370

Lesbians
Posted on April 13, 2017 by David M Willis

370 thoughts on “Lesbians”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    “Are you talking about Sportsball? The one with the Superb Owl?”

    “Sportland Sports! First in points!”

    1. Stephen Bierce

      Or maybe it was the one with the Balloon Door. Or the Whirled Kup?

      1. Lawzlo

        Or Stan Lee’s Kup?

        1. The Other Mike

          Excelsior, you turbo-revvin’ young punks!

    2. Needfuldoer

      Is that the one with the theme song that went like this</a?

      1. Northamptonier

        Perhaps an apt Sportsball anthem would be the Garfunkel & Oates classic “Sports Go Sports”:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fraSdN-PG8

    3. Jhon

      Sportsballs are a real thing. I once saw a bin of miscellaneous balls at Five Below, labelled “Sportsballs”.

      1. Ana Chronistic

        oh I know Sportsball is a real thing… I got to play it (badly) at MAGFest!

  2. Doctor_Who

    So Howard’s actually familiar with Game of Thrones? I got the impression he was just obsessed with seeing it because he wasn’t normally allowed to.

    Now it seems like he’s just never watched anything else. That makes him even more off-putting, which is impressive. Considering the floating timeline, one day GoT will be a classic show that’s been around his whole life. Other kids were watching Sesame Street, Howie was watching Game of Thrones. He called his mother “Mhysa” growing up and his first words were in Dothraki.

    1. BloodPlum

      Honestly it sounds like he doesn’t watch television at all, either because their grandfather doesn’t allow it, or because he doesn’t have many options because they have basic cable and the edited shows don’t interest him. He does however probably have access to edited internet, which means he probably can look up wikipedia articles and tvtropes page to read about Game of Thrones even if he doesn’t get to watch it.

      1. Melonge

        He probably wants to watch the show because hes already read the books and knows there are boobies in it. I don’t think his grandfather is the kind of guy to think that a fantasy book could be mature.

        1. Kris

          We are ruling out one important thing. Howard could and this is a stretch mind you….have “friends”. Friend potentially not hindered by a controlling grandfather with full access to internet and/or cable. Maybe he gets to watch it occasionally at a friends house. Just enough to make him desperate for more.

        2. Ana Chronistic

          “Friends”? What are those? Are they like NPCs?

        3. Opus the Poet

          Yes, exactly. NPCs.

        4. NelC

          “Hirelings”, surely?

        5. Dana

          NPCs with cable.

        6. Yet_One_More_Idiot

          Perhaps he’s familiar with Game of Thrones because he’s read the book and its sequels?

          (Still has yet to actually watch the season 1-4 boxset he bought last summer due to a surfeit of various other DVD boxsets waiting to be watched as well xD)

        7. brionl

          If you watch GOT, friends are the ones that you disembowel so you can bath in their blood.

        8. Dark

          I thought that was… everyone.

        9. Rukduk

          Appropriate Gravatar is appropriate.

        10. Baronbrian

          It’s how I watched cable when I was a kid.

        11. All-Purpose Guru

          You people that don’t have teenage kids. If Howard wants to see GoT he will see GoT, Grandpa be damned.

          I used to think I would have all kinds of control over my kids. Fiction.

        12. BBCC

          Ohhhh, it’s possible, but only if you’re comfortable with ‘abusive bastard’ territory, like Clint was and the Browns were early on (well, okay, Carol still is, Hank’s been pretty on the mend).

        13. ischemgeek

          … even then. My parents were often well into abusive bastard territory and they didn’t have total control. I just hid my defiance from them in little ways, or did the big stuff after they’d gone to bed and made sure not to get caught.

        14. BBCC

          Yeah, it’s still possible to do things abusive bastard parents don’t want you to, but the ones that do have total control over their kids tend to be the abusive bastard-y ones.

        15. Liliaeth

          Or it could be that he remembers watching it at a friend’s house.

      2. zoelogical

        this depends on how technologically savvy his grandpa is

        for instance: some users of his generation are stymied by the concept of tabs

  3. Sdrainbow

    Ah, yes, the “not quite gay but also super not straight” dilemma. I know it well.

    1. LeslieBean4Shizzle

      This is the problem with bi-erasure. If you’re bi, but you’ve never heard anyone anywhere mention bisexuality, it can be pretty upsetting trying to explain.

      1. JetstreamGW

        I’m deeply confused by that concept, honestly. I mean, maybe it’s cuz I’m from AUSTIN, and was raised by a mother who was a Ballet instructor who fancied herself a New Yorker (she was from Pennsylvania), but I can’t fathom the concept of having never heard of bisexuality.

        Unless you’re, like, Amish.

        1. LauraS

          It happens, trust me. It’s also possible to hear about it but not learn about it, like you get a lot of heteronormativity shoved at you, and a reasonable amount of “it’s okay to be gay!” but bisexuality is something that happens to other people. Or the only thing you learn is the stereotypes.

