SoH Mercy

Home.

knitmeapony:

knitmeapony:

When I was sixteen years old, I was a very lost little girl. 

I am tremendously lucky; my family is open and kind, my parents are loving, my church was liberal and warm, my school was progressive and thoughtful.

But I still remember getting teased mercilessly about how much of a ‘boy’ I was, with my short haircut and my t-shirt and shorts at the pool.  I still remember getting mocked for being fat, for being not enough of a girl, for not developing fast enough, for developing too fast.  I still can’t question my identity as a woman too much without cracking into a nasty mess of trauma.  I was nine, and I wanted to be anything but what I was.

I still recall the pastor at our church crying because of the gay brother she lost to AIDS.  I remember people outside of our little circle mocking us for working on his quilt square.  I remember sobbing myself, wondering what I would do if I got infected, wondering if the way I was would kill me before I graduated.  I was fourteen, and I knew that I was going to die.  Young, probably.  Certainly alone.

I can replay in my head when, at summer camp, were were tasked with writing monologues including one from the perspective of ourselves, fifty years in the future.  I wrote a comedy about robot limbs and virtual pets.  My friend wrote about how she would be dead, because something would have killed her.  The world would have killed her. AIDS or violence or the government would have killed her. I was sixteen, and I knew none of us would see the other side of twenty.  Some of us had pills to make sure it was so.

And then I remember this day, this miracle, magical day, when a girl from my youth group, three years older than me, beautiful and queer and proud, just came to my house.  I think she knew, though I never talked about it, I think she could see in me what I was and where I was going. 

We never hung out, but she picked me up and she told my Mom we were just going to hang out, and she drove me to a part of town I’d never been before.  It was a coffee shop, and it had a bookstore, and it had rainbows painted into the fence, and I knew what that meant.  And I was terrified.  But N, she was so cool.  She was so cool and so amazing and so confident and so self-assured.  So I went with her.

She ordered a french press and I had a tea, and we just talked.  About life, and philosophy, and all the beautiful, weird things teenage girls talked about.  And all around me, there were these people I’d never seen before.  There were boys holding hands.  There were photos of women kissing on the walls.  There were shelves of queer studies texts.  There were Polaroids of quilt squares stuck all around the register.

And the longer I was there, the better I felt.  And when we left, when the shop closed, I was so regretful to leave, so grateful to be there – I put every dime of my money in the tip jar.

And when I got back to my bedroom, I cried.

Because that place – it was home.  Home. Home.  It was safe.  For all my objectively wonderful, fantastic life, I had never, not once in my life, felt like that.  I could say anything.  I could do anything.  I could be anything.  

And there were people there twice my age.  Three times!  There were old people drinking coffee, holding hands, buying books, obviously not alone and they were like me.

My mom asked why I was crying, and all I could tell her was that I was going to be okay.  And that was it, that was the whole story.  I was crying because I was going to be okay.  Because there were people who lived beyond twenty.  Because no matter what else happened, there was a home.  I went back, over and over.  When school started, I gave my carefully hoarded pills to someone else, but I also asked them if they wanted to come to the coffee shop with me.

That coffee shop is long gone, and N has moved on and we haven’t talked in decades, but that first trip was absolutely essential to my survival, because it taught me there were places out there that’d feel like home.  Other queer spaces, ones that were quite explicitly so.  Clubs.  Parties.  College groups.  I never really came out, I just started being this person.  The world around me was accepting enough that I could.  And always, no matter what, if the world got too hard, I could find one of those places.  I wouldn’t get hell.  I would be home.

Where you go in, and you see someone like you.  You see a hundred people like you but not like you, old people, successful people, beautiful people, ordinary people.  You feel safe.  You go home.  Because it doesn’t matter what the place is, what people do there, it’s the people, it’s the strangeness, it’s the things you can not see in your mainstream life that make them special.

These places are so important.  And when one of them is violated, even when I don’t know anyone personally affected, I feel like my own home was broken into.  I feel terrified.

My family has been relentlessly, endlessly, constantly under siege since long before I was born.  It will still be at war long after I die.  But there are places like that coffee shop, like Pulse, where I can go to plan and play, to mourn and dance, to be.  

