Anonymous asked: Ugh, Texas is just as bad as where I live. Mississippi. Or as I like to call it, the asshole of the world.

Yeah Texas can definitely be a terrifying place! I’ve only driven through Mississippi once and it scared me too D: Though they were nice enough to spell out “Mississippi” in the tile at the rest stops on the side of the road. Thats a nice touch.

0 notes

Anonymous asked: have you ever lived anywhere besides the south?

No :( I’ve lived in Texas all my life

0 notes

Anonymous asked: have you ever had a threesome?

Yes. It was underwhelming.

13 notes

dooleydotj asked: Have you ever finished a whole bottle of wine by yourself?

Nope!

0 notes

Send me ‘Have You Evers’ and I will reply with Yes or NO

(Source: megan-hansenn, via stompy-boots)

124,203 notes

fffcuk:

what doesn’t kill you fucks you up mentally and affects your ability to have stable relationships with other human beings

(via holyfuckmeinthemouth)

57,683 notes

"If you are reading this in the United States or Canada, whose land are you on, dear reader? What are the specific names of the Native nation(s) who have historical claim to the territory on which you currently read this article? What are their histories before European invasion? What are their historical and present acts of resistance to colonial occupation? If you are like most people in the United States and Canada, you cannot answer these questions. And this disturbs me."

Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies” (via nepantlastrategies)

(via ethiopienne)

673 notes

sinidentidades:

On the Street: UndocuAsians Come Out
Asians are a driving force behind migration to the U.S. and the demographic shifts; 40 percent of all migrants to the U.S. hail from Asia, and 40 percent of Asian Americans were not born in the U.S. What’s more, 1.2 million of the country’s 18 million Asian Americans are undocumented, according to the Asian American Justice Center.
So who are the country’s undocumented Asian American youth? They’re students and granddaughters and big brothers. They’re all over the country. Sitting next to you in class. Riding the bus alongside you. Probably dating your cousins. And if the latest social media campaign from the undocumented youth contingent of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund is any indication, they’re a seriously hip crowd committed to social justice.
Raise Our Story, organized by the Asian-American undocumented youth group RAISE and launched this week, will collect and highlight stories of undocumented Asian-American youth to highlight the many faces of immigration. As the immigration reform bill heats up, RAISE youth organized the initiative to make sure that the immigration reform debate includes the stories and voices of Asian immigrants, “who are often overlooked in the narrative surrounding immigration reform,” they said in a statement. But organizers also hope the project empowers the Asian American immigrant community to speak their stories aloud.

Share yours on Facebook, at Twitter via @raiseourstory, and on Tumblr, where you can read the stories of the folks whose photos are included below.

sinidentidades:

On the Street: UndocuAsians Come Out

Asians are a driving force behind migration to the U.S. and the demographic shifts; 40 percent of all migrants to the U.S. hail from Asia, and 40 percent of Asian Americans were not born in the U.S. What’s more, 1.2 million of the country’s 18 million Asian Americans are undocumented, according to the Asian American Justice Center.

So who are the country’s undocumented Asian American youth? They’re students and granddaughters and big brothers. They’re all over the country. Sitting next to you in class. Riding the bus alongside you. Probably dating your cousins. And if the latest social media campaign from the undocumented youth contingent of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund is any indication, they’re a seriously hip crowd committed to social justice.

Raise Our Story, organized by the Asian-American undocumented youth group RAISE and launched this week, will collect and highlight stories of undocumented Asian-American youth to highlight the many faces of immigration. As the immigration reform bill heats up, RAISE youth organized the initiative to make sure that the immigration reform debate includes the stories and voices of Asian immigrants, “who are often overlooked in the narrative surrounding immigration reform,” they said in a statement. But organizers also hope the project empowers the Asian American immigrant community to speak their stories aloud.

Share yours on Facebook, at Twitter via @raiseourstory, and on Tumblr, where you can read the stories of the folks whose photos are included below.

