i do think things like 'give the rainbow back to queers' really highlights an increasing split between people who see queer identities as something primarily sexual or gendered (that affects the rest of your self), vs a more all encompassing, culturally rooted sense of self

for me, no part of my sense of self-identification is really rooted in the rainbow flag? it doesn't really threaten me for it to take on other significations. i find it interesting that for many people the flag - and other non-sexual/gender things- are real sites *of* queer id

im picking my words really carefully here because i don't think anyone has necessarily anything Wrong, but i do think there's a real gulf of alienation between how different people perceive all sorts of queer signifiers as either arbitrary *or* defining of their identities

while it's natural for ingroups -esp persecuted ones- to begin to associate often arbitrary activities or symbols with themselves (eg. brunch is gay) i think there's a meaningful difference when these signifiers come to discursively overtake the original definition of the group?

i think this happens particularly quickly online - where a fun observation that eg some nb people like frogs gets very quickly stripped of context, universalised, and made into this pre-figuring statement that 'frogs are nb'. but they're not, are they

and partly this is probably just an emergent property of how the internet works - loads of sites, especially one that sell to us - tag content by category, tag us by content category, and create (inherently) reductive relationships between different content categories

and while that doesn't make us all think in that exact way obviously, it does mean that the information we interact with is structured according to certain logics, which i think can establish much harder (and weirdly directional?) relationships between things than exist irl

so you get a lot of context-appropriate looseness about what you associate with your culture very quickly being reified into very inflexible, almost mandatory? identity markers, despite their totally arbitrary nature. but im also interested in why people seem to like this?

think there's lots to be said here, about how presenting yourself online inherently involves having to deliberately choose which parts of self to share, which can slip into a sort of self branding exercise, how brands encourage this, how online discourse demands self declaration

but im also really interested in this trade off that seemed to happen at some point in the last few decades (?) where 'being queer isn't sexual' became an accepted sort of rallying cry. but it is

homosexuality is of course about sex. being trans is hugely defined by the way your transness disrupts and interacts with the expectations of existing reproductive orders. even asexuality stands in relation to a sexual mainstream. sex/uality is formative to these positions

the 90s respectability wars (that in many analyses basically won - homosexuality is fully compatible with nuclear family, love is love, we're just like you etc) have sort of been picked up by a new generation? who seem equally keen to disavow how sex figures in their selves

and i reckon that's probably why stuff like 'cake is queer!' 'knitting is queer!' 'frogs are queer!', whatever the platform-related reasons that come about, are so popular, because that de-sexed compromise was so successful queerness isn't defacto sex-related in many many circles

like, obviously all such categories have very fuzzy edges, but they're also not internally homogenous, and i do feel extremely alienated from a view of queerness that doesn't have some disruptive relation to sex and reproduction as its prototypical centre

ive been quite careful here partly to sincerely not upset anyone but also because i have been screamed at for days on here for saying that *overtly* sexual spaces are important in queer culture, and screamed at by people who thought they were far more radical queers than i

and you sort of think 'wow, how does that happen?!' but, if you think that most of those people have grown up with an accepted mainstream queerness defined by marriage, where ~radical language comes out of the mouths of corporate brands, then it makes more sense!

then it's possible to say reactionary things in ~progressive language, it is absolutely possible to position liberated sexuality as a threat to queers as much as to a dominant cishet reproductive order; it all relies on the primary site of queerness being outside of gender + sex

anyway i'm gonna shut up now (get a blog! no) bye

(please don't yell at me, i'm just some guy, i have zero say in how you live)