Nico

check this out

neetainari:

Queering Sápmi—”Queering Sápmi is a storytelling project. We search for sami persons that challenge norms about gender, sexuality and identity.”

Go ahead and contact them with your stories! And/or pass this along if you have Saami friends who might have something to share as well.

Introducing We’re Queer Out Here: Stories from small town and rural LGBT

queer-out-here:

Far too often, the narratives of small town and rural LGBT life have taken a back seat to the vision of urban queerness, in cities where spaces of acceptance, community, and organization are much more accessible. Those of us who grew up or currently live in small towns frequently do not have access to the same level of resources, organization, and community. Our stories, our difficulties, are often met with dismissive attitudes by our urban counterparts, who assure us that once we  leave and make it to the city life will be different. What about those of us for whom such an exodus isn’t financially, socially, or otherwise materially accessible? What do we do? How do we organize? How do we ensure that we not only create a space and change for ourselves but for the next generation?

Let’s talk about it. Let’s share our stories, our strategies, our histories, our hopes for the future. Let’s talk about the ways that the urban vision of queer life doesn’t fit us, and about the ways that maybe we don’t want it to fit.

We’re Queer Out Here is a submission based Tumblr created specifically to highlight the stories and experiences of rural and small town lesbian, gay, bisexual/pansexual, transgender, and genderqueer people. No matter where your small town or rural community is in the world, your story, your voice, and your experience matters and we want to hear from you.

piddlebucket:

adailyriot:

combat—wombat:

[TW FOR ANTI-TRANS AND RACIST VIOLENCE AND HATE SPEECH]

SUPPORT CECE MCDONALD! 

CeCe McDonald is a young African American transgender woman charged with “second degree murder” after an incident that began when she was violently attacked because of her gender and race.

DROP the charges and FREE CeCe!

CeCe is a creative and energetic person who, before her life was so unjustly interrupted, was studying fashion at MCTC. She had a stable home where she lived with and helped support four other African American youth, her family. CeCe’s family describes her as a leader, a role model, and a loyal friend. She is known as a wise, out-spoken, and welcoming person, with a cheerful disposition and a history of handling prejudice with amazing grace.

Around 12:30 am on June 5, CeCe and four of her friends (all of them black) were on their way to Cub Foods to get some food. As they walked past Schooner’s Bar in South Minneapolis, a man and two women (all of them white) began to yell epithets at them. They called CeCe and her friends ‘faggots,’ ‘niggers,’ and ‘chicks with dicks,’ amongst other things.

As they were shouting, one of the women smashed her drink into the side of CeCe’s face, slicing her cheek open, lacerating her salivary gland, and stinging her eyes with liquor. A fight ensued, with more people joining in. What happened during the fight is unclear, but within a few minutes Dean Schmitz–one of the attackers–had been stabbed.

CeCe was later arrested, and is now falsely accused of murder

For a month, CeCe was kept in solitary confinement “for her own protection”; she had no say in this matter. Finally, she was transferred to a psychiatric unit in the Public Safety Facility. It was nearly two months before she was taken back to a doctor to check up on the wound on her face, which by then had turned into a painful, golf ball-sized lump.

Later on, CeCe’s friends were harassed on the street by people they recognized from the scene of the fight. Individuals circled the block that CeCe’s friends were walking on and called them ‘niggers’ and ‘faggots’ and told them to ‘go back to Africa.’ When they attempted to wave down a passing squad car for assistance, the officer driving the car said he would not help them.

Help us fight for CeCe, and for an end to racist, transphobic violence in our communities! Visit our What You Can Do page and find out how to get involved.

ohmygod

fourloves:

also, this is probably as good a time as any to start talking about:

[BAD IN BED]

So, my idea is for this zine thing called Bad in Bed that explores the similarities/connections between sexual needs and access needs. Or writes about sex as a series of access needs.

Basically I’ve always been really interested in writing/talking about what different people want or need sexually or what sex is to them. Being gay is probably the most acknowledged different sexual need, but there are various other things that isolate, constrict, and/or stigmatize people sexually, like being graysexual or asexual, being stone, being into power exchange, having fetishes…basically anything where sex means something different to you, or you need something different, or you don’t want to or can’t do something that is seen by other people as being part of sex.

(It probably seems weird that I am talking about asexual people as people who have different sexual needs instead of none, but it is really a failure of language in my part that I am using the word sex, because what I mean to talk about is a particular kind of connection that I can’t name or define. There are definitely situations where one person doesn’t want to “have sex” but their lack of interest in doing that leads to losing something that they actually do want which seems to be tied up in “having sex.”)

Anyway, even though I think that these differences between people and their needs are super interesting, I often feel like it’s not really seen that way because there is Real Sex and then there’s the rest of us and maybe what we need (or don’t need) is just a problem. I think it’s really similar to the reasons disability exists, because individual needs become invisible unless they are unusual—no one actually needs anything except one person, who has a “fetish,” is probably reacting to a traumatic experience (therefore isn’t real?), and so on.

