Tag: lgbtq

How to spell the word “bisexual”

queermutiny:

(via whatexit.org)

By Tom Limoncelli

10/18/1999

The word is spelled “bisexual”. It’s really quite simple. It has no hypen and the “s” is not caps. Unless it is at the beginning of a sentence, the first letter is lowercase.

RIGHTWRONGbisexualbi-sexualBiSexualBisexual (unless at the beginning of a sentence)

It’s easy to remember the thing about the hyphen: It’s not homo-sexual, it’s not les-bian, it’s not bi-sexual.

I see some people write it with the first letter in caps as in:

Tom is a Bisexual.

I consider this to be bad form. Nationalities are first letter cap, but adjectives aren’t. The word “bisexual” is an adjective, not a nationality. There is no Bisexualia from which we all come. Therefore this is correct:

Tom is Italian.

and this is correct also:

Tom is bisexual.

On the other hand, some GLBT publications, like the Philadelphia Gay News have an editorial guideline that dictates that they always capitalize Gay and Lesbian. Therefore they write:

Johnson, a Gay activist, spoke at the conference.

In this case, we demand capitalization parity and therefore in this case and in this case only should the word be capitalized. Therefore, PGN should write:

Bob, a Gay man, and his partner Mike, who is Bisexual, also spoke at the conference.

However, we consider this a silly editorial standard since they don’t capitalize the word “heterosexual”.

I can’t believe that I’ve been doing bisexual activism for the last 10 years and this issue still comes up so often. Oh well. There are bigger fish to fry.

P.S. This reminds me of the old vaudville joke where the secretary asks her boss if “brown” should be capitalized. He tells her “no” and leaves the room. She turns to her typewriter and speaks as she types: “Dear Mister brown”.

androgynistic:

The word Monosexual and Monoromantic are so important because otherwise

  • when Bi/Pan/Omni people vent explicitly about Gay and Lesbian people straight people will side with us not to support us but because of their own Homophobic and Lesbophobic agenda                                                 
  • when Bi/Pan/Omni people vent explicitly about Straight people Gay and Lesbian people will side with us not in support of us but to co-opt our experiences and erase that our experiences with oppression are always linked to us being bi, which may help to fight Homophobia and Lesbophobia but do fuck all about Bipobia

If you’re a woman, if you’re a person of color, if you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you’re a person of size, a person of intelligence, a person of integrity, then you’re considered a minority in this world. And it’s going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. It’s all about how you have to look a certain way or else you’re worthless. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue.

Margaret Cho (via larmoyante)

“If you really believe that representation doesn’t matter, then why the fuck are you threatened by it? If not seeing yourself depicted in stories has no negative psychological impact – if the breakdown of who we see on screen has no bearing on wider social issues – then what would it matter if nine stories out of ten were suddenly all about queer brown women? No big, right? It wouldn’t change anything important; just a few superficial details. Because YOU can identify with ANYONE.

So I guess the problem is that you just don’t want to. Because deep down, you think it’ll make stories worse. And why is that? Oh, yeah: because it means they wouldn’t all be about YOU.”

fozmeadows (via kawaii-afro-fluff)

funkvibe:

ok do you see this Legendary Epic woman right here? this is wendy fucking carlos and i’m going to describe to you why wendy carlos is 30 thousand times better than you

  1. she is a 74 year old trans fucking woman. she remembers having dysphoria at age five and started hrt in 1968. you think transitioning is difficult now? try doing it in 1968. the thought scares the shit out of me.
  2. her first album, switched on bach, is a literal hour of her playing bach’s music on synthesizers. that’s classical edm. edm wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t brought synthesizers to prominence. the catch? synthesizers in 1968 were monophonic. that means you can only play one note at a time. wendy carlos sat there and played each instrument’s piece of bachs music at least 6 times per symphony, painstakingly overdubbing and rerecording each line, one at a time.
  3. oh yeah, switched on bach was the first classical album to sell more than 500k copies and she won 3 grammies and stayed on the billboard #1 pop charts for 17 weeks.
  4. you know tron? that really awesome movie whose sequel daft punk made the ost for? wendy is the original daft punk. tron’s soundtrack was all her; not only that, but so was a clockwork orange and the shining. 
  5. in 1998 this piece of shit momus (aka nick currie on wired) made a song mocking wendy’s sexual orientation. $50k of currie’ money later, she forced him to remove that song from his entire collection, have the master destroyed, and his music career fucking died after that.

figured i’d post this since daft punk keep getting a lot of love. i love daft punk, but they owe their lives to this fucking badass.