When love finds you again, I wish for you that is kind, gentle, loving, peaceful and tranquil. May it make you smile again, laugh often, dance like no one’s watching, and support your true self without condition.
Imagine growing old with her. Imagine watching as the wrinkles come in, deepening the lines on her face that came from smiling, the frown line from when she concentrated, the crows feet from that devious look she’d get when she was going to do something silly and couldn’t hold in her giddiness. Imagine the way her eyes will soften as you grow together, and that fond exasperation she’ll look at you with when you do something she doesn’t really get but has accepted because it’s a quirk uniquely yours. Imagine that day you would’ve smiled a hundred thousand times together, laughed so hard you couldn’t stand, found comfort in each other so intense that a mere hint of them could ease all tension from your body.
What a privilege it would be to grow old with her.
My autobio collection We Are Here (And Other Queer Comics) is available to download in full on my kofi! That’s right folks! You can buy the harrowing confessions of my soul for just $5!!!
Huge thanks to my professor Jeremy Bushnell for being my advisor on this project, and for the many friends who supported me along my journey 💓🏳️🌈 I love you all you’re very cool
also pls don’t feel too bad for me in the comments abt this comic… i have an amazing lesbian girlfriend LMAO
Okay, so I try hard to cover global queer history, and this isn't marking a stop to that, but I am aware that most of my audience is American, and I want to address them very directly right now.
Google Removed Pride Month From Its Calendar App, and Stonewall National Monument's "LGBTQ" status was changed to "LGB" on the government website. This is the beginning of the erasure of queer history, not the end. I don't know what the future of the United States looks like, as someone who studies queer history and has done so for many years, I want to share some tools with you.
Now is a good time to prioritize local queer history, Making Gay History is a great project, so is the Digital Transgender Archive, but also check your city and see what resources there are.
Read and buy books about queer history. I have an affiliate list with some of the books I personally recommend.
If you use Google Calendar, repopulate that resource with so much queer history with a free queer history calendar plug-in, it has names from queer history that you can also learn more about for free when they come up. As the author of these articles, feel free to save them, print them off, whatever makes them freely accessible as suppression get's worse.
Use your local library. Email the board about book bans, request banned books, request queer books, and make your voice heard.
Make queer art. Share queer art. Protect queer art. Here is some public-domain queer art to use as you wish.
Keep up with queer news, THEM is a great resource.
All of these tools are currently freely accessible with an internet connection. Queer history is a community responsibility, do your part.
I don't know how people came to think that "the banality of evil" means "evil people are people too".
That's also true but it's not what the banality of evil means.
The term was coined by Hannah Arendt in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the "final solution" in the Holocaust.
It describes the way in which the Nazis at large and Eichmann in particular have turned the horrendous act of mass murder into just another job, disconnecting themselves morally and emotionally from their actions.
Before the death camps and gas chambers, Nazi soldiers simply shot Jews into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands. It was a lot cheaper and faster, but it caused great psychological distress for the murderers who pulled the trigger.
The leadership's solution was a massively upscaled version of the "gas vans" they used to mass murder hundreds of thousands of Germans with disabilities and mental health issues.
Shooting bound civilians in point blank range over and over is something you can't just pretend you're not doing or is no big deal. But if you're just the guy who sorts people into groups. Or just the guy that funnels them into a room. Or just the guy who opens a cannister on the roof. It's much easier to distance yourself from what you know is happening.
The same principle applies to much lesser evils, like soldiers operating drones from a distance, or insurance workers denying coverage for life-saving treatment.
“This turbulent week has shown that the administration has lost the trust of the entire autism community. HHS’ walk-back is a success for our advocacy; it shows that our community has power, and that it is vital to speak up when potential threats emerge."