When lockdown happened in the UK it happened very suddenly. At the law firm I work at, our office building emptied overnight when everyone was told to work from home. No time to clear our desks, no time to bring office plants home.
Fast forward three and a half months - everyone assumes that their plants are dead.
But then! An email goes round! It’s turns out that one of our security guards is a florist, and -
-the security team has moved EVERY SINGLE PLANT from all 12 FLOORS of our office building into the cafeteria. It’s been turned into a temporary greenhouse. Cacti and succulents and spider plants and terrariums and potted ferns
AND! Each plant has been INDIVIDUALLY LABELLED by hand with post-it notes with name and desk location so the plants can go home after lockdown ends
To give some indication of the scale of the endeavour:
If you zoom into the centre right photo you can see one of our security team happily waving
The plants are being taken care of tenderly. They get sun and water and are spending happy times with other plant friends
constantly devastated by the world we lost due to aids
The battles that rose out of the AIDs epidemic were access to marriage and military service. When once the Queer community was focused on creating the best art and living lives worth telling stories about, the 1990’s brought on a new goal: How to best fit in.
As the brilliant Fran Bebowitz has said many times, the first people who died of AIDS were the interesting ones. The artists. There’s a reason that arts became Ghostbusters and Cats in the 1990s. Because all of the really talented artists were dying. The rule-breakers. The ones who weren’t afraid to shake things up. And the audience died with them.
“Now we don’t have any kind of discerning audience. When that audience died- and that audience died in five minutes. Literally people didn’t die faster in war. And it allowed of course, like the second, third, fourth tier to rise up to the front. Because of course, the first people who died of AIDS were the people who… I don’t know how top put this… got laid a lot. OK. Now imagine who didn’t get AIDS. That’s who was then lauded as like - the great artists.” - Fran Lebowitz
So many of the gays left alive once the Clinton Administration came into being were, to be frank, the boring ones. Gays who knew nobody and who nobody knew, and they rose to the top of the community and therefore their priorities rose to the top of the community as well. And what did they want? Apparently, they wanted to join the army and have big gay weddings.
General employment non-discrimination wasn’t all that important to them. Making sexuality and gender identity a protected class, along with sex, race, and religion, wasn’t that important to them. They wanted marriage and military. Because they were the good gays. Not the naughty gays who were sleeping around and dying of AIDS. Not the poor gays who couldn’t make political contributions.
They were the gays with families and commitment ceremonies and office jobs and houses. They were the good ones. The ones who would look fantastic and incredibily marketable when they were interviewed by CNN. They were the gays who straight people would look at and say to themselves: “Maybe they’re not so bad after all. I still don’t want my kid to be gay. But maybe it’s okay if Bob and Henry got married.”
The gay rights movement shifted from ‘Accept us for who we are’ to 'We’ll be whatever you want us to be if you accept us.’ And it’s kind of remained that way over the last thirty years.
We’ve been trained to be offended by queers who step too far out of the mainstream. Plenty, and I mean plenty, of gays online were on edge when Billy Porter started showing up to awards shows in dresses. Lots, and I mean lots, of gays were unnerved and worried when trans people started coming out of their own closets. Some going so far as to disavow the T from LGBT because they were worried people who don’t like trans people would lop in the gay men and women in with them. Who needs community when you’ve already got your house in the suburbs, right?
You know, you’d think that someone who wrote an essay about queer people selling each other out for cishet approval would agree with this, and to a certain extent, I do, at least in the outcomes and effects, but this excerpt contains a number of deeply wrong and deeply fucked up things to say.
The big pushes for marriage equality and military service were responses to things done to us. They weren’t the malicious behavior of a bunch of second-rate, shitty gays (holy fuck, what the fuck, measuring people’s artistic prowess and social importance by how much they got laid? James, what the fuck). The push for marriage equality got bigger and louder because of the AIDS epidemic. Because we were denied entry into the hospital rooms and funerals of our loved ones. Because sometimes all families left behind when they cleared out everything in a shared apartment was a fucking box fan. Because people lost their homes when their partners died. Because people were buried under the wrong names, or unclaimed by family and unable to be claimed by the people who loved them.
