Queerly Beloved

Hello, all, and happy Thursday!

This week I'm recommending Trans Lifeline, a crisis hotline for and by trans people.

A particularly important note from their Hotline FAQ (under "Will you connect or call the police/emergency services during my call?"), and one of the reasons I recommend them:

Trans Lifeline has a policy against non-consensual active rescue, which means we will not call emergency services or law enforcement without your explicit request – even if you tell us you or someone else is in danger.

If you would like support requesting an ambulance or calling 911, we can assist you after informing you about that process and what may be triggered.

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm prepared to go into detail about why this is important in the comments (under a details/summary tag), but the short version is that it's a pretty big deal, especially for already marginalized communities.


Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

Oh right, I should probably boost this over here as well:

My sister-in-law would like me to remind everyone that free-to-read speculative fiction magazines Strange Horizons and Samovar pay Pro Rates for artists, writers, and, in Samovar's case, translation! They are also always looking for stories by and about marginalized people: Non-straight, non-cis, intersex, POC, disabled, minority religion, etc. Samovar also offers stories in multiple languages, so feel free to submit something that's not in English! For example, in their recent Mexicanx issue, they had a story in Nahuatl!

The staff at Strange Horizons and Samovar are especially proud to focus on content about a particular identity whenever bigots get up in arms about their inclusion (or, as was the case with the Sad/Rabid Puppies and the Hugos a few years back, have completely misunderstood what the magazine and its staff stand for).

From an accessibility standpoint, they also have a podcast and toggle-able content warnings at the top of each writing entry; as of very recently, the content warnings are also available in multiple languages!

From a writing standpoint, Strange Horizons and Samovar use the broad definition of speculative fiction that includes not only all types of fantasy and sci-fi, but horror, and pretty much all non-reality elements, as well as accepting poetry and nonfiction.

Also, again, my SIL works as an editor for them, and I can vouch that she's good people and is telling the truth about how enthusiastic the staff are about representation in stories.

Anyway, if you like to write stuff (or draw or translate stuff!), or like speculative fiction, be sure to check them out!

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.

With many of us stuck in our houses or at least working very reduced hours for a good chunk of time, I thought now would be a great opportunity to round up some media recommendations featuring queer/LGBTQIAP+ characters! You can reply to this post with the titles of books, movies, TV shows, video games, podcasts, fanfics, webcomics, or whatever else you can think of that folx might enjoy. If you've read/watched/played/listened to/etc something that someone else recs, you can chime in with your own reviews. Suggesting authors or creators in general are also good.

Optional template:

Title:
Author/Creator/Distributor:
Media type:
Summary:
Identities represented:
Content Warnings:
Where you can find/get the thing:

<b>Title:</b> <b>Author/Creator/Distributor:</b> <b>Media type:</b> <b>Summary:</b> <b>Identities represented:</b> <b>Content Warnings:</b> <b>Where you can find/get the thing:</b>

amadi has a tutorial for how to make spoiler-blocking warning tags here, if you want to use it; I've got the relevant code available for copy-pasting below:

<span title="This is a warning that is also a spoiler. Highlight to read." style="color:#666;background-color:#666;">Warning text goes here.</span>

All the fields in the template are completely optional, so use as many or as few as you like, or even skip the template altogether and throw together something yourself. I'm looking forward to finding all sorts of new titles to explore!

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.)