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

all this heavy stuff about being old prompts me to quote my favorite recent lines on the matter, from television's "1880 or so":

A face that glows in a golden hue
No one in this world knows what they do
I take my oath and I make my vow
For the tender things are upon me now

In the fragrance sweet of the evening air
I could leave this world quite without a care

map, I love you for quoting a song from what is probably my favorite Television album

I am going to be real and say that I look better and feel better than I did 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. Sure, I shit in a bag now, but otherwise— I am happy with getting older.

The issue is that maintaining one’s emotional and physical well-being becomes more work as one ages, and I don’t deny that this is true for me, too. It’s hard to find the time. But I have found that if I make the time to do one, the other is close behind.

Yeah, I'm way proud of my health and physique like I wasn't even five years ago. Age is everything but a number.

ok i am gonna be real and admit that i didn't know Television made more than 1 album

That third album got a lot of press in 1992, is legit good to great, and made me go backward.

i'm thinking of leaving. there's nothing keeping me here anymore.

i'm in the same boat. 30's were my best decade, i was able to feel a lot, find meaning in everything, become human. in the last year or 2 it's like everything i've learned to value no longer enriches me. i'm eager to break out of established patterns, but so far it's very unclear what i ought to replace them with. i am living in a ghost town honestly.

i'm stuck on autopilot though. i either don't have the discipline or the motivation to change anything.

sorry, this is too much.

the way you describe Portland is really how i always imagined it, based on, i have no idea, maybe Elliott Smith lyrics

i'm sorry my framing of that was so gay male-centric. I'm starting to better understand everything you're going through. i mean i'm clueless, i had to look up what "clocking" means.

i had a talk with my mom a few weeks ago where i said i'm not sure what my gender is, she rolled her eyes at first but then when i said i think i might need counseling for this she 'got it' and turned very sympathetic and supportive. wow, i was not expecting that. for my friends it's more of a political stance i think. we'll call you whatever pronouns you want, even when you're not here .

i am in the worst shape of my life, physically. i was a 29-30" waist size at the beginning of 2020, now i'm 33-34". what's that, 40 lbs?? i feel gross. it's encouraging that you all are in such great shape. if i moved out of the city it would sort itself out without my really doing anything. but that isn't going to happen.

i need something to disrupt my routine, make it impossible for me to sleepwalk through another day. that's why i'm going to South America

i am in the worst shape of my life, physically. i was a 29-30" waist size at the beginning of 2020, now i'm 33-34". what's that, 40 lbs?? i feel gross. it's encouraging that you all are in such great shape. if i moved out of the city it would sort itself out without my really doing anything. but that isn't going to happen.

i need something to disrupt my routine, make it impossible for me to sleepwalk through another day. that's why i'm going to South America

i'm really not feeling as down and pessimistic as all that makes it sound. i'm "comfortable" just struggling with deliberate, decisive action because it's so much easier to keep the hamster wheel spinning

39: living in the shadow of my own past, trying to perpetuate a moment that has ended

40: actively looking for the off ramp :D

Yeah, I'm way proud of my health and physique like I wasn't even five years ago. Age is everything but a number.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

thinking about it, it doesn't bother me that i'm "old". i'm not "old", particularly. i'm better-looking, taking better care of my body, more resilient, more competent, more emotionally well-adjusted, than, well. than i've ever been in my life. it's not so much that i'm old, it's that everybody else is so _young_. what am i supposed to say to these people? what am i supposed to _do_ with these people?

