The LGBT Club

[Flora]

*awkwardly walks in* Oh, hi.

Uh, I'm Flora, I'm bisexual, and I really need to realize that if I have to ask myself whether I like someone, then the answer is an obvious yes.

Okay, to be honest I sorta knew end of freshman year, but then was like "wait...no I'm straight," then got confused, then got really confused, then figured out sometime last year "oh wait yeah I'm bi."

But then again, I'm absolutely oblivious to love (or apparently crushes).

Also, would my friends either come out or please stop joking about being lesbians/bi? It's incredibly frustrating because I don't know whether or not they're serious. And, of course, the two that joke about it are the ones that I have crushes on. :/

 

[Ether's Bane]

I'm coming out to my mum on Sunday - this will be the biggest thing I've ever done. I'll tell you guys how it went when I've done it (hopefully in the Laughing Cupboard).

 

[Leaftail]

(Dang I haven't posted here in months.)

When I eat lunch with my 'friends,' they use the... you know... f-word-for-gay-people on a minutely basis (and I'm not kidding), and that's obviously offensive. I haven't said anything about it yet, nor have I come out to them yet. But the next time anyone says it, I'll ask them to stop. Odds are they're going to correctly assume I'm gay. And I don't think they're the kind of people who would respect my sexuality.

I'm planning on coming out to another friend via facebook in the next few days (probably on my birthday)... let's hope he doesn't have a negative reaction to it.

 

[Harlequin]

Whenever someone I know says something a bit thick about gay people I just look at them flatly, especially if it involves stereotypes, and they usually just look a bit awkward and apologise. That only works because people actually know I'm gay, though, and because I'm not a stereotype... regardless, all of my flatmates are fine with it anyway.

 

[Zeph]

Actually I can't say I see (hear?) that sort of stuff happening a lot. And since pretty much everyone's aware of my, erm, sexuality, I think they kind of might avoid saying that sort of thing? Or if they do, they will glance at me and say "No offence" which doesn't, y'know, really make it any better. In fact now I think about it, I vaguely recall making several people in the past aware that I'm gay through being displeased at anti-gay things they've said. Like, uh, I don't know.
"Gay marriage should be illegal."
"...Oh, I guess I'll just have to pretend I'm married then :C"
"...REALLY?!"
"Yes."
"NO, REALLY?"
"Yes!"
"Uh, sorry..."
"Yes."

 

[ultraviolet]

I met a gay gentleman at work today who was complaining about australia's lack of gay marriage to another customer and I was all like 'yeah! I agree' and we talked about it for a whole five minutes. :>

 

[...]

So the other day I was talking to one of my best female friends and I don't know how our conversation even got onto the topic, but she started asking questions, trying to find out if I was gay. I covertly texted one of my bisexual male friends asking if I should tell her and he said to go for it, and so I told her I was bi.

And you know what?


She's bi too.


And has a hot boyfriend who is also bi.

Remember this? Yeah. It was a great day.

Just this past Saturday, she and I were talking about how in terms of straight-ness, I'm a complete and total virgin, never even kissed a girl. She suggested we just clear up that last statement right then, but I, being very apprehensive about being with a girl (Because I started out as completely asexual and jumped right to bi) didn't want to get in the way of her currently existing relationship. She said and I quote: "You won't be getting in the way. My boyfriend wants some guy time so it's okay if you kiss me too." And we talked about her boyfriend awhile (She suggested we have a threesome which I find weird on soo many levels) and then we jumped right back to the virgin thing. And just as we were about to kiss...

My sister and her boyfriend came over and completely ruined it.

And they followed us everywhere.

We couldn't even text a decent LGBT conversation without having one of them look over and shout "WHO YA TEXTIN".

tl;dr, I'm a little upset but also a little amused at the fact that even during the ONE TIME I get a chance at straight activity to set my record straight (literally), it gets ruined by family.

EDIT: Completely unrelated event but I think it's funny as hell; the girl I actually do have a crush on is having some problems with an on-and-off boyfriend about him wanting sex but she's Catholic and can't/won't allow it. So she asked me for help.

That's right; she asked the single, virginal, bisexual guy about a straight relationship problem involving sex.

 

[Lorem Ipsum]

had a random influx of people I don't particularly know come up to me and say "I've heard rumours that you're gay" today, and deciding, "what the hey", told them the truth. and they were all OK with it - even somebody who I absolutely wouldn't have expected to have been (bless him he said "but you don't act gay")

I officially <3 the modern day

 

[Dannichu]

This story is equal parts sad and awesome.

