can we like…get rid of the so-called leather and rubber “pride flags” ? it’s honestly ridiculous and offensive to the lgbtq community. those aren’t pride flags.
The leather pride flag is the second oldest pride flag. It has been at almost every single US pride parade and protest in history.
It’s older then you are, it’s older then I am. The leather community is responsible for pride. Leather daddies were the ones chasing away cops when they tried to arrest us for being queer in public back when Pride Parades were illegal in the US. They are still the ones chasing away cops and corporations from smaller pride events and those that aren’t sanctioned by Wells Fargo. The leather community is essential to the queer community and has a long and rich history.
Please fuck off if you’re not going to learn the actual history of pride.
And don’t fucking out your hate in our tags, asshole.
The leather pride flag represents an expression of self which is inherently queer, and a community which has been around for generations. It is not offensive to the LGBT+ community in any way. I have seen cis gay and bisexual men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with trans men, all of them united by their leather community roots. The leather community is more diverse and nuanced than you perhaps know, but that is no reason for you to shit on a community you don’t understand.
Here is a photograph from 1998, displaying the leather pride flag, the bear gay pride flag, and the rainbow flag. This is our history.
A photograph from 1988: Tony Deblase, the creator of the leather pride flag, and a gay man, embracing a fellow member of the leather community. Over his shoulder is Judy Tallwing McCarthy, a Native American woman who was part of the leather community from 1959. She co-founded the first lesbian BDSM group in Portland, along with her partner, Sashie Hyatt.
Just because you don’t know the history, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Be humble, and always assume you have more to learn. Hatred, and outright dismissal of communities you know nothing about, is the most aggressively anti-LGBT thing I can imagine.
The leather community has always included trans people, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. The leather community is global and nuanced. The leather community is where many of us encounter our found families, and our lovers. For you to dismiss that is cold-hearted and ignorant. Just because queer sex is involved, doesn’t make the community dirty or bad.
Do you have any. Any idea. Any god damn clue. How kink intersects with LGBT and queer community. Queer history. Do you know why the community pushed for, and against, closing the bathhouses during the 80s? Do you know who organized awareness campaigns about HIV, even way back when it was still called GIRD. Do you know who created the safe sex pamphlets, the classes, who pushed for disclosing your health history to partners, who distributed contraceptives and condoms and dental dams at parties and meetings and baths? Do you even know where the safe sex education we have now comes from? Do you know where a bulk of the language about consent came from? Do you have any good god damn idea what the kink communities have done for us, and continue to do for us?
Keep their names out of your mouths because you clearly don’t know what the hell you’re talking about
If there is one thing I could say to young queer folks, especially young queer folks in the U.S. who are coming of age in a world that is more accepting than the one I knew growing up, it’s this:
Don’t be so quick to sanitize your queerness and make it corporate pride daytime TV-friendly. Don’t be so quick to jump on the purity bandwagon. Don’t be so quick to speak on what your community should look like before you’ve actually learned the history of your community, and always be aware that there are things you probably don’t yet know.
These things will not protect you. They never have. And all you’re doing is isolating yourself from community, from support, from the strength we all have when we stand together in a world that would gladly pick us off one by one.
Queerness isn’t as hidden or embattled now (in some places) as it once was, but make no mistake: when our existence was illegal everywhere the people you have this knee-jerk “hide the weirdos” reaction to are the very ones who would’ve had your back against the cops and the gay-bashers.
The people who made me feel safe to come out in my 20s flew the rubber and leather flags alongside the rainbow flag and often the trans flag as well. You don’t get to tell any of them they don’t belong anymore just because you don’t understand.
All of this, and also:
The Leather Pride Flag (1989) was created 12 years after the Gilbert Pride Flag (1977). The next widely-recognized flags were the Rubber and Bear Pride flags in 1995, followed by the Bi Pride flag in 1998, the Trans Pride flag in 1999, and everything else thereafter.
Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”
“Friend”
Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.
Plants don’t wage war
Ever heard of blackberries?
Yes, plants do wage war
Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else.
I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.
It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.
Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.
And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.
This post did not go where I expected it to.
Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.
Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.
Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed.
Can second the comments of Kudzu.
I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.
I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:
See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.
Kudzu is an apocalyptic nightmare
They smother every other living plant to death
Those trees under there are dead, they can’t get sunlight. Kudzu takes over and steals everything from these trees, and becomes them. It’s creepy as hell. These plants are basically straight out of a horror novelist’s wet dream tbh.
The bodies of everything the kudzu has slain.
What used to be a house
Someone attempting to drive a four wheeler through it, to give you scale
It’s an ornamental plant kept in check in china, but was introduced to north america where it immediately went rampant and began to spread incredibly fast like a disease, destroying everything in its wake
The ONLY thing that has stopped this curse from engulfing the united states is goats. Apparently goats love this stuff like no tomorrow. Everywhere we find it now, we just bring a horde of goats to cut it down. Everything is fine…. for now.
Kudzu is on time magazine’s top 10 invasive species to look out for.
This little buddy doing his part
Not to keep spamming this post but
“the growth of kudzu as it became a “structural parasite” of the South,[7] enveloping entire structures when untreated[11] and often referred to as “the vine that ate the South”.[13]”
“It has been spreading rapidly in the southern U.S., “easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually”.[2]“
yall it’s been estimated this plant consumes 600 kilometers of the united states every year
it’s been suggested that we just start eating it to make it go away
Adding to the spam: yes, kudzu IS edible. In fact, all parts of it but the vine are edible. The leaves are supposedly great in salads or baked into quiche. The flowers supposedly are great in jam. The roots… Well, if you know how to cook other root vegetables, you know what to do with kudzu root. Feed this stuff to your livestock and cook it.
Gokushufudou: The Way Of The House Husband Chapter 27
This time: You gotta do the cooking by the book.
Find download links and etc in a reblog soon (if you can, hold fire on uploading it to sites until that comes out for highest quality! (that means YOU, MD))