Raise-Our-Story-Image-1-23.jpg

Raise-Our-Story-Image-2-23.jpg

raiseourstory3_051713.jpg

223 notes

temporarilyeuropean:

Read it to the end. Bolding toward the end mine.
thematerialworld:

[Photo by Adam Feldman]
Last night, Adam Feldman (theater critic for Time Out New York) organized a midnight vigil for Mark Carson, the Black gay man who was killed in the West Village Friday night.  We gathered on 6th Avenue and West 8th Street, on the corner where he was shot in the face.  It was an intense, emotional event.  I’m bad at estimating these things, but I think there were around 100 people there.  While a few speakers betrayed an upsetting short-sightedness about how violence operates in our society, most were eloquent and inspiring.  In no particular order:
Performer and playwright Justin Sayre started things off with a volcanic, passionate sermon about the perceived danger of queer love — how the straight world fears us for the very thing that makes us most powerful, and so the only response is to love harder, love louder, and love more than ever.  His tone set the stage for the event, and allowed people to fully feel the emotions we’d all been locking up tight.
Photographer and ACT UP vet Jon Nalley revealed, shockingly and emotionally, that Mark Carson is also the name of a fallen ACT UP comrade.  Jon schooled the crowd about the true cause of AIDS death (not the HIV virus, but government neglect and institutional heterosexism), highlighting the connections between one Mark’s death and the other’s.
Long-time activist and Stonewall vet Jim Fouratt pointed out something that SHOULD be obvious, but which hadn’t occurred to me — that there used to be a hospital TWO BLOCKS from that corner, but in the wake of St. Vincent’s closing, Mark had to be rushed to Beth Israel all the way across town.  Perhaps, in the distance between these hospitals, Mark’s life could have been saved.  In that sense, the politicians that allowed St. Vincents to be converted to a luxury condo high rise — politicians like lesbian mayoral candidate Christine Quinn — may have gay blood on their hands.  Jim helped us understand how depriving a gay neighborhood of a hospital is inherently homophobic and violent.
A trans woman who was once homeless in that same neighborhood spoke intensely about how vigils shouldn’t be the only time we come together, and how we must take our struggle to the U.N. to fight for queer safety internationally, and hold the U.S. to the highest possible global standard.
A member of Queer Fist read a first-person account of the Stonewall Riots, in which a gay rioter’s head was injured on that very corner, his blood pouring into the street.  Another rioter screamed into the city, “THIS IS THE BLOOD OF YOUR BROTHERS!”  It was chilling, to consider the bloody history of that location.
Another Queer First member pointed out that this murder was allowed to happen because the killer had access to a gun, and that the supporters of gun rights, deep down inside, are primarily afraid of the specter of the Black gunman, who will infiltrate their towns and homes.  These gun rights advocates feel they need weapons to protect themselves from their racist fantasy.  It underscored how racism fuels violence against ALL peoples.
Khaela Maricich from The Blow was like: we’re all going to die anyway, and it’s better to die being yourself and expressing your love and your identity than hiding it and living longer.  Her comment was somewhat insensitive to queers in greater danger than her, like trans people and people of color, but I understood what she was trying to say.
An older trans man shared that he was attacked in Manhattan only a few days ago, and reminded the crowd, with tremendous grief in his voice, that trans people are killed CONSTANTLY in this country.
A straight mother spoke because her adult son in another city asked her to, so she could share her love and support with us.
Interestingly, a straight young woman who lives on that block confessed that her initial impulse was to text her gay friends, warning them to “dial it down” so that no one on the street would know they’re gay, but that, after hearing the speakers, she realized that this was the wrong lesson - that we should “dial it up,” to demand our right to exist.  ”DIAL IT UP” became a chant, briefly.
A Black gay man spoke with great anguish, commenting on how not many other men of color were in attendance, and laying out so clearly how different queer people have unique challenges and specific circumstances — that Mark Carson’s life as a Black gay man was significantly different from the lives of the white gay men who made up the majority of the crowd.
A few speakers mentioned the importance of hate crimes legislation, and thanked the police for their cooperation with the vigil, and one speaker even said, “THANK YOU TO THE NYPD OF TODAY FOR NOT BEING THE NYPD OF 1969!” and though I had been resisting the urge to speak, that was my last straw
I got up on the box and said something like this:

