My Best Content is my Tags

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
chaoticbooklesbian
sirfrogsworth

image

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help.
He went to guidance counselors for help.
He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

jenroses

Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because... he liked wearing eyeliner. That's it. he had a girlfriend. He's still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.

And later learned that a number of people I'd known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.

vaspider

Kids started calling me a "lesbo" on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became "boy crazy" as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn't a dyke.

It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for "girls." Ha ha, it's funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.

That's my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.

Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn't.

wolfinthethorns

If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss "homosexually" (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn't an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).

Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.

Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as "a lesbian with a man's body" and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female "transvestites" didn't exist, so I guess I couldn't feel like that? Painfully.

So why didn't you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren't getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.

anxious-mess19

Yall are talking 2000 and earlier but ik kids at my fucking school who are too terrfied to come out bc they're in a bad class.

I spent middle school clutching my identity in secret because if it came out I was more then a emo girl with funky colored hair we'd be fucking dead. Litterly.

We went to a good school, in a big-ish city. Our current school is considred one of the queerest, and yet we can still point out each and every closeted person we only know to be trans because they've confided in us.

Its still like this. It's better, but it's never been the time. It's been that if we come out, we're fucking dead.

seananmcguire

Graduated high school in 1996. One of the first people I met in the school who wasn't awful to me was a splendid, but awkward individual who took me home and handed me off to their big sister as a more suitable mentor for a weird, loud, mouthy little baby lesbian.

Said person was several grades ahead of me, and graduated long before I did, but I remained very close with the sister.

Said person fully transitioned the minute we were all out of high school, and he was my manager at my first full-time office job. No, he never talked about being trans on campus. He would have been beaten to death by the other students. But he was trans, and the minute he could live his truth, he did.

roach-works

in 2000 i was in fifth grade. the girl who sat next to me, inez, for reasons unknown, lied to everyone on her bus that i had told her i was a lesbian and spent all class trying to touch her. this was how i learned what lesbians were. the next day she got a seat change and all the girls in class who were in on the fun laughingly screamed and shoved me when i tried to approach them. this went on for a few weeks, until they found something else to bully me for. we were ten years old and i wouldn't hit puberty for another five years or understand that i was bisexual for another seven, but i sure learned very early not to get too close to anyone for any reason.

queer history
chaoticbooklesbian
largishcat

Audrey R., who’s running for the OTW board, is apparently also currently running for office. As a Republican

image

so uhhhhhh keep that in mind when you’re voting

yourlocalfallofthewest

you’re saying this like a liberal who has the view of republicans.bad dems good and vote blue no mayter who.

largishcat

y-yes? i sort of think the website that was founded because every other website was purging queer fanwork would be best served by someone who isn’t a member of the We Love Burning Books and Killing Gay People party. but that’s just the humble opinion of someone with a brain that works

current events ao3
headspace-hotel
lostlegendaerie

there's something deeply gutting about being a writer right now. watching studio execs brag about starving people like you out of your very house just to not pay you anything above the pennies you currently make. watching some people cheer over AO3 being targeted for a DDOS attack. the complete lack of profitability of writing commissions or writing in general in transformative spaces, especially in contrast to fanart. the pivot of so many social media platforms to be video and image based near-exclusively.

I don't know. it just makes me sad to know that the hobby that kept me alive while growing up homeschooled with dial-up internet and local antenna TV... is only ever gonna be a side job with minimal engagement. I know this site is good about supporting libraries and the concept of books but, do me a favor? Reach out to a writer friend you know. Leave a comment on your last five read stories on your favorite website.

Tell us you care.

lostlegendaerie

and like. this isn't a guilt trip on an individual level, I don't want anyone to read this and feel like they're not doing their part. it's not you. it's just the slow crush of watching capitalism crush one of the oldest art forms we've got as a species, deliberately and gleefully, when no one else really cared about it in the first place.

writing is by nature a slow, solitary work. I can't livestream my writing process, I can't make a time lapse video of me writing my novel. our faces aren't on the covers of our books hardly any amount of time. I see one read-more to a fanfic or AO3 link for every hundred pieces of fanart and twice as many memes. and parasocial relationships are so, so, so incredibly important in our society (not inherently evil, either) and it just.

Hurts. To already be small, and get stepped on anyway.

headspace-hotel

At least take comfort, if you can't take heart, though. The human species will never stop needing stories. Perhaps now more than ever.

If you tell stories your work is essential to the human soul.