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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
heystaceykay
voiceamerica.com

Sex Out Loud with Tristan Taormino | VoiceAmerica

Sex Out Loud, hosted by Tristan Taormino, delves into topics from the popular to the taboo, including erotic fantasies, non-monogamy, the adult industry, and more
heystaceykay

I’ve been listening to the latest (8/2) episode of this podcast because one of my favorite essayists, Carrie Wade, is on as a guest. She writes on Autostraddle about being her experiences as a queer disabled woman. Her writing is raw and fascinating. It’s tremendously rare to see yourself represented when you live on such a seemingly unicorn-levels rare intersection of identity.

Which, yeah, kind of skips ahead to the point of this post.

In the interview, Carrie and Tristan discuss the concept of ableism and how it can take so many forms. Including perfectionism and silencing yourself for the benefit of everyone else. I’ve struggled with this for so long that I’m not sure how to disassemble it. But since this is a place I’ve felt fairly comfortable for a long time (and also I snuck it into my description a while back anyway) I think I’m going to try declarations here first.

Training wheels, you know.

Disability makes vulnerability super awkward and hard for me because of how little space I have to exist privately. I need help with stuff that most people do without any stress or struggle. I don’t feel sad about that or anything, but it does make me much more compelled to keep my feelings extremely private. There’s a limit to how open I can be and still feel safe. I’m trying to let that go.

So essentially, this is just a really elaborate preamble to me saying that I’m super queer and proud of that but am not out to most people in the real world. I like people of all genders. I just happen to like them very, very rarely.

I wanted to tell the people in my life all of this before I posted (just in case someone comes across this before I get a chance to say it) but I keep losing my words every time I try.

I’m hoping this can be step one in a long process of being more authentic and finally letting go of so much of the dumb shame I’ve held onto for my entire life.

And… post.

As Frank Ocean recently said, “summer’s not as long as it used to be.” That’s especially true when you’re going back to school, like me! After taking a few years off I’ll be starting community college this week, and my venture into the world of “adult education” is as new to me as my venture into THE WORLD OF FASHION. Specifically: my queer, masculine-ish-of-center, tomboy baby butch fashion. One morning I woke up and realized I was completely unsatisfied with (almost) my entire closet, and have since been on a journey to find my style-of-center, mixing Goodwill finds with brand-name bits from the sale rack.

Stylish-of-Center: Back to School Tomboy Butch Looks for the Fashionably On Time

When the Hogan verdict was announced earlier this year, the schadenfreude-drenched response on social media found many people pretending that Gawker had only run two posts: the Hogan sex tape, and the CFO/gay escort story of last year. I’m not sure, exactly, why so many people saw fit to distill the millions of words that Gawker has produced down to a few thousand (and about a minute of grainy video). I wonder if it’s easier for some people to simplify either because they aren’t very smart or they don’t like thinking. That sort of revising, of steamrolling nuance, of performative ignorance, though, is something that Gawker, functioning as it was supposed to be functioning, would resist, refute, and ridicule. And now with Gawker not around, there’s one less site invested in calling bullshit, one less site to shake you from the comfort of black-and-white thinking and selective reasoning.

You’ll agree or disagree with this assessment, depending on the posts you read, and depending on how invested you are in nuance. Because of Gawker’s breadth, and because it didn’t have so much a single voice as a cacophony of several voices at any given time, the site meant many different things to many different people. What appealed to me, more than anything, was a sensibility that loathed preciousness, that refused to defer to the most sensitive person in the room out of social pressure and smarmy politeness. The site’s run-till-tackled mentality was exhilarating while we ran—I appreciated that no one ever asked me to reduce myself or change to appease readers, especially because I know that even the best-intentioned among a liberal audience can have a hard time swallowing really gay shit. The tackling that finally took place, wrestling Gawker to the ground and then erasing it from the planet, makes me wonder whether time will revise that run as an illusion. Maybe that run will be remembered as a 14-year slow fall. We who took part know better.

Rich Juzwiak via There’s Someone Else I’ve Got To Be
Source: Gawker
fuckyeahautostraddle
For me, home is the vague place where queer and Dixie overlap, often uncomfortably. This is why I’m constantly chasing after other Southern-reared queers; the kind who also had “Home Is Where The Heart Is” wood- or needlework somewhere in their childhood homes; who understand what Allison meant when she wrote, We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained; whose bodies are familiar with manual labor; the kind with at least one family recipe that is not a secret but a national treasure which is shown off whenever the opportunity to entertain presents itself.
Fonseca via Autostraddle — Going Down (South): Home Is Where The (Queer) Heart Is (via autostraddle)
Source: autostraddle.com
thomdunn
You’re either Good Disabled and don’t need anything, or Bad Disabled and need too much. If someone decides your body is too needy or behaves in ways they’d rather not contend with, they can also decide to hurt or even kill you. (That’s a reality the queer community likewise knows too well.) So admitting vulnerability can feel like inviting any response from ridicule to danger, with no idea which one you’ll get. And if someone offers distance from that uncertainty, a guarantee of safety and belonging, you’re going to take it.
On Vulnerability as a Disabled Person | Autostraddle (via thomdunn)
weareallmixedup
autostraddle.com

I Didn’t Know How to Be Poor, Black, Biracial, AND Queer; So I Wasn’t | Autostraddle

"I wasn’t in denial, I had just become extremely successful at compartmentalizing difficult emotions that I had no idea what to do with."
weareallmixedup

“…Once, and only once, did I ever let my brain consider the possibility that I might like girls in a way that was different than what was expected of me. I considered this thought, honestly and quietly, knowing that this had the potential to rip my world apart, and then I reminded myself that I barely knew how to survive with the identity I already had. I didn’t know how to be poor, and black, and biracial, AND queer. So I wasn’t. I shut it down. I quieted the voice inside of me, convincing it that this was not a world in which it could survive. I had seen no examples of anyone like me, not in my life, not on tv, not in books, so rather than be the first of my kind, I decided not to exist.

Do you know how traumatizing it is to live your life thinking that you don’t exist?”

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