Call me cynical (I'm usually not, but I think I sort-of am in relation to this), I'll like the modern day when you can be gay without being bombarded with questions about it, or having to 'confirm rumours' or things. Nobody has ever been asked "So when did you realise you were heterosexual? What did your parents say?" and so on. That it's no longer (broadly speaking) seen as a bad thing is wonderful, I agree, but what I really love is for it to not be a big deal.

 

[shy ♡]

This story is equal parts sad and awesome.

Call me cynical (I'm usually not, but I think I sort-of am in relation to this), I'll like the modern day when you can be gay without being bombarded with questions about it, or having to 'confirm rumours' or things. Nobody has ever been asked "So when did you realise you were heterosexual? What did your parents say?" and so on. That it's no longer (broadly speaking) seen as a bad thing is wonderful, I agree, but what I really love is for it to not be a big deal.

Oh, god, I don't even know what to say. I sorta teared up. :[ Mostly because a similar thing happened with my brother, this week; he 'crossdressed' for halloween, which obviously as jews my family doesn't celebrate, and following the reactions of my other brother, quickly took the costume off. My other brother and my dad were pretty damned negative about it, both about the fact he dressed up and what he chose to dress as. :\ Sigh...

 

[Koori Renchuu]

I am late for this party. Not even fashionably late just late.

I am bisexual with more of an interest in men. Came out to the world on facebook, may as well broadcast it. I also don't really act all that gay and many people are surprised after hearing it. I had a feeling in the first grade that I was different. I liked watching wrestling and it excited me so much that I started, you know...

Well, I hereby join the club.

 

[...]

Glad to have you around, Koori.

 

[Dinru]

Tsk tsk DeviantART. And I used to love you.

For the linkphobic, not long ago DeviantART took away the option to specify your gender as "undefined". If you selected a binary gender and chose to hide it, it would still show gendered pronouns in a few places. Also, the reason they took away that option was so that they could use "gender targeted marketing". You know, makeup and clothes for females, steaks and ties for males.

Needless to say, someone complained, however...

For those of you who don't know, I identify as neutrois -- neither male nor female. I've been in the closet about it for several years for various reasons... mainly, the fear that saying "I don't have a gender" was a way of exercising cis privilege. Lately, though, I've gotten tired of not talking about it and pretending that I consider myself female. So this is it: I'm not.

What's the relevance of this? I deleted my old account at deviantART because I was tired of the username and embarrassed about the old crappy art I'd posted years ago. Starting over with a new account sounded pretty good. But when I went to edit my profile settings on my new account, well...

I was pretty confused at how there were only options for "Male" and "Female" in their gender dropdown box. I distinctly remembered there being some third option, which I had chosen for my previous account. A brief Google search later, I found that as of May, the "Unspecified" option had been removed. I'm sure this sounds familiar to those of you who witnessed LJ's gender fail several months ago; however, unlike Livejournal, deviantART has not backtracked on this. Despite (or maybe in spite of) the numerous user complaints, dA has not offered an explanation of any sort.

I had to wonder why, so I asked in a support request. Maybe they just hadn't considered that non-binary people used their site? Or, well, existed. It wouldn't be the first time. I got a response from a user named realitysquared, aka Daniel Sowers Jr., the site's Copyright & Etiquette Administration manager:

Thank you for contacting deviantART, I will be assisting you with your support ticket.

A relatively recent redesign of our profile setting page now requires that you designate yourself as being male or female.

If you do not wish to designate your gender and prefer to deactivate your account due to being forced to make this choice then you may do so if you choose.

Missing the point much? It's not that I do not wish to designate my gender, but that I am unable to with their current setup. I replied letting him know as much:

It's not that I "do not wish" to designate my gender. I wouldn't mind doing so, actually! But I can't with the options you offer. I am not male and I am not female. Therefore, I CANNOT designate my gender. It's as though you offered a box for users to designate their race and only listed white and black. You missed the entire point of my support request.

Surely that would get through to him, right? I mean, maybe that would help explain my position. Surely he'd just misunderstood. Right?

Well... apparently not. Mr. Sowers replied thusly:

My apologies but there are only two sexes; male and female so one should apply to you. In the unusual case that you are hermaphrodite then I would suggest that you select the one which you feel applies the best.

