r/lgbt

Can’t edit flair but essentially a discussion on biphobia

Of course everyone is entitled to their attraction, but as an ally have you ever tried to… you know, examine why you automatically cross out an entire demographic of people who have nothing in common other than their sexuality??? Like that’s kind of what allies do, learning to support better? Honestly I’m glad they don’t force themselves to because as a bi woman when I was in a more fragile period of my life desperate for connection an ‘ally’ bf that hated my attraction to women and made me feel guilty for it would absolutely wreck me. It’s just really unsettling how someone can do that.

Yesterday, I was practising driving; I was struggling to park straight, and my 11 years old brother said to me, ‘It’s a good thing you don’t have a boyfriend, seeing as you can’t aim properly.’ Bro you're 11, where did you learn that?

I believe i have finally figured out my sexuality, im omnisexual!! im kinda leaning on being a demigirl too but idk yet. this is kinda a random post but yeah!

Most people kept watching the World Cup in Saudi Arabia, ignoring all the atrocities the country continues to commit. Most people keep watching the World Cup in America despite Trump's pedo fascism.

Literally, everything comes second after their beloved football, but when red cards are suspended and the tournament is supposedly compromised, everyone loses their minds.

I don't know, I just think it's kinda heartbreaking to see where priorities truly lie.

So this morning I opened X, and below are just a handful of the posts that were ‘suggested to me’. I honestly thought we were on a path of acceptance, yet it’s clear we still have to continue fighting to be able to be visible. It makes me so sad.

‘We need to go back to a time when you are gay, you kept it a secret because you would get publicly told you were disgusting and get your head kicked in’

‘Do you honestly have no problem with people being gay? I’d love to know how many people actually just say that. I find gay men fucking disgusting. Fucking weirdos, they speak weird. I’m just being honest. I just don’t get it.’

‘Having it thrown in our faces is against our human rights. If ya gay ya gay so what you don’t have to push it in peoples faces you weirdos’

There were so many more. Makes me wonder did we ever make progress and it has just creeped back in, or was the hate always there, but did we just have a period where it was hidden?! What do you lot think?

Edit: So after many of your lovely comments, I now realise X is not a viable app for anyone who is different from Cis White Hetro (I obviously never got the memo).
I think I will be doing what many of you have and delete my X account.

I don't know if this is been talked about here and I know most LGBT individuals don't have this view point but I've never gotten to ask people about it, though I'll attempt to phrase it delicately as to avoid caricaturing: What are your thoughts on queer conservatism? Usually I see it defined as sort of assimilationist or conformist; that we should conform to the same sort of entrenched, systemized gender norms as everyone else and reduce our visibility/saturation in the media to in a sense, placate and mollify the traditionalist establishment and avoid being othered.

Personally, I don't agree with it: I see any attempt to be the "model minority" as a recipe for disaster because, fundamentally, we're still a minority. And the rhetoric around that term has usually been employed as a sort of divide and conquer tactic to make artificial boundaries around minorities in order to promote aggressiveness between the two and make the alienated group easier to suppress. I don't think certain right-wing people will see gay, bisexual, pansexual, transsexual, asexual, intersex or nonbinary individuals any differently just because we "conform" because the status of being a minority is still unchanged. I also just generally disagree with the idea of conformity and rigid adherence to social norms. I think a quote from John Stuart Mill puts it best (though unfortunately even he was an elitist and racist </3):

"Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of taste that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical atmosphere and climate."

To me, human individuality and eccentricity is our greatest virtue; it is the cornerstone of our Adamic exceptionalism after all, the thing that separates us from a lowly invertebrate or simplemindedly gregarious herbivore. And I think any attempt to undermine or discredit individuality usually appeals to dogma or traditionalism and lacks an objective argument as to why we shouldn't embrace our self-actualization. Anyway sorry for the tangent. I'm still curious how everyone else feels about this ideology (if you can call it that) and if you've met any people who've espoused it.

