A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - Annoying Gays are Not the Problem

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Autistic nonbinary TikTokers. Loud, flamboyant gay men. The twink who filmed himself having sex in the Senate hearing room. Are gay rights being eroded across the country because some of us are… annoying? It’s tempting to think so, but it isn’t true. Sadly, we can never Blaire White-ify or Pete Buttigieg-ify ourselves to freedom. Support me on Patreon! Find more of Devon’s work. Find more of A Bit Fruity. Find more of Matt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A BitFruity, the show where we don't really care if you have sex in the United States Senate hearing room. Because on the list of the most egregious humanitarian violations that take place in there, consensual gay sex isn't even making the top 50. So last week, someone on Instagram sent me this essay called, Anoying Queer People Are Not Why We're Oppressed, which was about the way queer people police each other's behavior. casting out the weirdest and freakiest among us, and how we tend to cling to this belief that being less annoying, you know, less flaming, less out and in people's faces, we'll make it more likely that the rest of the world will stop discriminating against us.

This mindset is one that I've at times adopted personally. It's one that I think about literally all the time. It's one that people online have used when they try to make the case that like I and people like me are like bad representations for the community because we're too flamboyant or something. And it's a topic respectability politics that I wanted to dig into on this podcast since I started the show. So I reached out to the author. And today we are joined by Devin Price to talk about what it means to be the wrong type of queer person. Devin Price is an author of the book's unmasking autism, laziness does not exist, and unlearning shame.

Devin Price, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being here. Hi, Matt. I'm so happy to have this conversation, and I'm so glad this is a problem that's been annoying other people as much as me. I want to start today's episode by showing you an image. This is a meme that circulates the internet, like kind of a lot, and it usually gets a lot of traction. In this case, it was tweeted recently by a cisgender white gay man named Tyler, who's like a conservative influencer on Twitter. He wrote the caption, Know the Difference. We are not the same. And it's a picture where it's, okay, it's split into two sections. On the left, it says LGBT. And on the right, it says TQIA plus. And over the LGBT part,

there is a photo of the gay, recently out gay football player Carl Nassib. He's like hot, hunky, white, all-American-looking dude. And then over the TQIA plus, it is a picture of Jeffrey Marsh, who is a queer TikTok influencer who makes these like tender TikToks that appeal to like young people who don't have accepting parents. And they are visibly androgynous wearing a dress. and eye makeup and have facial hair. The way that you're supposed to read this image, right, is like, LGBT people are, you know, normal and we're football players, and we can pass in society, and we don't, you know, push anyone's buttons.

And then the TQIA plus people are freaks, and we're flamboyant, and we're cross-dressing, and we're in your face. And there's an obvious connotation here with how you're meant to feel about each of these people. And so I want to get your reaction to this image. God, it reminds me of things that I used to hear as like a millennial who was like coming up during like the gay marriage fights of the early 2000s. The things people would say about like, I don't care if you're gay as long as you don't shove it in my face. Like that kind of messaging that is so tired and you'll still sometimes hear this idea that some people just how they live and how they present is like shoving it in your face in some way. Because when people say things like that, they see being queer as so other that it feels.

feels in their face for somebody to just live. It's just so tired because the reason that we even have people who are the more respectable, straight-laced seeming out queer people today is because of the people who are willing to be the bold ones to kind of be in people's faces, the Jeffrey Marshes of the world. Yeah, I mean, I skulk around conservative LGBT internet way more than I should because it's a form of self-harm for me at a certain point. Something that happens a lot there is this like revisionist history where people will say the goal of the gay rights movement was to assimilate into society. And I'm like, which gay rights movement are we talking about? Not the one that I'm familiar with. It's totally a historical. So before pride parades, before Stonewall, there were these events

every year put together mostly by white, cis gay men called the annual reminder parades. And they started in the 50s and 60s. And they were, again, very cis male, very white. They would wear suits. They were very subdued. And they would just like march calmly in the street saying, this is what gay people look like. See, we're normal like you, accept us. And it didn't do anything. It didn't score any political victories. It wasn't until Stonewall and fighting against the cops and this really diverse coalition of sex workers and trans people and queer people and homeless people all fighting the police that we actually started to see any kind of social gains. So when people, regurgitate that same logic now so many decades later, it's just really sad. How would you describe respectability politics? I would say that respectability politics is the idea that if, as a member of a marginalized group, if you would only act correctly, you would somehow win the approval of the majority and no longer be oppressed, that it's on you as the individual to just somehow be the perfect type of queer person, of person of color, whatever it is.

to earn your right into assimilation. The definition, according to Wikipedia, is the assimilation of LGBT or otherwise marginalized people based on sexuality or transgender status into a hegemonic and heteronormative society. This can be achieved by downplaying stereotypes or behaviors associated with homosexuality, for example, cross-dressing or flamboyant dressing, public displays of same-sex affection, or participating in cisgender heterosexual institutions. And there is a version of respectability politics. I feel like in every marginalized group.

And I feel like every marginalized community has their own, like, infighting about this, right? Yeah, I think everybody internalizes that stigma, right, of what everyone from the outside says about your group. And you really don't want to live up to that stereotype, even though actually most of the time those stereotypes, there's nothing wrong with them, right? Like, what's the problem with being flaming? What's the problem with not wanting to get married, you know, and like having a million partners or whatever it is? we internalize that self-loathing and then we hate anybody in our own group that reminds us of what we're the most embarrassed about about ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like respectability politics, I mean, it's usually expressed in my experience on like through our judgment of people in our group, right? And so in this case, LGBT people who we don't want to be associated with. And so I feel like in queer communities, it's like this judgment that's levied against like very flaming and flamboyant gay men or queer people who, who are in kink communities, fat queer people, sex workers, drag queens, non-binary people, people who use neo-pronounds, oftentimes autistic queer people. The list goes on. There's almost the sense of like, if you're too frivolous, you don't deserve rights.

