Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

i regularly go months at a time without a drink, will have the odd one socially but mostly like to get good and sloppy by myself. what you'd call a problem drinker basically.

saving up for galapagos trip and hoping to add siloli desert but then i start thinking i should also add costa rica and where do i draw the line

that sounds amazing! wow. i hardly travel.

i don't drink MUCH during the week but i can def hang with the best of em if i'm in the right mood. lately i've been having a hard time figuring out what my drink is tho, i was a Manhattan rocks guy for years but i need to change it up.

yeah i never travel. i think the reason i'm trying to cram so much in is idk when or if i'll take another trip.

yeah i also don't have a regular drink order, depends on the place.

was thinking about "gaydar" and how i used to be much better at reading into subtle ambiguities and i feel like it's no longer a thing? is it just cause i've stopped looking or is gaydar obsolete now due to growing mainstream acceptance, dating apps or something else?

I ordered gaydar in 1999, was told it was on back order, still hasn't come in.

'gaydar' is a pretty funny word

haha, yeah it was always framed as like a sixth sense, there is probably a bad psychology today article on 'demystifying gaydar' that breaks it all down

was a Sunday piece at Pitchfork iirc

it has 'wacky 90s sitcom' energy

dm that sounds like an amazing trip!

i also don't travel much, at least by air, but i like to spend a few days in the utah desert every month or so if i can swing it.

maybe ppl know this since i feel like i've said it a bunch but i'm no-alcohol. it's just what i gotta do and it's no stress at this point.

i hear that, i can never take another hit of weed again myself and i don't miss it

googled utah desert pics, wow, i thought this place only existed in roadrunner cartoons. do you camp overnight? the sky must be incredible.

in 20 years i've been to london and socal once each to see fam, that's it. this trip is actually terrifying

'wacky 90's sitcom energy' is otm, maybe it's due a resurgence, like cargo pants.

i love to travel, but also am cash-poor a lot of time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i love weed

i'm a spoiled baby who stays in motels when i go to the desert now. i used to do more camping. i don't have much gear atm. i'd like to do a backpacking trip with someone who enjoys it and knows the ropes. maybe a class or something. the sky is very good there yes.

i'm really getting into the rock art sites. i used to not get it, because i am a fool in a world of fools. young pine is an artist who is also into them, so we went to horseshoe canyon and hiked to the great gallery a few weekends ago. about 7 miles round trip. very deep desert wilderness. we didn't see anyone else all day. the panels and the journey to them are just overwhelmingly beautiful. really high on my list of aesthetic experiences and incredibly romantic too :)

map, my god, I love backpacking, I would go on a trip with you any time. husband and I have taken many backpacking and camping trips, nothing more than a few weeks, but it's legit one of my favorite things to do.

i am also a little bit more of a princess than I used to be, tho— i like a shower and an actual bed.

but i think we are planning for something this summer, which rules.

that's awesome tabes. backpacking with you fellas sounds like it would be great fun, good vibes, not to be missed. i'll be sure to check in with ya about your summer plans.

i mean send me a postcard with like a perfume bottle from the gift shop at the end of the trail or something, cuz you know the only backpack i carry is to the mall :D :D :D

It's called musk, Swen!

i also love camping but yeah need a "guide" who brings the gear and actually knows what they're doing. Dated such a person once and it was a blast. i HATE rock climbing though :D
never done more than a few days but used to fantasize about living in the wilderness forever. Harriman State Park near NYC is really nice, has glamping sites too. the desert makes me goofy, it's romantic as hell for sure. Never seen rock art in person, that's wild.

used to make art & i was sorta serious but felt i needed w33d to access the voice so yeah that got ugly lol

what desert have you been to, dm?

Joshua Tree National Park with my brother. We just went for a weekend and did a couple of day hikes. No camping.
Siloli desert has a little rustic hotel for the tourists and guided Jeep excursions, so I'll be more tethered out there, too.

siloli looks incredible. i still haven't been to joshua tree! gotta fix that.

