US Politics: Queer history
May. 15th, 2025 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
\o/ I appreciate the long-ago Quakers who said, "Actually, bisexuals are valid and get erased by the binary."
In related news, Tumblr has thoughts on the definition of bisexual and pansexual
According to this, and a new book I maybe have to read now, a gay pioneer in the UK was blind.
In 1960, seven years before the law in the UK changed to permit sex between men, he had written to the national press declaring himself to be gay. Roger believed that the only way to change public opinion about homosexuals was for them to take control of the gay rights movement – and this required them to unashamedly identify themselves on the national stage. But nobody else had been willing to do it.
It's because of his blindness that this person had to come in to his life: an Oxford student, also gay, who could be trusted to read his papers and write and generally be a kind of personal assistant.
To gay when it was illegal, and then to be blind, required a lot of access intimacy when everything was still on paper.
The article ends:
In the years since, it has often led me to wonder how many other quiet revolutionaries live among us, ready to share their stories, if only we knock on their doors.
So many. I'm sure of it.
Roddy McGristle shows up
Obi-Wan inadvertently listens to Anakin and Padmé having sex multiple times and concludes that it's no big deal.
It's ME Awareness Day, and my train is running 39 minutes late last I heard, so I took the opportunity to finally read this piece in a tab I've had open so long I cannot remember where it came from. It's a really incredible read about chronic illness and narratives as necessary for access to care, and what hearing from ill people does to those in a position to offer care.
I had a dream that I missed my train to London today and it was fine.
Almost disappointed to wake up with my alarm, in plenty of time.
I was briefly tempted to just stay in bed...
Now, on my train back to Manchester 12 hours later, with two hours left to go before I get home, I can say with certainty that I could've stayed home and it would have been fine.