at worst the world will sing along

renniequeer:

Reminder that the discussion about needing non-alcoholic and all-ages queer spaces was pretty universally agreed on until asexuals started agreeing that we wanted access to them, too. Then suddenly it was “homophobic” to point out that gay bars aren’t accessible to all.

I have a hair trigger for this conversation because of how many times it has been brought up SPECIFICALLY to drag ace and aro people through the mud. If someone shits on the idea of queer cafes, my hackles go up, because of how often that topic has been used to abuse aspecs.

“do you have a source”

I was a mod on a few different ace & aro positivity blogs roughly between 2015-2019. I have seen some shit, y'all. “Queer cafe” discourse isn’t inherently aphobic–of course it’s not!–but it gets used in a shitty way A LOT.

(TW sexual assault & substance abuse) Also, I won’t go to queer bars anymore. Half my friends are recovering alcoholics, and one of the few times I DID go to the local queer bar, some twink I had never met tweaked my nipple because he thought it was funny. So.

Alcohol companies prey on queer people. Underage queer people exist. Disabled queer people exist. Sober queer people exist. All these are reasons for non-bar queer spaces.

But the SECOND aspec people started agreeing with that? The discourse changed. Suddenly queer bars were sacrosanct and could never be critiqued or you’d get called a homophobe.

It’s directly rooted in aphobia. And nobody really talks about it outside aspec places.

tbh I feel completely insane a lot of the time because of how many things immediately put my hackles up bc they’ve been used to abuse aspecs

but y'all, there is SO MUCH of it

Aspecs have been consistently abused by the entire rest of the queer “”“community”“” for so long.

“dare I say asexual” is a phrase that will immediately activate my fight-or-flight

I can’t look at aspec pride edits anymore without remembering the mass-spamming of aspec tags on tumblr. They were full of gore, animal abuse, and fake pride edits proclaiming people like Ronald Reagan and Charles Manson as “ace icons” for no fucking reason other than hurting people

There used to be a lot of common community pride symbols that were pretty well known across most English-speaking aspec spaces. They’re almost completely gone now.

And I just…I feel so paranoid and insane and overreactive, and it’s so hard to explain to people who didn’t live through it that, yes, there are lots of seemingly-innocuous things that got used as abuse tactics against entire aspec communities. And we don’t get believed.

idk man, I just want to see more people talking about the way pretty much every single ace or aro person has been traumatized and gaslit and forced out of queer spaces. The “it only happens online” bullshit hasn’t been true in fucking YEARS.

It IS happening IRL, y'all. I don’t go to queer events in my city anymore, even pre-covid, because I’ve had falling-outs with multiple ppl in my community who decided to shit all over aspecs. It’s not the only reason, but it’s on the list.

Aphobia is REAL, it has MATERIAL effects, and it HURTS.

(via sepulchritude)