I'm there too. Be who you are. It's not really words -- it's just the power to charm.

i am in the worst shape of my life, physically. i was a 29-30" waist size at the beginning of 2020, now i'm 33-34". what's that, 40 lbs?? i feel gross. it's encouraging that you all are in such great shape. if i moved out of the city it would sort itself out without my really doing anything. but that isn't going to happen.

feeling this. i was in the best shape of my life from like 2018-2020 and then backslid hard once the covid lockdowns began, then i managed to undo about two years of hard work on my body in the span of about two months. i've gained about 40 lbs. since then too. i go to the gym 1-2x a week usually but i'm not anywhere at the level i was at before in terms of exercise (partly because i'm not seeing a trainer or taking a class like i was pre-covid). and as much as i want to get back to that level it also feels so much more difficult now somehow.

in spite of all that, i turn 40 in the fall and i do sincerely think i'm currently at my handsomest. i have little grays and whites in my beard and i honestly love them.

the idea of "good shape" is a complicated question for me. i'm not actually in the best shape of my life and (like most trans people i know) i have a fundamentally disordered relationship with food. i also, though, have reached a point where i genuinely love my body. trans people have a very complicated relationship with mirrors but mine at this point is pretty good. my closet doors are full-length mirrors, and every time i catch my reflection in them, i just think to myself "damn, i look good".

at the same time, just... culturally there's a huge difference in the pressure i face. i never framed myself as a gay man so i'm totally ignorant of whatever pressures gay men face, but there's a night and day difference between the cultural expectations of someone who gets treated as a cishet man and someone who gets treated as a cis woman. i get affected by those expectations a lot! all of the normative expectations of how women are "supposed" to look ... they've never really applied to me, and honestly i felt there was something wrong with me for liking what i liked. i like all kinds of body types, but i prefer fat women. at the same time, though, i judge myself for being overweight, for having a belly, for not being _fit_. like a lot of trans women i know, i tend to hold myself to a double standard. i work really hard to not do that, to recognize that i'm the sort of person i'd find extremely physically attractive. if i wasn't asexual, i'd fuck me. (have i mentioned recently how much i hate _silence of the lambs_?)

addendum/codicil to me talking about "clocking" above... another phenomenon particularly prevalent in transfemmes is known as something like "egg spotting" or worse, "egg cracking". it's been around for a long time - imogen binnie's _nevada_ is a good treatment of the phenomenon and the problems inherent in it. for me there was a certain element of wish fulfillment, not being able to figure out i was trans until after the age of 40 - "i wish i had known", "i wish someone had told me". at the same time, i know that (1) if someone had tried to tell me, i wouldn't have believed them and (2) even if i'd known/accepted i was trans, it wouldn't have fucking helped, because it wasn't like i could transition before i did.

it's complicated though because there's also an element of "realizing the extent of the patriarchy", realizing the bullshit lies we were all told, the bullshit lies i believed, the bullshit lies most people of my generation at least have never questioned. cis people didn't exactly send out a memo saying "hey you know all that shit we said about what it means to be trans, turns out we were, uh, we made some mistakes and we kind of said that most of the people who are trans aren't".

that said one of the things that jules gill-peterson talks about in her new book is that her advisor said to her something like "your job as a historian is not to assume that you know more about people than they know about themselves." _a short history of trans misogyny_ is an academic book and honestly i kind of skim through a lot of the jargon, and i think it does also explain in some really good ways the issues with the "trans" framing, in ways that kind of... helped me put words to some of the biases i had earlier in my transition, and the ways i've come to challenge them.

she talks about "trans" having meaning in two senses - in a certain context, it's a queer liberation movement based around self-identification, but at the same time it's also an imperialist tool used by NGOs to label people in ways they don't label themselves. my experience of "transness" is definitely biased and based around the experiences i've had and the people i've known. gill-peterson talks about the way it intersects with privilege and i think that's true to _some_ extent. like i said, though, mainly what i got from her is putting words to something i'd already sort of been learning through experience. the understanding of "transness" i had early on, one that had more of an... there was kind of an aspiration to respectability. even as a white, professionally employed, cis-passing trans woman in an openly trans-affirming environment, that idea is a fucking mirage. it doesn't fucking _work_, it's not congruent with the lived experience of me or of, as far as i can see, any of the people i know, many of whom are _also_ white, professionally employed, cis-passing trans women in openly trans-affirming environments.