That like queer rights are this very serious thing, and we're trying to get these legal protections and get plugged into the legal existing, you know, cisgender heterosexual system. but if you need a surgery that's like too weird of a surgery that we can't understand or the way you present is unprofessional, you don't really need to do that, really, do you? Like, can't you quiet it down while we're in public? You're making us look bad. You're making us look bad. That is kind of, okay, hold on, I'm jumping the gun.

So from your essay, a quote that I took from your essay was, I don't think any of us literally believe that the more irritating a person is, the more of oppressing political threat they are. But we behave as if they do. We devote huge amounts of time to complaining about the types of queer people that irritate us and develop complex taximonies for describing why they are so annoying

and why defeating that annoyingness matters. I feel like that's the whole thing, what you just said, right? They're making us look bad. The cringy queer TikToker is giving queers a bad look. Drag queens, being too, in public or people at kink festivals or the Senate twink who we will get to. Like they're making us look bad.

That as a thought process is what we're going to attempt to unpack today, right? They're making us look bad. Who are they and are they making us look bad? So we're going to look at a bunch of examples of that today and try to get to the bottom of this. Like, do we have to cast out weird queers? If we do, I'm first to go. So, uh-oh.

Most of us are pretty weird. And that's the thing, too. It's like when you start scraping back, like, okay, who doesn't belong to any of the groups that are considered weird? It's like literally just Pete Buttigieg. And even he, like, is like, you know how he, like edits his own Wikipedia to, like, list all of his, like, watches that he collects and stuff? What? This is a whole thing. Somebody did this whole investigation and they proved that he was editing his.

his own Wikipedia from like his his professional office and it like updated all he has like this watch fetish or whatever or you know special interest so even he's a freak you know like we're all like weird and pathetic and cringy in somewhere or the other like some of us attend kink festivals and some of us update our own Wikipedia pages to reflect our updated watch collections and you know what good for Pete like I like Pete more now yeah that's like his one really redeeming personality. Okay. So that's so funny.

Because we're on a podcast that some people might be consuming through YouTube, I want to start with some YouTube-based examples. And I actually think especially towards younger people who are sort of maybe coming into their queerness or just coming into like politics in general. The first place where they learn to adopt this mindset of like, we need to cast out the weirdest. among us so that us normal gaze or whatever that means so that we look good for the rest of the world. There are people who devote their entire like careers in media to making content that

feeds that explicit impulse. One of them is Blair White, who is someone who I think about a lot. Like I don't know. Actually all of the people on this list that I have, Blair White, Ariel Scarsela, Buck Angel. Like I wish I didn't think about them as much as I do, but I'm so fascinating. by their ability to turn out the same video every single week for years on end. So what do you know about these people? I remember when Ariel Garcella first became like explicitly transphobic and people fighting against her. And she kind of pulled a JK rolling a little bit where it was like, well, now that you've

criticized me, I'm going to be even more trans misogynistic. Yeah. See, won't that show you? And then, of course, Blair White has been the subject of so much complaints and speculation about like, do you even believe this stuff that you're saying all of the time? Like, and just that weird, just soulless career path of I'm going to make videos about cringy trans people while being a trans person and like just how soul rotting that has to be. And then Buck Angel obviously has been the subject of many a controversy over the years

since that basically early 2000s when he outed one of the Wachowski's against their will and has been basically dunking on other trans people to lift himself up, I guess, ever since. Yeah, so these are all people who have ended up in the YouTube sphere. If you're listening, you might already know who they are. Blair White, I just collected a collection of titles from her rich body of work online. Here are a few titles of recent YouTube videos. Okay, wait, also, yes, this is important to know. Blair White is a trans woman.

She's very pretty. She's very feminine. So, okay, here's some titles. Mr. Beast's Trans Friend is a nightmare. The trans lesbians of Tinder are a bit. big problem. Reacting to insane trans tic-toks with Buck Angel. How TikTok is convincing teens, they're trans and mentally ill. Okay. The truth about Dylan Mulvaney. Dylan Mulvaney, I'm so sorry, sister. The disturbing LGBTQ kids show needs to be stopped. It's the same video over and over and over

again. And Ariel Scarcella too, she was, I mean, she is a lesbian. She, for a long time for years on YouTube got her start making just like lesbian content and then at some point started like waiting into the waters of transphobia of like I don't know these trans people are doing a little too much and they're making us look bad as a queer community and then she gets pushback for that and instead of like reflecting she just like jumps into the deep end and now literally every video she makes is like trans craziness on woke TikTok that doda and they all get so many views and it's just like so like I don't know if all I was interested in was like making a lot of Google AdSense revenue I think that's like a really dependable way to do it people seem to just keep

falling for it and then it also gets the rage bait of us watching it because we hate it and because it hurts it's like picking a scab what's interesting to me is less these people because like I said we could debate until the sun comes up about like whether or not they actually believe what they're saying or they're just doing it for like the endless amount of clicks that they know they will always get. But what's interesting to me is, like, I think the fact that people tune into this type of content and, like, all of the comment, I mean, there are thousands of comments on all of these videos being like, yeah, I can't believe that person really thinks they're trans when they're just a non-binary freak and that-da-da-da. And it's all of these people

who are like inside the queer community who so consciously want to push themselves away from other people in the queer community by like becoming the bully. Kind of to one of your points, It's like a lot of kids watch this content, a lot of queer kids or people who are just questioning their identity or coming into themselves, newly out people. And it's almost like this stage, I think for a lot of us of identity development, where you're trying to figure out what kind of person can I be, you know, what am I allowed to be and what am I not allowed to be? And so a lot of really impressionable people or people who are in like a really vulnerable spot, they see this stuff and then they say, oh, I can't be like these blue-haired pronoun users. Like that's become such a thing that people literally do actually make decisions about what they do with their hair and their body based on not wanting to seem like the wrong kind of queer person. And then, of course, conservatives lap it up too. And it's like when we have these conversations, we're doing the work of conservatives for them by saying more and more people are realizing they're trans online.