I hope this doesn’t sound callous, but I was not surprised by this death. Queer people are killed in this country all the time.  I have always thought of myself as someone who is vulnerable to murder.  Four trans women were killed in the month of April alone — four in one month!  So when things like this happen in our neighborhoods, we need to ask ourselves what this violence means.  And we have to be skeptical about solutions like hate crimes legislation, which just feeds the prison industrial complex — an industry that profits from the imprisonment of queers and people of color.  One third of all adult Black men in the U.S. are in prisons, and trans people are disproportionately arrested and locked up.  We cannot continue to support this!  And while I’m sure individual NYPD officers were polite in the lead-up to this vigil, we cannot forget that the NYPD ritually harasses trans people and people of color in this city!  Trans women are arrested simply for walking down the street!  So when we talk about how queer people need to be “safe,” we have to ask ourselves what “safety” really means — because the NYPD does not makes us safe!  It harasses and imprisons us!  We must reckon with these connections — that Mark Carson’s death is an extension of the violence that oppresses so many others, from the institutional violence of governments to the random violence of a crazy guy with a gun.

I make a living speaking in front of people, but talking at this vigil was terrifying.  As I spoke, I felt myself hyperventilating, and I worried I would vomit.  After I stepped down, I sat on the curb a few yards away from the crowd, catching my breath.
I wish I had specifically named the Stop & Frisk policy that makes queers and people of color vulnerable to police harassment.  I wish I had called out Christine Quinn for supporting this policy.  
I wish I had acknowledged a previous speakers’ disappointment about the lack of people of color in attendance.  I wish I had pointed out the sad truth: that our queer “community” is still so segregated, such that when a white person organizes a vigil and spreads the word through his social networks, that message will not automatically filter into Black queer circles.  When I mentioned this afterwards to Ted Kerr from Visual AIDS, he added that many queers of color are not willing to make themselves vulnerable to the kind of police surveillance that surrounded the event.  This hadn’t occurred to me, and reminded me that so many aspects of our queer condition are so complicated, and we all have so much to learn and understand about each other.
When the event was over, I was surrounded by friends and colleagues.  People whom I respect, and who inspire me on a regular basis — the people I came to NYC hoping to meet, and the people who keep me here.  I was proud of Adam for making this happen, and proud of my community for showing up.
But I was sad too — not just about the senseless death of this man — but that there didn’t seem to be anyone at this vigil who knew him.  It seemed indicative of the intense divide amongst queer people in this city.  
Tomorrow night, there will be another rally — this one sponsored by the (often idiotic) LGBT Center and featuring Christine Quinn herself — the lesbian mayoral candidate whose policies hurt queer people and may have allowed Mark Carson to die.  I will not be in town for this event, but I am fixated on it.  Will there be resistance to the party line?  Will Quinn be heckled?  How can we best honor Mark Carson’s death?  What comes next?

temporarilyeuropean:

Read it to the end. Bolding toward the end mine.

thematerialworld:

[Photo by Adam Feldman]

Last night, Adam Feldman (theater critic for Time Out New York) organized a midnight vigil for Mark Carson, the Black gay man who was killed in the West Village Friday night.  We gathered on 6th Avenue and West 8th Street, on the corner where he was shot in the face.  It was an intense, emotional event.  I’m bad at estimating these things, but I think there were around 100 people there.  While a few speakers betrayed an upsetting short-sightedness about how violence operates in our society, most were eloquent and inspiring.  In no particular order:

  • Performer and playwright Justin Sayre started things off with a volcanic, passionate sermon about the perceived danger of queer love — how the straight world fears us for the very thing that makes us most powerful, and so the only response is to love harder, love louder, and love more than ever.  His tone set the stage for the event, and allowed people to fully feel the emotions we’d all been locking up tight.
  • Photographer and ACT UP vet Jon Nalley revealed, shockingly and emotionally, that Mark Carson is also the name of a fallen ACT UP comrade.  Jon schooled the crowd about the true cause of AIDS death (not the HIV virus, but government neglect and institutional heterosexism), highlighting the connections between one Mark’s death and the other’s.
  • Long-time activist and Stonewall vet Jim Fouratt pointed out something that SHOULD be obvious, but which hadn’t occurred to me — that there used to be a hospital TWO BLOCKS from that corner, but in the wake of St. Vincent’s closing, Mark had to be rushed to Beth Israel all the way across town.  Perhaps, in the distance between these hospitals, Mark’s life could have been saved.  In that sense, the politicians that allowed St. Vincents to be converted to a luxury condo high rise — politicians like lesbian mayoral candidate Christine Quinn — may have gay blood on their hands.  Jim helped us understand how depriving a gay neighborhood of a hospital is inherently homophobic and violent.
  • A trans woman who was once homeless in that same neighborhood spoke intensely about how vigils shouldn’t be the only time we come together, and how we must take our struggle to the U.N. to fight for queer safety internationally, and hold the U.S. to the highest possible global standard.
  • A member of Queer Fist read a first-person account of the Stonewall Riots, in which a gay rioter’s head was injured on that very corner, his blood pouring into the street.  Another rioter screamed into the city, “THIS IS THE BLOOD OF YOUR BROTHERS!”  It was chilling, to consider the bloody history of that location.
  • Another Queer First member pointed out that this murder was allowed to happen because the killer had access to a gun, and that the supporters of gun rights, deep down inside, are primarily afraid of the specter of the Black gunman, who will infiltrate their towns and homes.  These gun rights advocates feel they need weapons to protect themselves from their racist fantasy.  It underscored how racism fuels violence against ALL peoples.
  • Khaela Maricich from The Blow was like: we’re all going to die anyway, and it’s better to die being yourself and expressing your love and your identity than hiding it and living longer.  Her comment was somewhat insensitive to queers in greater danger than her, like trans people and people of color, but I understood what she was trying to say.
  • An older trans man shared that he was attacked in Manhattan only a few days ago, and reminded the crowd, with tremendous grief in his voice, that trans people are killed CONSTANTLY in this country.
  • A straight mother spoke because her adult son in another city asked her to, so she could share her love and support with us.
  • Interestingly, a straight young woman who lives on that block confessed that her initial impulse was to text her gay friends, warning them to “dial it down” so that no one on the street would know they’re gay, but that, after hearing the speakers, she realized that this was the wrong lesson - that we should “dial it up,” to demand our right to exist.  ”DIAL IT UP” became a chant, briefly.
  • A Black gay man spoke with great anguish, commenting on how not many other men of color were in attendance, and laying out so clearly how different queer people have unique challenges and specific circumstances — that Mark Carson’s life as a Black gay man was significantly different from the lives of the white gay men who made up the majority of the crowd.
  • A few speakers mentioned the importance of hate crimes legislation, and thanked the police for their cooperation with the vigil, and one speaker even said, “THANK YOU TO THE NYPD OF TODAY FOR NOT BEING THE NYPD OF 1969!” and though I had been resisting the urge to speak, that was my last straw

I got up on the box and said something like this:

I hope this doesn’t sound callous, but I was not surprised by this death. Queer people are killed in this country all the time.  I have always thought of myself as someone who is vulnerable to murder.  Four trans women were killed in the month of April alone — four in one month!  So when things like this happen in our neighborhoods, we need to ask ourselves what this violence means.  And we have to be skeptical about solutions like hate crimes legislation, which just feeds the prison industrial complex — an industry that profits from the imprisonment of queers and people of color.  One third of all adult Black men in the U.S. are in prisons, and trans people are disproportionately arrested and locked up.  We cannot continue to support this!  And while I’m sure individual NYPD officers were polite in the lead-up to this vigil, we cannot forget that the NYPD ritually harasses trans people and people of color in this city!  Trans women are arrested simply for walking down the street!  So when we talk about how queer people need to be “safe,” we have to ask ourselves what “safety” really means — because the NYPD does not makes us safe!  It harasses and imprisons us!  We must reckon with these connections — that Mark Carson’s death is an extension of the violence that oppresses so many others, from the institutional violence of governments to the random violence of a crazy guy with a gun.

I make a living speaking in front of people, but talking at this vigil was terrifying.  As I spoke, I felt myself hyperventilating, and I worried I would vomit.  After I stepped down, I sat on the curb a few yards away from the crowd, catching my breath.

I wish I had specifically named the Stop & Frisk policy that makes queers and people of color vulnerable to police harassment.  I wish I had called out Christine Quinn for supporting this policy.  

I wish I had acknowledged a previous speakers’ disappointment about the lack of people of color in attendance.  I wish I had pointed out the sad truth: that our queer “community” is still so segregated, such that when a white person organizes a vigil and spreads the word through his social networks, that message will not automatically filter into Black queer circles.  When I mentioned this afterwards to Ted Kerr from Visual AIDS, he added that many queers of color are not willing to make themselves vulnerable to the kind of police surveillance that surrounded the event.  This hadn’t occurred to me, and reminded me that so many aspects of our queer condition are so complicated, and we all have so much to learn and understand about each other.

When the event was over, I was surrounded by friends and colleagues.  People whom I respect, and who inspire me on a regular basis — the people I came to NYC hoping to meet, and the people who keep me here.  I was proud of Adam for making this happen, and proud of my community for showing up.

But I was sad too — not just about the senseless death of this man — but that there didn’t seem to be anyone at this vigil who knew him.  It seemed indicative of the intense divide amongst queer people in this city.  

Tomorrow night, there will be another rally — this one sponsored by the (often idiotic) LGBT Center and featuring Christine Quinn herself — the lesbian mayoral candidate whose policies hurt queer people and may have allowed Mark Carson to die.  I will not be in town for this event, but I am fixated on it.  Will there be resistance to the party line?  Will Quinn be heckled?  How can we best honor Mark Carson’s death?  What comes next?

(via faroutinto)

650 notes

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Hands Off Assata!

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Hands Off Assata!

(via oscurovolpe)

174 notes

if i was being totally honest on okcupid the only thing under “i spend a lot of time thinking about” would be “my hair”

20 notes

"

THERE IS SOMETHING ORGANIC TO BLACK POSITIONALITY THAT MAKES IT ESSENTIAL to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.

In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental antiBlackness.

"

The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal 

Frank B. Wilderson, III 


doing some work and found this article. this is like basically the entire premise of my paper and the point i want to make in response to this book the two reconstructions which discuss the strengths of the second and the failures of the first (first being 1877 times and second being 1964 voting rights time). the second reconstruction is considered a success but there is immense black disenfranchisement still. frank b wilderson breaks down so much shit but ugh, i have to find a way to use this to critique political sociological type stuff -_-

(via strugglingtobeheard)

70 notes

psilentasincjelli:

claydols:

if tumblr does nothing for social justice then youre obviously following the wrong blogs because i learned more from here than i could anywhere else
i didnt even know half of the problems that i learned about existed or that i was contributing to them

Seriously, educating is a form of activism, and Tumblr does that in spades.

(via hellisotherppl)

3,114 notes

sadhag:

Like its so important to check yourself daily, especially for radical queers bc we get so caught up in calling other ppl out that we lose sight of where we’re fucking up and that’s total bullshit. Unlearning is a lifelong process and none of us are exempt from that.