one of the things i had a lot of stereotypes about was... i'm gonna go after jonathan demme, who really is a fine filmmaker whose skill i respect a lot, again. it's this kind of "philadelphia" idea of white, desexualized, straight-passing gay men. a lot of my ignorance, particularly coming from a background of thinking of myself as "cishet", was taking this one particular subset and acting like _all_ gay men were like that. over time i've come to understand just how _not_ true that is.

one of the things that helped me out most reading gill-peterson's book, and i might still be misunderstanding this, but she makes a distinction between "drag queens" and "street queens" - drag queens being what, in a trans sense, i think of as "dual-role", people who present as femme _some_ of the time, and street queens being the "full-timers", the "real life experience" people. marsha p. johnson _didn't_ identify as "trans" in the modern day sense... STAR was for "street transvestite". i'm very much _not_ "street", and at the same time it makes sense to me that she and sylvia rivera are seen as the foundational figures of transness.

and particularly of the "be gay, do crime" way of things... doing "drag" in private was to some degree considered _acceptable_, if not necessarily _respectable_, but going out on the street femme was very often a criminal act. i don't think of my forebears as "trans women" these days. the people who inspire me, the people who made my own queer liberation (to the extent that i am liberated) possible, are openly queer femmes, whatever gender identity they use or used, whatever label they think or thought of themselves as.

fuuuuuck i gotta knock it off with these long-ass 4 am posts

I’m 30 pounds heavier in 2024 than I was in 2020. Happier tho!

Kate never apologize for your long rambles I love them

I have had some successful “give me wisdom” exchanges with elder gays, but ironically the wisdom offered wasn’t what I expected:

1. People will try and destroy you constantly in your life

2. Your life will continue to get harder and worse, in scary and unexpected ways

Both the elder gays who offered me this advice (if you could call it that) are dead now, RIP I loved you guys

When I was 21-22, my best friend was a twenty-five years older lesbian lady. Her life at the time seemed impossibly well put-together— she owned a house! I remember she said, of being 46: “your friends just start dying left and right, it’s shocking”

some of the more positive(?) things elder gays have taught me have been reminders of how contingent, temporary and limiting the current norms of queer culture, discourse, terminology, and praxis actually are, and that today's ideas aren't always the best ideas - which seems obvious but can be easy to forget, especially with so many people and spaces and movements being destroyed and too often forgotten (so that every generation feels like it's starting from scratch and ends up falling for the same pitfalls that could easily have been avoided if we weren't so alienated from our own history)

(I don't want to project my own desires onto a prelapsarian radical queer past because I know it was messier and uglier than that I just wish younger people were more interested in learning from the insights and mistakes of older people in general) (I know there are structural and political and cultural and social-reproductive issues in the way of that and it's not all their fault) (whether I count as a younger person depends on who I'm talking to but I'm partly scolding myself here as well as realising I'm just another out of touch elder to the average teen)

(when I say gay I mean queer because requeering gay is a personal project of mine)

Maybe I'm just in a sad place today, thinking about my friends who've passed. Two close friends of mine, both younger than me, died last year. One of them, the last time I saw him, was March 2019. We had lunch together in Harlem. At that lunch, we were talking about the topic you're referencing, Left. I took a "young queers could learn something from elder queers" position. I felt that there were/are a lot of weird traps that the discourse was falling into. My friend disagreed. He thought that we middle-aged queers (and older) should be in a constant state of being-educated by the youth. He felt that the education should flow upwards.

gotta be a two-way street imho

Principal Skinner.gif

Death -- painful, prolonged death -- was such a touchstone of the previous generation of gay men that in my experience they've only been too willing to talk.

wonder if this generational isolation is one consequence of the way we educate kids, where there's lots of emphasis on the need for a large section of students to remain "on the same level" so that they can be taught more efficiently. and like we quarantine kids away from others who are even one year older or younger.

