Queer[ness]
Posts related to queerness.
QAC 73 – 【Asexuality In JAPAN】An Interview ♠【アセクシャルって？】日本ｘ英語圏 || #AAW2018
Happy Asexual Awareness Week! I hope you, reader, are doing well. Last month, I had the pleasure of sitting down with two activists in Japan to shoot this interview about a topic that is pretty dear to me; that is, about the current state of the asexual community in Japan. It goes without saying that everything that’s said in the video is nothing but the experiences and opinions of three people and should NOT be mistaken as being representative of the experiences or opinions of everyone, but at the same time, who better to ask than two of the most active and dedicated people that I know in what is essentially the current hub for ace activity in Japan (Tokyo)? In this 23-minute and 10-question long (bear with me) interview, I sit down with 21 year old YouTuber, ace activist and friend, Nakaken of Seisei Doudou / 性性堂堂, as well…
「やがて君になる」/ “Yagate Kimi ni Naru”: an aro/ace coded, sapphic ‘love story’…?
cw: non-consensual touch and invasion of personal space this past Friday say the TV premiere of 「やがて君になる」 / “Yagate Kimi ni Naru” (“Bloom Into You”), a new anime based on the on-going manga of the same name by 仲谷鳰 / Nio Nakatani. while those who understand Japanese will benefit from the trailer shown above (and here, have another one), continue reading if you’re able to stomach my rudimentary rendition of the basic premise of the anime and what happened in the first episode that has me clinging to my seat in the hope that this particular series may not be your typical 百合 / yuri (sapphic / lesbian) story, but rather an aro/ace coded, mixed orientation ‘love story’. a story about two girls– one an avid reader of romance manga who struggles with having never once experienced for herself the love she reads about, the other having never experienced attraction…
QAC 72 – Outted To Religious Mom: 4 Years Later | HRT | Non-Binary Relationship || #ItGetsBetter?
in 2014, YouTube outted me to my mom and she’s struggled to understand, let alone accept my sexuality and gender ever since. four years later, things are still touch-and-go when mom finds out that i’m on testosterone and in what she perceives to be a “lesbian relationship”… does her head implode yet again? #ItGetsBetter, they said. well, at this point i have zero fucks to give either way, buuttt i made this #LifeUpdate / #StoryTime video for you anyway. consider this me being ‘officially’ back from being MIA / AFK, i suppose.
humbled
it’s always humbling (for me) to be told by someone that something i made / did / said matters to them, but for whatever reason it feels especially… significant? when i’m told it out of the blue offline. i mean, the last thing i expected to happen going into work today was for a coworker, who happened to be in town for an in-house training event, to approach me about having seen me in a BuzzFeed video about asexuality…
…and here we are. again. (cw: homophobia, nsfw)
NYTimes Opinion: “Trump and Putin: A Love Story” This is a three-part series of short satirical video cartoons called “Trump Bites” by Bill Plympton, a two-time Oscar-nominated animator. In Episode Two of “Trump Bites,” above, Mr. Trump’s not-so-secret admiration for President Vladimir Putin of Russia plays out in a teenager’s bedroom, where the fantasies of this forbidden romance come to life. “Trump Bites” is a series of three short video cartoons that combine real Donald Trump audio clips with hand-drawn fantasy animations by Mr. Plympton. The video cartoons riff on Mr. Trump’s absurd utterances to illustrate the president’s tumultuous inner life of paranoia, narcissism and xenophobia [ … ] lying in bed at 1:08am on a Tuesday, scrolling through my Twitter feed, this animation portraying the “forbidden romance” between Trump and Valdimir Putin in which the same-gender status of the ought-be rivals is the entirety of the ‘sick’, ‘edgy’ punchline…
This Is Fine.
in 2015, i wrote a random, word vomit of a post about being “WhenTheStarsAlignHyperRo[mantic]” while offhandedly reflecting back on what little ‘data’ i had to work off of in trying to figure out my own experience of romantic attraction (or lack thereof). it was the first second (in so far as i remember) time i had questioned not being (allo)romantic outside of my head (& journal) while shrugging off identifying as being on the aromantic spectrum.
QAC 71 – Testosterone, Libido & Asexuality: Has HRT Changed My Sexuality? || The T Files #009
six months on testosterone and navigating having a (over)active libido (or “sex drive”) to show for it. as an ace, suddenly having to navigate having a high libido for the first time in my life has been…. interesting, to say the least.
QAC 70 – 5 Months On T: Stopping HRT? | Voice Change | Non-Binary || The T Files #008
from YouTube: (more than) two months has passed since my last T update and a lot has happened…? increased acne, continued voice dropping; increasing body hair, fat redistribution; adjusting to having a libido, enjoying no longer being anemic; a failed health check, stopping T– wait, what?
“You are freaking perfect how you are.”
content warning: homophobia, suicidal ideation …so, my sister sent me this video out of the blue today. she often sends me links to all kinds of random, obscure videos from the depths of YouTube, to the point that i didn’t bother clicking the link until hours after she’d sent it, thinking it to be another one of those videos. needless to say, i was pleasantly surprised. my appreciation of this video is beyond words. <3
landscapes and fissures: navigating ace terminology in Japanese & English
the following post was written for the May 2018 Carnival of Aces on the subject of “Nuance & Complexity“. it may or may not be cleaned up and cross-posted to the YouTube channel Queer As Cat in the future. —— some feel that people in (English-speaking, anglophone) ace communities are “overthinking” things. that the amount of words and identities (also referred to as “microlabels”) which have been coined in such communities is not only “overdoing it,” but even potentially harmful. i’d hope that this would go without saying (but understand that it doesn’t), that i disagree with the former and vehemently reject the latter. regardless of whether i or you or that random person over there petting the stray cat that’s out in the street right now feel such terminology to be useful to us personally, the fact remains that others do and there is immense value in that.
