Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Happy pride. I hope one day the world loves bisexual women as much as heterosexual couples with a failing marriage do." -- Kate Willett (katewillett), 2021-06-02

"I hope one day the world accepts bisexual men, like, even a little." -- Matt Miner * BLACK LIVES MATTER * (MattMinerXVX), replying to Kate Willett

"Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence." -- Henri Frederic Amiel, philosopher and writer (1821-1881) [attributed but not sourced?]

(Compare the "Silence=Death" slogan from 1987, popularized by (though not created by) ACT-UP.)

Definitely Craig (Bedo76), 2021-06-03:

People say "you're autistic? Does that mean you take everything literally?"

And I'm like "nah, that's kleptomaniacs"

"I am seven years old.

"In school we read a chapter book about a boy who changes into a girl. My heart throbs until I feel it in my teeth and I feel like everyone is staring at me. Of course, they aren't. Back at home I stare at the cover, which shows a boy looking into a mirror to see a girl looking back, and I cry.

[...]

"I am nine years old.

"I love everything my sister loves, but I will not admit it. I know she and her friends will make fun of me. I know my parents will chastise me and correct me. I am learning the rules, and I am learning that boys liking girl things is a very high stakes issue. I am learning that adults react the same way to my interest in makeup as they do to my interest in matches and lighters.

"As if maybe, by being what I am, I might burn down something very important to them. Something that makes their life more comfortable and easy.

[...]

"I am seventeen years old.

"Girls start to think I am a cute boy. I start to think I am an ugly girl.

-- Jennifer Coates, "I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out.", 2016-03-11 [Note that this story is not the only/entire point of the piece -- there are some observations at the end about how all of us, cis and trans, closeted or out, tend to talk about gender, and who is allowed to say what.]

"When NYPD officers raided the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, they didn't expect protests. In those days, gay bars were common police targets. But this time, the community, led by trans women of color, decided to push back. Three days of protests erupted in New York City, and the gay-rights cause began to roar nationwide.

"As the '70s trudged on, however, this pro-gay movement met pushback. Outspoken homophobes like Anita Bryant of 'Save Our Children' and Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority ignited an anti-gay counterwave, drawing Christian conservatives from the shadows to the ballot box en masse.

[...]

"By 1981, nine states had criminalized homosexual conduct while decriminalizing sodomy for opposite-sex couples. Compared to a century earlier, convictions for consensual, same-sex sodomy were up twentyfold.

[...]

"Over the years, police and prosecutors have used CANS to target a revolving door of 'threatening' groups: those who transgressed family norms in the 1980s, those made vulnerable by welfare cuts in the 1990s, and those left destitute by failed levees and toppled flood walls in the post-Katrina 2000s. But one community represents the intersection of all these targeted groups: Black trans women.

"Indeed, some of the 'gay men' CANS targeted in the 1980s likely became the women it targeted in the '90s-as a consolidated identity category, 'transgender' hardly existed in the '80s, and gender-affirming health care options were scarce. Although many gays and lesbians benefited from greater social acceptance in the years after Tom Hanks won his Oscar for the white-gay classic Philadelphia (1994), trans women of color did not. Youth homelessness, biased hiring, and discriminatory government safety nets relegated many to the streets-at the precise moment those streets were being 'cleaned.'

[...]

"Although the law may be what lawyers call 'facially neutral'-that is, its text doesn't explicitly mention LGBTQ+ people-its anti-queer origins are clear. As long as that animus remains codified, Cooper argues, a message of hate is sent to Louisiana's hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ residents."

-- Matt Nadel, "Prostitution was already illegal in Louisiana. Then Republicans crafted an even more damning law to target trans sex workers.", Scalawag Magazine, 2021-06-01

"Today I explained to a recently-out 14yo of whom I have the honor of being an auntie that one does not need to purchase corporate rainbow swag in order to #Pride (& that actually, as she's an artist, she could DIY), & as such have fulfilled one of the mitzvot of #PrideMonth.

"Some say: telling corporations to shove it and helping raise the young are two separate mitzvot."

-- Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (TheRaDR), 2021-06-01

"Other sages have counted these as four - two mitzvot for telling corporations to shove it (1, calling them on pinkwashing, and 2, for decrying their lack of care the rest of the year), and two mitzvot for raising the young (3, encouraging them, and 4, providing safe haven)." -- Vex: the very model of a modern major gender role! (The_Terroirist), quote-tweeting Rabbi Ruttenberg

"I couldn't have imagined back then that people would get on board with they/them pronouns or other pronouns we were experimenting with in the late 90s. We were playing around with gender and language for so long. I say playing because there was such a creative force behind it but it was also really serious -- we were inventing new ways of being so we could exist." -- Daniela Sea, from "Daniela Sea On 'The L Word,' Gender Identity, and Imagining Queer Liberation" by Drew Gregory (draw_gregory)

From Architects of Memory by Karen Osborne (karenthology), 2020, Tom Doherty Associates, New York, ISBN 978-1-250-21547-5 (paperback), 978-1-250-21546-8 (ebook)

"We could bring the war to them," Natalie said, "We could win."

Ash closed her eyes and tried to think about what winning would look like. All she saw were bodies. Hearts. Livers. Blood. Stones, fallen from above, crushing Christopher's chest, blood pooling at his neck. Marley, taken apart by light, breathing one moment and gone the next. Natalie, bloodstained and snarling.

"You don't win a war," Ash whispered [...]