        2. Liliet

          I can pinpoint exactly three places where I’ve heard of bisexuality before tumblr. RP forums that listed suggested options for sexuality in their character quizzes, TVTropes, and the OotS forums.

          Literally nowhere else has this word been used.

        3. Liliet

          (later I came back to those forums and saw ‘asexual’ listed alongside bi, hetero and homo and the good old disclaimer ‘we dont know what the fuck ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’ orienation means you cant put that in please clarify’)
          (I might or might not have cried)
          (that was literally what normalized different orientations to me… like… there are kids now growing up who have no clue what ‘bisexual erasure’ or ‘asexual erasure’ is because look its listed right there)

        4. Dragon_Nataku

          Meanwhile I’m 34, bi, and have no idea what “bisexual erasure” means…

        5. Rowen Morland

          It is the idea that bisexuality isn’t just getting left out of mainstream culture and education because the people producing it/teaching it have no idea about it but instead it is getting left out because people don’t want it to be in there because of the prejudices.

          I didn’t hear about it for a long time and once when I was listening to a radio show about sexuality with some late teens it was talking about alt sexualities and I mentioned that there were more than straight, gay and bi and they asked me what the heck bi even was.

        6. Deanatay

          It’s the idea that ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ are like an on/off switch, with nothing in between. If you’re a boy, and you like a boy, then you’re gay, and all those GFs you had before were lies or mistakes and you’re horrible for ‘deceiving’ them just so you could fit in. If you’re a girl, and you like boys, then there’s no way that moment of attraction you felt for a girl is real or in any way significant and you’re NOT REPRESSING ANYTHING.

        7. Liliet

          Yeah, this is what I mean.
          (Or the other way round, if you’re a girl and like a girl, clearly everything you’ve ever felt for boys was just mainstream culture deceiving you… which like, is possible, but not the only option)

          I had no clue that there is a point of view from which bisexuality is not a thing, because between the Sims and their glorious ability to romance whoever and the RP forums, 15 year old me had fully internalized that there were in fact THREE options.
          (And I thought I was bisexual because there wasn’t a difference between how I felt about girls and boys and it’s not like there’s a fourth option that explains that… naaah. WELP YOUNGER KIDS WILL KNOW MORE)

        8. NelC

          You may have been lucky enough to have missed the phenomenon, or maybe I’m just old, but it’s what happens when you’re told that you’re a gay/lesbian in denial, or a confused straight; one or the other, there’s no such thing as bisexuality.

        9. Dragon_Nataku

          Oh OK, thanks guys. Well, I grew up in Latin America where everyone is a super-Catholic so we just didnt talk about sexuality really. I’ve never felt the need to “come out” either so I guess I’ve never had to experience any of that.

        10. Ansel

          Contrastingly, I knew what bisexuality was by the time I was in middle school (11). I have no idea where I first heard the word, and my family isn’t/wasn’t particularly progressive so it’s not like they acclimated me to it. Most of my friends were all pretty familiar with asexuality as a concept too.

          I don’t find people not getting it surprising, though, if only because I’ve been exposed to so so so many.

        11. Mr.Morningstar

          If I recall correctly the first time I heard the word bisexual was from Khaos Khomix. that’s not true actually I heard it before when I was 13 on gaia online but I thought it actually meant transgender because I was uneducated on the matter. But the comic taught me the actual meaning of the word and my first reaction was “…That sounds like me actually” since I thought you could only be one or the other.

        12. Mr.Morningstar

          by which i mean you could only like one gender and/or sex

        13. Cerberus

          Eh, it happens. Especially in the more uptight areas. Where I grew up, there was “normal” and gay. And if you weren’t “normal”, you were gay.

          I didn’t hear about bisexuality, asexuality, or trans stuff until college when I got massively into queer culture. Heck, I think Dykes to Watch Out For was my first exposure to everything but the ace stuff.

        14. Krys Brynhildr

          Yeah, around the various places I grew up at the relevant times I was there, well, after puberty ages I guess where other people my age started throwing the labels around at each other…

          It often didn’t even matter if the “non-normal” didn’t even have to do with sex. I mean I’d heard of people being bi, in as much as that was possibly considered a “sexual deviancy that celebrities sometimes end up getting”, but generally you were “normal” or that meant you “must be gay cause you don’t act like what we’ve classified your sexual identity by…and the non-sexual parts of your identity by as well”.

          Asexual stuff I’d vaguely heard about by people I know claiming to be “that”, but I didn’t really get what it meant until I looked it up on the internet after being rankled enough by all the nonsense around me. Even being Ace is super complicated though, since its a whole spectrum as well…

          Still, explanations existing makes the whole thing less confusing and isolating I guess? For people who haven’t trained themselves to be paranoid about interacting with others anyways.

        15. neeks

          It took me till my midtwenties to figure out I’m asexual (including a five year relationship) because even though I’m an atheist, I was raised Christian and good Christian girls aren’t SUPPOSED to want sex.