The push for military service equality? That happened as a pushback against active campaigns to out queer people and drive them out of military service. Like it or not, military service has become (by intent on the part of the Department of Defense) a way out of poverty for a lot of people, and queer people? Well, we tend to be poorer than others. Protecting people’s ability to serve in the military meant protecting that path out of poverty for a lot of queer people, meant protecting health care, meant protecting housing, meant protecting lots and lots of things.
A friend of mine was expelled from the military under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He’d been in almost long enough to have a pension, and he pissed someone off who knew he was gay. When I talked to him about it when DADT was repealed, he was still bitter about it – he and his now-husband couldn’t at the time get VA loans or any benefits for his years and years of service. There are at least a hundred thousand people who were expelled from military service for being gay from WWII until its repeal in 2011. Most of those people still have their records showing an other than honorable discharge, and so they and their families are not receiving benefits to which they are otherwise entitled.
Again, this push was a pushback against an active Republican campaign to drive queer people out of public life, one which was used by Republicans in order to stir up their base into a froth over the concept of gays tainting the pure American way of life. There were accusations of gays attempting to undermine the military in the 90s, lots of talk about how the very presence of queers in that space would sully it immeasurably, ruin the American way of life. (Lots of talk about 'combat readiness’ and I heard people talking about not wanting 'faggots in foxholes.’)
Sound familiar?
Is there a problem with respectability politics in the queer community? Yes. Does that problem with respectability politics undermine our ability to make meaningful change? Yes, absolutely. But we need to refrain from this absolutely fucking asinine and totally untrue reframing of the narrative to blame respectability politics for decisions made out of desperation by people under attack, and we one fucking hundred percent do not need this gross “the survivors were the losers who didn’t fuck” narrative, as if one’s sexual prowess has anything to do with one’s worth as an artist or a human being.
That’s fucking disgusting, and James Somerton should be ashamed for even thinking that, much less putting those words in that order and putting them out into the world. My worth as an artist – and yes, a queer artist – has nothing to do with who I fuck or how much I fuck or how many partners I fuck. It says a lot about the art world and who gets to rise to the top in it – the pretty, the popular, the fuckable – that people think so, though.
Yes, the community has a problem with respectability politics – I have been loudly saying so for years – but the response to that can’t be grading people by their transgressiveness and fuckability. It just creates a new metric by which you can be found a Worthy Queer.
And we sure as shit need to not reframe the desperate actions of people trying to protect their livelihoods, their homes, and their access to health care from an active and aggressive onslaught of Republican politicians using them as wedge issues as the petty and frivolous concerns of a bunch of no-talent suburban sissies. That shit is just as fucking exhausting. Authentic queer liberation must include the ability to be fucking boring if one desires without incurring whatever this dramatic and ahistorical bullshit rewrite is.
I’m still angry about this. I will eat his heart in the fucking marketplace.
“General employment discrimination wasn’t all that important to them.”
Executive Order 12968 was signed by U.S. PresidentBill Clinton on August 2, 1995. … Executive Order 12968’s anti-discrimination statement, “The United States Government does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation in granting access to classified information.” responded to longstanding complaints by advocates for gay and lesbian rights by including “sexual orientation” for the first time in an Executive Order. It also said that “no inference” about suitability for access to classified information “may be raised solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the employee.”
You can find this shit is fucking wrong on fucking Wikipedia, you goddamned rotten cabbage.
For clarity and conciseness, I’ve included only those advances made during the worst parts of the AIDS Crisis: 1982: Wisconsin: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1983: New York: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Ohio: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1985: New Mexico: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Washington: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1987: Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1988: Oregon: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1989: Massachusetts: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1990: Colorado: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1991: Connecticut: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Hawaii: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Minnesota: Sexual orientation protected in state employment New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1992: California: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Louisiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Vermont: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1993: Minnesota: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in all employment 1995: Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1996: Illinois: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Louisiana: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1998: New Hampshire: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1999: Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in state employment Nevada: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Ohio: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment Delaware: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity no longer protected in state employment Montana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 2001: Indiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Maine: Sexual orientation protected in state employment Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in all employment Rhode Island: Gender identity protected in all employment
Do you think all of those things were just magically fucking granted by the benevolent cishets? No. Each one of those advances came with long, tedious, brutal fucking fights, with people risking their careers, their livelihoods, and sometimes the possibility of criminal charges by coming out and fighting.
