i remember... what, 15 or 16 years ago now, when i was but a wee little nus, around the start of the mainstream internet.
back when places like AGNPH were relevant hubs for community activity.

when i was first learning about masturbation, and i was first looking for pornography, the characters i would look up were the same ones from shows that came on after i got home from school.

pikachu, charmander.
stitch, reuben.
hamtaro, boss, oxnard, howdy. etc.

i had no contexts to know whether what i was doing was normal behavior, but having almost two decades of hindsight now i can say this seems to be what queer kids do for lack of any queer representation in media.

they take safe, innocuous characters to explore sexuality through.

when i was fifteen, several of my friends in the community were in their twenties, and we frequently sexually roleplayed and discussed fantasies of meeting.

it's my birthday, so how about a complicated thread about queer communities, sex and age?

that's a refreshing one. everyone loves to see and deal with that shit. we're not all constantly exhausted from dealing with the hell world we live in.

let's start by tying it back to the thread from last week about being divorced from the mainstream identity.

when you realize your queer, you become instantly isolated whether anyone but you knows it or not.
and isolated people by programming search for community.

in queer communities, art is traded at a premium because it's a transaction which grants a person identity visibility.

for example, look at my art.
you can tell from it that I am:

- gay
- i find chubby men attractive
- not in a relationship
- have particular aesthetic tastes

having art in a queer community is a form of participation in that community, and it's also a form of peacocking.

the art you purchase or produce is a signifier of who you are. this is a big reason why tumblr's porn ban obliterated tumblr's queer community.

what i am saying is that queer communities presently rely heavily on pornographic art to convey queerness.

and to tie it back to the former point, young isolated individuals are desperate to find the queer communities they belong to.

they do so almost universally through porn.

so by this point you might have an understanding as to why this puts queer communities in a uniquely precarious situation regarding pedophilia.

i mean, let's be clear. every community has really precarious situations. have you seen straight culture? they fucking love pedophilia.

but that's a different thread.

so, back to being young and queer, looking up porn of hamtaro and finding yourself friends with someone in their mid twenties who is expressing sexual interest in you.

Being queer puts a person at nearly a decades long deficit on learning about themselves. Heteronormative individuals are trained and raised into their identities from birth, they're surrounded by heterosexual sexual material, advertisements, heteromatic concepts and traditions.

So we all undergo a period in our teens of trying to figure out how we are supposed to be, and this as well complicates the relationship between queers, pornography, and potentially dangerous adult/teen relationships. There is an urgent need for counsel.

Stating all of this, we can understand that it's a problem, right?

In fact, I'd venture to say that many of us have had these experiences formatively.

the complicated part begins at how we address this vulnerable transitionary period young queers go through.

we can't keep underage individuals from accessing the pornography we create or share in the community.

like, unless that kid has a strict code of moral ethics that doesn't allow them to lie on a "how old are you" check to view mature art.

there's no stopping that.

rapidly losing interest in finishing this thread because i can't end it on a solid point of advice.

anyways. my sympathies go out to young queers because i was one, and i needed access to a community, and access to sexual material to learn about my own sexuality.

i have always felt efforts to shut underage queers out of the community when they're seeking community is harmful, and puts them directly in contact with the people who /will/ talk to them and likely don't have great motives.

i think that laws aren't written with minorities in mind, and are made for the heteronormative world by and for the protection of wealthy individuals.

the situation in queer communities is complex and in no way reflected by the laws of the outside world.

it's really easy to fuck with a queer kid's head when they don't know who they are yet, so it's an extremely delicate situation that requires genuinely benevolent mentorship, but we don't have the ability to vet or prepare our artists for this role in the community.

so understandably, what i'm saying is all of this is extremely murky.

sheesh, what a downer thread.

time for some good porn my friend just posted. I'm going to retweet it, ready?