Photon telling me some grade A gossip
nltm:
One thing I always bring up that straight writers obviously don’t understand but every gay person ever can attest to is that queer people stick together. Like, every queer person knows like 15 other ones and those 15 know even more.
Like, having only One in your story completely misses the point of how we organize and stay safe, in addition to completely missing the point on being progressive (ie, having A Single Gay in your story isn’t special anymore and hasn’t been for decades now)
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how marginalized people act bc straight people are allowed to be solitary and they don’t understand any other way of Being
Hijacking this post to talk about something interesting! There’s a lot of criticism in fanfiction circles of yaoi or yuri fanfiction where ‘everybody is gay’, and it’s almost always by folks who haven’t been involved in queer communities. If you’re queer, you really do surround yourself with queer people - so ‘everybody is gay’ in a character’s social circle actually makes perfect sense!
this exhibits itself in other ways too, for example, when there’s one queer sibling there’s usually more - often because one sibling will bring the definitions home and the other will use that to explore their own identity!
Another weird phenomenon I noticed is this happens a lot even before people realize they’re Not Straight ™. Out of my close friends in high school, most of us turned out some form of LGBTQA, and I’ve heard other people say the same is true for them.
So people saying it’s “unrealistic” that everyone in the same social circle would gradually discover they’re Not Straight ™- yeah, it is totally reasonable and even likely.#we know our own #sometimes before we know ourselves (tags via @anneapocalypse )
I was thinking about this the other day. Like “who on earth is friends with just one gay??” kinda like “who who has exclusively white friends???” like…it just seems impossibley unrealistic to me??
Me n my friends in highschool were those chums who became progressively more gay the more we came to know ourselves and understand each other. I have come to assume now that everyone I get along with is some shade of Not Straight until proven otherwise (and my quiet assuptions are usually correct).