"Soothly we live in mighty years!" -- Poul Anderson (b. 1926-11-25, d. 2001-07-31), "Uncleftish Beholding", 1989

"What is a manifold? A miserable little pile of locally Euclidean neighborhoods." -- syzygay (syzygay1), 2021-05-09

Virtual-Balticon is this weekend across (Zoom, Discord, SecondLife, Gather, and YouTube), and I'm joining Karen Osborne (author of Architects of Memory and Engines of Oblivion, and one of my bandmates in The Homespun Ceilidh Band and Circle of Confusion) for a concert at 8:30 pm EDT tonight. As Karen put it, "it's a time travel concert! done live!" (you get to time-travel to a recent afternoon with us, for logistics reasons).

Register for the concert Zoom session

It's good to be making & sharing music again!

Virtual Balticon 55 is free to attend, but they're accepting donations 'cause they still have expenses:

Access to Virtual Balticon 55 is being provided free of charge. To cover the cost of putting on a virtual convention and to support the Baltimore Science Fiction Society’s literacy activities, please donate what you are able to the Balticon 55 Go Fund Me campaign. [...]

[With Pride month just around the corner, the annual respectability debate has come to the foreground. Lots of apparent 4channers, some 'GC' people, and a bunch of young queerfolk unfamiliar with our history and susceptible to the arguments of the first two groups, have been all over Twitter trying to equate Leather Daddies and Pups at pride with having sex in front of children. Many older or more history-aware queerfolk have been pushing back and trying to educate, explaining why kink groups have always been part of Pride, why that's important, and how bogus the "seeing somebody wearing fetishwear is equivalent to being forced to watch them fuck" rhetoric is so misguided. That's the context of the quote below, from the middle of a thread.]

"pride isnt the opposite of hate. pride is the opposite of shame. the events aren't called pride by accident. as much as the character and tone of these events have changed over time, to turn them into 'anti hate' rather than 'anti shame' events is total capitulation to homophobia" -- michael wave (SzMarsupial), 2021-05-18

"if you're bad at something first check to see if you're a beginner." -- Wearing a mask #BLM #CripTheVote (EusticeTheSheep), 2021-05-26, quoting Steph Pearl-McPhee (YarnHarlot)

"I think the pervasive demand that people--especially female people--be productive and positive produces the majority of the guilt and shame we experience. I can't condone advice to smile more or work harder. The only general advice I can get behind is along the lines of 'travel abroad' or 'take a bath'--means to no clear end or product beyond themselves. Travel because other places have better food and different languages. Take a bath because the point of a bath is the bath. I find that enormously edifying. With Kant, I urge us to act as if our bath pleasure is not a means to an end but rather an end in itself.

"Guilty pleasure texts are like baths for the mind. They're usually cast as mindless or unproductive. My first objection here is, predictably, that therein lies a particularly bad account of productivity. Pleasure is productive; it produces itself. My second is that if you're a thinking person, you can think 'productively' through any objectan essay by Susan Sontag or a Ke$ha lyric--and if NPR ever asked for my 'This I Believe' statement, I would say, with Virginia Woolf, that I think people should consume whatever media they like without any sense of shame or pride. While I'm at it, I'd also like to ask why the guys I internet-dated in the aughts lied about having read all of the Faulkner or Joyce novels they claimed to have read on their profiles. It's a curious, and frankly puritanical, notion that what you consume defines you or--worse--ranks you, that a person is only as good or as terrible as their most-listened-to songs and the spines on their shelves."

-- Arielle Zibrak, "The Concept of the Guilty Pleasure Privileges Productivity Above All Else", excerpted from Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures (2021, New York University Press)

"What Biles is doing is incredibly difficult. Like, physicists-could-make-case-studies-of-what-she-does difficult. But because she makes things look effortless, because she plays with skills for months, even years before letting the public get a glimpse of them, it is easy to underestimate just how transcendent she is." -- Nancy Armour (nrarmour), "Opinion: Simone Biles maintains gold standard despite 19-month layoff between competitions", 2021-05-22, USA Today

"Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets." -- Neil Gaiman, Stardust

[Happy Victoria Day to my Canadian friends!]

"Bethlehem was God with us, Calvary was God for us, and Pentecost is God in us." -- Robert Baer (unclear, from what I could find on the web, which Robert Baer this is, but I suspect it's Robert Newton Bear, b. 1834, d. 1888)

[A blessed Whitsunday/Pentecost to everyone celebrating it today!]

Miyke: "Wow. Your reputation is no exaggeration!"

Khaba: "We'd love to exaggerate it, but we keep outdoing our greatest embellishments."

-- from Spacetrawler by Christopher Baldwin, 2021-05-06

"There are many reasons why someone who is vaccinated would choose to wear a mask. It helps prevent all kinds of airborne diseases and should become standard for anyone feeling under the weather.

"But this would mean caring for other people, and that's something the self-appointed culture warriors just can't stand for. A lack of care permeates every so-called culture war issue, from trans rights, to abortion access, to the panic over cancel culture.

"'Fuck your feelings,' rings the now-too-familiar refrain. The mask debate takes it a step further. 'Fuck your health' is the newly in-vogue attitude permeating anti-woke media circles."

-- Katelyn Burns (transscribe), "We're Being Trained Not to Care", 2021-05-20

"I told my kid she was gonna be seeing a lot more people not wearing masks now and she was like 'well that's dumb because the cicadas are going to fly into their mouths'" -- Amber Sparks (ambernoelle), 2021-05-16