i think these kinds of intergenerational relationships are most common among artists, and seem to come about where there's a mutual desire to produce work and to midwife the creation of artworks, and then nurturing each other is a vital part of that.

i read into things sometimes that aren't there, because i _want_ everyone to be queer.

thank you, otm, this is 100% what i used to do also. my own 'gaydar' debunked

i got it right the first time (the "subtle ambiguity" = he had eyes for me, it wasn't actually subtle at all)
and that was my license to see what i wanted to see

i have little grays and whites in my beard and i honestly love them.

oh, def no complaints about the little white hairs

jeez wtf did i post last night?
having these moments very recently where there is zero impulse control, pretty scary 😳

i mean, recently i slept with 2 men (well, one was a boy) who i legit HAD NO RECOLLECTION OF. like i got in touch with them on the apps thinking it was the first time, they were like oh hi! remember that was fun wasn't it! i was like... they were like yeah your apartment was so nice, we had fun.

i mean. there is def some sex Alzheimer's thing going on. maybe it was a post-cancer thing and i was still reeling. but like, ok i'll watch out for that.

well thankfully they’re making so many advances today on sex Alzheimers that we may soon be rid entirely of this cruel affliction

For real though I never remember sex I’ve had anymore. Young pine is like ‘remember when he x and I y and you z’ and I decide in the moment if I can white lie or not.

I have had some successful “give me wisdom” exchanges with elder gays, but ironically the wisdom offered wasn’t what I expected:

1. People will try and destroy you constantly in your life

2. Your life will continue to get harder and worse, in scary and unexpected ways

Both the elder gays who offered me this advice (if you could call it that) are dead now, RIP I loved you guys

When I was 21-22, my best friend was a twenty-five years older lesbian lady. Her life at the time seemed impossibly well put-together— she owned a house! I remember she said, of being 46: “your friends just start dying left and right, it’s shocking”

― a hyperlink to the past (flamboyant goon tie included)

omg fgti that was pretty much exactly the advice that i needed to hear

yeah i am the older person, i do seem impossibly well put-together (tho I had to sell the house in the divorce). and i missed being part of the queer community at 20, at 30, at 40 (one of the things the transmedicalist Benjamin Scale was most adamant was that queer people COULD NOT BE TRANS). that kind of hard-earned wisdom, that kind of real talk, god i value that so much. because i'm nearly 50, because the people who could have told me that are dead now, just like your best friend is dead now.

and it's not suicide, it's not people not transitioning, it's just fucking _allostatic load_. it's the way it wears on you.

there's so much pressure to frame things in positive ways. "it gets better" and all that. that's what i fucking needed to hear, that my life will continue to get harder and worse. in a way i have been kind of waiting for things to get better, telling myself "it'll all blow over", while in the back of my mind asking myself "but what if it _doesn't_ get better? what if this is the best things get for me?"

i was talking with a friend, someone who transitioned before me, someone who was one of my transcestors actually. she writes stories, and that's a lot of how i think of transness - the way we tell and live our own stories. there's this idea that i have a lot of trouble with, which is the idea of "happily ever after". i don't believe in that. at the same time, she's got this view of things where transition _doesn't_ make anything better, that she has the same problems she always had and a lot more besides. and it's complicated. there's also this idea that having to be cis is the problem and transition is the solution, it's the cure. i wanted to believe that. i was a really fucked up person for a long time and then i transitioned and things were so much better, i had the Barbie Dream Transition, and it didn't fucking fix _anything_. getting my dick cut off didn't _fix_ anything which, now that I say that, is ironic given that i kind of got "fixed". it _helped_, in ways i didn't expect. i stopped having the genital dysphoria i never knew i had. what i wanted was to get this done and then maybe i'd be able to cum with someone else. there is a lot of focus on it, a lot of anxiety about it. i was certainly like "god, what if i never cum again". it makes sense. genitals are sexual organs and there's pressure to act like they're not, i mean reasons for GRS don't _have_ to be sexual, one doesn't need a _reason_ for GRS at all, but i certainly hoped it'd be easier for me to cum. my surgeon asked me that, at a followup, it's a standard question, "can u cum from sex", and i said "no, but i couldn't before". grs changed nothing about my sexual functioning except the dysphoria, the feeling of _wrongness_ that always came along with sensual pleasure, that tended to overshadow any pleasure i was feeling.