Like, the implication of that video is being trans is supposed to be weird and rare, and there shouldn't be a lot of us. You know, that's like the unspoken premise of a lot of this stuff. Like, these messages discourage more people from being queer. And it's like, why? We see this so much from inside of the queer community, right? Like, this judgment calls made about who is really queer and who is not really queer. So many of these, like, Blair White, Buck Angel type videos, which we're going to get to him in a second. And Buck, don't go anywhere.

I saw that tweet you wrote about me last week and it pissed me off. So you're included in the outline. Buck Angel does not like me. And that, my friends, is fine. There's so many of these videos, like, as a real trans person, I can say who all of these, like, fake trans people are who are not really part of the community. But cis queer people do this, too, especially I feel like with bisexuals. There's, like, this delineation around, like, who is really bisexual and who hasn't.

and like for as much progressive conversation as we have about no one owes anyone their dating or sexual history, we do this thing a lot where I feel like especially towards bisexual women, where we're like, tell me which women you've slept with or else as far as I'm concerned, you're a straight woman. I wonder if a lot of this stuff comes from like queer trauma and this idea of, you know, reproducing the abuse you went through of like, it was so hard for me. I had to fight so hard to transition or I had to. to fight so hard and deal with overt homophobia every day. And so how dare you come waltzing in and you don't even want to get surgery or you were in relationships where you were basically

closeted? People didn't realize you were queer all your life. It must have been so easy for you and now I'm going to like beat up on you. Even though that's not actually the case, right, where being closeted or not being seen for who you are or not having the freedom to explore who you are, that itself is a very traumatic thing that I think all queer people undergo. We're all made to suppress ourselves. So it's so counterproductive. And I think it really does just come from that place of resentment of I suffered so you have to suffer to you. I had to work so hard to make myself pass. So why don't you even want to pass that completely devalues the thing that's the most important thing to me, like if you're Blair White? And so, you know, she lashes out at it.

or you were in a straight marriage for many years. And of course, you were, like, quietly, really unhappy and lonely and detached from the queer community. Like, it's not easy to be a closeted bisexual person, actually. It's not easy to be straight passing. But from the outside, we say, how dare you? You got to walk down the street without being hate crime or things like that. Something that I think about a lot is, like, how we identify with our pain.

And especially for queer people, how we, like, we define our queerness by the pain involved in our like coming out experiences and stuff. And I see that a lot. I mean, there's a lot of asexual discourse on Twitter around like, well, what, what oppression do you deal with for being asexual? Which like, first of all, I don't even really understand because do we not know about like corrective rape? Like, that's a thing.

It's really infuriating to me, especially the asexual stuff, because so often and, and the way bisexual women get treated, because the rest of us in the queer community will talk and talk and talk about how those groups aren't oppressed and will never actually listen to the members of those groups when they try to speak up and say, I experience, like you said, corrective rape, I live in a world that's built all around marriage. And so if I don't connect to people romantically and I don't want to get married, I'm a romantic or whatever, I'm structurally excluded from a lot of economic benefits. Like, we just don't listen to them because we've already decided as a community, oh, they're annoying and they're just complaining about the smallest things.

but they have it so easy. And I think it kind of still does come from, like, there's a tiny Blair White, potentially in all of us that. The Blair White Within. Yes. Yeah, you have to question the Blair White Within. That, you know, and ask yourself, like, am I moralizing suffering? Like, do I think that my suffering makes me a better person?

Because suffering doesn't make you a better person. It's just a horrible thing that happens to you. and it can rot inside of you and make you lash out at other people, or it can be something you choose to learn from, and a reason to empathize with people whose struggle looks differently from your own. And again, I just keep coming back to that idea of, like, being erased and invisible, and not even having the chance to figure out who you are, because nobody around who has even heard of a demisexual before.

That doesn't sound anything like privileged to me. Like, that sounds like the height of being disenfranchised, to not even know your own people or know that you can be. be who you are, that is like one of the most foundational queer traumas. And that happens to us, whether we're trans or we're star gender or omnisexual or whatever else. Like who's hurt by people finding a term that feels like home to them? Who indeed? There is so much back and forth around like neo pronouns and neo labels. What do you make of that, right? There are so many people being like, okay, well, I'm fine with like he, him, she, her. Maybe they. Maybe they.

them, but the second you start doing this like Zir-Zem stuff or go by demisexual or, you know, any star gender or like all of these words, which I got to be honest, I haven't heard of half of these. Sometimes, especially when like very young queer people on TikTok are describing their gender and pronouns, like, I've never heard of them either. But I try to fight back on the impulse to be like, well, oh my God, they're pushing this whole thing too far and they're going to rock the boat and I'm going to lose my right. as a result of this. Like, guys, come on. When people say things like that, it's like they think those queer people are asking too much.

And it's like they think acceptance is this like finite pie. And it's like, we can get being he-himmed or she heard. But if you ask to be Zimzerd, oh, that's going to ruin it all for all of us. Because it's asking cishead people to do too much work. And the project of queerness, I think, is for us to just kind of like flip everything over on its head. you know, like we want people to rethink how they think about gender and sexuality and gender roles and roles and relationships. And so it seems like to me the more and more people we have that are just doing things, their own freaky, queer way that we've never heard of before. That, like, helps really change the paradigm. That helps set all of us free. It's not a threat to us. If anything, the queer people that are more willing to be out there and do something that we've never heard of before that is totally baffling, that makes us all question.

the like cis-het conditioning that so much of us still have, even if we're in the queer community. There's a little bit of this discourse. It happens in trans circles all the time, like passing versus like fuck passing, where a lot of trans people, especially trans women and men, they do want to seamlessly pass, if not as cis, but then as the gender that they identify as, because they want the safety of that. They want people to know how to treat them. And that's just true enough for them that that's the easiest way to move through the world. but there's also a lot of queer people who there is no such thing as passing as what they are because society has like no conception of it yet. Like for the most part, there is no passing as non-binary still for most people.

