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

I mix it once a week. My parents dig it. Reconciliation is possible.

thanks for the sympathy alfred. my community is small but truly loving. it includes the purring kitty next to me. djp, it makes me so so happy to hear you're surrounded by so much love.

Thanks, map. I think my situation should be the default for all families and I hate that it isn’t.

Creating our own families by choice -- by necessity -- is our superpower.

We had a nice visit with my parents on Xmas eve, and were very explicit with them that we were going to be spending Christmas Day with a few of our queer friends who don't have family close by, are estranged, and/or are Jewish. That's what we did! We ate tons of Chinese food, got exceptionally gay girl stoned, and made each other laugh non-stop for most of the day. Bless chosen family.

haha! so heartwarming! LOVE "gay girl stoned"

https://i.imgur.com/frheJQE.gif

my seven fishes dinner on Xmas eve was a success! (all told it was more like 12 fishes too!) only had one small moment of panic when guests started arriving but i quickly learned the key to not melting down is to let people help you make stuff. on Xmas day our houseguests (friends of ours, another gay couple) and we went on a short hike and then we had Chinese for dinner. went to a sauna yesterday with our friends - one of them got lucky in the steam room lol. now we are at tampa airport waiting for our luggage.

oh also i got that job - i start late January :)

oh wow that sounds marvelous dr! and way to go on the job - i imagine you'll be ascending to archivist royalty where you belong in no time flat!

Congrats on both job and seven fishes! That is huge

I’m at Christmas with the in-laws.

Aunt D’Arcy: “merry Christmas! If you can even call it that. You know Jesus wasn’t even born on December 25”

Me: “Council of Nicaea, 8th or 9th century iirc”

D’Arcy: “that’s right. Competing with the pagans. Jesus was born in September or something. We should move Christmas to September. September 11th! That’d show ‘em”

Tell your aunt that I don't appreciate how Billy Corgan treated her.

Yeah canning Aunt D'Arcy was a crime. That space rocket bass sound was monumental.

She seems super happy and has nothing but nice things to say about “William”

spending Christmas Day with a few of our queer friends who don't have family close by, are estranged, and/or are Jewish.

We ate tons of Chinese food,

got exceptionally gay girl stoned

made each other laugh non-stop for most of the day.

that sounds so perfect, i love it, can we plz POLL these? i vote laugh non-stop for most of the day

Awful to hear about the nasty christmas cards. Fuck. It makes me wanna send random people some really fun and unexpected mail. My mother and brother are really warm, loving people. They're also very stubborn & domineering and uninterested in other people's ideas. Just utterly impenetrable. Everything falls on deaf ears. My sister in law is an unwilling mother & has checked out, so the thing my nieces are going to need is someone who will hear them out. Can i give them that?

I worry sometimes that maybe i'm like my mom and brother, impenetrable. But i think i'm just really slow and so not always good at listening in real time. I have to take time to process things alone. I absorb things but there's a delayed onset. I'm not the best candidate, but it might be me just by default. i need to work on being a better listener.

I do really feel for you, map. Even though there's no one to hear me out in my family, i can turn to my brother to support me in a moment of crisis. To be decisive under pressure, which he's very good at. To bear much of that load.

My dad was more of a space case like me, and my mother completely dominated him. She's in constant contact with me and i've been pushing her to communicate less. She means well but has a way of shrinking me down.

my insatiable need for alone time has slowly alienated most of my friends. those who still call have learned not to call often. i love them and want them in my life, the problem is i never seem to wanna hang out right now, today. as i write this i realize it's just selfishness.

Alfred, you're a sweetheart and your nieces are lucky to have you.

and yes congrats on the job DR

Deflatormouse, sending you good feeling, but also just to say that wanting alone time isn’t selfish— people have different needs when it comes to that sort of thing, and taking care of yours isn’t wrong!