Don’t know if this is a very good explanation, but Bad in Bed would be an interview zine which would obviously be anonymous, and would basically be about people talking about what they need sex/closeness to be, times when there has been a mismatch between what they needed and what someone else needed or wanted them to need, and/or how this relates to disability if they are disabled. Signal boost if you think this sounds interesting or if you are interested yourself, email me (awf.vivian at gmail).

Intersex Fertility

tal9000:

My daughter was not of woman born. That is a concept that has fascinated people through the ages. My daughter’s gestation was perfectly “natural,” I should point out—but I carried her, and I was never of the female sex; I am a so-called “true hermaphrodite.” I was assigned female at birth, and was living as such when I gave birth to her, but I never identified as a woman, and am now legally male. A lot of myths circulate around the topic of intersex fertility, many of them perpetuated by doctors. They all relate to the current Western insistence on the ideology of sex dyadism. That ideology holds that there are two and only two sexes, and that this is required by “nature” in order to perpetuate the human species.

In fact, sex is a spectrum (see here and here for more information). About one in 200 people has some intersex characteristic. However, in contemporary Western society we are hidden away, medically “corrected,” erased. And often this erasure is bound up in rhetoric about fertility. One way in which medical textbooks frame intersex people as “tragic” is by presenting us as usually infertile. I’m not going to spend time critiquing the idea that a person must procreate to be a fully mature and valid adult, though I certainly don’t believe that to be true. What I want to address from an intersex perspective is the fact that many of us are capable of reproducing.

via Intersex Roadshow

Intersex Roadshow is a quality blog.

crankyskirt:

The True Colors Residence, a project of West End Intergenerational Residence and partners Cyndi Lauper and her manager Lisa Barbaris, is slated to open in Central Harlem this summer. True Colors will be the first permanent, supportive housing facility for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in New York State.

Read more about the project and a message from TCR partner Cyndi Lauper in our True Colors Residence update area and show your support today by making a donation or signing up for True Colors updates!

I like to put my Ramadan charity dollars towards people and organizations doing great things for others. This year part of my money went towards a teacher in Brooklyn, through DonorsChoose. The other part of my money is going here. Check out the page when you get the chance - this will be the second of their residences, and I have a lot of respect for the work they do.

savannahstreethassle:

lebanesepoppyseed:

savannahstreethassle:

raptortooth:

Queer Porn Star Accused of Pedophilia for Breastfeeding Baby

By Diane Anderson-Minshall

Weeks after queer porn star Madison Young had her baby, she created an art exhibit titled “Becoming MILF.” The concept, according to Jezebel.com, was to explore how Young now embodies a contradiction, the dichotomy to end all dichotomies — that of the Madonna and the whore. At the show’s opening, she served up self-made breast-milk shakes and displayed a baby quilt made of burp cloths and porn star panties. Turns out not every feminist porn star agrees. According to Salon.com, a series of sex worker Twitter wars ensued, the controversy tapping into “culture-wide mommy issues.”

Porn star Furry Girl (who is known for her, um, stage name–like features) criticized Young for publicly breast-feeding, tweeting that only “creeps and pedophiles” are interested in seeing a porn star breast-feed and insinuated that exposing her child to such an audience was abusive. Girl called Young a “a revolting person” and dubbed her defenders “baby fetishists” and “pedos.”

Of course Young (née Tina Butcher) is already a well-known feminist porn star, director, author, and the founder of Femina Potens, an ever-evolving, queer and trans nonprofit gallery and performance space in California that the San Francisco Chronicle calls “the most happening art space in the city; a revolution in art and sex.” She’s curated the gallery for years, mixing envelope-pushing women’s sexuality exhibitions and spoken word shows from lesbians like Annie Sprinkle with less kinky feminist projects from literati like Michelle Tea. Young’s shown up on such outlets as IFC and the History Channel and in MSNBC’s Brian Alexander’s book America Unzipped, which has a whole chapter on her art and work.

So what was this controversial display of pedophilia that Furry Girl imagines? According to Salon, Young posed for a black-and-white photograph dressed up like Marilyn Monroe while clutching her daughter to her bare breast, nonchalantly breast-fed on a video, and then announced that she would nurse live and in person at an upcoming event meant to promote “health awareness for our queer, kinky, and sex positive communities.”

At the event itself, Young discussed breast health, while other presenters talked about breast cancer, antiretroviral drugs, and safe sex. “It wasn’t a sex party; it was an adult sex-ed class hosted by sex workers,” writes Salon’s Tracy Clark-Florey.

Furry Girl, an actress in vegan porn, tweeted that context is at the root of her argument, though she no longer wants to comment on the debacle. Meanwhile, Young returned to social media in hopes of ending the Twitter mommy sex wars: “The only one sexualizing this image of me breastfeeding is you. Which makes me feel truly disgusted and violated.”

So, what, porn stars aren’t allowed to have kids or something?

Jeezus.

What bullshit. I remember seeing a mini documentary about her and her space Femina Potens and thought she was so awesome/brilliant. It is what first made me connect “Sex Work” and “Queerness” with “Sex positivity” and “Feminism”.

Read FB’s post on her blog, and while I can kiiiiind of get her point that Young’s child didn’t consent to the demonstration I also think she skipped over the part where the breastfeeding took place in a non-sexual setting.

(Source: advocate.com)