Queerly Beloved

It's just past midnight where I live, and I have no idea how to make this post, but I know one must be made.

Worldwide, we've been dealing with a pandemic for almost half a year. Trump's rise to power in the US has coincided with an acceleration in the rise of racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, and other bigotries that have themselves been on the rise for over a decade. A handful of days ago, yet another unarmed Black man was killed by police, so-called officers of the law, who outnumbered him and heard him begging for his life; in response, peaceful protests against his murder, crying for justice, have been sabotaged by the very same police force and opportunistic white people who want an excuse to be violent.

It is a tragedy and a travesty, what race relations are in the United States of America, and many places beyond our borders, as it has been for some time. I don't know what, if any, comfort I can offer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and others, including Floridian trans man Tony McDade; words cannot express my grief and outrage, and can only be inadequate on their own. Nevertheless, I feel that making a public statement on this blog's behalf in support of Black Lives Matter and the people of color who are terrorized by the state and their fellow citizens is not only the least I can do, but a responsibility.

To the Black and brown members and followers of this community, if you need any specific support, please share in the comments, and I'll do my best to make sure things are safe for you. To everyone, if you have any resources or links to share, now is the time. And to my fellow white people especially, please look for at least one way your can offer your support; here are details on one option that you can do for free.

And to everyone everywhere, take care of yourselves, and do your best to stay safe.

Phew, okay! I've got our community tags up. Or, well, as many as I can think of, at any rate. I'm sure there's a bunch I missed, and fandom tags in particular I'll have to add as we go.

Anyone who wants to is welcome to look over the tag list and request that I add something to it, especially if it's something I missed. This was just everything I could come up with off the top of my head, and while it covers a lot of stuff, I know I'm not perfect and didn't think of everything or everyone. Please also let me know if you spot any spelling mistakes or typos; I'm still not entirely used to the keyboard on my new laptop, which will account for some slipups, but definitely not all of them.

Let's see here, what else. Oh! CW is short for Content Warning, and warns for types of content that people might not want to deal with or, in the case of NSFW (literally: Not Safe For Work), is the type of thing they might get in trouble for having a record of on a work computer. Media is for reviews and shoutouts about various forms of media that have representation of us, good and bad. Everything else should be fairly self-explanatory, I think.

Since Dreamwidth has a tag limit of 1000 for free accounts (1500 for paid, 2000 for premium paid), there may come a time when I have to combine some lesser-used tags in order to preserve some more-used tags. We've still got close to 900 tags to go before reaching the free account limit, though, so I'm pretty sure we'll be okay for a while.

Thanks to everyone who's joined so far, and if you have any feedback, I would be very interested in it!

Edit: It looks like I have tags hidden somehow at the moment? Lemme go take a look around, see how I need to fix that.

Edit 2: Apparently all unused tags were marked as "private" in the tag management thing. There's probably a better way to fix that, but it's late and I'm tired, so my current workaround is: Literally tag this post with every single tag available. (For the record, I tried doing that and then untagging everything, but the tags went right back to being private, so that shortcut is a no-go.)