The idea that “general employment discrimination was not on the agenda” is such a bald-faced fucking lie that I can’t even see past the goddamned red mist in my vision. I highly, highly recommend reading that page if you don’t understand what an ongoing fight antidiscrimination laws have been. Several states have gone back and forth several times on whether or not employment and housing discrimination is banned, making it especially fucking risky to get involved in those fights, but the boring gays did it anyway.
Fuck, I am angry. That is just a bunch of self-congratulatory bullshit, and it doesn’t do fucking anything to talk meaningfully about what AIDS took from us.
Fuck James Somerton’s shitty opinions.
I think those are Fran Lebowiz’s words?? Or at least she has the same beliefs. I watched both documentaries about / with her, and during a speech (idk remember where, but i think it is on netflix or it was) she said those exact things. Not the “got laid a lot” but about the one surviving being the boring second third fourth tier types. I remember because I found her stan on gay marriage and military quite… problematic, one would say. I pinned it on her being an old and quite peculiar person, who lived through those years, and who am i to tell she is wrong.
Maybe she was citing james?? Idk, but i could swear she said those exact words.
Yes, there is a direct quote from her in that, the paragraph which indicates that it is a quote is in fact her words, but a lot of what I responded to is what he said, and the video essay in question is linked in what the OP posted. A lot of those words that I responded to are his, and some are a quote from one of the most insufferably smug people to have ever lived.
But, you know, he’s the one who chose to quote her in that essay as if it fucking proved something.
First: once you know something’s name you have power over it. This is an old, old rule. Be careful giving out your name, because if it can be given it can be taken, and you along with it.
Second: the fae love beautiful things, and they will steal what they love. Sometimes it is to keep the object of their affection pristine and unaging, unravaged by time; sometimes it is just for the sake of having it. (They don’t love in the same way we do.)
Third: a changeling is a replica created to hide a theft. Sometimes it is a fae creature fully alive and wearing a stolen face. Sometimes it is simply a bundle of branches wrapped in magic, meant to die a wasting death and leave mourners who never suspect the truth.
Last: our city was beautiful. It was known far and wide, and because of that had names spoken in many different tongues. But it was not so hard to gather them all, in the end.
in itself, it’s not a good thing, or a bad thing. it’s just a thing people do.
now, intention and setting can make it a good thing (you’re with someone you love! you’re having fun!) or a bad thing (from awkwardness to straight up lack of consent).
what i mean is: the sex act in itself is not morally bad or good. if you have it before marriage, or for a one-night stand, or with many people, those things aren’t bad.
a lot of people want you to feel shame for sex, because in their mind sex is automatically a bad thing. it’s not. it’s just a thing people do.
When I’m in charge of the planet, it will be illegal to make a job posting unless you are actively searching for a candidate.
Lean staffing will also be illegal. If you need three people to do a job, you’re hiring four.
You are also either earning an amount or you are not earning that amount. ‘Earn up to 21.50/hr’ no. Either you’re paying 21.50 or you are not paying 21.50. Tell the truth or jail for employer for 1000 years.
If someone asks for 2 years experience for an entry level job paying just above minimum wage, you should be legally permitted to launch them into the fucking sun.
Fuck it, Urbanism hot take night, none of you bitches actually know what gentrification is
Those dilapidated warehouses being demolished and turned into a restaurant or an apartment complex is not gentrification
No, that man with a metrosexual haircut wearing airpods on the bus is not gentrifying your neighborhood, he is a person, not the American socio-economic landscape
They are incredibly cheap to build apartment buildings with the current building codes. They are called 5 over 1’s because they are 5 floors with wooden frames over a concrete base
Shout out to someone finally getting the point of this post