Copland told Bowles to work hard through his 20s. “If you don’t work hard in your 20s, who will love you when you’re 30?”

― a hyperlink to the past (flamboyant goon tie included)

i think a lot about this old song by dead fingers talk called "nobody loves you when you're old and gay"

i don't think the premise of that song holds up to fact-checking but i am really self-conscious about my age

been thinking a lot about relationship stuff lately what with my girlfriend having her own thing to do.

today what i'm missing most are role models, i need people to look up to

five years ago when i started out there were plenty of people to look up to, plenty of people i admired, plenty of people where i said "oh my god i wish i could be as cool as her"

somehow i am the elder, i am the person people look up to. i've been doing this for five years. i have no idea what i'm doing. and five years is longer than nearly everybody else, and 48 years is older than almost everybody else, and i pass and i've had _bottom surgery_ and i have a _job_

and what am i doing here? what the fuck am i doing here? people act like portland is queer paradise, and well there sure are a lot of queer people out here. traumatized, fucked up, hanging on by our fingernails. i was telling my girlfriend... one of the reasons i held to my marriage so much was because having a Cis Partner was so important to me, because all of the trans people i know... it's the allostatic load, trans people have to deal with this shit that other people just don't. i wish she hadn't been abusive. i wish i hadn't had to leave.

my emotional judgement is that trans people are all fucked up, all of us, "boys in the band" style. i try to fact check that and i can't successfully challenge that judgement. what am i gonna do? i'm trying to not be fucked up in a sea of fucked up, traumatized people. who can i talk to? who can i socialize with? who can i cuddle with, do kink with? what options do i have for _community_?

i'm coming up blank. everywhere i go i see people doing fucked up shit to each other, fucked up shit to themselves. there aren't a lot of people here i trust not to hurt me. not after what i've seen.

i'm thinking of leaving. there's nothing keeping me here anymore. no spouse. no house. a job i hate and am trying, without success, to get out of and which, more importantly, i can do remote, i can do from anywhere. there's my girlfriend. she wants to leave too, after everything that's happened. she said i got her blessing if i decide to leave, which does mean a lot.

what am i doing hangin' round? there's got to be something better than this. doesn't there?

was thinking about "gaydar" and how i used to be much better at reading into subtle ambiguities and i feel like it's no longer a thing? is it just cause i've stopped looking or is gaydar obsolete now due to growing mainstream acceptance, dating apps or something else?

― O Fundo Escuro de (Deflatormouse)

it depends on the context

out on the street here i got no idea about anything. this guy passed by and my girlfriend complimented his kicks and i complimented his "protect trans lives" sweatshirt, which my girlfriend thought was gauche, well, i guess it was. his sneakers had _snails_ embroidered on them! like ok i don't know from "gaydar", but if you have snails embroidered on your sneakers you are queer. full stop.

reading into subtle ambiguities is a fraught topic, because when you're doing it with trans people, that's "clocking". it's incredibly gauche, to say the least, to clock someone, even if they're blatantly out, even if there are no significant social consequences, even if they have _snails embroidered on their high-tops_. i'm incredibly self-conscious about it, because the expectation was that one would transition and become invisible, pretend to be cis, ignore one's past life, and to me that's death, invisibility, silence, that's death. and it's a huge struggle to continue to be visible when nobody's going to acknowledge my transness, when acknowledging my transness is considered rude and offensive. and sometimes it seems like the only way to continue to be visible is to let my gender identity define my life which now that i think about it really gets in the way of being gay. if i spend all my time communicating who i am than i don't get to spend any time focusing on what (or who) i want!

but i do it. i clock people, cis people, straight people, i read into things sometimes that aren't there, because i _want_ everyone to be queer. i mean more than that i just kind of assume everybody's queer until proven otherwise. it's a pretty safe assumption around here.