I don’t have some big conclusion for this.  I don’t have one of my usual messages of hope.  I just wanted to say that places like this are important, that we need more of them.  Places like this changed me, and for the better.  Places like this are where my family lives.  And while I will be on my guard, I refuse to be afraid to go there.  I will go home, any time, any city, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.  The reward is worth the risk.  

If you feel the same – if you can, if you feel safe – please, go to one of these places this week.  Go to a club, go to a coffee shop, go to a mixer or an event, hell, go to a thrift store if it’s an explicitly queer one.  There are a lot of people that are going to be afraid, this week.  Go, please, if you are brave, and make those places weird and wonderful and diverse and home.  

I wrote this in 2016, and I meant every word, and I mean it all over again now. And I’ll mean it every time someone invades our spaces, invades our lives, and tries to make us afraid to be ourselves.

(via vassraptor)

killerblackberrypie:

miseriathome:

People think of themselves as more legitimate when they operate under solidarity instead of in coalitions. The cool thing about the LGBT(QQIAPP+) mess of an acronym is that it defines different kinds of groups that belong together, without making an attempt to justify how one relates to another.

What REG’s did was try to ascribe solidarity to a coalition. When they said “the community is about fighting homophobia and transphobia,” they decided that every member of the group should have the same experiences, thus unifying them through something tangible.

The problem I have with solidarity (read as: shared experiences as the basis for unity in activist groups) is that if the criteria for entry is having a certain experience, the group is inevitably going to reject somebody who would benefit from access to a community and to resources, but who isn’t up to snuff. You can see this in racial activist groups, for example, when they kick out mixed folks for being too white, or adopted folks for not having the right cultural upbringing.

The point of coalitional politics is to be a community. If you think of a community like a street of small apartments, nothing really unifies the people on that street except that they live there, and living there is something that could easily change. But people are nonetheless friendly to their neighbors and try to help one-another out. They take turns being on neighborhood watch duty and they pool their resources to maintain a community garden. One guy who lives there has a daughter who doesn’t; she comes to visit every so often and all the neighbors still welcome her with an open embrace even though she isn’t technically one of them, but she’s close enough, and that’s what a community is. If somebody shows up to their block party uninvited, they’re not going to say “go away,” they’re going to say “we have plenty of food, enjoy yourself! Do you know somebody here, or are you just stopping by? Either way is great, the more the merrier!” And people who move away are still treated like family and welcome back at any time, thus increasing the pool of people-who-don’t-live-here-but-are-still-part-of-our-community. And at some point, one of the apartments catches on fire, and only the people who lived there know the true pain of their own experiences; plenty of others can’t relate at all, but they still show compassion and try to be good allies, even if it’s not an issue that affects them personally.

I think about this street metaphor a lot when I’m trying to organize a group, because that’s how activism should be–lots of different people with any or no amount of similarity should rally behind causes together and give one another support, even though they may not have any shared experience. Having compassion doesn’t require you to have felt the pain of oppression, whether it’s internal or social. You don’t need dysphoria to be trans and you don’t need to have faced outright transphobia to be trans.

A lot of people think that queer, as a community identifier, is about people who don’t fit elsewhere. And to some extent, this is true–it aligns with the historical context of queer meaning weird. However this kind of thinking leads to the idea that it’s a solidarity group centered around fighting queerphobia and normative Straightness. With solidarity groups, there always has to be a line. Some people draw the line “monogamous able-bodied neurotypical peri-cis-allo-hetero vanilla white person,” whereas others get into passionate arguments, asserting that polyamory, kink, drag, etc aren’t queer.

The way to fix this is to make it very very clear that queer is for people who want to call themselves queer. The queer community is firstly a community for one another (in that it provides comfort and support to its members) and secondly an activist group. People call themselves queer when they need a community and when they are ready to defy norms that box people in (thus choosing a definitionless identifier over a concrete one like you would find in the LGBT acronym).