I don't think I should have to explain what's wrong here. First of all, despite being in such a position of authority, Mr. Sowers had no grasp of proper comma usage. And second, well, there's that lie about there only being two sexes (though I wasn't actually talking about sex to begin with, but gender). Finally, do people really still use the word "hermaphrodite"? It's one thing if an intersexed person wants to identify that way on their own (I'm not, so it's not up to me to say they can't), but binary folks really don't have that right.

In the meantime, I'd found that their profile setting to "not display" the chosen gender doesn't actually work, so I left one last angry reply:

There are not only two sexes, and neither of them applies to me. That is extremely hateful and bigoted of you to say. Why is this website called deviantArt if you only want people who fit into neat little boxes, and why are you celebrating Spirit Day if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of intersexed (the word isn't 'hermaphrodite', thanks), genderqueer, neutrois, and other non-binary users?

I'd also like to point out that your setting to "not display" a user's chosen gender does not work. http://split-complex.deviantart.com/stats/gallery/ I have "male" chosen right now and this page refers to me with the he/him set of pronouns.

Yes. This happened on Spirit Day, of all days! At first I was baffled, but then I realized why: deviantART doesn't actually give a damn about the queer community or those kids who had killed themselves. They were just jumping on a convenient bandwagon to make themselves look all awesome and progressive.

After that, my support request was closed without further comment; attempting to re-open it did no good. By that point, I was thoroughly disgusted and tired of arguing, so I let it lie for a few days. After a while, though, I got angry again. This wasn't acceptable, and I wasn't going to stand for it. I opened three new support requests on three separate issues.

Request #110960: Question about site name

Hi, I'm just wondering why this website is called deviantArt when you don't welcome users unless they fit into the tiny, narrowly-defined boxes of either male or female. In fact, devArt used to be open to people of all genders, but as of earlier this year you've forbidden non-binary people from registering accounts, and I was just wondering why that is.

↑ This was my attempt to find out why they had made their discriminatory policy change and understand their reasoning behind it, which had not actually been explained to me.

Request #110955: Chosen gender isn't hidden even though I set it to be

Hi. In my settings, I set my chosen gender to be hidden. However, the page at http://split-complex.deviantart.com/stats/gallery/ uses either the he/his or she/her set of pronouns, varying with which gender I've chosen. That's not "hidden".

↑ This was an attempt to at least get the problem about the stats page that I'd noticed resolved. And finally...

Request #110959: Abuse report: User realitysquared

In my previous support request at http://support.deviantart.com/requests/102727 a staff member with the username realitysquared basically mansplained to me that "there are only two sexes", which is a lie, and off-handedly wondered if I was a "hermaphrodite", which is actually a very offensive word when applied to humans. I'd appreciate if some action could be taken about this.

↑ Having been insulted to my face by deviantART's "Copyright & Etiquette Administration Manager", I thought this warranted an abuse report. So here we go.

As of today, the bug report has not been replied to. So let's just ignore that one.

My question about why the site is called deviantART was replied to by a user named Stykera, as follows:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting deviantART. I'm sorry but you are mistaken: we do not forbid anyone from registering on the site due to their sexuality.
If you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Chris Price
Customer Service Representative

Talk about missing the point, right? I replied,

I'm sorry, but you've misunderstood my question. I didn't say anything about sexuality; I was talking about gender and how you only have options for "Male" and "Female" on the profile page.

Stykera's answer:

Hi,

I see you have previously discussed this same matter with us. To rephrase:

A relatively recent redesign of our profile setting page now requires that you designate yourself as being male or female.

If you do not wish to designate your gender and prefer to deactivate your account due to being forced to make this choice then you may do so if you choose.

Kind regards,

Chris Price
Customer Service Representative

Kind regards. L O L, am I right? She "saw" that I had previously discussed the matter with them, and then repeated the same bullshit answer I'd gotten before! I replied,

You have not answered my question: Why is your site called deviantART if you do not welcome deviants?

Furthermore, I do wish to designate my gender, but am unable to do so as my gender is not listed in your drop-down box. Please don't patronize me.

You'd think this would be a simple matter. But, no. After that, the request was closed without comment. I re-opened it three times asking for a response before Stykera replied,

Please, you have already had this issue addressed by at least two admins. There will be no further discussion here, and the ticket will be marked solved.

Kind regards,

Chris Price
Customer Service Representative

So that was that, and that was why I decided to go ahead and make this post. If they won't discuss it, the least I can do is let other people know that the site is being run in a bigoted manner. Am I right?

And finally, about the matter of my abuse report... A user called y2jenn replied.

