This Angry Grape has opinions

getting kicked off love island for just swimming in the pool and not talking to anyone

So fun fact from when I worked on multiple reality shows, names redacted for NDA purposes.

Gay people are INCREDIBLY ANNOYING for production when they are on reality shows cause they always do shit like this. Reality shows pick their cast specifically for people who will create drama, so it tracks that bringing in some gay people (in the era that I worked, 2013-2018, this was considered to be new and interesting) would diversify people enough to create some conflict. To a degree, this was true.

But what actually happened was that the gay person, or worse, people, would end up estranged from the other people because Straight People Who Are Fucking Nuts in a way that would be ideal for a reality show are very different from Gay People Who Are Fucking Nuts.

There's one particular instance I remember in which our Gay Person tm wasn't getting into drama and no one could figure out why. Any time anything happened it would just defuse almost instantly. Eventually we prodded during a solo interview and one of the guys said something along the lines of "Mayn gay marriage just got legalized n shit if I yell at this guy I'm being a homophobe". This meant that our gay was COASTING along in this reality show cause no one would vote him out!!

But you know what the PINNACLE of this was?

DATING SHOWS.

One... Very popular dating show I worked on (you know the one) has an unofficial, unwritten rule: you can only have 1 queer woman in the cast of ladies. This is because for a solid few years, if ever there were two bisexual women in the show, they would ALWAYS abandon the man and run off together instead. You can't have contestants saying shit like "this guy has no personality and sucks ass. I prefer this girl I met who actually listens to me". Like this was an actual epidemic in the casting. It happened over and over for YEARS and they couldn't find a way to stop it without literally separating the women from each other, which obviously wouldn't be good for the show. They also couldn't show this was happening because that. Uh. Would be pretty bad to reveal to audiences.

Eventually they just decided to subtly prod and see if women who were going on the show were gay and then avoid having two on the same season at the same time. To my knowledge they still do it this way.

Anyways the summary is that gay people are fucking crazy in a way that heterosexual tv just does not know how to handle

Amber Glenn the woman that you are.

The first openly queer US female figure skater, breaking stigmas and speaking out on issues in the figure skating world around mental health, homophobia and misogyny. On top of that she’s an extremely powerful skater with beautiful artistry. Love her.

going on hormones and starting to pass as a man is a mixed bag. obviously that is The Goal. but like

pros: yay! i finally look like a guy! people think im a man!

cons: im only noticing that people perceive me as male because of misogyny 90% of the time

it's shit i didn't even register before transitioning too. i went out with my friends to a diner yesterday, one is a girl and the other gets clocked as a girl, and when we went in and they asked for the name of the table they asked Me specifically. like looked dead in my eyes and asked Me. i was addressed when it orders and payment first as well. like. Damn. Okay. Shit

being trans in any direction gives you this but with like a multiplier effect

trans women should not have to be sexy to you for you to respect them. Aaaaaand post

Peak trans woman experience is knowing you can remove the word trans from any sentence about our struggle and everyone will easily recognize it as a true and valid battle against patriarchy. But the moment trans is inserted back and we get radio silence from half the people who would otherwise agree. If we're lucky.

yeah

yeahhhhhh

This satire article resonated with me so much

Pride isn’t a parade or a riot or fuck of all things an “intifada”; it’s not an event or a thing you go to; pride is in you, it’s in me; it’s the love I have for the parts of me people refuse to love, and no bigot of any kind can take any part of that from me.

I’m Jewish and queer and if you don’t like either of those things, that’s too damn bad.

Allow me at your event or don’t, my pride is mine, and nothing you can say can ruin that for me.

im curious about a specific generational divide

because it happened to me and im wondering if this was a product of the ongoing cultural change around gay issues. before i ever had the chance to say to my parents "i am this" my mom was already sitting me aside to tell me "if there is anything you want to tell me, i want you to know ill accept you no matter what"

My mom tried but she was extremely clumsy about it and actually scared me further into the closet.

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

RATING: RELIABLE

you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here

unfortunately i dont think its queerbaiting if the creator is just so terminally heterosexual that they never remotely considered the same gender relationship their show is centered around could be read as romantic. it is deeply painful however.

Maybe accidental queer baiting? The way someone may not mean to say something rude, but it may come off rude, so it's rude. Frustrating either way.

Not being a dick, just a friendly clarification.

By definition you can't accidentally queerbait. Queerbaiting is specifically using a same sex pair from the show to market the show to queer audiences with no intention of ever following through on a romantic relationship.

There is officially licensed Destiel merch signed off on by Kripke. Teen Wolf had a commercial with the actors for Derek and Stiles draped over each other talking about being "on a ship." Both shows actively used scenes between them as marketing while actively mocking fans for wanting them together. Sherlock has multiple characters refer to Johnlock as a couple, including characters we're supposed to believe are never wrong about human behavior and pushed those scenes in marketing. Then they acted insulted when fans saw them as a couple.

That's queerbaiting.

Done on accident it would just be queer subtext. Done because they had no other choice due to censorship is queer coding.

The specific meaning of the word is really starting to get lost and it's a pretty important one to keep accurate. It describes a very specific phenomenon that was done repeatedly and maliciously for decades and is meant to examine that specifically.

Doing it on accident sucks, but it isn't a tactic of capitalism intentionally intended to suppress queer representation while making money from queer fans.

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

PS: if you liked this, there’s a whole book of these comics available now!

I’m reblogging this 7-year-old comic of mine because, not only is it somehow still circulating, it just passed 400,000 notes??? Thank you, several hundred thousand internet strangers, for keepin’ this ol’ goat girl goin’ so long

(Also hi, I’m still making fairy-tale-flavored lesbian romance comics and have a new one coming out very soon…)

my mom’s trans allyship is on another level

she once called my friend’s deadname “that stupid thing his mom calls him”

I was once talking to my 75 year old Chinese dad in passing about a trans friend of mine not getting along with her family and he asked why and I said err, because she's trans, dad.

He asked: "Oh, was she the only son or something before *waves hand*?" and I was like, warily, no she has two brothers. And he responded with a great deal of confusion: "Then what's their problem?!?!"

Later on: "Anyway, even if she WAS the only son, that's not her problem, that's THEIR problem. They should have had more sons if they were going to be bothered about it."

Knowing what I know about chinese culture there’s something so beautifully simple about his logic of “no son to carry on family name/look after them in old age/all the other stuff? Skill issue! Should’ve had more sons! Should’ve kept the family unit strong yourself! Blaming your daughter for your own failure of family planning is W E A K!” and then he learns there are more sons and it completely breaks his train of logic because if yes to more sons then why issue?? You have two others and you’re mad you don’t have three?? Whack. Greedy.

I can already envision him as an ancient lord of a powerful house looking down his nose at the latest messenger bringing gossip from the house of his offspring’s friend and going “now they have a daughter to marry into another family for powerful alliances and two sons to take over her former duties and somehow they’re still complaining about their good fortune? They shall not survive the winter.” and then sipping his tea with all the grim satisfaction of someone about to watch an unnecessary soap opera of drama unfold from a safe distance or something

Reblogging this manually. Op doesn't want credit for fear of being terminated.

Source

Happy Pride Month!

yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.

I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.

Asexuals were always part of pride and it really fucking shows when people think it's a recent term.

Although not going by the term "asexual" yet, asexuality was spoken about alongside homosexuality as far back as the 1890s. Asexual history is just as vital to queer history as any other term and I'm so tired of watching us being treated like a new thing

This image is so so fucking important to me

Reblog this, cowards

Happy Pride!

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.