Like if you use they-them or if you use zizim-zur, you're pretty much going to have to correct people. You're going to have to assert yourself or just tolerate people being wrong. And so you might seem like a more annoying queer person because you have to assert yourself because there is no structure in place for you. We put this weird onus on queer people, again, to kind of ask, do I really need this? What do I need to make people understand about me? And I don't think we get to ever decide for someone else what they need

and what's like a life and death or even just like an important validating issue for them. And yeah, we get into a lot of trouble as a community when we act like, okay, being able to use a bathroom that aligns with your gender, that's important because it's so you won't die. But wearing an outfit that you feel comfortable in, if it's a little obnoxious, you don't really need that. You don't need that badly enough. That's not acceptable or whatever the case may be.

I want to revisit Buck Angel really briefly. Buck Angel is a form. He's a trans man. He is a former porn star. And my understanding is that his porn has been very influential. I mean, I think it's introduced people to trans people. I remember in his porn, he used to call himself the man with the pussy, which like even that is kind of treating, even himself as like a novelty. Like he's the only guy with a pussy.

That was how a lot of people got introduced to him. Yeah, it worked for him. He got very famous in the porn industry. And now he's just like, I don't know, which is such a cool story, right? Like you were a trans guy porn star in the early 2000s. And now he's just like Blair White. Like he's just doing conservative social media. like we have to stop the crazy woke TikTok teens from like making our community look too bad like

dude whatever all right in preparing for this episode i was going through all of these people's youtube channels and again with him as well as the rest of them it's the same video over and over again reacting to cringy queers on TikTok like oh my god you are like 40 fucking years old you should not be reacting to cringy TikTok teens you should be going to the theater anyway yeah Join the symphony. Get some culture. Love yourself. One of his recent YouTube videos is called delusional trans TikTok featuring fake trans people.

Okay, Buck. But so I want to play just the first clip for you and we will talk about it together. The first part of it is like the first TikTok that he opens the video with and then his immediate reaction to it. Being told that I can't identify as trans and also non-binary. being told that non-binary doesn't exist, being told that non-binary people are just ruining everything for trans people. Hey everybody, welcome back to my channel and today I'm gonna do some reactions on some weirdo TikToks. These people have lost their minds, it's so crazy. I mean, if you don't see mental illness, come on man, we gotta really just get it together. These kids need help, but I'm gonna laugh at them anyway. I don't care. Because if you're stupid enough to put this on the internet, sorry, but you open the door for all of us to start

making fun of you. Maybe if we make fun of you, you'll start to realize that whatever you think you're doing, it's amicely damaging to you as well as to this community. Somebody needs to remind him that being trans was considered a mental illness until a couple of years ago. That being gay was considered a mental illness. So if you're trying to say, you're crazy for being a part of these groups, that's what's going to be said about all of us. And has been said about all of us. all of our identities have been pathologized as mental illness at some point in the very recent history. And also like, oh, you need help so I'm going to just bully you. I'm going to just bully teens online. That's going to help them. That's going to protect the community.

Yeah. How does scrutinizing that protect anyone? Yeah. No, the only thing you're helping is, is once again, your Google AdSense account. It just strikes me how like people like this, they've cut off everyone in their own community so much that all they have left after they do that. is to pander to the conservatives. Like, that's the ultimate sadness of it. Like, I think we can resent them for running this grift and making a living out of exposing, like, young teens.

Like, that's absolutely vile. But it's also just so pathetically sad that, like, there are very few places that the Ariel Scarsallas can go anymore among other queer people. Like, it's such a lonely existence, and they're just licking the boot of the cishead people now for the rest of their lives. Like, that's all they can do because they're so isolated.

Yeah, and then whenever you say something to that effect, they'll always turn it around and be like, well, whatever happened to the tolerant left queer community? And then they use it as further reason to like, well, I don't associate with the queer community anymore because I expressed some questions and now they don't want anything to do with me. And it's like, yeah, your questions were like fucking bullying 14 year old non-binary kids on TikTok. Like, correct, I don't want anything to do with you. the only people who are ever saying, whatever happened to the tolerant left are like people who just are expressing the most vile viewpoints that I don't feel the need to tolerate. And also just side note on like tolerance, my goal personally, and I won't speak for other queer people, I won't speak for people on the left, my goal is not uninhibited tolerance. And I don't know how

you feel about this, but like my goal is liberation for my people. Yeah, there's a big difference between tolerance and actual political gains where we actually have power. And I think that is where it breaks down that a lot of these respectability politics, queer people, they want to just lobby for the straits to approve of us and tolerate us. They don't actually want us to have enough power to be a threat to the CISHET system. And I think that's what a lot of us are actually gunning for, is for us to actually have the ability to change society in really dramatic ways and reclaim our power. And yeah, that is more scary. So we actually don't need all the syshats to like us. It might actually be to our credit if sometimes they feel a little uncomfortable,

a little scared, a little annoyed. That actually might be where our power lies. So I think the examples we've looked at so far have been pretty straightforwardly just kind of bullying. And I think we're doing some good psychoanalysis of why that bullying can appeal to us, both as like the content creators of that, you know, Blair White, Ariel Scarsela Buck Angel, but also why it's interesting and sometimes feels good to view it. I want to go now into a little bit more of a complicated territory and also one that I just have been wanting to talk about on this podcast forever. We've arrived the Senate Twink. Devin, what do you know about the Senate twink? I know that he got caught or like exposed for having sex in like Senate chambers. I think he's an intern for a senator. And I guess people were