Me: “Council of Nicaea, 8th or 9th century iirc”

― he’s an adventurer (derogatory) (flamboyant goon tie included)

lol, this confused the hell out of me for a bit, i didn't even realize there _was_ a second council of nicaea (in the late 8th century), though that one was mainly about putting an end to all that nasty "iconoclasm" business

sorry, i can get a little nerdy about early christian history lol

aunt darcy is my new hero for this: "We should move Christmas to September. September 11th! That’d show ‘em"

guns blazing

Yeah I need to look it up, it’s been a while. I thought the Council of Nicaea was “dealing w Arianism, also let’s set a date for Christmas”, but it’s been a long time since I took those courses. I used to be able to list all the significant heresies and why they were problematic and what happened about them. Not any more, I just remember Arianism and Monothelitism and John Chrysostom. I re-read a bunch of Origen this year! that was amazing, I love early church history.

The Johannite Comma and implications of Trinity versus “other structural God-like shapes” has become a major inspiration on new songs I been writing. I love this stuff. It feels like peeking into the writer’s room as they make decisions about Star Trek

Yeah I need to look it up, it’s been a while. I thought the Council of Nicaea was “dealing w Arianism, also let’s set a date for Christmas”, but it’s been a long time since I took those courses. I used to be able to list all the significant heresies and why they were problematic and what happened about them. Not any more, I just remember Arianism and Monothelitism and John Chrysostom. I re-read a bunch of Origen this year! that was amazing, I love early church history.

― he’s an adventurer (derogatory) (flamboyant goon tie included)

that was the first nicene council, the one in the 4th century. after constantine doing his "in hoc signo vinces" thing, the point where christianity ceased being resistance to imperial repression and instead became a tool of imperial repression. the aftermath of the diocletianic persecutions. the first nicene council also fixed the date of eastern, not christmas, which was set on the feast of sol invictus by tradition a few decades after the Nicene Council. (i'm just getting this from wikipedia, i don't actually know this stuff off the top of my head.)

the first nicene council under constantine _tried_ to renounce arianism, but constantine backslid and got really into arianism towards the end of his life. so arianism thrived for a little while after that, particularly in the East (which from the start was a very different community from the West - fish (the wordplay only made sense in greek) vs. cross (subtextually a very different thing).

anyway that did get resolved but then you get into the nestorians (aka the "church of the east", not to be confused with eastern orthodoxy), and god this shit is like reading those wiki articles on estrogen, except i actually understand this:

Nestorian Christology promotes the concept of a prosopic union of two persons (divine and human) in Jesus Christ,[4] thus trying to avoid and replace the concept of a hypostatic union. This Christological position is defined as radical dyophysitism,[5] and differs from orthodox dyophysitism, that was reaffirmed at the Council of Chalcedon (451).[6]

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what the hell is the name of that book? i read it a long time ago. there were three different accounts of a medieval conversion out in the east, told from the perspective of three different religions - jewish, christian, and muslim. in addition there were separately printed "male version" and "female versions", in which the only difference was one paragraph buried deep within the middle of the book. i can't remember what it was called. that one really interested me.

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anyway the idea of _multiple perspectives_ within christianity, not as heresy but as _orthodoxy_, that fascinated me. trinitarianism, but also the four gospels. i see people saying that the gospels aren't internally consistent, and to me that's not even interesting, like yeah if you had an internally consistent narrative you'd only need one gospel? but they have four gospels that tell four different stories like some fuckin rashomon shit. and they tried to make one gospel out of them but it was the heresiologist and church father irenaeus who seems to have come up with an excuse for having four, on this justification:

Irenaeus of Lyons went further, stating that there must be four gospels and only four because there were four corners of the Earth and thus the Church should have four pillars.[1][57] He referred to the four collectively as the "fourfold gospel" (euangelion tetramorphon).[58]

like i think he goes beyond that, he talks about there being four winds and four seasons and has all of this fascinating philosophical reasoning that is completely divorced from, like, evidence-based arguments. so much of the early church is built on stuff like this, it literally reads like the monty python explanation for why someone is a witch, and people can make fun of it but it's also brilliant. the thought process. even though it's completely wrong. like with the 17th century jesuit athanasius kircher, who was one of the most brilliant minds of his age, made many new discoveries, and just happened to be completely and totally wrong about everything, so hardly anybody knows or cares about him these days.