the main thing is that i am loudly out pretty much everywhere i go. doing that i find there are a _lot_ more queer people than most people would recognize. i'm not a good role model in a lot of ways, but i do talk about how queer i am all the time, and it's not just because i'm proud of being queer, not just because of how fucking hard i had to work to be this fucking gay.

gaydar isn't obsolete. mainstream acceptance is a lie. dating apps are trash. i just gotta be more discreet about how i judge others and less discreet about how i present myself. is all.

all this heavy stuff about being old prompts me to quote my favorite recent lines on the matter, from television's "1880 or so":

A face that glows in a golden hue
No one in this world knows what they do
I take my oath and I make my vow
For the tender things are upon me now

In the fragrance sweet of the evening air
I could leave this world quite without a care

map, I love you for quoting a song from what is probably my favorite Television album

I am going to be real and say that I look better and feel better than I did 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. Sure, I shit in a bag now, but otherwise— I am happy with getting older.

The issue is that maintaining one’s emotional and physical well-being becomes more work as one ages, and I don’t deny that this is true for me, too. It’s hard to find the time. But I have found that if I make the time to do one, the other is close behind.

Yeah, I'm way proud of my health and physique like I wasn't even five years ago. Age is everything but a number.

ok i am gonna be real and admit that i didn't know Television made more than 1 album

That third album got a lot of press in 1992, is legit good to great, and made me go backward.

i'm thinking of leaving. there's nothing keeping me here anymore.

i'm in the same boat. 30's were my best decade, i was able to feel a lot, find meaning in everything, become human. in the last year or 2 it's like everything i've learned to value no longer enriches me. i'm eager to break out of established patterns, but so far it's very unclear what i ought to replace them with. i am living in a ghost town honestly.

i'm stuck on autopilot though. i either don't have the discipline or the motivation to change anything.

sorry, this is too much.

the way you describe Portland is really how i always imagined it, based on, i have no idea, maybe Elliott Smith lyrics

i'm sorry my framing of that was so gay male-centric. I'm starting to better understand everything you're going through. i mean i'm clueless, i had to look up what "clocking" means.

i had a talk with my mom a few weeks ago where i said i'm not sure what my gender is, she rolled her eyes at first but then when i said i think i might need counseling for this she 'got it' and turned very sympathetic and supportive. wow, i was not expecting that. for my friends it's more of a political stance i think. we'll call you whatever pronouns you want, even when you're not here .

i am in the worst shape of my life, physically. i was a 29-30" waist size at the beginning of 2020, now i'm 33-34". what's that, 40 lbs?? i feel gross. it's encouraging that you all are in such great shape. if i moved out of the city it would sort itself out without my really doing anything. but that isn't going to happen.

i need something to disrupt my routine, make it impossible for me to sleepwalk through another day. that's why i'm going to South America

i am in the worst shape of my life, physically. i was a 29-30" waist size at the beginning of 2020, now i'm 33-34". what's that, 40 lbs?? i feel gross. it's encouraging that you all are in such great shape. if i moved out of the city it would sort itself out without my really doing anything. but that isn't going to happen.

i need something to disrupt my routine, make it impossible for me to sleepwalk through another day. that's why i'm going to South America

i'm really not feeling as down and pessimistic as all that makes it sound. i'm "comfortable" just struggling with deliberate, decisive action because it's so much easier to keep the hamster wheel spinning

39: living in the shadow of my own past, trying to perpetuate a moment that has ended

40: actively looking for the off ramp :D

Yeah, I'm way proud of my health and physique like I wasn't even five years ago. Age is everything but a number.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

thinking about it, it doesn't bother me that i'm "old". i'm not "old", particularly. i'm better-looking, taking better care of my body, more resilient, more competent, more emotionally well-adjusted, than, well. than i've ever been in my life. it's not so much that i'm old, it's that everybody else is so _young_. what am i supposed to say to these people? what am i supposed to _do_ with these people?

