so, today we, russian queers, may become “extremists” by decision of russian supreme court and thus our existence will be silenced and erased. any queer activism will be impossible for us. I don’t know what to do anymore. I was heartbroken when they passed the laws about “gay propaganda” and transgender people, now I’m just numb. I don’t want to escape. I just want to live safely in my own country.
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
RATING: RELIABLE
you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here
so my sister’s dog is named communist gun, but we call him red. right? and every once in a while when she wants him to jump on someone she goes “red scare!” and recently ive been trying to get him to jump on people when i go “mccarthyism!” but it’s not working yet
oh this is absolutely the wrong blog. please ignore
Remember that the entire reason the internet forced you to fill in Captchas for the past 14 years is because they were using your answers to train AI in image and text recognition.
Of course the AI can read the text because the entire human race has been unable to use the internet without being forced to train it for over a decade.
The fact that they are still trying to keep up the facade so they can keep charging for their captcha services is laughable since they have made the service useless by using it this way.
not to be that bitch, but the original captcha project was used to train computers to read badly printed words in newspapers and books that were being digitized. this changed in like 2014, about 5 years after captcha was bought by google
saw a guy at uni today wearing this hoodie. i couldnt see the text on the back but i could see there was definitely text and images THERE. i can only conclude that this guy was genuinely walking around campus wearing meth instructions
TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).
Bonus:
These are my people.
Betting I’ve reblogged this before. Betting I’ll reblog it when it turns up again.
In addition to the print terminology stuff: the visual shorthand icons and ad graphics for something about writing are still often pen-nibs, fountain pens and typewriters…
…while graphics of a monitor, keyboard and mouse remain visual shorthand for computing…
…even though most writers now use monitor / keyboard / mouse or even laptop / touchpad.
In addition, headers for “this blog / website is about writing” are often in one of the many imitation typewriter fonts complete with smudges, or just Courier.
The start and end call icons on most / all smartphones is still the handset of a classic desk telephone, and sometimes the open-app icon is a complete phone.
The term “hang up” for “end the call” refers to something even older - one of these…
And of course the Save icon
is indeed a 3½ inch floppy disc.
Why it wasn’t a
5¼
floppy is a mystery. The icon version is just as distinctive.
Also, why various OP updates never changed “Save” to the graphic of a CD / DVD or flash drive is another mystery, and nowadays a Save icon should probably be a cartoon cloud.
Graphics and terminology are funny things.
reblogging this again for EVEN MORE information.
I’m mostly entertained by the guy who thinks you need to know that “case” means “box” in French as though that’s not what it means in English.
skeumorphism my beloved
It’s fascinating. This post alternately made me feel old and taught me something. Tumblr is amazing.
And because we continue to use signs of ancient hardware, youngsters come up with questions like “why is the icon for ‘save’ a vending machine with a can of soda?” (One day I’ll find that post and link it)
following this dude on insta who only has 5k of 35k on his sons evac fund and im so confused cuz he has multiple microinfluencers making videos abt him, hes been consistently posting and asking for donations for at least two months, hes DMing everyone he sees, he’s even got ppl printing his story out and pasting it up apparently. yet only at 5k? after all that time and effort?
isn’t it insane though how schizophrenic people are viewed as violent and dangerous by the majority of society when in reality schizophrenic people are nearly 14 times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than to be the perpetrators…
schizophrenic person: makes a post trying to raise awareness about the disproportionate abuse and harmful stereotypes schizophrenic people face
yall: “yeah im not gonna reblog this they used the word ins*ne which is so problematic ://”
What the fuck happens that changes these stats to such a massive degree?
1) schizophrenia hardly ever causes people to be violent so schizophrenic people aren’t more likely to be violent than anyone else
2) schizophrenic people’s autonomy is often taken away from them because of their schizophrenia. because the authorities and mental healthcare providers often automatically assume schizophrenic people to be violent, they’re more likely to immediately react to schizophrenic people’s symptoms with violence, without even knowing for sure said schizophrenic person was going to be violent. all of this causes schizophrenic people to be more likely of being victims of violence and abuse. schizophrenic people also have a harder time getting out of abusive households because of the risk of their autonomy being taken away. if a schizophrenic person’s relative or partner is abusive, often the schizophrenic person has no way out of the situation, both because our disconnect from reality can result in us being easier to manipulate, and because the system is built in a way that it takes away our autonomy because of our condition.
also schizophrenic people and psychotic people in general, please do a lot of research before picking a provider for your own sake, and if they try to treat your psychosis in a way that you think is harmful then don’t hesitate to switch providers. your safety and wellbeing should be a priority over everything else.
can y'all please reblog this version instead
Sure thing! That was very well-written catgirlapologist also i feel sad that is true.
