for the first like 14 years of my life i thought that the story of saint valentine and valentines day were a celebration of a massive gay polyamorous marriage and let me tell you, i was sorely disappointed when i learned i had massively misunderstood that story
i was told the basic story of “the king had made it illegal for young men to get married so that they could be drafted off to go to war (as married men with families were not, apparently)” and that “saint valentine thought this was cruel, and married the young men in secret”
what this was supposed to communicate to me was “saint valentine would marry young men to their girlfriends in secret as a priest at his own risk and thats why we celebrate valentines day”
what i got out of it was “saint valentine married a shitton of dudes so he could protect his army of husbands from having to go to war and it was beautiful and love can halt war in its tracks and thats why we celebrate valentines day”
and thats why the assumption that a child would automatically get a hetero interpretation of the story and the innate unclarity of the english language made me think that valentines day was about mass gay poly marriage until i was like fourteen and recited the story to a friend who stared at me like id grown three extra heads
As yet another fanfic writer deleted all of their writing in the last couple of weeks, I wonder how many people are aware that you can disassociate and orphan your fics on archiveofourown once you’ve decided to leave a particular fandom.
“Orphaning is a way to remove your connection to your works without taking them away from fandom altogether. We hope this account will be used by people who wish (for whatever reasons) to retire from fandom but are willing to allow their works to remain in the Archive. Works orphaned in this way will be maintained by the Archive to be enjoyed by future fans; existing bookmarks and links will not break. This function means that users can continue to share their contributions to fandom while having their privacy respected.”
the thing that always comes to me about the concept of Transtrending is … who even Cares? so what if someone turns out to be happier being cis after trying out different pronouns, different ways of thinking about them selfs or their genders? so what? who did they hurt? if a dfab person tries out they pronouns and asks for gender neutral terminology for a couple months and then says “hm, i think i am actually happiest with she pronouns, i am a cis girl” who did she hurt? she didnt hurt any one she just chilled in a different gender zone for a while.
and then what about someone who did try out different pronouns and then ended up saying “wow! this really works for me, i am so much happier with these new pronouns! i am trans!” ? they couldnt have learned that without experimenting
calling all gender exploration transtrending and acting like its some harmful or appropriative thing discourages people from exploring their genders, reinforces ideas about transness being immutable + A Condition, reinforces the idea of rigid gender roles (by saying like. people arent allowed to consider other genders for themselfs in a gentle way / arent allowed to express their gend differently) and makes it way harder to figure out trans stuff bye
Chinese emperor Ai of Han, fell in love with a minor official, a man named Dong Xian, and bestowed upon him great political power and a magnificent palace. Legend has it that one day while the two men were sleeping in the same bed, the emperor was roused from his sleep by pressing business. Dong Xian had fallen asleep across the emperor’s robe, but rather than awaken his peaceful lover, the Emperor cut his robe free at the sleeve. Thus “the passion of the cut sleeve” became a euphemism for same-sex love in China. — R.G.L.
get you a dude who will fuck up his own clothing for you
NO OKAY THIS IS REALLY COOL SO SHUT UP AND LISTEN KIDS. Ancient China was super chill about homosexuality okay. Like we have gay emperors and feudal lords, lesbian princesses who were girlfriends with their serving maids, gay ass poets who wrote lots of poems about that one courtesan who played the guzheng so well.
In fact homosexuality was so okay that in Shiji, which is basically the Bible of Ancient Chinese history, there is an entire section dedicated to the gay lovers of emperors. What’s the best part? All the laws and criticism about homosexuality in Ancient China were all about shit like prostitution and rape. These laws were outlawing homosexual stuff were all very specific.
For example, there were laws banning male prostitution, but no laws against homosexuality. These laws were passed to stop the spread of prostitution and laws targeting prostitution in general were pretty common in Chinese history. There were also really strict laws about male rape. Rape was punishable by death, regardless of the gender of the victim. Rape a girl, you die. Rape a guy, you die. Have sex with a minor, you die regardless of whether it was consensual. The lightest sentence you could get was slavery where you were bound to the army.
Also scholars wrote essays criticising the boyfriends of emperors, saying that they distracted the emperor from work blah blah blah but THEY ALSO DID THE SAME FOR THE CONCUBINES. That’s right – the issue wasn’t homosexuality but rather the hormones of the emperor. They didn’t care about the gender of the emperor’s favourite lover but rather the fact that the emperor was too horny to get shit done.
“But WAIT, Modern China is a hardass about homosexuality!!!! How do you explain that!”
Yes. That. That’s because of the late Qing years where Western influences entered the country and brought their gross ass homophobic attitudes with them. And the Qing government was so anxious to seem modern and be seen as equals to their Western counterparts. So they adopted Western ways and discarded their previous attitudes about homosexuality. Hence you have Modern China.