I'm there too. Be who you are. It's not really words -- it's just the power to charm.

i am in the worst shape of my life, physically. i was a 29-30" waist size at the beginning of 2020, now i'm 33-34". what's that, 40 lbs?? i feel gross. it's encouraging that you all are in such great shape. if i moved out of the city it would sort itself out without my really doing anything. but that isn't going to happen.

feeling this. i was in the best shape of my life from like 2018-2020 and then backslid hard once the covid lockdowns began, then i managed to undo about two years of hard work on my body in the span of about two months. i've gained about 40 lbs. since then too. i go to the gym 1-2x a week usually but i'm not anywhere at the level i was at before in terms of exercise (partly because i'm not seeing a trainer or taking a class like i was pre-covid). and as much as i want to get back to that level it also feels so much more difficult now somehow.

in spite of all that, i turn 40 in the fall and i do sincerely think i'm currently at my handsomest. i have little grays and whites in my beard and i honestly love them.

the idea of "good shape" is a complicated question for me. i'm not actually in the best shape of my life and (like most trans people i know) i have a fundamentally disordered relationship with food. i also, though, have reached a point where i genuinely love my body. trans people have a very complicated relationship with mirrors but mine at this point is pretty good. my closet doors are full-length mirrors, and every time i catch my reflection in them, i just think to myself "damn, i look good".

at the same time, just... culturally there's a huge difference in the pressure i face. i never framed myself as a gay man so i'm totally ignorant of whatever pressures gay men face, but there's a night and day difference between the cultural expectations of someone who gets treated as a cishet man and someone who gets treated as a cis woman. i get affected by those expectations a lot! all of the normative expectations of how women are "supposed" to look ... they've never really applied to me, and honestly i felt there was something wrong with me for liking what i liked. i like all kinds of body types, but i prefer fat women. at the same time, though, i judge myself for being overweight, for having a belly, for not being _fit_. like a lot of trans women i know, i tend to hold myself to a double standard. i work really hard to not do that, to recognize that i'm the sort of person i'd find extremely physically attractive. if i wasn't asexual, i'd fuck me. (have i mentioned recently how much i hate _silence of the lambs_?)

addendum/codicil to me talking about "clocking" above... another phenomenon particularly prevalent in transfemmes is known as something like "egg spotting" or worse, "egg cracking". it's been around for a long time - imogen binnie's _nevada_ is a good treatment of the phenomenon and the problems inherent in it. for me there was a certain element of wish fulfillment, not being able to figure out i was trans until after the age of 40 - "i wish i had known", "i wish someone had told me". at the same time, i know that (1) if someone had tried to tell me, i wouldn't have believed them and (2) even if i'd known/accepted i was trans, it wouldn't have fucking helped, because it wasn't like i could transition before i did.

it's complicated though because there's also an element of "realizing the extent of the patriarchy", realizing the bullshit lies we were all told, the bullshit lies i believed, the bullshit lies most people of my generation at least have never questioned. cis people didn't exactly send out a memo saying "hey you know all that shit we said about what it means to be trans, turns out we were, uh, we made some mistakes and we kind of said that most of the people who are trans aren't".

that said one of the things that jules gill-peterson talks about in her new book is that her advisor said to her something like "your job as a historian is not to assume that you know more about people than they know about themselves." _a short history of trans misogyny_ is an academic book and honestly i kind of skim through a lot of the jargon, and i think it does also explain in some really good ways the issues with the "trans" framing, in ways that kind of... helped me put words to some of the biases i had earlier in my transition, and the ways i've come to challenge them.

she talks about "trans" having meaning in two senses - in a certain context, it's a queer liberation movement based around self-identification, but at the same time it's also an imperialist tool used by NGOs to label people in ways they don't label themselves. my experience of "transness" is definitely biased and based around the experiences i've had and the people i've known. gill-peterson talks about the way it intersects with privilege and i think that's true to _some_ extent. like i said, though, mainly what i got from her is putting words to something i'd already sort of been learning through experience. the understanding of "transness" i had early on, one that had more of an... there was kind of an aspiration to respectability. even as a white, professionally employed, cis-passing trans woman in an openly trans-affirming environment, that idea is a fucking mirage. it doesn't fucking _work_, it's not congruent with the lived experience of me or of, as far as i can see, any of the people i know, many of whom are _also_ white, professionally employed, cis-passing trans women in openly trans-affirming environments.