was reminded of that youtube channel that records footage of that bridge that scalps trucks today. one of the fascinating developments that’s happened since i last heard about it is that, in one of their many attempts to stop the trucks from being can-opened, they installed a traffic light that detects when a vehicle that’s over the allowed height is coming and turns red so the driver can stop and hopefully notice the signage all around that’s screaming “YOUR VEHICLE IS OVERHEIGHT TURN AROUND” and avoid an accident. However as a result sometimes drivers see the light turning yellow and IMMEDIATELY start flooring it to avoid having to stop, ensuring that the roof of their truck just gets fucking annihilated instantly. Really beautiful stuff you should check it out
comics as an art form make me insane. they’re so difficult to do well. there’s so many different ways to make sequential art work and most of them are deeply unintuitive. onomatopoeia that feels completely ridiculous to put down often reads seamlessly. panels on a page become a fractally nested image composition challenge that’s only possible to lose because if you do a good job no one will notice. you have to direct the readers’ eyes on a specific path across the page but also account for the fact that they won’t follow it. comic time isn’t linear. if the order of events isn’t crystal clear the story becomes incomprehensible. sometimes you need to do this on purpose. all this for a medium almost universally considered less effective than animation and less respectable than plain text. even its own name doesn’t take it seriously
a bunch of pissed off vampires stuck in Venice because they can’t go over moving water
Not to victim blame, but you’d have to be a pretty bad Italian to even get turned into a vampire in the first place.
the only two places practically immune to vampires are texas and italy
Let me tell you of A Thing.
Lithuania has no vampires, I guarantee it.
Lithuania has one vampire, and let me tell you, she’s gonna be FURY UNLEASHED once someone gets her out of the centre of that crossterfuck of a burial point.
as a knitter, you start to notice how rare it is for characters in tv shows and movies to knit correctly. from worst to best, it ranges from:
- laughably incorrect, just flinging yarn around
- knitting the most basic scarf incredibly slowly because the actor Learned How To Do It For The Role
- old lady actresses casually knitting an intricate lace pattern while doing a monologue
- gromit from wallace and gromit
1. that’s a garter stitch, which you can clearly see despite it being made of clay
2. they took the time to animate a modified continental style of knitting, including showing how his working yarn is wrapped around his pinky, and that he’s flicking with his index on his right hand
3. he only has four fingers and yet this is better than the vast majority of knitting on tv
an acquaintance told me i had the subtle guardedness of someone who “learned social skills the hard way” and i’d honestly have much preferred they took out a gun and shot me
white americans when you tell them that the idea of climate change as an impending disaster is a reductive first world perspective because it’s a tangible reality for many in the global south already:
maybe if you see south and southeast asians dying in the heat and latin americans dying in floods and all you think of is imagining a reality where YOU are affected, then you should rethink how you see people of color. if you cannot see climate change as a real disaster until it is other americans dying in the heat and the floods and not just black and brown people, then don’t talk about climate change until you can acknowledge the grim reality of climate change for everyone.
Also it is already a reality in the northern hemisphere even if you’ve been privileged enough to not be truly affected by it. But a lot of white liberals don’t really see that either, given tornados and hurricanes mainly affect southern states. They don’t care that the southwest is in major drought without any signs of letting up. They don’t care that tribes in the Pacific Northwest are losing their land to raising seas, or that Arctic natives are losing their traditional food ways. The extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, are killing the unhoused. There is major flooding in central Europe and the UK temperatures are only getting hotter and hotter.
It’s happening and it’s been happening and it’s going to keep happening.
Someone anonymously messaged me to tell me that writing about detrans folks makes me a traitor to trans people, because all detrans people want to push conversion therapy on us and forcibly detransition us.
That’s precisely the kind of narrative that ends up pushing detransitioners into the arms of TERFs and the religious far-right.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with detransitioning. Sometimes people realize that transitioning no longer suits them, or never really did. And that’s fine.
When we systematically push them away regardless of their politics, we make people feel like the only places they can get support are among transphobes. That’s not a good thing. Building de/trans solidarity is an critical tool for disarming anti-trans movements.
You have here, writings that detail Indigenous topics covering or in the style of: manifestos, creative writings, political, cultural, “feminist”, environment/ecosystems, and Natural Law.
Enjoy the readings!
Didn’t know this. BOOST
I would add Schumacher lectures by John Mohawk, and another by Oren Lyons titled ‘The Ice is Melting’. Not pdf’s but available online in their entirety.
A while back my psychopathology class did a basic overview of gender terms because we need to understand it to understand what the statistics we’ were given mean, and all I could think of was that xkcd quartz comic.
A guy said sex was “biological gender,” another guy said that a sex that is neither male nor female is nonbinary, and another guy said that a person who’s gender does not align with their sex is “gay.”
ALT