(via holyfuckmeinthemouth)

232 notes

billierain:

Seattle folks!! this is tomorrow
Deaf Spotlight, Seattle Disability Justice Collective “the DJC”*, and the D Center will be screening two films on the subject on Deaf Culture, with a group discussion to follow. Date: May 18, 2013 Time: 2 -5 p.m. Location: UW Kane Hall 210 Free Admission Scent-free environment ASL & voice interpretation provided. If you need a shuttle to the venue space in order to access the campus, let us know ASAP at seattledisabilityjustice@gmail.com or by phone at  (206) 380-1474. AUDISM UNVEILED (2008) ‘Audism Unveiled’ is a 57 minute documentary made by Ben Bahan, H-Dirksen Bauman, and Facundo Montenegro. ‘Audism Unveiled’ features interviews with a wide range of Deaf people who speak to how audism, the oppressive treatment of Deaf people, has affected their lives and culture. This film aims to educate and spread the knowledge that oppressed people are not alone, and share a common bond with many others who have experienced oppression. This film explores the many faces of audism, and the deep emotional scars resulting from this form of discrimination. This film is a wonderful introduction to a side of Deaf culture that cannot be found in any textbook. THE END (2011) ‘The End’ is a 25 minute film written and directed by Ted Evans. It is an award-winning drama that starts in the 1980’s and follows four Deaf children over a span of 60 years. After the introduction of a treatment aimed at eradicating deafness, the very survival of Deaf language and culture is at stake. Featuring stunning visual effects and an ensemble cast, ‘The End’ is a thought-provoking alternative vision of the future. This tale is told in British Sign Language with voiceover, and open captions. *The Seattle Disability Justice Collective is a grassroots organization founded in 2011 that organizes events that are political, cultural, artistic and educational regarding disability justice. Disability justice to us means building more liberated communities and movements by making connections between disability, race, gender, class and sexuality and *centering the experiences of those often marginalized in disability communities.

billierain:

Seattle folks!! this is tomorrow

Deaf Spotlight, Seattle Disability Justice Collective “the DJC”*, and the D Center will be screening two films on the subject on Deaf Culture, with a group discussion to follow.
Date: May 18, 2013
Time: 2 -5 p.m.
Location: UW Kane Hall 210
Free Admission
Scent-free environment
ASL & voice interpretation provided.
If you need a shuttle to the venue space in order to access the campus, let us know ASAP at seattledisabilityjustice@gmail.com or by phone at
(206) 380-1474.

AUDISM UNVEILED (2008)
‘Audism Unveiled’ is a 57 minute documentary made by Ben Bahan, H-Dirksen Bauman, and Facundo Montenegro.
‘Audism Unveiled’ features interviews with a wide range of Deaf people who speak to how audism, the oppressive treatment of Deaf people, has affected their lives and culture. This film aims to educate and spread the knowledge that oppressed people are not alone, and share a common bond with many others who have experienced oppression. This film explores the many faces of audism, and the deep emotional scars resulting from this form of discrimination. This film is a wonderful introduction to a side of Deaf culture that cannot be found in any textbook.
THE END (2011)
‘The End’ is a 25 minute film written and directed by Ted Evans. It is an award-winning drama that starts in the 1980’s and follows four Deaf
children over a span of 60 years. After the introduction of a treatment aimed at eradicating deafness, the very survival of Deaf language and
culture is at stake. Featuring stunning visual effects and an ensemble cast, ‘The End’ is a thought-provoking alternative vision of the future.
This tale is told in British Sign Language with voiceover, and open captions.


*The Seattle Disability Justice Collective is a grassroots organization founded in 2011 that organizes events that are political, cultural,
artistic and educational regarding disability justice. Disability justice to us means building more liberated communities and movements by making connections between disability, race, gender, class and sexuality and *centering the experiences of those often marginalized in disability communities.

(via mzmew)

9 notes