i didn't pre-estrogen. i still identify as a lesbian and people argue about that, of course, because people argue about everything, "gold star" lesbians vs. "bi/pan" lesbians, and for me queer labels aren't a thing that are there to tell me what i'm _not allowed_ to do, they're there to help me understand and accept myself, whatever that happens to be. i do recommend, again, lily alexandre on this, the video of hers that went viral and got me to start following her was the one on MOGAI, which is a really good breakdown of the tumblr "microgender" thing and how it got made fun of but also what it contributed, where it came from, what its failures and successes were.

putting too strict a label on things can be limiting. experimental gender, like, using aspects of the scientific method, try things, record your observations, draw conclusions, repeat, i am a strong supporter of that. that was my process. being open to things, open to changes. it helped me a lot in my transition when someone who used to post here talked about how when she'd started, she was pretty sure she was non-op but that changed. it meant that when that changed for me, too, i was ready, it saved me a lot of time and bullshit self-doubt. and that's not the perspective you're coming from, but the same principle, i think, of openness and non-judgement, applies.

which isn't exactly the vibe of the dan s/jordan s exchange upthread, i know, but i also recognize that they're both trying to be non-judgemental and i do want to celebrate that!

---

when it comes to masc/femme stuff, i come at it from a kind of different place than you, marcos - i've found, through that process of non-judgemental observation, that i really like topping guys and bottoming to women. that's something that's been a challenge to me because there is a lot of... the normative thing is that masc = top and femme = bottom and for me going against that is challenging, on top of the, what i'm gonna say, i feel like there's a lot of ingrained versphobia or switchphobia kind of like there used to be biphobia.

(i guess i should also make it clear that i'm... ambiguously ace. i don't think of myself as asexual but "getting railed in a sundress"/"railing someone in a sundress" is more of a joke meme for me. sundress, yes, weather permitting. "railed", idgaf; there's other shit that is way more interesting to me that i won't get into here; idk why but ilx in general has always come off to me as being really vanilla, sometimes aggressively so, and i don't really want to challenge that!)

sort of the same with body hair, at least coming at it as a trans woman. i do epilate, pretty thoroughly, and it's pretty fucking important to me to not have body hair. at the same time i've not felt the need to have permanent hair removal of any sort. i shave my face (if anybody ever is considering epilating their face, just fucking don't, ok? people of my acquaintance keep trying it and it's a bad idea) and some people have huge dysphoria over it but me not so much. i don't have heavy beard shadow, it's light hair, and i don't really feel like electro. plus epilation to me is very centering in a sort of "girls rituals" sense and i don't want to give it up. i find that as a woman, the social expectations are different, very often the only "downtime" i get in my life is bodily self-care/grooming, which is... not without its advantages, because it feels intentional and productive in a way that the canonical "relaxing in a la-z-boy with a drink in one's hand" experience doesn't.

i haven't - this is personal stuff here, but i've become more open about talking about volunteering this stuff unasked just because if i don't people have a tendency to make dumb fucking assumptions - i haven't had genital hair removal, either. the bottom surgery i've had doesn't require it. i like the flexibility of it. anywhere else i'm pretty dogmatic about no hair, but sometimes i like growing things out a little bit, having a hairy bush. one of the effects of not having had hair removal... the particular surgery is called "zero depth" or "minimal depth", vulvoplasty without creation of a neovaginal canal, which is why hair removal isn't necessary. but it does mean i can get pretty damn hairy down there! i find that having a more closely trimmed bush or shaved cunt helps keep things from getting too terribly pungent down there, particularly since i don't need to shower every day now.

i can't relate at _all_ to the ball talk. most of the dicks i encounter in everyday life are girl dicks, and while trans women can often have complicated and nuanced feelings about our dicks, when it comes to our balls, most of the trans women i know feel as negatively towards them as i did (which is to say _very_ negatively). since orchi is the least invasive version of bottom surgery, it's pretty common for us to have had them yeeted.

Truly don’t understand what I’ve done to deserve your constant desire to provoke me, Alfred, but I don’t appreciate it.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table),

I'm sorry I missed this last Friday. I'm sorry for provoking you -- I like to prick people's self-importance, especially in a gay thread, and certainly I can use ahem pricking too. In other cases sometimes you're quick to jump on other posters, and, to your credit, you recognize it; but then I'm no one to judge either. Hugs. You're one of my favorite posters -- it's been more than a dozen years, no?

I just thought it was well known that Alfred and I communicate in All About Eve lines roughly 75% of the time.

Enchantez to you too!

Thank you Mr. Fabian!

see, that made me laugh, even tho i don’t know the film.

Alfred, I think we first really interacted on here in 2007, since the “I have, like, no gay friends in town” era. I obviously have much fondness for you and your posts, too— many hugs.

talk to me about your look this summer map. any new pieces? or tried and true?

― Swen, Saturday, May 14, 2022 3:08 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don't know, it's a bit of a mess. i've been vacillating between feeble attempts at "hip dance music guy" and "embracing power daddydom". both feeble because i'm short on time and money.

i have a lot of short mesh gym shorts and crossfit tees so i'll be defaulting to that a lot of the time when i don't feel like i have to look a certain way.

anyone else have exciting look developments?

i'm going to a secondhand clothing store this afternoon, first time in years. i need a "retro" costume for a pride party.