anyway it's just... so fucking liberating to hear the tradition of queer wisdom speaking. gaudeamus igitur, motherfuckers. i could be dead in so many different ways two years from now. i'm alive now. and it's not just the haters, the bigots who will try and fuck you over. that's easy. it's other queers. it's evil exes who will say stupid shit like the shit your evil ex said to you. the shit other queer people have said to me, if a transphobe said it i'd laugh in their face, but when it's another queer person, it fucking wrecks me.

-

Death -- painful, prolonged death -- was such a touchstone of the previous generation of gay men that in my experience they've only been too willing to talk.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i never _got_ queer transphobes (are there any left? i think of them as being kind of like the fash furries you used to see). so much of what i learned was from queer tradition was from other queer people. i grew up in the northern new jersey during the AIDS crisis. i heard a lot about ACT UP. one of the big reasons i never shut up about being trans is larry kramer. silence = death, that's what i took from the AIDS crisis. and i've had to work really hard to find a way to talk about it that isn't just doom spiraling. i do find it important to... state the facts as much as possible. to talk about the trans people i know who kill themselves. to talk about the shit that cishets just don't _know_, don't _think about_, don't _have to_ think about. seeing people around you dying all the time and _nobody talking about it_, instead talking about it like it's _your fault_ somehow, that god hates you, that you're _grooming children_, i'm not the first fucking queer person to live with that. damn near everything i've been through gay men or street queens or people who were something other than _trans_ went through it first, paved the way. i guess a lot of why i've avoided gay male community, gay male wisdom for so long is this fear i had of being seen as a gay man. and i just don't fucking care anymore. someone wants to think i'm a f-ggot? sure, ok, i'm a f-ggot. i'd say it all the time except that i know not everybody is as ok with that word as i am. it's a balance. it's knowing where and how to speak up.

oh, def no complaints about the little white hairs

― O Fundo Escuro de (Deflatormouse)

i always wanted to be _old_, i always wanted to be _distinguished_, white-haired. i bleached my hair in my 20s and it looked terrible, i was blonde back then. now my hair is naturally white (the stuff that wasn't fell out during the same work project that led me to conclude "i can't fucking do this shit _and_ pretend to be cis at the same time") and i dye it red, haha. well, maybe i'll get to be a white-haired old lady one day.

-

i'm sort of working to try and better understand and express my feelings about intimacy... it's easy to put it in terms of "people don't like me" or "people don't find me attractive", and that's provably false. one of the big pain points of being a queer woman is not wanting to _initiate_. it's not about being a "bottom" or a "sub" at all for me. i mean, women, we compliment each other all the time, in ways that cishet guys never did, and i love that so fucking much. girl, you look amazing, oh my god, you're so gorgeous, and sometimes that _can_ be backstabby and bitchy and disingenuous but usually it's _not_. what i want to hear is not just "wow you're so cute", but "wow you're so cute, wanna cuddle". no that doesn't happen, i'm a queer _elder_, i'm nearly 50 and a _role model_, and i'm hardly the only trans woman with rejection sensitive dysphoria. when i was younger, when i passed as a pretty twink with gorgeous long hair, guys would come on to me sometimes, and that's the thing, _guys_. with women, cis and trans, i've always had to ask.