        16. ischemgeek

          I first heard of bisexuality from Degrassi: The Next Generation (shut up I know the acting is often terrible but that show has and will always have a soft spot in my heart for being the only fucking show for teenagers that had the balls to examine shit like sexuality, self-injury, homophobia, STDs, teen pregnancy, etc, in a non-shaming way).

          One of the characters at one point starts going out with a girl and people are all, “So are you a lesbian now?” and she (the fucking queen bee cheerleader and one of the main characters, not some two-bit guest star who will be there to be gay and then gone again next episode) replied with, “Uh, no. I’m bisexual – I like both.”

          … the only downside of Degrassi is (at the time I aged out of the target demographic) they never addressed trans issues – but aside from that, they got a lot right, and when they chose to address an issue, if at all possible they’d cast someone who actually represented that demographic (they had an autistic character played by an autistic dude, both girl and boy characters who had eating disorders played by people who actually had those eating disorders, they addressed both anti-native and anti-black racism head-on, I could go on. The only time they didn’t engage in representative casting was when a story decision wound up being made after the casting decision – usually a season or two after the character was cast – and even then they engaged in extensive research and consultation to make sure they got it right) and they were fucking fearless about it.

          Also as an aside, Drake was on it way back when he was a child actor, if you happen to be a Drake fan. I’m not, but I know a few people who are and are shocked he ever acted.

        17. BBCC

          If it helps, they have since had a trans man main character.

          On the other hand, he ended up dying after 3 seasons. thankfully not because he was trans, it was some texting and driving thing, but not exactly a great end for your only trans character and the first one to be a main on a teen drama.

        18. davidbreslin101

          I first encountered the concept at uinversity. More from meeting bi people than hearing about it, really- once three of your friends have all dated people of both sexes, you get the impression that this might just be a thing.

      2. ridtom

        The worst is when people, straight and gay, tell you to your face that it doesn’t exist.

        I wanted to say, “bongo, my best friend tried to seduce siblings of the opposite sex at the same time, just acknowledge it!” Oh I wish I had.

        1. HeySo

          AKA, the Mike approach.

        2. HeySo

          Okay, misunderstood the tag usage, sorry. :X

      3. Shade

        This seems odd to me. I got taught about heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality in highschool sex education. But I’m not in the US either.

        1. Needfuldoer

          In the US, high school “sex ed” is typically just a glorified birds-and-bees talk and a filmstrip on the horrors of VD (which you will surely get if you don’t keep it in your pants until you’re married). “Abstinence only” education, ladies and gentlemen!

        2. Felgraf

          Let me put it this way:
          In the US, it is possible to go through High School sex ed, and have fairly liberal parents, turn 18-
          And *not know what a clitoris is*. As a *cis woman*. Like, literally not know what the word describing a part of your own biology means. (This happened to a good friend of ours. This was learned playing cards against humanity with them upon turning 18.)

          Sex Ed in the US is really, REALLY REALLY BAD.

        3. garbud

          guess I got lucky my sex-ed was quite in-depth.

        4. Mr.Morningstar

          I am always baffled by the american education system, in particular sex ed.

          In our classes which start at 12 (though at that age parents are allowed to opt you out of it though very few actually did). Then in secondary school (high school to you yanks) They teach you more in depth about it. Generally about what the specific purpose of each part of the genitals were for.

          And even though I went to an all boys Irish catholic school, they still taught us about safe sex, the menstrual cycle and consent and non consent.

      4. Jon Rich

        I don’t remember this myself (since it wasn’t a personally significant incident at the time; I might also have been absent or not paying attention), but more than one bisexual classmate in high school has since told me that our sex ed teacher basically denied that bisexuality existed.

        I went to a really, *really* liberal high school, and in Massachusetts, no less. I graduated high school in 2010.

    2. Unusually Angry Hippie

      This. I’m not gay, I knew pretty early on that I wasn’t gay, because I liked girls. But I also never EXCLUSIVELY liked girls, but it’s what my friends liked so that was what we talked about, and so many of my behavior patterns are still a cheap imitation of ‘straightness’.

      After coming to terms with being bi, I’ve tried to change that, but I still catch myself hiding my same-sex attractions in public unless I’m around people who I KNOW will understand.

      I guess this is ‘internalized homophobia’, which is odd, because I was raised non-religious and tolerant and was never outwardly homophobic in the first place, and yet still have that narrow thread of shame against myself in my head. Brains be weird, yo.

      1. Leorale

        Yeah, brains be weird.
        We absorb so many societal messages, nobody is immune to biphobia or homophobia. I hope that you pick up that little thread of shame and throw it out the window whenever it comes up. : )

      2. Krys Brynhildr

        See, to me that seems more just a fear of other classifications of people. I mean, you don’t actually have to have a phobia of bisexuality or homosexuality to feel like hiding that part of oneself from the public at large. All you need is a large amount of awareness of how horrible people still can be towards people they can identify as such combined with a few smidgens of trust issues or paranoia, and a healthy amount of caution?