scandalized by that, but I never understood what the big deal was. Like, I thought it was cool. I think more people should be having, should be having sex in federal buildings. In December, a few months ago, a video of, yes, this congressional staffer is like a white gay twink in his 20s, soon to be known as the Senate twink, a video of him having sex with another man in the U.S. Senate hearing room leaked online by The Daily Caller, which is a very far right publication online. And it's just interesting that the fact that this boy's sex tape was leaked to the Daily Caller, like, I don't know, I always felt like that should have been more of a story. It seemed vengeful, and there was some discussion about the fact that this

was actually punishment for this congressional staffers having held pro-Palestinian views, which is why the sex tape was leaked. I don't know the merit to all of that, and it also kind of strays from the point, but I do think how this video came to be was never enough of a conversation. But anyway, the people's reaction to this congressional staffer having gay sex in the U.S. Senate hearing room was, it was explosive. It was like all anyone talked about for a week. And it really kind of dimmed the light of George Santos, which I do think, like, I think George Santos was pretty pissed about not being the most chaotic person in federal office for a little bit there. He needs the attention at all times. Yeah, yeah. What do you

remember about how people reacted? I remember seeing some of the, like, criticism happening on Twitter about it just being, like, really unprofessional or, like, sometimes people bring, wrap their homophobia now in language of like consent in these weird ways, you know, where people are saying, oh, it's so inappropriate and dangerous to have sex in a public space. That gets lobbed at especially gay men a lot these days. So I saw a little bit of that kind of hand-wringing where people are pretending to care about like propriety and consent and protecting other people. But it's like, you know, somebody having sex in an office after hours isn't actually hurting anyone. So let's be real. This is about them being gay and about queer sexuality. making you uncomfortable. I mean, we're getting into it. I already know people are in the comments being like, why do you have to defend like fucking in the government building, whatever. Okay, be patient with us. Let's take our time here a little bit. So this, this point, this twink, this twink was immediately canonized by some as, you know, a gay icon, right? Some people immediately were like, oh my God, this is so cunty. He was derided by most.

I would say within the community. This was very much an intra-community conversation. Like, I don't think that many straight people were talking about the Senate twink, but it felt like every gay person was. And the main thing that I saw over and over and over again was, this will set the community back. This makes us look bad. This Kansas Justice, Justice Horn on Twitter, wrote,

in a perfect world, one's actions would only be their own and not reflect. of the entire LGBTQ community. But we don't live in that perfect world. This will likely give our oppressors another tool to target us, especially LGBTQ folks in public service or those wanting to serve. What do you make of that? It is just the worst flavor of respectability politics.

There's something that I talk about in my most recent book on Learning Shame, about something called systemic shame, which is this idea that we blame marginalized individuals for the problem of their own oppression and we task them with like solving their own oppression. So every single thing you do as a queer person becomes a political symbol or a political statement. Like you're never allowed to just be a human and just live and be flawed and messy and do dramatic things. And so I think like, I think it's kind of doing that, right? Like it's putting the Senate twink or like any other gay person on this platform where, you know, we've been accused of being hypersexual perverts and

dangerous for so long that if any single one of us is openly sexual, they get lobbed with all the blame when, you know, they're going to call us hypersexual perverts for drag story time. You know, that's already happening. Like you can do the most tame, family-friendly stuff and you'll still get accused of being a pervert and dangerous and grooming children and all of this stuff. So it's just not reality to say that the Senate twink is what's setting us back. We're already set back by a rising conservative movement that's going to latch on to anything about us. So we have to own that stuff so that they can't use it against us. We need to be having more sex in the Senate chamber is what we're saying.

No, I do because I kind of think that because the Senate doesn't have any respect for our bodies and what we do with our bodies as queer people. They're trying to legislate away our rights to transition, to have birth control, to have queer sex, to have queer sex, to have queer. relationships. So if they don't show any respect for our bodies and our sexuality, why would we show any respect to them? Like, I think kind of defiling it with our sexuality and messiness is what they deserve. And I think it's like a very, I mean, maybe saying somebody like fucking after hours isn't always a revolutionary act in their office. I'm going to give it to him. Like, you know, if he wants to say it's a political statement, I think it's like actually it is, but in like a, like very transgressive revolutionary way. I think when you use. I think when you,

zoom out a little bit and you look at the bigger picture here, it's like two men were having consensual sex in the room where millions of people are regularly stripped of human rights. I'm not so offended by this. I'm just not. But there was so much of that hand-wringing, right? Like, what did Justice Horn write? This will likely give our oppressors another tool to target us. There are like 400, over 400 anti-transvils going through state and federal governments last year. They are cracking down on trans people's right to play sports, use bathrooms. I know people are eyeing marriage equality from the right. Discrimination against us socially has become so normalized in the last two years.

It's like, what tool are we handing them? I don't think any conservatives are waiting for us to hand them a tool. I don't think anyone saw this happen and was like, ah, yes, now my oppression of the gaze is justified. Finally, I can begin to discriminate against him. Were Republicans on the precipice of being nicer to us? Yeah, like, if the burden is, every queer person needs to act exactly perfect

and be in this somehow perfect line of like family-friendly, but not so family-friendly that they'll call you a groomer, you know, like, and do everything right. And that's the only way that we're going to have rights. that's impossible and that's a burden that we can't put on a marginalized group. Like if you only think that a group can find liberation if everybody in that group is an angel, you don't actually believe in the liberation of that group. People need to have the right, like in disability justice, we talk about the right to make mistakes. Like if somebody is a human with full legal rights,

they're allowed to be stupid and messy and impulsive and make mistakes and they still have the same rights. Yeah, and I'm curious what you make. I'm returning to this tweet because it really did encapsulate so much of the discourse. I'm curious what you make of what he said. In a perfect world, one's actions would only be their own and not reflective of the entire community, but we don't live in a perfect world. How would you push back on this like, okay, I wish we lived in a world where we could make mistakes, but we don't? I hate that logic that people often trot out of like, oh sure, you know, I wish the world worked differently, but this is how the world works. And so you need to just, you know, deal with it. Like, my counter to

that is always like, what kind of world are we trying to build? Like, if we don't want to be in this world with these sets of rules of respectability politics, we have to be, like, as human beings, the ones to create it. I think if we say, yeah, so, this twink had sex in the Senate chambers, and what about it? Like, that is how we help counter a lot of these conservative talking points. If we're not scared of them bringing this stuff up, then it isn't ammunition for them anymore. You know, we, we have a little bit of that power to say, we're not afraid of this. Our sexuality is beautiful. It's neutral.