I’ve started wearing more color, but summer on the east coast for me just usually means tight shorts with baggy top or the opposite, depending on mood and activity

I also am trying to not buy new clothes any longer, only goodwill or thrift shops

anyone else have exciting look developments?

― the cat needs to start paying for its own cbd (map),

Me! Me! Haircut:

https://i.imgur.com/d0BagVD.jpg

hi alfred :) nice haircut

Thanks!

handsome!

haha, has _anyone_ here actually seen a picture of me? i have a billion but, like. trans woman. public internets. nope.

please!!!

I have seen a pic of you, Kate! I think you might have posted one a few years ago. You were wearing a cute top.

she has a _name_

sorry i know that's a corny one

lmfao Kate, i kinda knew i was setting myself up there

Hey y’all, I didn’t think I’d still be saying this at my age, but I am horny on fucking main right now and have been for the past month. Just uh, putting it out there. Husband has been not as horny but accommodating.

how is everyone else doing?

One husband is always more horny than the other, as we've sadly learned these recent years.

But that's. Fucking. Awesome.

I'm older but continue to be horny, don't count out older people

I kicked off this year's "no really we're back to normal" Pride Month by testing positive for COVID, but I'm boosted and, tbh, this is the shortest window of sickness I've ever experienced, so if I get lucky this month with or without my husband, I'll be humping one out for science.

xp it’s not just you, T. i actually just rejoined ~the apps~ this week after a three-year hiatus and hooooo boy. (my partner is currently out of town for about a month - he’s back on them too)

tabes and kate’s most recent exchange reminded me: watched the pirate yesterday and i giggled at the scene early on where judy garland snaps at gene kelly: “will you stop walking in circles around me? it’s like trying to talk to a top!” internet has broken me etc

Quite horny now that this tropical storm's a bust. Come at me.

At least buy me a drink first

Avec plaisir.

Hey y’all, I didn’t think I’d still be saying this at my age, but I am horny on fucking main right now and have been for the past month. Just uh, putting it out there. Husband has been not as horny but accommodating.

how is everyone else doing?

― broccoli rabe thomas (the table is the table)

Just re-started progesterone and uh whew. It's been pretty frustrating because I've been meaning to see people but somebody always gets COVID and it winds up being cancelled.

This is my first Pride since coming out, and I'm really frustrated about the whole thing already this year. Gone straight from "ally" to burnout, this damn quickly. Not just COVID spiking again, but the whole thing. It's not just the corporatism, it's the growing sense I have that the whole thing seems to be centered around cisgender gay men, with the rest of us just an afterthought along for the ride. Trans people are viciously and brutally under attack everywhere but when I talk to people who've been to Pride before, it's mostly by and for gay men. Gay men are centered. Particularly, in PDX, _white_ gay men, to the extent that Pride NW decided to hold Portland pride on fucking _Juneteenth_, and politely declined requests to, you know, move it. And where I'm at is, you know, boycotting would be the right thing to do but damn I need something to celebrate right now.

That's what so much queer life is, compromising with people who have the economic resources to make things happen. Which is cis gay men, particularly cis _white_ gay men. There's this idea of "rainbow capitalism" and I'm not opposed to it, but it never seems to have trickled down to anybody but cis white gay men, and I'm not sure a lot of cis white gay men seem to necessarily understand this. For the rest of us, it's the same old precarity. For us trans folks, the extreme public transphobia on display is causing us ludicrous levels of trauma, and we're just trying to be here for each other as best we can, despite none of us being at our best.

What does Pride look like in Portland? Drag shows. Lots and lots and _lots_ of drag shows. That's the public face of Pride. Look, I like drag, I think drag is fine, but just like a lot of trans women, I have a complicated relationship with drag. Quite honestly, a lot of people don't understand the _difference_ between drag queens and trans women. I've got a number of friends who, it's well-intentioned, but when they come out drag queens they know are like "Oh girl I'll help you with your makeup" and look, personally, I want to look as _little_ like a drag queen as possible.

Of course, lots of trans people do drag, there's a lot of overlap there, but the two experiences are _so_ linked in the public mind and just personally, it fucked me up for a long time. A long time. I had a lot of misconceptions about what it was to be trans, and a lot of people still have those misconceptions, and I feel like there's a lot at Pride that perpetuates those misconceptions, rather than correcting them. People can say "trans rights" all they want but a lot of people still don't understand who we are, what we are, and that's frustrating as hell to me. I'm tired of having my identity constructed in someone else's image. I want people to know me for who I am, I want to be _visible_, and Pride, well, Pride just isn't making me feel that way right now.

Pride has nothing to do with me afaic— being a target for vodka advertisements and Andrew Christian jocks isn’t my idea of liberation.

I am going to point out, tho, that I regular get called a faggot and intimidated, and I live in the most progressive voting congressional district in the US. While I am well aware of how fucked up and violent the world is for non- cis queer people and particularly trans women, I’m also getting a little ticked off when I read stuff that’s like “you aren’t oppressed.” Both can be true, particularly since like many things in the US, class is handily elided by solidarity formations that rely on identity formations. I don’t think identity formations need to be thrown to the side, obviously, but I resent being grouped in with rich white fags who have nothing to do with me except sharing a love of dicks and buttholes.