Given the nature of what a community is, who is allowed in a community, and how activism is most effective, it makes sense not to police who can call themselves queer. So with regard to polyam//kink/drag/etc, proximity to queerness and a willingness to identify as queer is all it takes to be welcomed into the community, and rightfully so. I think this model is the best way to not only form productive, meaningful communities, but also to respect the autonomy of each individual member, by giving them the choice to enter or not.

The way I see it, LGBT was historically a solidarity group (which started with G, then LG, then LGB), but as the smaller identity categories started voicing their unique experiences and creating more precise solidarity groups within the larger one, the entirety of LGBT expanded to be a coalition. Identity politics became a bigger thing and people realized that their behaviors didn’t have to reflect their attractions, so attraction became the root of identity. Thus, entry into LGBT was definitional; if you were lesbian, gay, bi, or trans (or another letter in whatever acronym is being used), then you were given automatic entry. And when people are automatically enlisted, no matter their life experiences or politics, you can’t be an activist group. So LGBT was successful at giving people resources and emotional support, but it was never supposed to be the face of queer politics. And that’s why “homophobia and transphobia” (or “SGA and trans”) doesn’t make sense–because LGBT as a coalition/solidarity group can’t fight anything on a unified front, because they aren’t truly unified.

The thing that unifies the queer community is the choice to be queer and the choice to respect that each other queer individual has just as much right to call themselves queer as the next person. That’s what makes queer politics so successful, is that if you’re not onboard, you’re not going to join; queer is as much an ideology as it is an identity. It’s a community of people who come from all walks of life but prioritize compassion over empathy because they understand that they may never actually understand, but that doesn’t mean bad things can’t end.

I’m mostly here for this.

But.

I don’t want to police the community- that way lies madness. But I also don’t want people with a lot of privilege ending up in charge of or crowding out those of us with less privilege.

Like, I’m polyam. And I have a lot of privileged white friends who are also polyam- some are LGBT, but many are straight. And there’s been a HUGE issue in my polyam community with the people in charge ending up being cis white guys and shit going down as a result. And they tend to complain about being bullied (as admins!) when they’re asked direct questions and called on it when they don’t answer. And they tend to invite their friends into the group and be initially suspicious if a woman in the group has issues with their friend and suddenly the group feels…frankly pretty unsafe.

How do we not police the community or question other people’s queerness and allow it to be a community while not letting it be taken over by this kind of shitbag?

Short answer: education, individual responsibility, and compassion

Long answer:

It’s not a problem of privilege so much as individual faults which are pervasive in privileged groups. Privilege is a social phenomena, so it’s not fair to claim that individuals are privileged when it’s actually their social class. after all–there are plenty of really awesome straight cis white people, and some of those people are better humans than some QPoC. So that fact alone indicates that it’s not entirely an identity-bound issue.

Straight experiences* and white experiences aren’t illegitimate experiences… they’re just more visibly represented. On an individual level, it only hurts people to delegitimize their troubles. Like if any other person said they were being bullied and had trouble articulating how… it would be bad form to call them a shitbag. And if the only reason to take that approach is because of that person’s whiteness or straightness… that’s bad identity politics and there’s nothing progressive about judging the merits of individuals by their social class, even if that happens to be the oppressor class. That’s how a politics of compassion operates.

* (It seems off that polyam folks would be straight, and honestly I would operate under the assumption that if they personally identify themselves as straight, it’s because they don’t have a full education on what straightness entails and what queerness is, but the nature of being queer or polyam is that you are alienated from Straight society by default, so idk something about identifying heterosexuality as privileged within this small scope seems dubious.)

I don’t really see a problem with a person being in charge if they do good work and foster a good environment, regardless of their identity labels–that goes back to how categorical labels can’t be indicators of what an individual is like. Ideologies and praxis are way more important than identity. If the problem is that a leader has bad ideologies or behaviors, then that’s not equivalent to the problem being their “privilege” in the broader social world (which may not be applicable within a smaller social sphere).

Not to lecture you in particular, but this is the kind of mentality I see operating a lot, and it’s counter-intuitive to true inclusionism. I value precision in real-world discussions, and the point of postmodern sociology is to question assumptions.