sorry. i'm just a huge fucking nerd for this kind of shit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBT_heads_of_state_and_government

Acquainting myself with queer political figures. Didn’t know until today that Latvia elected a gay prez last year, that’s fun

feels like kind of a cheat to put Jim McGreevey in there, considering he had to resign when it came out that he was gay :(

yeah, i'm still mcgrieving that one

JM reportedly looked at a house for sale on the same block my mom lives on shortly after his fall from grace

xps thank you for that, table

omg it feels great 2b back

reason: lost job / got new job / losing home / getting new home / etc /
--> life i guess is a thing ?

so happy to see the lot. i'm going to FLL soon with a bud for a "girls weekend" - haven't done that in ages / kinda cute!

hi Swen!!

Hello Swen!

I googled "FLL" but all that came up was "First Lego League", which is a nice image

hahha ft lauderdale intl airport =)

but - - - i was not expecting the invite and def have not been preparing for bikini season!

(will def catch up on thread! can't wait)

anyone have a good way to access this?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/lavender-scare-gay-people-public-service-erasure/677236/

Sven, let me know when you'll be in South Florida.

yes I was just thinking that!! I don't think I'll have time this trip, but here are the dates just in case. February 8th through 11. if there's anything you think my buddy and I should do let me know! also if you have a party favors dealer please express that to me lol

swen nice to see ya!

missed you

I said to bf: “Kristen Chenoweth is just Jerri Blank who got Scott Rudin’s number” and he said he was gonna hit me

hi Swen congrats on the new job and the new home

thank you so much - things def. feel fortunate, so admiring the universe rn

xp ha - adore kristen c., what a gift

Ya it wasn’t really meant to be a dis, more a josh

It’s going to be a while before the mental image of Amy Sedaris singing “Glitter And Be Gay” leaves my brain

just saw some strangers with candy for the first time. woah lol. also steph colbert is hot.

got exhausted and went to sleep super early and so i woke up in the middle of the night with all kinds of super gay thoughts (god i remember when some assholes tried to make "super gay" mean something transphobic, yeah that wasn't gonna happen) and the desire to post them

like one of the things i sometimes wonder, and i say it here because folks here have mentioned it, is if there should be a poly thread. because it's all Discoursey now and to me, like, it's just inevitable, it's one of those things where if you're really supporting LGBTQ people it doesn't make sense to be all outraged about poly. i see a lot of similarities and parallels between being poly and being queer in the sense of, there's been a lot of pressure to be closeted about it. and so it's Discoursey and people act like it's this new thing that people just fucking came up with last week, and it's so not. so many people i know have been poly all this time and just couldn't be OUT about it. it's also one of those things that i personally see as being implicitly queer in the same way kink is. like a lot of the people i know who are poly are... i mean i guess i don't have any reason to think of them as anything _but_ cishet? but i don't assume anybody is cishet. particularly if they're my friends. a lot of the people i know turn out to be queer in some way... i like to call it "B-52s syndrome", in which these three people wind up in a band together and they're somehow all queer but they don't want to come out because they're not sure the other people in the band will accept them.

but maybe queerness is just that common, and i only really learned about it when i came out. i came out as poly and suddenly all of these friends who i didn't know where poly turn out to also be poly. that kind of thing.

i guess also, not to trauma dump, but a lot of it comes down to my breakup with my ex, who was trans-affirming but also super fucking SWERF-y. so not actually trans-affirming. and also incredibly hostile and judgemental towards poly... i mean i'm poly, she was monogamous, obviously that's not gonna work out, it was just this incredible vitriol and hatred she had towards me for being poly. she didn't see my transness as having anything to do with our breakup because she accepted me as _trans_, she just didn't accept me as _poly_ (again "accept" doesn't mean we have to stay married, it's the exceptional vitriol and hatred she had for any and all poly people).