It's just a human thing that happens sometimes. And that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not we're human beings who deserve equal political representation as anybody else. Whenever this stuff is happening, I think about the question I always ask myself, right? It's like, okay, if a heterosexual or cisgender person did this, would it reflect badly, societally on all heterosexuals or all cisgender people? Like, would they all feel responsible for the greater perception of the community? If the answer is no, then it's no in this case too. And your anger at the Senate twink is misdirected. Like, I believe that. And look, I don't think you necessarily have to get a life-size poster of the Senate twink and put it on your bedroom wall. I'm going to do that because

I think this twink is an icon. I'm not saying you have to do it. I'm not saying you have to approve of this person's actions. I'm not saying you have to go have sex in the Senate chamber as a revolutionary act. But you'd also be wrong in blaming him for the systemic oppression of queer people. Like, I understand it feels good to because you're like, well, I would never behave that way. And I would never behave in a way so unbecoming of a sexual minority. But it's literally just incorrect blame. Like, the Senate twink isn't why there is a rampant anti-LGB. ETQ effort on the right of this country. It's kind of that just world theory that people sometimes practice of, oh, I would never get

assaulted because I don't dress that way. Like, oh, I will never be the victim of homophobia because I'm not being the bad kind of gay. It's like this illusion that we can control whether we're going to get targeted with our choices, because that is like very comforting to think, like, oh, I'm the right kind of gay. I'm not the annoying kind. I'm not the impropriety, like, you know, behaving kind. I'm going to be safe. But actually, you're never going to be safe. Like, they could target you at any time. And so we have to actually stand together against that because it could happen and come for all of us eventually. Yeah. Wait. Can you describe the just world theory? Because I think that applies really well here. Yeah. Yeah. So the just world theory in psychology is this idea that people believe that things happen for a good reason, that people deserve what happens to them. The most famous example is like victim blaming sexual assault survivors. So, You know, people who are too promiscuous or who dress in a really slutty way, they're the ones who are more likely to get assaulted or, you know, people who are irresponsible and walk home alone late at night. Those are the people that are victims of crime. People really believe those myths, even though, first of all, they're just like, it's just really a messed up morally belief system. But it's also just statistically not true. Like, things can happen to you no matter where you're sitting and no matter what choice you make. And even though it's comforting to say, I have control over what's going to happen to me. And the world.

is just and right. I think if you're a marginalized person, you have to realize the world isn't just and right. Like, that's why we're fighting because it's not. I was reading back last night in getting ready for this episode some old discourse. I was dusting it off, some old Senate twink discourse going through the archives. And I found this really great post on Tumblr from Tumblr user Marissa Tomé. Of course, tumbler user Marissa Tomay has a good take on this. They wrote, there are rapists in the U.S. Supreme Court. And I, I'm supposed to clutch my pearls over two men having consensual sex in the Senate. Oh, heavens to Betsy!

The first time sex acts have been committed in a government building. Are the shades of Congress to be thus polluted? But for the record, no amount of sanitizing your sex life or sanding down of your LGBT edges will make bigots except you. So don't debase yourself by capitulating an inch to them, especially in ways that throw your fellow community members under the bus. That really resonated with me. Yeah, it's beautiful.

There's nothing sacred about the Senate. You know, I... Nothing. At a time when they're approving bills to just send as many weapons and as much funding to Israel to commit a genocide as possible, I can't speak for the Senate twink. If he was a staffer, that means he's probably pretty moderate liberal pill just because most people are who are working in the government. But I don't know him. But like, I think we should defile these. You know, it might not have been a political stance on his part, but I think we should defile these institutions because they're violent, they're homophobic, they're transphobic. There's nothing. to respect about them. So why are we like trying to make ourselves be respectable inside of them? Yeah. This video is getting demonetized. All of my videos get demonetized. No, no. It's my goal. I think, I think something that I do with myself at this point on this podcast is I see how many minutes into the show I can get before absolutely knowing that this video will not be monetized. Did I need to use like a TikTokism? Like what's the TikTok word for genocide?

No, what's the, we, we should be having more segs in the Senate hearing room. We should be having more segs in the Senate hearing room where people are unalived. The last thing I want to say about the Senate twink, and this is kind of unrelated to anything, but I just think it was so camp. He issued an apology via LinkedIn. I think this is from LinkedIn, based on the format of the screen. But the beginning of the apology reads as such, this has been a difficult time for me as I have been attacked for who I love to pursue a political agenda. While some of my actions in the past have shown poor judgment, I love my job and would never disrespect my workplace.

Any attempts to characterize my actions otherwise are fabricated and I will be exploring what legal options are available to me in these matters. And like, okay, I wish him luck in those legal, in that legal recourse. I don't know what success he's going to find. but I love, I love the first sentence, as I have been attacked for who I love. He really went for the like, love is love, like, which is like kind of a respectability politics thing, right? Like, it's like, it's very funny to take the talking point that like we used to use to like justify gay marriage. Like, it's not all a sex thing. Totally. It's about love.

