Some frustration

Recently watched a compilation of LGBTQ+ comedians, was having a great time. This one drag queen (?) comes up on the playlist, I don’t even remember her name cause I could care less. But this part of her act focused on things ✨ the community ✨ is doing wrong.

Like even just from the first few lines I was getting some major “Watch how EASY it is to TRIGGER the LIBS!” kind of sentiment. She said something like, “I’m sorry y’all, I’m oldschool.” Dunno what I was thinking I was getting into 💀 Anyways, she continued:

“We the LGBTQI … ABCDEFG … PTSD community. For real. I’m old school. When I’m from, you like either penis, vagina, or both. [She repeats this.] I can’t keep up with these labels and things, you tellin’ me you’re asexual, b-sexual, pansexual, skilletsexual, crockpotsexual.”

It’s just been on my mind for a while because oh my god. Talk about insensitive. I don’t know what it is with these kinds of people?? What, you think going out and hurting people, saying you know that what you’re doing could hurt people, and then act all pressed or confused when people get hurt??? That just doesn’t seem like developed, adult-like behavior in the slightest. Maybe behavior I’d see in a, say, Tyler, age 12, who plays exclusively FPSs.

And here I thought the older generations’ issue(s) with younger generations was that they were too lazy! Huh. At least the younger ones go out of their comfort zone to learn about others before themselves.

I just feel … genuinely grossed out.

I have many asexual friends, all of which are incredible people capable of love and compassion, are responsible and brave, and are icons each in their own way. I don’t need no fucking Gen X’er self-proclaimed “queen” to sound like my mom and dad, who go out of their way to never grow. And I don’t need no queen like this to think what she’s doing qualifies as entertaining in any value of the word.

Hell, I’ve had to think about the fluidity of how I myself feel in terms of sexuality, and what asexuality means to me, and a whole bunch of other things lately. Sure, I might not be doing this thinking out loud and using labels all the time, but I’m surely not going to be that if this is the kind of “support” my community is going to be doing. All the while turning around and saying that our issue as a community is that we don’t work well as one and that we let ourselves tear each other apart over nothing.

Cry me a fucking river.

If your whole bit, being that you want to help lead something you feel is important and helps people, helps yourself, shares love with the world and changes it for the better … if your whole bit is that it’s hard to be a leader because you don’t feel like you understand the community you want to try to lead then. Uh. Why are you still trying? Can’t really blame anyone but yourself there.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be glad to help in any way I can! The last thing I would want to do is become the frustration I find in you. I’d be glad to help you learn and change and become a more patient person. But you need yourself, more than anyone else, to understnad that your incompetence is not a problem as a result of my actions or anyone else’s actions but your own.

I did not have to learn that my sisters and brothers responsible for liberating and loving us all were subjects to an unfathomable amount of blind hatred, an uncountable number of attacks and genocides, and unknowable amount of agony throughout decades and decades and decades of history just so a jaded, bad-faith actor could tell us that we have an identity issue. Our identity is distinct, and it’s forever going to be. We have identified as queer, as weird and distinct from a system or world of “normality” that has tried again and again to commodify us, to reduce us, to erase us, and we will continue to identify, act, and grow because the rest of the world develops and changes just as well.

It would be asinine to believe otherwise, but sure. Blame the part you don’t understand and don’t bother to learn, then cry out in pain that you can’t understand why it’s this difficult. (Sarcasm)

My loved ones are not dying heroes so you can tell us our identity is a world of fractured glass shards. My loved ones are not dying so you can become a house built of glass, structured fragility in a community of opaque, unidentifiable, indivisible humanity.

With love,
Layla Parker