Fandoms Hate LGBTQ+ People

I really wish people would understand that there are other forms of queer rep besides two same gendered people kissing.

A queer character is queer rep regardless of their romance or a lack thereof even. Ace and aro people exist. Trans people exist. Bi people exist. Queer characters are rep by existing, not just by who they interact with. If a character is nonbinary, they are queer rep whether they kiss someone or not. A bi character in a relationship with someone a different gender is still queer rep because they are still bi. Queer characters can even just be friends with one another. They can be single! And still be queer because that’s who they are not who they do!

This whole trend of deciding if art is valid representation based on romance and ships is reductive and dismissive of identities existing within individuals. And of the communities that we all need.

Just please, stop reducing entire identities down to relationships. Its all good and fun to enjoy your ships, but you have to remember the community is bigger than just romances.

25,551 notes

renthony

One of my biggest frustrations in trying to discuss queer media is how many people seem incapable of separating "this is an important milestone in representation" from "I did or did not enjoy this piece of media." Media analysis goes beyond just "fandom stuff," and queer media in particular deserves analysis and discussion because of how hard it's been stifled.

It doesn't matter if you hate Steven Universe, it's still important to talk about, because it showed the first queer wedding in American children's television. It has been cited by the creators of subsequent queer family animation as a major milestone in allowing their shows to enter production. The Ruby/Sapphire wedding is a historical milestone, and that doesn't stop being true just because you hate the show or think the ending was bad.

It doesn't matter if you think Will & Grace is entertaining or if you have any real interest in watching it, it's still a majorly important entry in televised queer representation. It kicked down the door to allow even more to come after, and deserves credit for what it did even if you don't personally care about the story.

It doesn't matter if you have any personal interest in Rocky Horror Picture Show, it's still got a ton of important history in queer spaces. Understanding why Rocky Horror showings were and still are hubs of queer expression is important even if you despise the movie and the creator.

Giving credit for representation milestones doesn't mean you can't have criticisms of a piece of media, it doesn't mean you have to like the media, and it doesn't mean you can't prefer other media. It doesn't mean it's free from problematic material, it doesn't mean it's god's gift to television, it doesn't mean it's better or worse storytelling than other stories.

It just means it's worth talking about and understanding the context in which it was made.

renthony

Reblogging this to mention a couple specific examples people have brought up in the notes, that I thought were really good--

Glee. How many of us fucking hate Glee? I do. You couldn't pay me to watch an episode of Glee today. Damn important at the time, though!
Rent. Fucking goddamn Rent. I hate Rent. But how many people did it introduce to broader queer stories and issues and community?
The Ellen Show. The show was a HUGE deal, and the impact of Ellen DeGeneres coming out was far, far reaching. Ellen as a person, however, is the kind of rich asshole who hangs out with fucking Dubya. And that's something that can (and should!) be talked about in the analysis of the show and its aftermath, without ever saying that "the show is bad and shouldn't exist and Ellen's coming out should never get talked about."

renthony

I just blocked someone for going on a tag rant about how Rocky Horror doesn't deserve to be on this list because it's "irredeemably transmisogynistic," and I need all of you to sit down and listen.

I never said you had to like the things on this list. I never said that you are required to engage with them.

What you are obligated to do, if you want to exist in queer community spaces, is respect the history and culture of the space you're in. You don't get to go into queer spaces and shit on the communities and traditions that kept the community alive. It doesn't matter if you "approve" of those traditions, what matters is that they kept. people. alive.

Every now and then someone gets over-the-moon pissed at me for defending Rocky Horror, and I just want so badly to introduce all these people to the 60-something year old trans woman who came up to the cast & crew when I was helping clean up after a RHPS shadowcast performance to tell us all about how she and her fiance have both been coming to Rocky longer than I've been alive, and how heartwarming it was to see people keeping the tradition alive.

If you have never been part of a queer space putting on a Rocky show for other queer people, don't talk to me about Rocky. Go count your fucking blessings that you live in a world where we can have new, better kinds of representation, but don't you dare act superior to the queers who have been Time Warping since before either of us were fucking born.

36,122 notes

powerbottombrucespringsteen

“The overrepresentation of butch women with regard to lesbians in media” is my favorite discourse topic that’s blatantly, obviously untrue

submalevolentgrace

11,193 notes

lesbotan
idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+ 
lesbotan
  mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.
the oral history project from act up
the lesbian herstory archives
the transgender archives of the university of victoria
the digital transgender archives
glbt historical society (digital)
lgbtq digital collaboratory

lesbotan
since it was suggested in the tags
anything that moves
the bisexual manifesto
lesbotan
the Samuel Proctor oral history project 
a masterpost of lesile feinberg’s works by @genderoutlaws 
more to come
lesbotan
the queer zine archive
the dyke march compilation 
paris is burning 
how to survive a plague
united in anger: a history of ACT UP
one archives
new york public library lgbtq archives
124,491 notes
#resources

Anonymous asked:

What gets me about the queerbaiting accusations with regards to Valkyrie in TLAT is that they never gave anyone a reason to think she would get together with any particular woman, and actually if Valkyrie can be "king," a "queen" doesn't have to mean a woman, but they did repeatedly say from Ragnarok's release through the rest of Phase Three that Valkyrie and Thor were written as a romance, which ended up being sidelined in TLAT. But fans who throw around the word "queerbaiting" do not care that the Black bisexual female lead of the previous film has as of now been denied her love story with the protagonist and was altogether diminished in TLAT for a white straight woman. They also follow the promotion of the film enough to know that Natalie and Taika, both straight, said the film would be gay, but their interest in the WLW character apparently stopped short of paying attention to the bi actress playing her to know that Tessa requested the script be changed because being queer was initially all Valkyrie had in it and Tessa found it dehumanizing.