He's like, this is too also about love. Like, I don't actually think this boy. ever meant to be like like I don't think this was like a politically revolutionary act for him like I think he just thought it was really hot which I'm sure it was and I'm happy for him in that like I think he was like I just really want to get fucked in the Senate chamber and I love that or maybe neither of them could host you know maybe neither of them had a place to go and he was like I have keys to this office this is the new answer to can you host is well I am an intern at the Senate intern yeah yeah yeah

I just, I love that so much. I've been attacked for who I love. Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. He walked it back with this like very like Hillary Clinton, love is love sort of thing. In staying on theme with like sexual and kink, what some people would like to be outcasts in the community and something that stirs discourse every single year. I want to talk a little bit about the Folsom Street Fair. Devin, what is Folsom? Folsom is an annual street fair in San Francisco. And it is cordoned off. It's outside, but it's adults only. And videos from it constantly get reproduced with people intentionally excluding the fact that it's adults only and not mentioning that. But it is a big kink event where there are demos on, you know, flogging and leather. There are people having sex in the street. You know, there's people in fur suits having sex, wandering around, selling kinky wares. And yeah, it's just a big celebration of queer and kinky sexuality. out in the open, but only for adults.

Yes, it's in the open. It's a street fair, but it's in a cordoned off area where there are no children. There are no children. You are IDed to attend this event. And like you said, every year there is media that circulates the internet from Folsom and goes to places where it was just never intended to go. For example, like last year during Folsom, there were two things that I really remember. remember. One was a guy getting fisted in the street. And then the other was a guy like smeared

shit across, I think, his chest and his back. And what's interesting is I don't even know that that was a fetish thing. I actually think it was a political thing because apparently the, the motivation behind doing that was to make a statement about not wanting to be touched, which I think as a piece of like performance art at a sexual street fair is really interesting. But both of these things went totally nuts on Twitter. There was so much discourse of like, especially from younger queer people, of like, how are we ever going to stop the discrimination against us if this is how we behave? And then the second you say anything about like, well, this is sex negative.

And, you know, this is a conservative talking point. There is this very knee-jerk response of like, I'm conservative because I don't want people to smear shit on themselves in the street. You know, it's, there's this very kind of like heated debate that takes place around how people are supposed to behave and like what constitutes a conservative talking point. I want to appeal to younger queer people here because I came out when I was 15 and I remember for the first at least like four years of my being out, I clung pretty tightly to this like, well, I'm not that type of gay sort of thing, which is amazing because now, fucking look at me i lost it somewhere as it turns out i am that type of gay but i spent my whole life feeling like the outcast and feeling like the person who could never fit in and feeling like the faggot and all i wanted for myself was just to feel like the normal one for once when i see people react

to something like fulsome this way i a part of me identifies with them because i had years where i would have reacted the same way. First, I think it's great that you bring up, like, why you had your own reservations about this stuff. I think it is very normal. First of all, because being queer is so shame-ridden in society and any more deviance on top of that, kinkiness, gender deviance, whatever, it's so shamed. A lot of us feel really ashamed of what might be, like, lurking under the door, the, like, trap door if we open it up and find out what it is that we're into. It's also true that when you're a young, queer kid, you're just coming into your identity and sexuality. And sex can be very scary and can be very dangerous. It can feel that way. And so we often, I think, do have this like self-protective

impulse at that age of this is too much for me. I don't want to look at this. I feel uncomfortable. But just because you're not ready for something yet doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist or that it's bad and damaging and all of these things. And we, especially in America, have this. big problem of like moral puritanism where if something is disgusting, we assume that it's wrong. So shit on the chest, if you're not into to shit, must be morally wrong. Instead of just being like, oh, that's not for me. Yikes, I'm going to look away in the same way that we treat annoyingness as like a sign of immorality or somebody's doing something wrong.

And cruising and kinky sexuality, it's always been so integral to gay history and queer liberation. I was reading this amazing book, Cruising, An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime by Alex Espinoza. And he goes into how cruising existed even in ancient Greece, how there was cruising. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Yeah, they were getting into it. Like, there was graffiti from back then about like, you know, for like a cavernous bottom call this person, you know, like go to this house. A cavernous bottom. Looking for a cavernous bottom on Grindr. And he talked. And he talked about how in like aristocratic like France and stuff, like the police were like trying to shut down cruising and like glory holes and, you know, public restrooms where people would have sex in like the

1600s and the 1700s and how every time the police tried to crack down on it, that just made more people aware that it was a thing. So like when they would pass a law that was like, no having sex in this public restroom in the park, all of the queer people in like France would be like, wait, you mean people have been having sex in this park? I'm going to go there. Like being repressed and then resisting the laws or resisting the standards of propriety, that's like how we find each other. Like being queer was so unspeakable for the longest time that it was criminalized. It was a mental illness.

It was repressed as this evil, disgusting, like, threat to public life. And it's when we get demonized in that way and we try to push against it. That's how we even find out who we are. Like being queer is almost definitionally being told that you're wrong and saying, no, I'm going to choose not to believe that. I've been told all of these things about me are wrong. And I'm going to actually kind of, I'm going to own this. I'm going to own these slurs. I'm going to own these labels.