        I mean, yeah, its really too bad that being openly oneself is often responded to poorly, but its hard to fault people if the ‘worst’ they do because of social judgments is just not mentioning that they think someone ‘looks hot’. It’d be different if they lash out at or are dismissive of people in order to cover their own tracks, but people have a right not to have their whole identity on display at every moment if they don’t feel comfortable revealing stuff to strangers.

        Or at least thats my thoughts on the matter.

    3. Znayx

      Wow, this thread you started has really taught me some shit, even though I skipped over 90% of it. Now I understand the two earlier strips where bisexuality was dismissed or ignored despite fitting in the situation. I never knew it was possible to not be aware of bisexuality if one’s aware of homosexuality. There are some massive, glaring problems with education…

      It just stuns me. All this shit is ridiculous to me. All this shit about which sex someone prefers to bond romantically or sexually with is, to me, no different than someone saying they prefer chocolate, some other saying they prefer candy, yet another saying they like both almost equally, and others still saying that they like only the candy they grew up with or only 63% dark chocolate but not the other types.

      So, as you all might gather, I’m feeling quite baffled and really scratching my head here.

  4. valis_kr3

    The lack of banging in football is a negative.

    1. Ansel

      I’d probably start watching sports if there was banging.

    2. Jon Rich

      You’re generally not allowed to do it on the field, though. Or anywhere there’s cameras.

  5. shadowcell

    ah yes, football, the sport where they once had a long argument over whether Jimmy Graham was still a tight end or if he had hooked up with Drew Brees so much he was now a wide receiver

    1. Renshear Blade

      *shakes head with school girl giggles*

    2. Shiro

      It’s funny cause of the total misunderstanding of basic biology!

    3. All-Purpose Guru

      OMG

    4. Remmington Steele

      Rugby has hookers.

  6. Kris

    I watched a football once. It just sat there doing nothing, then someone kicked it.

    1. Passchendaele

      And then somebody grabbed it and ran with it and everyone tried to tackle him. And if he dropped the ball, it was a bad thing. How odd.

      1. Eldritch Gentleman

        Seeing how he is from Canada I wonder if he meant Football or the American Football…

        1. ValdVin

          Okay, does that mean Canadian football, football, or.American football?

          Rooting for.the Argos is just a tad less.futile than rooting form the Leafs.

        2. N0083rP00F

          Then there are The Raptors, TFC, Marlies, Wolfpack and The Rock.

        3. timemonkey

          I believe what you call football’ we call soccer.

      2. NelC

        How is feetball if they picked it up?

    2. trlkly

      They kicked it? I’m surprised it wasn’t taken away from them at the last moment by a black haired girl.

      1. Jon Rich

        I was waiting for a reference. Thanks for not letting me down.

  7. Stephen Bierce

    *plays The Fugs’ “Boobs-A-Lot” on the hacked Muzak*

    1. Cholma

      Nah, for this one, I would play “What is was, was Football,” by “Deacon” Andy Griffith, a classic 1953 Standup routine.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNxLxTZHKM8

      1. AwayFromHome

        Nah. My vote goes to boobs over football. Always.

  8. Keulan

    I watch sportsball games sometimes, usually when I’m on a break at work and there’s nothing else worth watching on the TV in the break room.

  9. achallenger

    there was plenty of banging, just never the type youj were hoping for

  10. caesaria82

    I miss Oberyn Martell literally daily. My beautiful bisexual viper <3

    1. Doctor_Who

      I read the book before the show came out. I was watching it with friends when that episode arrived, and everyone loved Oberyn. I couldn’t bear to tell them what was about to happen.

      1. Smiling Cat

        Why would you spoil it? How do you sustain yourself on their tears of grief that way? Man, I think I added two years to my life just from the Red Wedding.

        1. BBCC

          That was me introducing my boyfriend to Prison Break. His tears have been delicious thus far! 😀

          I am a delightful girlfriend, I dunno what you mean.

      2. Brotato

        No lie, it literally took me three whole weeks to catch up, because I was putting off watching THAT SCENE.

  11. Dara

    Purely. platonic.

  12. Sam

    There was just one football. All the football teams had to learn to share.

    1. Bret

      When I joined the NFL, we didn’t have any fancy schmancy pads. We had pillows- TWO pillows, and a bucket for the whole team! And we had to share the bucket!
      Buck up son, you are one lucky running back

  13. Larkle

    Football is very softcore guy on guy action.

    1. motorfirebox

      And wrestling is like Skinemax?

      1. Lan

        One can only assume so, if Skinemax is even still a thing.

      2. Krys Brynhildr

        Well, see with Wrestling there’s varieties.