If the admins are bad people, why were they allowed to be admins? Why weren’t more compassionate or more responsibility-ready people given that power? Is power assigned? Randomized? Offered? Applied to? Given out by merit? Contingent on seniority? Additionally, what kind of training to admins receive? What about everybody else? How many structured rules are there regarding participation? Every small-scale social environment is going to be structured differently, and so it helps to look at the actual systems at play instead of assuming that everything is a microcosm of society at large.

Also… is anybody actually discussing issues that come up, or are you expecting a magical solution to appear out of nowhere and fix everything? Because much like a functional relationship, being in a small space with other people requires open communication. If something is troubling you, you or your peers have to be able to say “this trend seems troubling and I want to discuss it.” In my apartment block model, if a fire breaks out but no one knows about it except those affected, then the community as a whole can’t do anything to help, and thus it’s not a community problem. So part of being a community is being open, both in speaking and also in receiving.

This can also be applied to criticisms, like pointing out a lack of intersectional thought, or unrealistic praxis, or rules which are unfair or otherwise troubling. It’s totally fine to have discussions about “problematic” things or to say you feel your autonomy or your own perceptions are being undermined/ignored in certain discussions. People who belong in leadership roles should be receptive and engaging… other people either need to learn more about compassion and conflict management or they need to admit to their own shortcomings and take responsible action, whether that’s learning more or stepping down. And at that point, it’s on that individual to either be in a good place or to be prematurely engaged in interpersonal dynamics that they’re not equipped for. But “I think you’re doing something wrong (but I am willing to accept different perceptions)” isn’t the same as policing.

It’s also possible that you’re in the wrong community. Some spaces just aren’t good for some people. And you have the individual autonomy to find a new space if things just aren’t working. And it kind of sucks, but it can be a smart move if it’s just impossibly wrong or if you can’t be the one to change things. Which is fine, because the great part about communities is that participation–and membership–is optional. But that makes a willingness to exercise individual autonomy especially important.

Or, more moderately, you can focus your attentions on conversations which uplift the people who you think aren’t being heard. Much in the same way that I don’t platform bigotry on my own blog, you can make your immediate space your own and encourage others to uphold certain standards or ideals. If there’s just a few bad apples, it’s still entirely possible to live down the street from some unfavorable people and still be civil with them without having to engage more than necessary.

We live in an individualistic society and that makes communal dynamics difficult for us. And yet this weird thing happens where we’re so often stripped of our own autonomy in our individualistic world that we don’t know how to take it back within a collective. I think a lot of interpersonal problems can be solves with basic communication and conflict management 101 skills, and if they can’t, then it’s time for something new.

(via killerblackberrypie)

People think of themselves as more legitimate when they operate under solidarity instead of in coalitions. The cool thing about the LGBT(QQIAPP+) mess of an acronym is that it defines different kinds of groups that belong together, without making an attempt to justify how one relates to another.

What REG’s did was try to ascribe solidarity to a coalition. When they said “the community is about fighting homophobia and transphobia,” they decided that every member of the group should have the same experiences, thus unifying them through something tangible.

The problem I have with solidarity (read as: shared experiences as the basis for unity in activist groups) is that if the criteria for entry is having a certain experience, the group is inevitably going to reject somebody who would benefit from access to a community and to resources, but who isn’t up to snuff. You can see this in racial activist groups, for example, when they kick out mixed folks for being too white, or adopted folks for not having the right cultural upbringing.

The point of coalitional politics is to be a community. If you think of a community like a street of small apartments, nothing really unifies the people on that street except that they live there, and living there is something that could easily change. But people are nonetheless friendly to their neighbors and try to help one-another out. They take turns being on neighborhood watch duty and they pool their resources to maintain a community garden. One guy who lives there has a daughter who doesn’t; she comes to visit every so often and all the neighbors still welcome her with an open embrace even though she isn’t technically one of them, but she’s close enough, and that’s what a community is. If somebody shows up to their block party uninvited, they’re not going to say “go away,” they’re going to say “we have plenty of food, enjoy yourself! Do you know somebody here, or are you just stopping by? Either way is great, the more the merrier!” And people who move away are still treated like family and welcome back at any time, thus increasing the pool of people-who-don’t-live-here-but-are-still-part-of-our-community. And at some point, one of the apartments catches on fire, and only the people who lived there know the true pain of their own experiences; plenty of others can’t relate at all, but they still show compassion and try to be good allies, even if it’s not an issue that affects them personally.

