There’s a persistent belief that women shouldn’t get paid a decent wage for their work and expertise, especially when their client group is other women. We dispute this.
Women. The nominees are women! Real and imaginary LGBTQ women are dominating this year’s GLAAD Awards nominations.
Alaina: Okay, so what do you want us to call this? Interview with my ex… with just my ex, why not just ‘my ex.’ Because I’m not a girl anymore and you’re not a girl anymore and we’re just… with my 'ex person.’
Holden: We’re just two non-girls.
Alaina: Two non girls. Two Non Blondes! Interview with two non-girls. Done. Okay.
I didn’t intend to create a tarot business – it sort of happened organically. I saw opportunities to help people out, so I started gearing my blog more towards tips for learning tarot, how-tos and helpful posts. After a while it became clear that I could make a living from this, so I designed and wrote an online course – that was my first digital product and I launched it at the start of this year. It felt incredible! People liked it, and I made a bunch of money, I was able to buy a new laptop, invest in my shop and go on a road-trip. That was the point where I really thought ‘yeah – I’m good at this. I want to put loads of energy into this and build a really sustainable, awesome business that people love.’ It was a scary thing to do – to create a project and put it out into the world not knowing if it will succeed or fail, but now I’ve done it, it’s given me loads of confidence.
Beth’s interviewing LGBTQ business owners for our new series, Follow Your Arrow. This week, she’s interviewing herself.
I fully believed I’d die before the age of 35. I was gonna live fast, get a lot accomplished in an abbreviated amount of time, and die young. When questioned about various reckless life decisions, I thought to myself, ‘Oh these silly people who think they’re going to live forever! So worried about long-term repercussions! Who wants to go tanning with me and do six drugs at once?’
Sometimes when people talk about the universe and its interaction in their life, it sounds too similar to the way people speak about being blessed or right with God, as if hardship comes from not honoring the galaxy every night or lighting enough Virgen de Guadalupe candles. No really and truly sometimes life fucks with you. Sometimes that grant that funded most of your department falls through, sometimes the white guy you work for just doesn’t think you’re good enough to continue, sometimes the universe makes you fall.
So you fall. I fell. I am falling.
And here’s where I have to take a pause.
Gabby Rivera via What Does It Mean To Be A Queer Adult? The Autostraddle Roundtable
I am pretty mad I don’t have my first novel published yet but I’ve been doing real good work on making the memories and material to go in it so I just gotta sit down and open a vein. I hope you’re ready. I’m not sure I am…
Alley Hector via What Does It Mean To Be A Queer Adult? The Autostraddle Roundtable
When I came out about being bisexual to a very well-educated medical school colleague of mine (at the top of his class, multiple degrees, extensive knowledge about politics), he innocently commented that he never quite understood the idea of threesomes and asked whether my bisexuality meant that I would want to marry both a man and a woman. I was totally taken aback that even a highly educated peer could so honestly equate bisexuality with polygamy.
Gay districts are constructed as havens, as sanctuaries, as places where expression and identity can freely tumble forward in messy, drunken messes. But this glosses over the realities of those of us who are policed for not being gay enough or for being too queer, for dressing wrong, for looking wrong, for being wrong; this doesn’t confront the complexities of police and policing at the intersections of queerphobia, racism, sexism and classism. This picture simply moves on past the interruptions that unruly bodies present, the disruptions to social norms that gave rise to gaybourhoods in the first place. This picture prioritises comfort over challenge, compromising the promise of safety and welcome that these neighbourhoods are supposed to stand for for those of us who aren’t white cis gay men. Who are the ‘gays’ for whom gay districts are built (around)? Who gets to decide?