So the next time someone tries to tell you that being LGBT is wrong because it goes against traditional Chinese values, tell them to go fuck themselves with 3000 years of Chinese queerness.
i found my yiff bracelet in my cupboard before and frankly i don’t know how to feel because it invokes my fight or flight response on visual contact
I both want to see it and forget this post exists
It’s also got a nifty story to boot:
When I was about 12, my family and I went on holiday to the Greek isles or something, and there’s this one island called Santorini which was placed lovingly at the top of some stupid high hill. You could either take the at least 400+ stairs to the top, or a rickety ass gondola to the top. we decided to not take the rickety ass gondola, but instead haul obese me up the stairs.
It was like nearly 40 degrees Celsius as we went up the stairs, it sucked. After about 45 minutes of trudging up these stairs and getting booted in the hip by some stupid fuckin’ donkeys, we finally made it to the top, and we were all fucking exhausted, but we wanted to find a cafe before we were going to actually rest.
On the way to the cafe, I saw this shop that sold “custom bracelets and necklaces” for like the equivalent of 5 pounds. Now 12 year old me was this unbearable gremlin of a furry. Y’know, the kind that will let you know within 30 seconds of meeting you that they are a furry, and wouldn’t shut up about anything furry-related ever, so I think you and I both know what kind of custom bracelet 12 year old me was going to buy. I walked into this shop with the biggest fucking shit-eating grin you’ve ever seen. Imagine a fat version of young Dylan Sprouse kicking down the door of this old woman’s corner shop and Chad striding towards the counter.
“Just 4 letters. These ones, please” I told the lady, clutching a Y, an I and two F’s in my hand. The poor lady didn’t know any better, she just placed the letter blocks on the string and asked for the money. I walked out of that shop as the most confident little fat blonde kid on the planet. I mean, I wasn’t going to walk up all those stairs and leave empty handed, was I?
I wore that bracelet with pride through the rest of the entire holiday, on the way home and even through the first week of school. But only the first week.
There were a small group of people in my Computing class that knew that I was a furry. Only 3. But they all endured my constant blabbering about nonsensical furry shit, and they were fine with it. Cut to about 5 days after I came back from the holiday, and I was sitting in my computing class, displaying in all glory a colourful bracelet bearing the word “YIFF”, engraved in 4 wooden blocks. People ignored it, my friends thought it was pretty funny and novelty, and so life just went on.
And then it happened.
“Yiff? What’s that?”
I snap around at mach 9, and there was my 40 year old computing teacher, towering over my arm to read the bracelet. The moment that word was uttered from his mouth, my 3 friends shot up and turned around like a pack of bleeding prairie dogs. They were eyes and ears on deck to this conversation. All of that childlike confidence I had gathered from this bracelet was just eviscerated right out of my head and replaced with the realization that I was just wearing a bracelet that just had the furry equivalent of the word “Porn” written on it.
“Uhhhh.. It’s, um… An inside joke.” I muttered desperately, giving death glares to my friends who were on the verge of exploding. The teacher just kinda shrugged his shoulders and moved on with the lesson, but that 10 seconds was fucking petrifying. After the lesson had ended, and we were packing our bags and leaving to go to lunch, I noticed the teacher switch off the projector, and kinda swivel his PC monitor away from the class. Tk. Tk. Tk. Tk. Four key presses from his keyboard and I knew exactly what the fuck was going on. I increased my pace, and darted towards the exit of the classroom.
The last thing I saw before I left was his face. It’s hard to describe, but imagine the face of somebody being confronted by the four horses of the apocalypse, and seeing cutie marks.
He looked at me for a solid half-second. We exchanged eye contact. At this point my life had finished. The old Securipun was dead, and like a fawn born in a wolfden, I fucking legged it. I think we both understood the next day that the day prior was single handedly the most jarring and uncomfortable moment of our entire lives, and that it should never be mentioned again, for the mental state of each other. The bracelet also never saw the life of day again, until I found it in a drawer like an hour ago.
“imagine the face of somebody being confronted by the four horses of the apocalypse, and seeing cutie marks“ has to be my new fovorite line
painting a gay bar as a safe place for straight girls avoiding straight men is wild to me bc ideally it would be a safe place from the straights for gay ppl but we can’t have anything can we
i think people here are misunderstanding what im trying to say. this isn’t a fuck you to every straight girl who’s been to a gay bar. i myself wouldn’t blink at the idea of bringing some of my straight friends to a gay bar for a fun night out. what im criticizing is this new wave of articles and think pieces urging straight women to take refuge in places that are ultimately meant to be safe places for gay people from straight people themselves. if you want to write about a need for more women’s spaces and women’s bars where women can feel safer, im all for it. but don’t try to rewrite or infringe on what a lgbt space is meant for – a space for lgbt people themselves
Ginger's Art n Junk 