I think about this street metaphor a lot when I’m trying to organize a group, because that’s how activism should be–lots of different people with any or no amount of similarity should rally behind causes together and give one another support, even though they may not have any shared experience. Having compassion doesn’t require you to have felt the pain of oppression, whether it’s internal or social. You don’t need dysphoria to be trans and you don’t need to have faced outright transphobia to be trans.

A lot of people think that queer, as a community identifier, is about people who don’t fit elsewhere. And to some extent, this is true–it aligns with the historical context of queer meaning weird. However this kind of thinking leads to the idea that it’s a solidarity group centered around fighting queerphobia and normative Straightness. With solidarity groups, there always has to be a line. Some people draw the line “monogamous able-bodied neurotypical peri-cis-allo-hetero vanilla white person,” whereas others get into passionate arguments, asserting that polyamory, kink, drag, etc aren’t queer.

The way to fix this is to make it very very clear that queer is for people who want to call themselves queer. The queer community is firstly a community for one another (in that it provides comfort and support to its members) and secondly an activist group. People call themselves queer when they need a community and when they are ready to defy norms that box people in (thus choosing a definitionless identifier over a concrete one like you would find in the LGBT acronym).

Given the nature of what a community is, who is allowed in a community, and how activism is most effective, it makes sense not to police who can call themselves queer. So with regard to polyam//kink/drag/etc, proximity to queerness and a willingness to identify as queer is all it takes to be welcomed into the community, and rightfully so. I think this model is the best way to not only form productive, meaningful communities, but also to respect the autonomy of each individual member, by giving them the choice to enter or not.

The way I see it, LGBT was historically a solidarity group (which started with G, then LG, then LGB), but as the smaller identity categories started voicing their unique experiences and creating more precise solidarity groups within the larger one, the entirety of LGBT expanded to be a coalition. Identity politics became a bigger thing and people realized that their behaviors didn’t have to reflect their attractions, so attraction became the root of identity. Thus, entry into LGBT was definitional; if you were lesbian, gay, bi, or trans (or another letter in whatever acronym is being used), then you were given automatic entry. And when people are automatically enlisted, no matter their life experiences or politics, you can’t be an activist group. So LGBT was successful at giving people resources and emotional support, but it was never supposed to be the face of queer politics. And that’s why “homophobia and transphobia” (or “SGA and trans”) doesn’t make sense–because LGBT as a coalition/solidarity group can’t fight anything on a unified front, because they aren’t truly unified.

The thing that unifies the queer community is the choice to be queer and the choice to respect that each other queer individual has just as much right to call themselves queer as the next person. That’s what makes queer politics so successful, is that if you’re not onboard, you’re not going to join; queer is as much an ideology as it is an identity. It’s a community of people who come from all walks of life but prioritize compassion over empathy because they understand that they may never actually understand, but that doesn’t mean bad things can’t end.

(Source: miseriathome)

golbatgender:

golbatgender:

“Wanting more queer spaces in addition to existing ones is gentrification now” is one of the top three most infuriatingly bizarre discourse ideas I’ve seen on this website, after “Saying I’m sexually harassing you is sexually harassing me” and “Asexuality and any orientation other than LGBT is white supremacist taxonimizing but those first four are somehow fine.”

I figured it out. It’s the homophobic “gay affluence” myth. Queer people are actually more likely to be poor than cishet people (actual ones), unsurprisingly, due to discrimination. You could have a queer cafe that’s like $6 for a 10-oz latte and $5 for a teacake, sure, and doubtless such a place exists somewhere, but you could instead have an all-night/24 hour queer-run cafe with coffee prices comparable to a gas station, maybe a bit more for fancier stuff, cups of soup for also like $2-3 (something like vegan+gf potato cabbage plus soup of the day), maybe fruit, with lots of tables and outlets and wheelchair accessibility—the kind of space where hanging out is encouraged and there’s no pressure to keep buying more stuff, and with a “pay it forward” option like that one pizzeria in Philly (Rosa’s I think it’s called?). Offer a fair wage to employees, and all profits go to local queer organizations.