        And by that I mean there’s the kind thats mostly “Grappling”… and then there’s stuff like Lucha Libre thats more about death-defying completely insane ultrasweet stunts, like if parkour had more bodyslams in between running up walls and jumping off stuff.

    2. davidbreslin101

      There’s been a rise in women watching rugby in the last decade or so. Also, yaoi fangirls are a big thing now. Coincidence? I think not.

      1. neeks

        Uh, yaoi fangirls are not a recent development.

  14. Tom T.

    How old is Howard? And is he on the spectrum somewhere?

    1. HMH

      It’s not unthinkable that he is, but his affect, poor social skill, withdrawn nature, and focused obsessiveness could just as easily be related to coping mechanisms that relate to escapism and selective isolation due to a clearly abusive background. We don’t know exactly what his home life is like, but at this point we have clear evidence that it probably isn’t good.

      1. Sam

        ^That plus abuse can cause developmental delays, empathy issues (where in times of stress they detach emotionally from situations) and there is the possibility of dissociative memory loss to cope with the actual abuse as well. It is overall too early to really say.

    2. Needfuldoer

      He’s still in high school, probably about 3 or 4 years younger than Ruth.

    3. thejeff

      16, actually.
      Ruth is 20.

      Howard certainly has issues, but I don’t think we’ve seen enough to diagnose them. My working assumption is that they’re more directly tied to the abuse than to neurodivergence or any other preexisting conditions.

    4. Mr.Morningstar

      I think his issues are less mental issues he was born with and more a result of living with his shit stain of a grandfather.

      or it could be both

      who knows?

    5. Guairdean Beatha

      Howard has no real father figure, and no one to guide him as he goes through puberty. Sadly, his sexual education is being handled by the characters in Game of Thrones. His views of sex, love, and human interaction are skewed to some sad extremes. This bodes ill for his future.

    6. Liliet

      I’m calling autism + ptsd because that’s what I’ve got and he reminds me of myself A LOT

  15. Delicious Taffy

    Is this a shout-out to Ma3?

  16. BBCC

    Fo..oot..ball? Is that a thing?

    Eh, screw it, Game of Thrones is on.

  17. Passchendaele

    Don’t fret, Howard, sometimes they have awesome wardrobe malfunctions in the Superb Owl. That’s about it though. 😛

  18. Shiro

    I, too, once watched a foot ball. It was awful.

  19. @zombieundergrnd

    There is lots of banging in football.
    Just not quite of the sexual nature (junk grabbing in a pile isn’t sexual, it is just being an ass).
    Hell, there is even a pass route called the Bang 8.

  20. TrueVCU

    There’s banging in football, it just usually comes later

  21. Kris

    A quick google search shows that the word “lesbian” not only means- a homosexual woman, but also- from or relating to the island of Lesbos. (which is apparently an island maybe) so Billie is correct. The word “lesbian” does actually mean multiple things.

    1. Spaz

      I can’t have been the only person who, when playing Total War games when young, giggled hysterically at the Lesbian rebels who were all totally dudes on horseback.

      Come to think of it, Lesbian dudes make me giggle even now.

      My sister even became a Lesbian for a month when she went there to help bring refugees (from Turkey) ashore.

      >.>

    2. No Name

      Fun fact: “lesbian” (a woman who loves only woman) is in fact derived from “Lesbian” (a person from Lesbos). In the ancient days, there was a famous temple to Aphrodite that was staffed by woman and not much else.
      You can see where this is going.

      Also: Sappho was one of them (and, I think, a head priestess at one point) and a prolific lyric writer. Most of her poems (or at least the ones that survive today) are quite suggestive, and she is where we get the term “Sapphic” for the more platonic acts of lesbianism.

      1. Cerberus

        Nonsense, nothing more than gals being pals:

        Please

        Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
        You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
        There hovers forever around you delight:
        A beauty desired.

        Even your garment plunders my eyes.
        I am enchanted: I who once
        Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
        Whom I now beseech

        Never to let this lose me grace
        But rather bring you back to me:
        Amongst all mortal women the one
        I most wish to see.

        1. Andy

          Yep, nothing to see here. Completely and utterly straight.

          Totally platonic.

          Totally.

        2. Deanatay

          Even if the temple at Lesbos WAS just ‘gals being pals’, don’t forget that most literature at the time was written by men. “They’re totally banging” is not a new thing.

      2. Spaz

        For the record, I was aware of the origin of the word.

        I just find the concept of Lesbian dudes (dudes from the island of Lesbos) hilarious, BECAUSE of the word’s origin.

      3. Gamaran Sepudomyn

        Funny thing. Sappho was actually bi.

      4. Li

        That’s… not what sapphic means. There’s no implication in it anywhere that it’s “more platonic”.

