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Ethan Quinsey

@gaslightgallows / gaslightgallows.tumblr.com

Writer of odd things. Breeder of plot bunnies. Anxious overthinker. Susceptible fandom hoarder. I will make it make sense. | Wife of @meldanya44 | Blank blogs will be blocked. | Queer transmasc enby, he/him butch. | patreon.com/ethanquinsey
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I've had a lot of new people following me lately (I assume y'all are here because of Binge O'Clock?), I should make an intro post.

Hi, I'm Ethan, I like cryptids and weird history. I'm writing a novel about an immortal disaster queer and all her bad decisions coming back to haunt her (literally!).

You can follow the process at patreon.com/ethanquinsey pls and ty 🙏🏳️‍🌈

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Mexicans in the United States now have a direct line to consular assistance at their fingertips. Juan Ramón de la Fuente Ramírez, Mexico’s Foreign Minister, has introduced “ConsulApp Contigo”, a mobile application designed to provide immediate support in emergencies, including detentions. The app connects users to consular services, offering legal guidance and critical resources in real time.

Los mexicanos en Estados Unidos ahora tienen a su disposición una línea directa de asistencia consular. Juan Ramón de la Fuente Ramírez, Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de México, presentó "ConsulApp Contigo", una aplicación móvil diseñada para brindar apoyo inmediato en situaciones de emergencia, incluidas las detenciones. La aplicación conecta a los usuarios con los servicios consulares, ofreciendo orientación legal y recursos críticos en tiempo real.
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mapsontheweb

Adult Transgender Legislative Risk Map, November 2024

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canisbeta

This map is made and maintained by transgender journalist Erin Reed. She read all 550 bills targeting trans people in America in 2023 and 586 so far in 2024 and she scores state safety based on proposed and enacted legislation. She regularly updates the map (including explanations of recent legislative changes) on her site. She has a separate map for trans youth (which: warning, is even more scary), since a lot of policies target minors specifically.

It’s depressing as all hell, but Erin does great work and I’ve been using her maps to plan my career and vacations for years. It’s helped me figure out where to apply for grad school, and helps me keep track of what states I cannot do a layover in while flying because of bathroom bills.

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wolvereaux

here’s the current map as of January 19th, 2025

Since again, Illinois and Washington is looking PRETTY fucking good rn

Source: reddit.com
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ICE raids are starting on Tuesday in Chicago.

Yell “ICE” and “LA MIGRA” to disrupt them. Notify people and use your privilege as a citizen to make ICE’s job as difficult as possible.

Fascism has been here. It’s just loud now. Time to be loud too.

If you cannot attend protests in person, it’s time for you to organize with your community and educate yourself.

Donate to bail funds in your city now. Find the sanctuary cities near you.

Go to libraries. There are groups organizing. Do not let the censorship of TikTok allow these communities to go silent.

What they’re doing to TikTok and the timing of it, whether Trump saves it to make himself look better or he censors it on the doorstep of his new reign, it is intentional.

Trump is expected to issue an emergency executive order regarding the southern US border tomorrow after inauguration.

California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, be ready for ICE and border patrol.

#WTF isn’t Chicago a sanctuary city?

Yes. Trump is targeting sanctuary cities. This report on Chicago was originally a leak, so all sanctuary cities are on alert.

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vaspider

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

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gulabi-gal

Reiterating this again for those of us queers who think that assimilating and making our queerness more palatable to be accepted is the best course of action. Of course, if you’re in active danger, try and protect yourself. But the thing is, being the “right” kind of queer won’t save you, they’ll always eventually come for you too. So be queer out and proud when you can. Especially as the attacks get worse, it is our time to unify.

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fucktoyfelix

Lines of thought that seem Normal but are actually rooted in extreme puritanism:

-Seeing the nude human body is inherently traumatic -Sex scenes in art are pointless -Wearing kink-related clothing in public is the similar to performing a sex scene in front of unwilling participants -Depicting female characters expressing sexuality is always degrading -People's sexual fantasies are always an endorsement of the behavior they want to see in real life -Sex work is more traumatic and coercive than other types of work The goal is to treat sex as just another thing people do. That is a much healthier attitude than hiding it! It's not uniquely traumatic, it's not weird to talk about it or include it in society.

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Hi new friends. Please don’t censor words, especially triggering ones. Seeing trigger words written l!ke th!s doesn’t stop them from being triggering.

It just stops Tumblr’s built in filter (see under settings) from working which many of us have in place to protect ourselves.

This has happened to me multiple times this week, and as someone currently struggling with suicidal ideation, has not been great.

You are not on TikTok or Insta, please use the full words so people can protect themselves. Thank you 💖

“Huh, weird my activity feed is spiking way too much considering I haven’t posted much lately, let’s see what’s oh... Yeah, that tracks.”

This is from 2022 but it's still vital Tumblr etiquette. Please don't self censor the way TikTok has taught you to. You can say kill, fuck, sex, murder, suicide, rape etc etc

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been exposed to major triggers recently because people are tagging rape as “grape.”

Please don’t do that. Just say the word so those of us with the filters in place can protect ourselves. Thank you 💖

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An ex-colleague of mine was complaining to me the other day about the ai problem in her students' papers, and I told her, "Just make your students hand-write them in class. Easy." She looked at me like I was insane and tried to explain how that would never work, but I just said,"That's how we did it for a thousand years. The invention of word processors doesn't erase all that."

To me it seems obvious. Readings are done out of class, handwritten essays are done within it. No more ai papers.

I give all my exams in blue books. A lot of my colleagues have started doing the same. The struggle to interpret student handwritting is worth avoiding the whole plagerism academic protocol nonsense.

Man of all the unexpected Secondary and Tertiary effects that AI Slop could have I think the best and funniest would be if it forced all schoolwork to return to being done in school and thus by necessity killed Homework.

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reblogged
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vaspider

So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.

I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?

They're my fucking hero.

So... I heard from a friend of 20+ years who works for the State Department who confirmed to me in so many words that they can assure me, without specifics, that "all of the suppositions you have made here are true."

So... yep. Passport folx at the State Department really did work incredibly long hours this week just... shoveling every passport out the door (and prioritizing the ones that might be A Problem come Monday) and yes, they did On Purpose make sure that all of them weren't just DONE but MAILED and out the door and in the hands of the USPS so that they can't be told to pull those passports back and deny/destroy them.

This also means they got the OK for the mountains of overtime from the Biden administration to get that done.

This is what I mean when I say that the Good Work is often not glamorous and that we have to prioritize things which actively and immediately better the lives of our siblings. The State Department worker who was still in the office last night at midnight Pacific time stuffing my passport into an Express Mail envelope and making sure that it was in the hands of USPS has done more liberatory work for the trans movement than 100 people endlessly auditing the language others use to describe their lives ever will.

These next years are gonna be real hard. Find something tangible to do for yourself and others, however small, and do it as hard as you can.

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paperjoshi

god, is that why I've been processing a trillion passports at the post office for the last few nights? well now I'm retroactively less annoyed about it.

That means you're also my hero.

Of these small uncelebrated deeds is greater justice made.

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