I'm going to dress myself in this outfit that might scare some people or might be really transgressive and sexual. And that's how I'm going to find the other people like me. Yeah. And look, we're not saying that if you see a video of someone getting fisted in the street. and are repulsed by it. I'm not saying that that's your first step into your journey that ends with you getting fisted in the street. I'm very well aware, not everyone wants to get fisted in the street, not everyone wants to

have shit smeared on them. And that is perfectly fine. I personally, let's keep me out of this. But I think, and correct me from wrong, Devin, but I think what we're getting at is like you're being uncomfortable with something does not make it morally wrong. wrong and does not mean that it is harm. And it doesn't mean that it's being forced on you. It goes back to Ariel Scarcella. Like her first like transphobic videos were saying, people are trying to force me as a lesbian to have sex with people with a penis. It's that don't shove it in my face thing

all over again. And somebody just being in that case a trans lesbian doesn't mean you're being forced to have sex with anybody and consenting adults, fisting each other or wearing a fur suit and having sex at an 18 plus event, again, isn't anybody forcing you to do anything you don't want to do? Like, you might feel scandalized, you might feel uncomfortable, you might want to look away and not be there. That's, that's fine. It's okay to be a gay normie or whatever. It's okay to be Vanilla. You can be Pete Buttigieg. Yes, you can. You can be the most boring dude in the world, and that's fine. You're still part of us. And like, I don't understand why that nuance is so hard for people. I feel like a lot of people just need to like take five.

deep breaths and say, okay, I'm not under attack right now just because I'm uncomfortable. And, yeah, again, even if you're never going to be the person who wants to get fisted or like, you know, do suspension play or whatever, just ask yourself, what about myself am I ashamed of? What about me? What hidden things behind the trap doors? Would other people look at me that way? Or I'm worried about people seeing me that way. And like, how can you give yourself some of that self-compassion and get over that a little bit. And then maybe you won't feel so threatened by other people being freaks and perverts and wild and annoying and whatever else it is. Yeah. And I mean, with this whole thing of like, oh, well, look at these videos of someone getting fisted in the street.

Like, they're going to take our rights away because of this. Honey, they're going to take our, they are taking our rights away. They're taking our rights away whether you give them a video of someone getting fisted in the street or not. Because you know what? If they don't have a video someone getting fisted in the street, they just make shit up anyway. Like, the biggest things that right-wing media as a whole latched onto over the last couple of years aren't like, aren't fulsome. They're not even the Senate twink. They're like made up shit that lives of TikTok puts out about like random queer people just like existing in public teaching positions or whatever. They will find whatever they want to find in order to discriminate against us. It's not, it's not this just world theory.

People who say this stuff, I wonder what they even want. Like, if Falsim, if an 18 plus cordoned off event isn't acceptable, then is like a private dungeon in somebody's house unacceptable, like, is, again, I just remember like the early 2000s and just how overtly homophobic that era was as a queer teen at that time. And we're back there again where like the people protesting at the pride parades back then, and I'm sure many places still are, they would have signs that would say things like, this is like one that I actually saw back in the day. eating shit is not a human right. Jesus. They were treating gay men having sex as if it was the most vile, fetishistic in their mind, right? Like, those things are linked, like, that it was the same thing as the guy with the shit on his chest. Yeah.

So if they already see this that way, we have to stand with the dude with the shit on his chest, you know? Like, maybe we want to keep our distance scent-wise, but like, he's one of us. He's our dude. Like, if he's not free, we're not free. I want to give baby gays. as I've attempted to do throughout, you know, this conversation, just as much grace as possible because I really understand why respectability politics, I understand why that's an attractive mindset, especially, you know, if you've lived your whole life in fear. And so I was like perusing

Reddit and I found this person, Reddit user Lauren M, who wrote something that I thought really gave grace to this idea in a beautiful way. They wrote, making yourself smaller is a dysfunctional fear response that people cling to as a result of abuse in an effort to make the abuse stop. It doesn't work. It never has and it never will. It is in fact just the victim perpetuating the abuse on themselves. All we have is each other. Don't let them use divide and conquer while dangling a reward you'll never get. I think that was really beautiful. That is beautiful. I love the last line. The reward of CISHET approval, it is not worth it. That's the kind of stuff that keeps us in the closet. We have to dream past that. I want to wrap up today's episode by

reading a portion of an essay that I clipped together from Tumblr. It's by a Tumblr user called VA Spider. And this essay went viral some time ago when it was published. It's called Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot. So here it is. 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 neopronoun set the trans movement back, or you're why the cis hets don't accept us, or including asexuals or by people with the wrong kinds of partners, or non-binary people, or kingsters, or non-passing trans people, or furries, or polyamorous people just hurts us. Can't you wait until we get all of our rights before we talk about some of yours?

To those people, Pete Buttigieg is just a fag. On Sunday night at Pride Northwest, some kids, late teens, early 20s. asked us what our, I survived Reagan for this, but and meant. All of the queer adults at the tables, making up our ad hoc counter, looked at each other and sighed a little. Emmett and another adult started to explain the way 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 by sexual 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, quote, women don't get AIDS, they just die from it, poster, and so on. That's 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 fag. Never.

These are the people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not. not even clean 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 you 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 Chaston 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, referring to the Reagan's. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died. It was 1985, four years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV-AIDS, and seven years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died. I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a wonderbread, 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 cis-hete 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 queer 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 cis hets 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 regans 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 gaze can come too, I guess. I thought that was fantastic. It's beautiful. It nails it fighting for acceptance in an unacceptable system isn't going to get us free. Devin, thank you so much for being here today and for shedding your light on this conversation. Yeah, thank you for having me, Matt. It's so nice to just be able to talk about this stuff. Yeah, this discourse about who's the acceptable target and who's the problem within our own community. It saps so much of our energy that we could expend on fighting our common actual enemy.

me. And so it's just, I think it's really important to talk about. Where can people find you? Where can people support your work? Yeah, probably the best place is my substack. So Dr. Devonprice.substack.com. That's where you'll find the piece on annoying queers that we've been talking about. And I, and that's everything on there is totally free. So lots of queer culture writing as well as neurodiversity stuff. And if you want to support him monetarily, he has books. Yes. Yes, I have books about autism, books about shame. Buy those books. Books about laziness.

Yeah, all the unrespectable things. You got to promote your books. Do what your publicist is telling you to do. Yes. Yeah, well, thank you. Yes. Those are also out there. Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you liked the episode, if you took something from it, if you found it maybe challenging to your own psyche, then I'm glad. And maybe feel free to share it with someone who might take something from it too. Until next time, I love you so much and stay foodie. We did it. We did it.

Okay, I'm going to stop the recording.