Dear deviant,
We are, of course, very sorry if you feel you were mistreated in any way during your last support inquiry. That wasn't our intention. deviantART's gender choosing system is limited to the general "male or female" choices by design. We completely understand that you may not feel at home classified as either gender. But we require that all deviants choose one or the other in order to complete the registration. You are, of course, more than welcome to hide the chosen gender from public view. Please don't hesitate to let us know if you need any further assistance with this or with anything else in the future.

☼ Jenn Lee
Support Desk Representative

Bullshit. Ms. Lee had decided to make it all about their ~intent~ and about their gender drop-down box (which I'd specifically opened a separate request about), ignoring the bigoted language that Mr. Sowers had used toward me. Naturally, I replied:

"We are, of course, very sorry if you feel you were mistreated in any way during your last support inquiry. That wasn't our intention." Intent does not matter. Realitysquared point-blank told me to my face that my gender does not exist, and now you're trying to tell me the same thing with nicer language. So far I have not received an actual answer as to why you want to throw non-binary users under the bus.

"deviantART's gender choosing system is limited to the general "male or female" choices by design." So it's a feature, not a bug. =|

"But we require that all deviants choose one or the other"... isn't that a bit self-contradictory? How can you justify that? This was one of the few websites that didn't force such a choice, and then you took it away. Is that supposed to be progress? It look more like regression to me. This is 2010, not 1900.

"You are, of course, more than welcome to hide the chosen gender from public view." As a matter of fact, it's not completely hidden, but I've already filed a separate bug report about that.

"Please don't hesitate to let us know if you need any further assistance with this or with anything else in the future." If you seriously think this is a solution to my problem, I have to wonder how it is you made it to the position of Support Desk Representative. You also did not address realitysquared's offensive language -- "There are only two sexes" (which is a lie) and the usage of the word "hermaphrodite".

I would appreciate if you didn't mark this as solved until I agree that it is.

Can you guess what happened next? If you guessed "She completely ignored the complaint about realitysquared and made it about the gender options", you guessed right!

I'm sorry, but you'll need to pick one of the genders available that best suits your needs. I do see your other ticket and it will be picked up by our bug department for review. Thank you.

☼ Jenn Lee
Support Desk Representative

So, I'm done arguing with deviantART. Instead, I'm bringing the issue to the wider Internet community. Everyone has a right to know about this issue; I do think we deserve an answer from them about why they did something so stupid and discriminatory, but I doubt we're ever going to get one. (My bet? I think they did it to better focus their advertisements. Yay, sexist ad targeting! Don't you love it? I know I do!)

(They DID fix it, but that doesn't excuse how they acted.)

 

[...]

DeviantArt has had quite a notorious history of being discriminatory, if not outright unaccepting of LGBT people.

 

[shy ♡]

Tsk tsk DeviantART. And I used to love you.

For the linkphobic, not long ago DeviantART took away the option to specify your gender as "undefined". If you selected a binary gender and chose to hide it, it would still show gendered pronouns in a few places. Also, the reason they took away that option was so that they could use "gender targeted marketing". You know, makeup and clothes for females, steaks and ties for males.

Needless to say, someone complained, however...


(They DID fix it, but that doesn't excuse how they acted.)

They've fixed it? Eh. Whatever, I barely used the site - so. :\ I wish Eevee would get his art site started *nudge*. Could really use a good one.

 

[shy ♡]

Sorry for the double post but this is relevant.

# I am guaranteed to find people of my sexual orientation represented in the Earlham curriculum, faculty, and administration.

I find this to be particularly true and hurtful; the fact that movies/shows are classed as 'gay' movies (not using the slang where gay means 'stupid' but where the movie has gay characters so it's automatically a queer movie) is just... evidence of how backwards we are. There aren't 'straight' movies. Wtf?

 

[baiyune]

# I can count on finding a therapist or doctor willing and able to talk about my sexuality.
Ugh. My mum took me to a psychologist ... last year, sometime, for something unrelated. I mentioned being gay to her and she just went ":/ oh. Have you always been that way?" and then quickly changed the subject. At least she didn't try and find some underlying reason for it, I suppose.

Right, uh, hi all. I'm queer/here/etc. Lesbian to be exact. Out to my close family and friends, unsubtle about it to everyone else. Hope you all don't mind me joining.

 

[...]

Of course we don't mind you joining. We've had a shortage of new lesbians around here as of late.

 

[surskitty]

How do you figure?

 

[...]

About all we've had join these past few weeks is a couple of bi males. We've had a couple of active bi or les girls but they've had membership for a while now. Now we have someone new, so hey. Party.