They/Them. Queer, Jewish, 25. Been here too long
When a physicist falls in love :)
Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.
I have another dog to put on this theoretical show. The original story can be found at this link. If the link breaks, it's a story on NotAlwaysRight called "Absolutely The Goodest Boy"
I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.
About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.
The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.
It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.
Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.
They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”
“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”
It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone.
And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”
The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”
When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.
They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.
When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”
After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.
Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.
It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.
We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.
She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”
Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”
“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.
“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”
And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.
every time i see this post i cry a little just out of sheer overwhelming emotion. gosh. but so I have a bit of a story that started as a tag ramble but got too long, and it’s… not similar, exactly, except for how it is, I think, because it’s about keeping the world blooming into something better.
so i was realizing i was queer and not actually a fan of the conservative party about the same time OP was. i’d been raised conservative and evangelical, in the southwest and also in florida, and everyone i knew for most of my life was that way.
so in early 2005, I hadn’t really followed anything about gay rights or anything like that until extremely recently. I didn’t know much about gay rights, but I knew gay people had gotten AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and I knew that they weren’t able to get married or join the army, and I knew my favorite character in First Wives Club was Annie’s adult daughter who was a lesbian college student and was complete #stylegoals for me in the early aughts.
In fall of 2004, I’d met some other kids who were about a grade behind me at a NaNoWriMo event, and I’d ended up going to see the tour of RENT that came through with one of them. They became, quite quickly, my very best friends, and all three of them were queer (two of them even started dating around when I met them, I think). They weren’t religious the way i was, they were liberal (as much as you generally got in high school in 2005), and they were newish friends but they were kinder and more supportive than anyone i’d ever met through church. They were the ones who’d reach out to me when i was having a rough time to make sure i was okay, they were the ones concerned about my wellbeing when i wasn’t sleeping or something. They were queer but… they were good people and i could recognize that in them. I thought that maybe they shouldn’t be doing gay stuff, but I was also starting to wonder why that was a bad thing in the first place. Literally could not figure out what harm could come from two girls or two boys loving each other.
I remember a month or two before i finally came out to those friends and kissed the girl who is now my wife, my mom and i got in a fight about me being friends with them because they weren’t “appropriate friends”. and i was mostly just tired and annoyed and prepared to go ‘okay mom’ until she was done rather than it being a fight, because I’d heard this before about my friend Willow and done the same thing.
but then she said “people LIKE THAT won’t be there for you when you need them. they will abandon you at the first sign of trouble.” To this day i’m not 100% sure if she meant non-christian or if she meant ~QUEER~ (or both), but either way i went from ‘just wait it out and pretend to agree’ to absolutely incandescently angry in the time it took me to parse what she’d said.
I lost my temper completely and for once I didn’t and still don’t feel bad about it. I screamed at her at the top of my lungs over this: about how they were the only ones who’d BEEN there for me, about how they didn’t need me to be perfect to be acceptable, about how they loved me even when i screwed up and had never ONCE made me feel like i was unworthy of love because I didn’t live up to some standard I could never quite reach. Unlike everyone i’d ever met through church and ESPECIALLY unlike her and my dad.
and in retrospect while i turned my sexuality over in my head a bit longer to be sure, i think that’s when i knew i was queer and that I wasn’t ashamed of it and was in fact proud of it. I parsed it at the time as pride in my friends, but looking back? It was pride in me. Because i didn’t want to be part of any family that would talk so cruelly about people who’d been so kind, just because of who those people loved and who they did or didn’t pray to. And I knew I DID want to be part of a family of misfits and outcasts who refused to sit down and shut up while people treated others like that.
In 2005 it was scary sometimes even just to openly be an ally of queer people, let alone openly queer yourself. Things had improved in a lot of ways, but it was still scary. You still couldn’t get married, which meant that if something happened to you, your spouse had no legal rights to make medical decisions, keep custody of your kids, keep your possessions, plan your funeral. You still couldn’t come out if you were in the military. There weren’t feel good queer stories that were easy to find - even the well written stories were almost exclusively tragic. (I discovered To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in late 2005 or early 2006, and it was the only story I had for YEARS where there were queer characters and they got a happy ending. I relished it. I still do.)