it's one of the reasons a lot of trans people break up, even if the cis partner is accepting of the trans partner transitioning, when the poly thing comes up... she was like "fuck how much shit are you gonna throw at me here". as much as i need to? i guess? which is probably one of the reasons i haven't actually done any poly shit despite being extremely poly, all that internalized guilt and shame i got from my ex, and then to have people say that she was justified in being shitty to me like that because of this idea that being poly is just about being a slut

which it isn't, for me, i'm goddamn ace, and fuck me if i could ever explain _that_ to her to her satisfaction (which of course i had to, not so much because we were married but because one always has to _justify_ one's identity to the "normal" people). i mean a lot of it is that i'm just too fucked up for monogamous relationships. i still think of it... i thought of it as my _fault_ for a long time and i don't so much now, but i think of it as a goddamn shame, we were so good for each other in every other way but we _never_ clicked sexually. her abusing me was a pretext, but a lot of her abusing me was because i didn't _want_ her sexually. it's easier to talk about the abuse than to say "yeah i left her because i wanted to do kinky shit with a bunch of other people and she wasn't down with that". i feel like an asshole... no, i feel like a _man_ because of that. not only do i not feel comfortable saying that but i haven't actually done kinky shit with a bunch of other people, in large part because of that fucking shame.

so much of queerness for me is _almost_ getting the stuff i need. my partner and i saw this couples therapist on monday, and they were super fucking great - trans, poly, kinky, AuDHD, and knowledgeable and able to work with people from all those backgrounds - but not able to work with people with BPD. well, where the fuck are we supposed to find a couples therapist who is also able to work with people for whom all four of those things apply? well, the truth is that here in portland we _could_, but that would also mean paying cash because they don't bill insurance. sigh.

anyway! poly is good and there's not even a word for being bigoted against poly people like "SWERF" and there should be, because my fucking SWERF ex was the same way about poly. PERF? can i just, like, coin that? it sounds dumb and i don't see why anybody would pick up on it, but it also seems obvious. also my ex... i guess she's probably radfem these days, but they fucking overturned roe, no shit she's radfem. it's not like there's any causative link between being radfem and being anti-poly.

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big fan of jerri blank if only because one of my best friends is named "jeri" and in my head jerri blank was a lot of what made that possible.

as for colbert it physically pains me when someone hot turns out to be catholic, like, not traumatized ex-catholic but _practicing_ catholic. no good can come from that. one of my friends posted a meme yesterday: "me explaining to a gen z my parents' hetero findom paypig consensual breeding fetish coparenting relationship (A Catholic marriage), and that shit is TOO REAL, except i'd call it more "dubcon" personally. also "dubcon" sounds like the setting of Super Mario USA that all of the weebs insist is inferior to subcon, even though it's actually a really fucking good dub which they'd know if they EVER FUCKING LISTENED TO IT.

i almost changed my username to "hetero findom paypig consensual breeding fetish coparenting relationship (A Catholic marriage)"

loved your post Kate, thank you for always being so thoughtful and open. bpd is really a mess for me, i won't lie. in other worlds, i've been discovering some kink lately but feel slightly self-conscious about it.

i mean not that kink is new for me, but i guess the past 5 years have seen an uptick.

i'm glad it's not just me who's self-conscious about kink, haha :)

<3 <3 <3

swen, i wrote the following and then realized you emphasized that you are feeling self-conscious about it, so please disregard if you'd rather not go into it here, i meant it in good fun:

may i be so brash as to offer a few guesses?

restraints, kinda goth with some candle wax
discipline maybe with forced fem for the extra eye water
smelly pits, socks and stuff, feet
chastity cages

am i in the ballpark?

i did a restraining thing with my guys for the first time, at least it felt like the first time because it was totally amazing. both giving and receiving.

omg

restraints sound cool. very "body of evidence" feat Madonna

tbh you haven't really gotten that close! feel free to keep guessing tho, i don't mind :P

or feel free to tell us more about you, don't mind that either.