[39/365] salty February

[cosmolinguist]

Ah, LGBT History Month, when a cishet friend comes out of the woodwork to ask me if a grid of four piride flags is "the best flag option" for this thing she's doing at work I guess (at a job I didn't know she had because she hasn't talked to me forever). I didn't know where to start with a reply; there was no sense of what these flags would be used for, if there'd be accompanying history for all four (well, five; the rainbow flag had two words "gay" and "lesbian" over it whereas the others (bisexual, transgender, and asexual) only had one) types of queer, or what.

Normally this kind of tokenism isn't something I encounter in my life, because so many of my friends are also from the back half of the LGBT+ acronym. But it does happen that people just see me as straight or whatever, only for me to find they'll validate me if they need something: I was ostracized by the gay clique at an old job because they knew I was married to a man and therefore I can't be a Proper Gay, but then the meanest one suddenly came to me for advice because she had her first ever crush on a butch woman and thought my short hair and Doc Martens apparently meant that I could give insight into The Butch Mind. Like, once it's useful, then I can be queer.

Comments

[otter]

Ugh, people. Well, too many of them. Ugh.

[finding_helena]

Oh yuck. I'm sorry.

[sfred]

Huh. :-\

[softfruit]

Has anyone coined "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer syndrome" for this?

[cosmolinguist]

Oh my gosh I never heard that before, but yes that's exactly what it is! I'm gonna do my best to remember this name and probably forget start calling it this.

[softfruit]

AFAIK I was making shit up as I went along in proposing it.

[silveradept]

That is a really solid idea, and now I wonder what TVTropes has tried to coin it as.

[silveradept]

That flag project looks like it will be a nightmare, but also, aigh for the tokenizing and the sudden relevance when you have value they want to use.

[cosmolinguist]

I mean I don't even know what my friend wants the flags for. When I asked they just said something like "a representation of all the different communities" and I was like... ...this is not all of them, and please include at least some history of the flags you are including? And they thanked me so I guess they got what they were looking for out of me? But yeah for all I know this is just going to be a pretty, colorful background on a PowerPoint slide or something, I have no idea what it's going to be used for.

[silveradept]

That sounds like the sort of thing where ours going to be a Thing, and they're going to thank you as a consultant on it, we've you have to explain that you weren't actually consulted at all.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I was thinking, I'm worried I'll end up being thanked vaguely but at least it's in a cintextI'll never see. :)

[tarasacon]

A) ugh.

B) Instead of a weird, inadequate sampler, they could just use the rebooted pride flag. I find it kinda fugly, design wise. However it covers QLTBG/QUILTBAG, or possibly QILTBG/QUILTBAG (since some intersex folk identify as trans), so ... most of the categories? For me, a single flag making an attempt at inclusivity is less offensive than a sampler of flags that attempt to, but fail at, being inclusive.

[tarasacon]

Also, did I mention UGH!!,

As a genderqueer bi person, I'm okay with a basic pride flag, and would prefer that straight people don’t try to force me to choose one specific flag to represent myself.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah when I mentioned this on social media, a friend immediately suggested that Progress pride flag. I think it seems a lot less ugly as you get used to it, I thought it was kinda weird/inelegant at first but now I'm so used to seeing it that it has stopped seeming like just the aesthetic of its colors and become something I'm just happy to see because I've sort of internalized its meaning.

[jesse_the_k]

My first sight of the revised pride flag, and I thought immediately oh it’s the South African flag. The motion that’s introduced with the right pointing triangle from the left edge is Zip-a-Dee-Doo-dah. .