"You are the reason they hate gay people."

No, this is not "why they hate" us.

They hate us because we exist.  They will hate us no matter how much we try to placate them by reifying their gender binary, no matter how polite we are or how monogamous and middle class we are.  We can deepen our voices and not move our hands while we speak and have the goddamn white picket fence and save Cambodian babies from being Cambodian, and the moment we slip up and hold someone's hand or not coerce our child's gender or move into the neighborhood or have our own spaces, our bashing will be justified.

We cannot save ourselves by being like them.  We aren't wrong: that is exactly what they're trying to say!  That we have to fit in.  Why the hell are you buying into it?  Fuck that noise.  They are the wrong ones. Why should giants deign to sit in caves, when they can stride the earth?

The problem isn't straight girls making out with other straight girls.  It's that straight girls can't make out with each other without being reinterpreted as (they are sluts and that is disgusting / they are sluts and they must be sexually available to me / they must be lesbians / they must be bisexual / they are fake bitches) because wow does misogyny and homophobia come in all sorts of delightful flavors.

And we don't care that maybe in a liberated world, we can make out with whomever just because we are alive.  That maybe there can be a world where there won't be environments where men have learned to use alcohol as a weapon and to browbeat women into performing for them and enjoy it, or that the only way a woman can make a living is to appeal to the male gaze in a music video.  That, you know what?, maybe two women can make out to turn on a guy without it being part of a pattern of the coercive commodification of women.

Because it is easier to be mad at two individual women who don't matter than it is to be mad at a system you don't care to take on.

It's easier to be mad at a guy who gets to wear a leather harness and dance down a street once a year, than to stop buying into our coercive political process.  It's easier to say the problem is with our kids, that they just have to wait for it to get better.  It's easier, and in ways, more profitable to buy into the heterosexism and cissexism.  To buy into their misogyny that men acting like women is degrading.  Maybe, if you play along well enough, you'll get to become one of them.  That is the power of the kyriarchy, to make you want to be an oppressor.  To internalize their homophobia, to make you want to fit into this fucked up world.

So, who gives a fuck if some gay dude sleeps around?  You're saying it reinforces stereotypes, when we've been characterized as sodomites and deviants before it was even legal for us to have sex.  You're willing to slap that HRC sticker on a binder, but you're not willing to strip off the hateful narratives they've told about us?  The man's doing it in a world that says a single kiss is too much, and the problem here is him?  Between people mired in their own hateful bitterness, backed up by institutional privileges and structural supports, and some guy having fun, you want to side with the former?

Look around you, look at the choice you have made.

I won't sit here anymore and listen to you parrot our oppressors.  I refuse.

You do not have to run naked with a rainbow flag cloak if that's not you.  Or you totally can if that's how you do.  But the point is to radically, audaciously, genuinely love each other.  I am not struggling for a world where we can resent each other equally.  I want for a world where we can embody James Baldwin's words, "Love him and let him love you.  Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"  Be brave enough to want that.

I am pretty sure that "Teenage Dream" video has moved to the top second spot on the front page of Hulu solely because of me.  You are welcome, Darren Criss.  You may thank me with many kisses; I shall supply the footstool that is necessitated by how I would tower over you with my 5'8" self.

I just spent five minutes analyzing this picture to determine what makes her smilies cuter than others.  I made lots of samples on a Post-It note.  I think it is the largeness of the eyes, the wide set distance between them, and their nearness to the ends of the smile, creating the impression of a baby's wide, circular face.

Also, I figured out the difference between a chrysalis and a cocoon is more than that the former is made by butterflies and the latter by moths.  Cocoons are not the actual pupae, which is the hard exoskeleton, but rather, the silk case which holds the pupa.  I think this confirms my preference for moths over butterflies.

The lack of obvious perspective in this picture (OF A CATERPILLAR, DO NOT CLICK, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) makes the little bugger look the size of a koala, aka about half the size of Darren Criss.

I've also been analyzing this picture to figure out whether this was taken in a UMBC dorm room; the wall, bed, and desk fit, but those are also probably common.  I always doubt the judgement of men who are interested in me; there must be something terribly wrong.  Oh, God, they messaged the wrong person with a very similar username.  There must be a pneumaticfleshlight out there or something.

When I was in a French airport, this guy made eye contact with me and wouldn't look away and I worried over whether this was the Mediterranean eye contact as flirting or the Glaswegian eye contact as prepping for a fight.  What if my face is bleeding.  And if it is, which is worse: That my bleeding face horrified this cute guy, or that it's turning him on?

This is what I have been doing instead of this paper.  What looks like slacking off is actually very rapid processing and synthesis of information.  I promise.

No fucking words.

So, there is a short hallway in the Commons that leads into the Student Org Space, which is where we have the SGA Office and the Student Events Board Office.  The hallway walls were painted into chalkboards this year and this week, SEB finally chalked it to advertise upcoming events.

And guess what's there in one corner?

Tell ya wife
Tell ya children
Tell ya husband
They playing everybody

Are you for real?

So, we have a story about how a black woman was sexually assaulted in her own home, which becomes a story about how a black gay man said something in a funny way.  Where two white men take his words to turn it into a song.  How this became memetic is gross in itself.  The disproportionate sexual violence experienced by black women is erased enough, but to take it to the point where you're literally erasing "raping" and inserting another word to advertise campus events?

I am sitting in the Commons getting increasingly pissed off.

ETA: Here is a blog piece that goes deeper into how the appropriation and erasure occurs here.