Thread by @gravislizard

it would be disingenuous if i ever wrote a story about queer characters experiencing sadness because they're queer. my life hasn't really contained that. my parents were upset once over it but i know people who got worse shit for wearing the "wrong" tie to a family event

i think about this a lot because of the obsession I've seen my entire life with queer stories needing to be misery porn. dude if I told my "story" you'd be like "so you're straight...?"

my sexuality has never been a component of any of the actual bad times I've experienced. I've had a lot of bad times but none of it because I'm gay

the author of the comic with the happy trans girl (who i ask you not to bother) is apparently still getting shit for not tormenting her in his strip and it's like... who could write the story these people want in good faith?

ignoring that he's cis, and any debate over whether he should have a trans character at all (he should, and the trans people I know agree), what would be good enough to satisfy the bloodlust of this audience, I wonder?

does she need to get dumped? have casual conversations with her boyfriend that go wrong and leave her in tears and ruin the date they had planned? lose her house? get killed? how much misery is required to make it Correct and Accurate

because like... i know plenty of trans people who that stuff *doesn't* happen to? are their stories invalid just because not every *single* second of their life focuses on their gender?

a ton of gay media in the 90s focused on people getting disowned and murdered and when i was a kid I watched it and learned that people hated me for being gay. that... kind of didn't pan out? not even my parents really?

when my first boyfriend died, my parents offered for me to come visit for a week to, you know, be comforted by home and family. and the whole time they didn't talk to me about it; I tried to bring it up once and got cold-shouldered.

six years later, and nearly a decade after i moved out of my parents' house, I learn from my mother that *she* thought *I* was uncomfortable talking about it. i just thought she hated my lover and was glad he was dead.

maybe not a hot idea to ensure that young trans (and other queer) people don't ever get to see a single story that shows them being happy. it took me a long time to figure out that i could be gay - as an identity - because the lessons i learned from those 90s movies fucked me up

it was incredibly liberating to come to see myself as Gravis, The Gay Boy. I can't fully encapsulate why; I've posted some stuff about it before at length but just take my word for it. It didn't happen until I was 27 because of self-imposed homophobia.

I spent 13 years thinking of myself as gay and strictly controlling my behavior and thoughts to never "look gay" or be glad that i'm gay or enjoy anything about being gay, because I'd been told it was something that you were smart to keep a tight lid on.

I don't want other queer people to feel like they need to hide even from themselves, or to expect everything to end in misery. Life ends in misery. You die at the end. We will all experience, at some point, truly immense pain.

That doesn't mean stories about uniquely queer misery are worthless, but I think it's unreasonable to ask someone to tell negative stories *that they have no personal connection to*

There are, unfortunately, lots of queer people who have had really bad things happen to them. There are also people who haven't had those experiences, but can synthesize something meaningful from hearing those stories from others

Those stories should all be told. But if someone's first instinct when telling a story about a queer character is "hmm, I think I want them to have a good time" then christ don't you dare dunk on them.

At the least because the story they thought of is the one coming from their heart, and if you succeeded in getting them to change tones it would probably be forced and remove any value it could have had