The point of all this is that I was proud, I wanted to be queer and to not sit quietly and assimilate but be loud and proud and unapologetic, but by fucking god it was scary and not always safe, so sometimes I did end up hiding it. And then things got better. Not everything, but… I was able to get legally married to my wife. I was able to get a testosterone prescription without needing to be psychologically pathologized. I was able to find a job in the midwest of all places where I can have “he/him” in my email signature but still wear skirts and not have any of the people I work with (at one point they’d all been 40+) question it or push back. We were helping the world keep blooming into someplace that doesn’t suck so much all the time!
But it’s starting to get worse again. My state’s passed legislation trying to dictate public bathroom use based on genitals. The supreme court is overturning many landmark decisions, and I know the moment they can, they’re coming for Obergefell v. Hodges, the legislation that made my legal marriage valid in all states (including the one I currently live in), not just the state I was married in (which is not the state I currently live in).
So we need to keep fighting. We need to get incandescently angry and we need to be there for each other. We need to scream at the top of our lungs at cruelty and injustice, and we need to be kind and support each other, especially when times are rough. We need to BE a family of misfits and outcasts who refuse to sit down and shut up while people treat our siblings and ourselves like this. Because that’s what they want. And we can not give it to them.
My fellow museum pros: we should be looking at the current strikes happening and be taking notes
Some museums that are striking;
100k notes and i'll @ my crush on this post
wrong. You have until august 1, 2023.
you have one week remaining.
lets maybe calm down and think about the decisions we've made
hi your local jew here reminding you that cherubim, seraphim, nephilim, and words of that nature ARE PLURAL and therefore should not be used to refer to a singular one of these creatures like i see every day of my g-dforsaken life
a single instance would be referred to as a cherub, a seraph, a nephil, et cetera
these words originated from hebrew, and in hebrew -im and -ot are our plural endings. so if you say, like, nephilim in order to refer to a single nephil, it’s like you’re saying “look, a dogs!” it just doesn’t match up and you look really silly
goyim you can reblog please do so to spare yourselves and your friends from this thing that i legitimately see everywhere i turn
this isn’t witch shit. unless you are a JEWISH WITCH you should not be reblogging this with those tags. judaism is a closed culture (with opportunity to convert) and while i know witchcraft has a hard-on for using our Mystical Exotic Middle Eastern Symbols and Creatures you don’t get to use our culture without being part of it
fireflies lighting up a rural Pennsylvania field at dusk
As a european i sometimes forget furefkied are actually real and not american folklore/cryptids. Like you’ve got friendly little bugs that glow in the dark….. b r uh
in case europeans were worried: we love them very much! even tho they’re clumsy and slow and sometimes bump into you, no one swats fireflies here, or takes them for granted. even grownups sometimes reach out in the summer and gently catch a firefly for a minute before letting it go.
By “reach out” that’s meant quite literally–you just kinda. Stick your hand in their flight path and they land on you and will sit on your hand for a bit. Sometimes if you’re just walking or standing outside while they’re active you have to shoo them off you because they’ll just. Sit on you.
They’re harmless and very pretty and it’s always a treat to see because they’re out for a relatively short time each year.
Now is an excellent time to tell your Democratic Congress Critters trans Healthcare is important
If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:
Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.
Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/
This is extremely important, y'all. They're trying to Hyde Amendment trans care for people of all ages.
Medicaid and Medicare coverage would go away, no matter what state you are in. ACA plan coverage would go away. Hospitals would fully just have to stop offering trans care, full stop, or lose their federal funding.
I know we hate the phone but we absolutely can't sleep on this. If you have a Democrat rep, you absolutely have to tell them to hold the line against this.
between tumblr being found guilty of moderating lgbtq content unequally during the 2018 ban in court and @ sorryforpartyrocking being nuked for suggesting one of tumblr staff may have investment in defending terfs to now many different trans women having their text posts and selfies being flagged as mature without the opportunity to appeal in any meaningful way (one of which was nuked herself)… it’s very. hmmmm. it’s a bad look. as if staff wasn’t already on thin ice for refusing to engage in any effective way with hate speech. “queerest space on the internet” my ass