"I will not call you your new name, but I will try to not call you [dead name]"

"You have been [deadname] to me your entire life and that's not going to change."

-Grandmother after asking her to call me by my name, not my deadname

Could be worse but still...

She's thinking with her emotions and not logic. And admitted that. So, I guess it's time to start treating her like a child, because adults should have their judgment clouded by emotions.

Edit: She says this is a compromise for both of us. I didn't realize asking for being treated with basic respect needed to be a compromise.

Edit|Edit: I want to stay in touch with her because "I need to appreciate the time we have left together."

But I would rather my memory of her be filled with happy memories, not the negative ones that we are making now. I'd rather remember her as a force of good, not bigotry.

When I attended Pride years ago, the question "Now that we have marriage equality, what would you like to fight for?" Was posed pretty frequently by individuals and booths. When I would reply "But we don't have marriage equality in america, we didn't gain that when we gained the right to gay marriage". I became more and more frustrated throughout the day, as more and more people asked this, but nobody knew what in the world I was talking about.

In a country where child marriage is legal in 33 states, and people on permanent disability cannot get married without losing the benefits keeping them alive we do not have equality.

Has this language changed? Or would I still have to explain to people why I don't have the same legal rights as them?

Thank you for your time

This year has cracked me open.

I spent two and a half years with someone I loved more deeply than I knew was possible ; a connection that felt rare, almost impossible to find twice in a lifetime. In March, it ended. Not because the love ran out, but because of something in me I didn’t yet understand. I broke it. And I have had to sit with that.

In the months before the breakup, I was already unraveling; insomnia that wouldn’t let me rest, panic attacks that came from nowhere and left me shaking. I didn’t know why. I just knew I was scared, and I was lonely in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone, including myself.

The day it ended, I went straight into therapy. I needed to know what had happened to me; why I had hurt the person I loved most, why my own mind felt like a stranger’s. What followed was the hardest and most clarifying period of my life. I am in the lowest place I have ever been; grieving, ashamed, guilty, depressed; and at the same time, for the first time, I can finally see myself clearly.

I am gay. And when I was thirteen, I was sexually abused. I didn’t know it at the time, or I didn’t let myself know; I buried it so deep that it took over a decade and a good therapist to bring it back to the surface. What I built instead, without realizing it, was a way to survive: a compulsive pull toward anonymous sex and sexual chat, a need to feel wanted, to feel in control of something, to drown out loneliness and shame with intensity. It worked, for a moment, every time. And every time, it left me more ashamed, more alone, until it became the current that quietly pulled my relationship apart.

Recently, I found my old diaries. Reading them broke something open in me.

I was 15/16 years old, and I was living inside a private terror. Because the abuse happened without protection, I became convinced I had contracted HIV. Night after night, for years, I woke up drenched in sweat, my heart pounding, certain that this was the proof; that the disease was already inside me, that time was running out. I didn’t get tested until I was twenty-four. But at fifteen, I didn’t know that waiting, that fear, that silence; I only knew I was calculating. Counting years. Working out how long I had before it would show itself, before AIDS would come for me.

And in those pages, I found what my calculations led to: a plan. I had decided I would end my life at 27; before the illness could surface, before anyone could find out what had happened to me, before anyone could learn I was gay, before anyone could see what I believed was a body already condemned. I wrote it in detail. What I would do. What I wanted to experience before then.
I am 27 now.
I found that diary this year; the same year I lost the love of my life due to my own behavior, the same year I finally understood the abuse, the addiction, the shame I’d been carrying since I was thirteen. My own mind had quietly written an ending for me over a decade ago, and I am living inside the exact age I once marked as my last.

Right now, everything feels like it’s collapsed into a single black hole; the loss, the grief, the shame, the fear, the identity I’m only just beginning to actually meet. I feel shattered. But I am also, for the first time, finally looking directly at all of it. I feel like a digusting person.