Eldritch Mlems

Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal — because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change.

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street, without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible.

To fight back, LGBTQ+ Americans need to organize, Jay said. That starts with thinking locally — supporting local artists, independent stores and small presses, as well as LGBTQ+ organizations taking demonstrable political action and protecting queer culture.

“See what you can do without going crazy. If you can focus on one thing and you can spend one hour a week, or you can spend one day a week, that’s much better than being depressed and doing nothing,” she said. “Because the person you’re going to help is yourself. This is the time for all of us to step up.”

We see a lot of posts here which are obviously referring to a specific gender or certain wants for transitioning, yet nobody seems to be using the CWs that the rules say should be used.

Why is this exactly? Should we be trying to point this out when people posting here don't? If they aren't ever used why do we have them as rules?

It would be way better to not have society be going through a moral panic about trans people at the same time I’m coming to terms with my trans-ness. I feel like I’d have to struggle with self-acceptance a lot less if I didn’t know that a large percentage of society hates me without knowing a thing about me. I don’t want to have to change out of my girl clothes or take off my makeup because I need to take my dog for a walk around the apartment complex, and I don’t know how my neighbors would treat a visibly trans person. I don’t want to have to worry about when the incongruity between my appearance and my passport is going to become a problem. (Setting aside that now for all my gender markers across documents to match, I can’t change any of them, and they’ll have to stay wrong). I don’t want to have to worry about losing friends or family or my job because I come out to them. I just want to live life being fully myself - what’s so wrong with that?

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Edit: omg everyone please reply to each other with suggested additional nicknames

Several corporate sponsors have pulled out of San Francisco’s 2025 Pride Celebration over what the parade’s executive director suspects is due to the country’s changing political climate under the Trump administration. 

San Francisco Pride’s street fair is scheduled for June 28-29, with the famed Pride Parade scheduled for 10 a.m. on the second day. Founded in 1970 as the Gay Freedom Day Parade, the event has grown to become one of the largest and most renowned LGBTQ+ celebrations in the world, attracting up to 1 million visitors each year. 

Every time I try to work on a project at least one of them has to be involved, probably doing quality control

She absolutely LOVES belly rubs.

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Paul M. would often fill himself with liquid courage before he slipped through the doors of Club LaGrange, a gay bathhouse that occupied a worn but majestic brownstone in a gritty slice of downtown Boston.

Up a flight of stairs, he’d approach the counter, supply his name and some cash, before proceeding to a room or locker, where he’d stow his clothes and don a towel. Then, for the night, he was anonymous and free to explore the showers, saunas and private rooms of the club—each space a new opportunity to cruise for sex.

“I was young, horny and in the closet,” says Paul, now 82 years old; the bathhouses—outside the gaze of the more public gay bars—filled a need for him.

Boston never had a legendary gay bathhouse scene like those in New York or San Francisco—partly due to a hangover of “Puritan prudishness” that augured a tamer scene overall, according to historians. Boston’s gay community, some of its own members admit, was not as “wild” or uninhibited as those in other large American cities. But for a period in the 1970s and ’80s, a string of baths in the city gave gay men like Paul crucial community spaces—which were also on the forefront of public health, before and after the AIDS crisis hit.