Queer people have historically gathered in cheap cafes and all-night diners. (Look up the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, incidentally. Happened before Stonewall!) Making such spaces explicitly for us and owned by us would be, without exaggeration, direct revolutionary praxis, would help establish queer people as visible and valued members of society while largely foregoing the usual respectability politics, and would create needed eating, study, shelter, and social spaces for queer and low-income people.

allosexualbislut:

Where do people get the idea that Straight people, and by that I mean people with full access to straight privilege, would ever want to identify with a non-straight identity or be associated with the lgbt+ community in any way?

When has a heterosexual, heteroromantic, cisgender, perisex person ever thought to themselves: “Wow, I want a pride parade too! Time to make up a new identity that I can call myself, so I can be just like the gays!”

Instead of thinking: “wow, I want a pride parade too! Why isn’t there a straight pride march? Those fucking gays, oppressing us straight folks!”

Seriously. Straight people don’t want to change their label to be a part of the lgbt+ community. If they want to be associated with us at all, they’ll do it under the banner of an ally.

There is no epidemic of straight people wanting to be a part of the lgbt+ community. People who want to join the community have a reason to want that, and that reason is that they actually are part of an oppressed minority, even if you don’t understand their weird new labels.

If they didn’t need the community, they wouldn’t want to get in.

(via )

mattykinsel-deactivated20190210 asked: Why do you support the idea of bringing back communal families at the expense of nuclear families? Why are they better/more healthy/Idk etc than the nuclear family, like philosophically or idk etc, you know? Thanks so much! :)

left-reminders:

I’m not full-on opposed to nuclear families or anything like that, nor are most leftists to my knowledge. We just don’t want them to be THE standard to live by, THE familial formation peddled as “default humanity”. If two people are happy getting married and having a couple kids and living in a traditional nuclear clique, cool beans, but it’s important to recognize the systemic bias capitalism has towards this setup: namely, people are easiest to exploit in a nuclear family setup (they have to foot bills by themselves, traditional gender roles and division of labor are more likely to spring up, they have kids and therefore help reproduce the workforce, it keeps them less exposed to community and solidarity, etc.). Communal family setups expose people to more perspectives, help enable a democratic/egalitarian spirit, slash bills down, etc. Those nuclear family implications may lose all power under a system of socialist economic democracy, where communal families are more likely to form (cultural superstructure being what it is). So mainly it’s a cultural hegemony thing – if you want to start a nuclear family, go for it; just recognize how this system peddles it as the ideal to aspire to and help us build the conditions through which more family diversity could thrive.
-Daividh

While nuclear families can empower adults to separate from their abusive parents, children don’t have the social power to choose to leave their families. So unless we give that to them and also force adults to accept this autonomy, allowing nuclear families to exist unquestioned (even while other systems exist) could enable child abuse. This would be especially significant in families with non-Western ideals who use the nuclear family as a means of controlling their children and sheltering them from knowledge of what functional dynamics look like.

I’ve also seen Marx discuss (nuclear) families as a means of hoarding capital–the family is a unit which only works/consumes for itself and keeps wealth within its own system through inheritance. Obviously this becomes a moot point if capital means nothing and inheritance is abolished… but I would also wonder whether strongly defined family systems would lead to a sort of familial nationalism, if that makes sense. Like superiority of one’s family/structure over others. Granted it’s important to understand different types of interpersonal relationships, but the way families have always been glorified might perpetuate hierarchies where they are none (read as: different kinds of interpersonal relationships are different but equally valuable).

It might all come down to how sheltered children can actually be while in a nuclear family. Because the benefit of communal families is that children get an enriched education from all kinds of different elders with different worldviews/moral teachings. Bad teaching practices can be balanced out by good ones and children can seek out guardians who make them comfortable. They also have other authorities to turn to when they need help or when a different trusted person does something bad. But when parents in a nuclear family don’t allow others to parent their kids, that kid has a whole wealth of resources cut off from them.

I’ve always wanted to be liberal.

Keep reading