I had to do some digging for sources for the quotes you’re mentioning, and it looks like you might be misremembering what was said back during Phase 3. According to Thor: Ragnarok’s writers, Thor and Valkyrie’s relationship was written as romantic in the original draft of the script but that subplot was scrapped when the movie was still in development (i.e. probably before casting) because they decided they wanted to focus on Valkyrie as character independent of Thor and didn’t want to commit to a romance between them right away. From Thor: Ragnarok writer, Eric Pearson:

“But we didn’t want to start from that place [a romance]. It was like, Let’s give Valkyrie her own story that connects with Thor … and if it makes sense for them to get together, then great. You’ve got two really good-looking people who can fight and who’d probably be [good together] if the story went there, but it just didn’t. It became more about the mutual respect, and also dealing with her PTSD.“

[source]

So it seems like it’s less that an in-progress romance was removed and more like the door was left open for a romance and they chose not to pick it up (yet?). But I definitely agree that Valkyrie herself was backburnered in favor of Thor and Jane’s romance, and I really hated that she got left out of the final battle. She wasn’t written as a sidekick in Ragnarok, but I feel like Love and Thunder used her as one. We really didn’t need to spend all that time rehashing romantic Thor/Jane. They could have just been two people who were very important to each other but weren’t in love anymore. That would have worked just as well, and it would have freed up more time for Valkyrie to have her own character arc.

It seems that you might also be slightly misremembering what Tessa Thompson said about Valkyrie’s bisexuality. From her interview with Yahoo:

“We talked about it a lot, it was big topic of conversation, because I think rightfully there’s this real want in audiences to see characters be very clearly queer or LGBTQIA inside these spaces. And I think it’s hugely important to have representation. And also as humans I think that we are not defined by our sexuality, and by who we love. And so sometimes I think to hang a narrative completely on that is a way of actually diminishing the humanity of the character. Because you don’t allow them to be anything else.”

[source]

Unless this is not the interview you’re referring to, she never mentions asking for the script to be changed or for anything to be removed. She’s just talking about working with Taika Waititi during the writing process to make sure Valkyrie’s bisexuality struck the right balance between being visible but not being her whole personality. Crucially, she does outright say that Valkyrie doesn’t have a romance, which undercuts the accusations of queerbaiting pretty significantly, so it is clear that no one making those accusations read this interview.

However, I do want to give people the benefit of the doubt in that it’s possible they weren’t following the promotional material at all and just heard about the "super gay” thing through the grapevine (like I did, lmao). People have been talking about that on this website for weeks. If it makes you feel better (sarcasm), Tessa Thompson also got accused of queerbaiting by one of our anons this morning, so she hasn’t been completely ignored.

15 notes

#mod k #queerbaiting

Anonymous asked:

Maybe I am projecting my headcanon onto to Jane Foster then ha ha. Though Thor Love and Thunder already has two, awesome queer people Korg and Valkyrie. Also off screen ones Korg’s Dads and Valkyrie’s girlfriend. Korg is a superhero too right? Two queer superheroes!

I mean, I love the idea of Jane/Valkyrie, so I’m definitely in favor of a queer reading of Jane! I just didn’t really notice any queercoding.

2 notes

#mod k

Anonymous asked:

“And people really think it’s worth the sacrifice so they can feel morally superior over any piece of media that didn’t play out exactly the way they wanted it to.”

I am sorry people are warping the word. But I am not sure if everyone is doing it with bad intentions or wanting to feel morally superior. People are upset with a lot of homophobia in media and as someone else said that is a limited vocabularity to express this upset. And some people are not always able to articulate their feelings due to things like learning disabilities, toxic masculinity or just not being good with words or maybe english is not a person’s first language. You can disagree with someone without accusing someone of feeling morally superior. Though some people in social justice spaces do use it as giving them a sense of worth because usually being queer in a lot of society’s means your society can hate you.

I would be more inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt if it wasn’t part of a larger trend of co-opting social justice terminology and representation language for use in ship wars to prove that your ship is the only objectively right ship and everyone who doesn’t ship your ship is morally inferior.

Hopefully I’m not swinging at a hornet’s nest with these examples, but after Avengers: Endgame came out, the Stucky fandom co-opted the word queerbaiting along with a handful of other social justice terms (including conversations about misogyny in the movie) to make the argument that Steve’s ending was morally wrong and that anyone who didn’t ship Stucky was homophobic, even if they were shipping other same-gender ships. The Klance fandom similarly co-opted queerbaiting along with other language related to racial representation to argue that Klance as a ship was morally superior to Lance/Allura as a ship, despite there never being any textual or extra-textual indication that Klance was going to happen.

I also think if it mostly came down to language barrier, people with learning disabilities, and men not being able to express their feelings, it would not be so common and people would not be so resistant to learning that they’d been using the word wrong. The pushback we’ve received on this just today tells me that there’s a motive behind wanting the term to be used this way.

11 notes

#mod k #queerbaiting

Anonymous asked:

Im fine with non canon shipping, that wasnt my point i just meant that its funny when shippers convince themselves and others a ship will become canon and then it doesnt and they get mad at the writers who never promised anything

Its like this, imagine you are at a restuarant

You order something to eat lets say a burger.

The waiter in no way warns you its spicy, it has 0 indication that its spicy on the menu, you get the food bite into it and get mad at the waiter because you thought the burger was gonna be spicy and it wasnt

I apologize for assuming. It was the “made up ships” comment that made me read that into your tone.

I don’t really find it funny though. It just frustrates me, especially if it’s a fandom I’m also in and I actually liked the way things were going (or even if I didn’t like it but I expected it). The way it just dominates a fandom when something like that happens is the number one reason for me just feeling the need to log off for a week.

5 notes

#mod k