        Also while we’re having an etymology lesson, here’s a history lesson, too: “lesbian” did not mean “exclusively attracted to women” until around the 1970s, after all the women we would now call “bi” were kicked out of the community by the lesbian separatist movement. This is deeply important to remember when you’re dealing with questions like “did Sappho also write poems about men”

        (she did; the first round of historical revisionists translated her poems into English with all-male pronouns, but a second round most definitely translated some of her poems about men so that they’d be about women instead)

        that “lesbian history” has never been 100% women who only loved women; that the tent used to be bigger, and used to include and accept all wlw.

    3. missilentmurmur

      I don’t mean to be rude, but this got me unprepared. Are there people in western countries who don’t like learn about that in middle school when learning about Greek history or litterature? And once again in high school litterature?

      1. zoelogical

        well i mean we had to create a whole women studies’ division in order to actually get women a focus so i would say: yes? and also depends on the kind of school you go to.

      2. Romanticide

        I don’t think they teach anything about Sapho or Lesbos in Mexican schools, there are lessons about the greeks in history but they get passed through very, very fast.

      3. Cerberus

        Definitely not, in the version of Greek history we were sold in school, the Greeks were the most heterosexual people ever, Sappho didn’t exist, and everyone was only worshipping these false Gods until Jesus set everyone straight.

        Though, in general, historians are pretty terrible of actually acknowledging the queer parts of history and it tends to get erased. Like, there’s some historians who try and argue that Sappho was straight and her poems of thirst for the women in her life was just her “celebrating communities of women”.

        1. Rukduk

          Yeah…that’s really desperate stretching right there. The Greeks were simultaneously one of the most sexist and least heteronormative societies of the Mediterranean world. I mean, seriously. The elite guard unit of (Greek) Thebes was made up of 150 same sex couples, and most other Greek city-states had systems whereby younger Greek men were sexually intimate with their mentors (because apparently teacher-student ethics weren’t a thing).

        2. CJ

          Also: you fight so much better if you want to impress your mentor…
          Even though bisexuality was rather a normal way of life for Greek men, I don’t really need a society that follows their ideals.

        3. Rukduk

          Oh hell no!! I want the slavery, sexism, institutional pedophilia, Plato’s ideal Facist government, and everything to do with Classical Era Greece as far away as possible! The Persians were actually a lot nicer…

        4. Krys Brynhildr

          See, the way I’d always thought it went in that case was that the way a lot of older “man on boy warrior cultures” tended to justify it was a “its not actually two men having sex, cause only one of them is actually a proper adult male with actual proper rights anyways” sort of thing.

          Like definitely an institutionalization of having a younger lover who wasn’t considered an equal in any way.

        5. Leorale

          I read a book on this: it’s because a youth should learn to love his army and his city. Which are represented by an older man. Then someday he’ll teach this to a new youth, and everyone will love their cities. Patriotic buttsex!!

        6. Krys Brynhildr

          But only towards people who aren’t yet allowed rights. Or something. Cause having to decide who is the top or bottom in a relationship between two adult males diminishes the bottom or something.

        7. Cerberus

          I will note, this is the same educational environment that tried to argue that pyramids pointed up to God in Heaven, mentioned any Islamic or East Asian culture exactly zero times except for a brief mention about India when going over Alexander the Great, and “taught” the section on evolution as “it’s a theory. It’s wrong. Don’t believe in it.”

          My educational environment growing up was beyond fucked.

        8. BBCC

          ….I realize I just said this last night, but I’m a history major who loves learning about cultures different from mine and world religions class. I gotta say it.

          It hurts worse than ice cream.

        9. StClair

          I spent exactly one day at a school like that. I’d been bullied in public middle school, and my parents decided to shop around for alternatives.
          At the end of the day, I came out with my science textbook, which said (among other things) that Darwin was wrong for questioning the Lord’s creation. I asked my mother, “Do I have to do this?” She said, “No.”
          And that was that.

          (may have told this story before)

        10. Deanatay

          Smart parents.

        11. Roborat

          It makes my heart hurt when I realize that people that ignorant exist in the supposed first world; and that they force their ignorance upon innocent kids in the name of religious freedom makes me go ballistic with rage.

        12. ischemgeek

          The more I learn about Sappho the more awesome I find her. I mean, someone (possibly herself? Historical record is cloudy but I like to think it was her) made up an imaginary husband for her called Kerkylas of Andros which is basically ancient Greek for Penis from Manland. Or, as one modern philosopher translated, “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man” (Parker, Holt (1993). “Sappho Schoolmistress”. Transactions of the American Philological Association. 123). I mean, come on.

        13. davidbreslin101

          We got plenty of Romans at school, but not a whisper of those frisky Greeks. Not surprising, in retrospect: this was Britain in the grip of Section 28, when teachers were terrified of anything that could be construed as “promoting homosexuality.”
          This also meant that while our teachers came down like a ton of bricks on racist and sexist insults, they went all selectively deaf about homophobic insults. Result: eleven-year-olds who called each other “gay” as the dirtiest insult in the world without having a clue what it actually meant.