(having said that i do actually _like_ guys, like a lot, if a guy came on to me in a way that wasn't creepy and i was into him i'd absolutely say "yes", or at least "so what kind of fun are we talking about here, because i might be on board depending". but i gotta be careful who i say that around, particularly since i _am_ very much the bi/pan stereotype of "i like four men and all women" haha)

what i want to hear is not just "wow you're so cute", but "wow you're so cute, wanna cuddle".

feel this

funny, i had way more girls come on to me than guys when i was young and pretty. i should have embroidered snails on my shoes

it's 57 degrees and sunny today and i feel like the snuggle dryer sheet bear about it

really!! omg that's so cute. lol i love him. you know i'm totally the opposite - we had a beautiful chilly day in NY today and i loathe the reality that it's inching towards a warmer climate this week.

for real Henkel North American Consumer Goods sure knows how to sell me toxic garbage

i feel the same, for once. instead of dreaming of summer all year i'm kinda dreading it.

like the time off and people leaving you the fuck alone is always nice lol. i just wish the heat were dryer in my part of the world.

what have you been purchasing??

oh, lol, i meant the snuggle bear makes me want to buy their awful fabric softener 🧸☣️
i like hibernating lately. i feel more pressure to seize the day when it's nice out.
got a nice little playlist with a lot of satie and relevant japanese ambient music and a huge stack of research books and a bottle of eau trois and a bed with fairy lights and a semi-permanent blanket fort in my living room, don't make me leave my apt this year

omg i've been listening to a healthy amount of japanese ambient! and yess to fairy lights and blanket forts in combatting the unrelenting rat race pressure of the sun yikes.

haha, well said
what japanese ambient?
that satoshi ashikawa record is probably my favorite- the still park pieces sound so much like falling snow that i will probably have to delete them soon, along with the obvious debussy piece :(
but also really feeling yoshio ojima/satsuki shibano, got into that via the St. Giga radio archive thing which was posted here

well i'm going to paste these in my "music recs" log (which is currently pretty empty because i got rid of it in a system revamp some time ago so this is lovely) - but my embarrassing approach lately has been to just tell Alexa to "play Japanese ambient music" haha. trying to remember how i got started on that, either i just randomly thought of it or she may have suggested it once. what's the obvious debussy piece? i always liked him.

lol
i heard this stuff on Youtube initially, it all went viral on my favorite website Youtube

The Debussy is called The Snow is Dancing

there's a comp on LITA with a bunch of these folks
https://lightintheattic.net/products/kankyo-ongaku-japanese-ambient-environmental-new-age-music-1980-1990

oh snap love that - thank you.
now let's talk about your late-night habits - is this a typical time for you to be up? it's 1am here which is pretty standard for me. i have a little ways left and i think a lot of people think i'm nuts, but i know Brad Pitt stays up super late.

i work as a doorman/security guard, formerly in a famous hotel, currently in a residential building, and currently most of my shifts are 11pm to 7am

no regular bedtime.
i sleep for 4 hours per day on the days when i work that shift
i sleep about 15 hours most saturdays

i am heading to bed shortly myself (not working).

what about you?
And how come the summer dread, Swen?
Or the Winter Love as the case may be?

amazing. love the nighttime so that sounds cool and a big thumbs up to sleeping on Saturdays. i dunno i've just always loved staying up late, gray days and winter lol. emotional safety. i'm not sure. sometimes it feels like there's some connection between daytime and my relative experience with trauma from the past that i can't put my finger on. dunno, that's probably way overthinking it! <3 hope dreams are sweet tonight.

i love gray days, too. you think it's a north shore thing (i had extended fam there growing up, still do)? it's really beautiful on gray winter days. so now on gray days in the city that's what i think of.

wish you sweet dreams too <3

oh, blackout curtains. i couldn't survive without blackout curtains

i have them literally always closed in my bedroom lol. i grew up on the north shore!! :D you're prolly right about that!

i know you did, why i said that. same, mine are permanently closed.

oh boy, i suspected by the way you said that you prob already knew but you know, new display names and such, i barely know what's what!! we will need to dig deeper soon haha.