one of the things i had a lot of stereotypes about was... i'm gonna go after jonathan demme, who really is a fine filmmaker whose skill i respect a lot, again. it's this kind of "philadelphia" idea of white, desexualized, straight-passing gay men. a lot of my ignorance, particularly coming from a background of thinking of myself as "cishet", was taking this one particular subset and acting like _all_ gay men were like that. over time i've come to understand just how _not_ true that is.

one of the things that helped me out most reading gill-peterson's book, and i might still be misunderstanding this, but she makes a distinction between "drag queens" and "street queens" - drag queens being what, in a trans sense, i think of as "dual-role", people who present as femme _some_ of the time, and street queens being the "full-timers", the "real life experience" people. marsha p. johnson _didn't_ identify as "trans" in the modern day sense... STAR was for "street transvestite". i'm very much _not_ "street", and at the same time it makes sense to me that she and sylvia rivera are seen as the foundational figures of transness.

and particularly of the "be gay, do crime" way of things... doing "drag" in private was to some degree considered _acceptable_, if not necessarily _respectable_, but going out on the street femme was very often a criminal act. i don't think of my forebears as "trans women" these days. the people who inspire me, the people who made my own queer liberation (to the extent that i am liberated) possible, are openly queer femmes, whatever gender identity they use or used, whatever label they think or thought of themselves as.

fuuuuuck i gotta knock it off with these long-ass 4 am posts

I’m 30 pounds heavier in 2024 than I was in 2020. Happier tho!

Kate never apologize for your long rambles I love them

I have had some successful “give me wisdom” exchanges with elder gays, but ironically the wisdom offered wasn’t what I expected:

1. People will try and destroy you constantly in your life

2. Your life will continue to get harder and worse, in scary and unexpected ways

Both the elder gays who offered me this advice (if you could call it that) are dead now, RIP I loved you guys

When I was 21-22, my best friend was a twenty-five years older lesbian lady. Her life at the time seemed impossibly well put-together— she owned a house! I remember she said, of being 46: “your friends just start dying left and right, it’s shocking”

some of the more positive(?) things elder gays have taught me have been reminders of how contingent, temporary and limiting the current norms of queer culture, discourse, terminology, and praxis actually are, and that today's ideas aren't always the best ideas - which seems obvious but can be easy to forget, especially with so many people and spaces and movements being destroyed and too often forgotten (so that every generation feels like it's starting from scratch and ends up falling for the same pitfalls that could easily have been avoided if we weren't so alienated from our own history)

(I don't want to project my own desires onto a prelapsarian radical queer past because I know it was messier and uglier than that I just wish younger people were more interested in learning from the insights and mistakes of older people in general) (I know there are structural and political and cultural and social-reproductive issues in the way of that and it's not all their fault) (whether I count as a younger person depends on who I'm talking to but I'm partly scolding myself here as well as realising I'm just another out of touch elder to the average teen)

(when I say gay I mean queer because requeering gay is a personal project of mine)

Maybe I'm just in a sad place today, thinking about my friends who've passed. Two close friends of mine, both younger than me, died last year. One of them, the last time I saw him, was March 2019. We had lunch together in Harlem. At that lunch, we were talking about the topic you're referencing, Left. I took a "young queers could learn something from elder queers" position. I felt that there were/are a lot of weird traps that the discourse was falling into. My friend disagreed. He thought that we middle-aged queers (and older) should be in a constant state of being-educated by the youth. He felt that the education should flow upwards.

gotta be a two-way street imho

Principal Skinner.gif

Death -- painful, prolonged death -- was such a touchstone of the previous generation of gay men that in my experience they've only been too willing to talk.