      4. Rukduk

        A US student will also most likely not learn about anything involving Ancient Greece until high school, and then half the time they’ll focus on Sparta because of the testosterone overload (and blatant homoeroticism) is associated to that city because of the movie “300”.

        1. BBCC

          My high school wasn’t allowed to show us 300. I mean, my my ancient history teacher did anyways but, but she wasn’t allowed to. Though she also taught us about Alexander and Hephaestion and let me write a paper about the treatment of homosexuality in ancient Greece (by which I mean folks of a similar age, not the gross basically child grooming a lot of folks did).

        2. hof1991

          No school should be allowed to show 300. At least not as remotely related to history. As a study in ballet of blood film making maybe. As a study in propaganda possibly, aimed at present day Iran as an enemy of Western Culture.

          Only remotely connected to even the ancient Greek version of the story, which wasn’t written until decades after the events. Like having the South write about the Civil War, but waiting for everyone involved to be dead first.

        3. BBCC

          The point of showing 300 was for us to rip apart how badly inaccurate it was. The teacher liked to do that a lot to connect the class to stuff we might no about. So basically she showed us the movie and then asked ‘Okay, so, what was wrong with THAT?” The answer to that, as you note, was basically everything.

        4. Spaz

          For a far more fair-handed approach to the battle, I highly recommend Dan Carlin’s “King of Kings series.

          Or just Dan Carlin in general. It’s long and rambly, but it gives a lot of context and is in general well done (as could be said about any of his stuff, to be fair).

        5. Deanatay

          His long (LONG) series on WWI is worth rambling through.

        6. Spaz

          Oh god yes.

          Really puts the last century into perspective. If he did a series on colonialism……

  22. Tacos

    Ah yes… hand egg.

    Also, is… is this the first time anybody has learned anything about sexuality from Game of Thrones?

    1. Kris

      That would be the show to learn that from. Really earns that TVMA rating. Also really equal opportunity with the sex. Very informative……Howard probably shouldn’t be watching it.

      1. Rukduk

        It’s not like he’s going to start having confusing feelings about Ruth because Jaime and Cersei are incestuous and he found out incest was a thing through the show…at least I hope Howard didn’t. He’s got a hard enough life already.

  23. Schpoonman

    Damn, did most of them really not grow up knowing about the LGBT+ spectrum*?

    *: I’m trying to use a somewhat convenient catchall in place of “anyone not straight and cisgender.” Is there a polite term to use or am I better off using as many descriptors as is necessary?

    1. Smiling Cat

      Most people still don’t grow up knowing about it.

      1. LeslieBean4Shizzle

        As I noted above, bi-erasure sucks.

    2. Spaz

      I didn’t really know much about it (aside from, you know, standard-issue gayness) until I was older than 20

      1. Krys Brynhildr

        I think thats still the case for a lot of over 20s? Its only been recently that the whole conversation really went so public its hard to avoid if you interact with the internet at large.

        1. Spaz

          that being said, I do find what I like to call “the socioogy of sexuality” incredibly fascinating.

          Not just because my own sexuality is incredibly complicated–though I could sum it up as demiromantic demisexual–even that requires a bit of explanation and even THAT is dumbing it down.

        2. Krys Brynhildr

          Yeah, the Demis were as far as I could actually wrap my head around at all. Going deeper was like “How are these even classifications anymore”.

          Meanwhile it seems like a lot of the younger generations just know a lot of this stuff naturally.

    3. Belegcam

      Knowing the concept exists in the abstract and actually seeing it in real life with people you know (or yourself, even!) are two very different things.

      1. Schpoonman

        That’s fair, I was one of those people (didn’t actually sit down and speak with a gay person until I was 18). One of my best friends came out to me as bi when we were 21, while another came out as gay the prior summer, and my sister came out as trans just a year-and-a-half ago. I’m familiar with the concept of not seeing it face-to-face until full adulthood, but I still grew up with at least a passing knowledge of the concepts. So far very few of the kids even seem to know about the term bisexual.

        Saying this puts a bad taste in my mouth, but I think John is better versed in the minutiae than the kids are (he got to LGB before he fucked off even further than he had already). I really hope Leslie doesn’t break too hard from the scandal with Robin, because holy shit these queer kids need a benevolent helping hand.

        1. AlexanderHammil

          There’s a microgeneration thing at work, too, maybe? I’m 35, and so I grew up during the AIDS crisis and the immediate aftermath, and so we got a LOT of sex ed about safer sex and LGBT issues, stuff that it sounds like people mostly skip over today now that people aren’t dying the way they were. But people born in the 2000s, like most of the cast, wouldn’t have gotten that same exposure. People talk about the Oregon Trail generation sometimes, but the AIDS crisis is at least as formative.

        2. thejeff

          Whereas I’d made it to college before AIDS really hit mainstream awareness. Maybe just a little after, but long before sex ed caught up. I don’t remember much from sex ed, but I’m pretty sure LGBT stuff got barely a mention if that. The extent of my real life exposure to “alternative lifestyles” was bullies calling me (or others) gay. 🙂

          College was a different story. Or maybe just a different crowd I ran with. It’s where I started meeting out LGB people. No trans folk until much later.

          While the 2000’s kids might not have had the same panic sex ed classes, they’ve grown up in an era when LGBT issues are much more mainstream. The same-sex marriage fight has been going on very publicly most of their lives, for example. Positive portrayals of LGBT issues are much more common in the media. There are far more open LGBT kids in schools. Etc, etc.

        3. Spaz

          I have to agree with thejeff here. Maybe it’s just the circles, social media, etc bubble I tend to find myself in, but kids these days (I feel like I should go looking for a cane or a walker just for saying that phrase) are a lot more open, there’s a lot more out there, and there is a LOT of discussion about the LGBTQIA stuff (to be fair, both pro and con).

          Not to mention various “scandals”/”positive role models” depending on your point of view that have popped up on the news for all kinds of LGBT folks.

          And, even if we’re fairly new from a mainstream perspective (despite having been recognized on the Kinsey scale back in ’48), as a gray ace I find it awesome that there are some asexuals in TV shows (Jughead in the CW Archie show [and in the comic] and Raphael from Shadowhunters).

        4. thejeff

          And it’s still quite possible for kids to have missed some of these things, even without being as blatantly repressed as Joyce & Becky.

          OTOH, it’s also worth considering that Willis is really writing based on his own experiences not actually that of college kids today, though I’m sure he’s done research to get closer. The characters are still rooted in his experiences, which would be what: late 90s college?

    4. Grethelwvier

      You’re good. “LGBT+” is usually sufficient, and is considered an inclusive shorthand for any and all longer versions of the “LGBT” acronym.

    5. nightsbridge

      ‘Queer’ is also a pretty well accepted term, if you’re not on tumblr. But there’s nothing wrong with LGBT+!

      Speaking as someone who is on several points . . . I spent a long time with pretty much no knowledge of it.

      1. Cerberus

        Ugh, the AERFs on tumblr trying to declare war on queer in order to justify attacking ace, trans, and bi folks infuriates me like nothing else. Like poor ace kids are getting attacked because some shitty TERFs decided to train a new generation on how to hate and dogpile a marginalized group based on fake history.

        1. Bagge

          …I know I will regret asking this, but what are AERF? Are they Ace excluding the same way TERFs are Trans excluding?

          Personally, I think the world “excluding” makes the claim of “feminism” pretty dubious.

        2. Cerberus

          Yup.

        3. Bagge

          *Sigh*

          All the hugs, and sorry for the world being shitty.

        4. Krys Brynhildr

          I would like to offer an apology for the world being shitty as well. Even though I’m not really responsible for it being so or any real clue how to make it less so.

        5. StClair

          but you can’t truly define your little tribe without excluding/ hating/ othering everyone who’s not!
          (bah, humans.)

        6. Krys Brynhildr

          I think thats a large part of why I’ve always hated the idea of joining into any sort of group identity to be honest. Well, that and I’m not good at squeezing myself into whatever boxes people want to classify the group requirements as.

        7. davidbreslin101

          I think they just think of themselves as “feminists.” Possibly “TRUE feminists,” at that. “TERF” is the name applied to them by people pissed off with their hypocrisy.

  24. John

    Okay, so, Howard, of all people, is explaining to the bisexual lady what “bisexual” is.

    1. Shiro

      Tbf Billie is sounding like she’s got hella internalized homophobia right here. “Normal”, huh, Billie?

      1. Smiling Cat

        She specifically said she didn’t want to say normal. She’s probably just not familiar with the terminology.

        1. Carms

          she recognises the wrongness of the terminology but it still reflects how she feels. She doesn’t know the words, sure, but ALSO, she thinks of non-hetero as aberrant. It’s difficult not to when the only words you have to think about it with are in terms of normal and wrong

        2. Kris

          Honestly I doubt she’s put much thought into it. Most people develop their sexuality naturally as they grow up. Labels and definitions are learned later. Take Becky. Did she grow up knowing she was a “lesbian” or knowing she liked girls. I can understand if Billie has never thought of being lesbian or bisexual or whatever until confronted with it. It really shouldn’t matter though. Whatever Billie “is” is her business and hers alone.

        3. Fart Captor

          I’m pretty sure Becky didn’t even figure out that she liked girls until she got to Anderson

        4. Kris

          Indeed. She probably just wanted to be friends with Joyce. Best friends even, maybe the best friends possible? In an AU that happened! Unless that best friend stealing trollop Dorothy beat her to it!

        5. zoelogical

          the BEST of FRIENDS with your husbands always conveniently off screen

        6. zoelogical

          watch the great sitcom Becky and Joyce Tuesday nights @ 7pm central, only on Channel 6! This week: the girls get themselves into a whale of a tale making jello molds for the church potluck. Who knows what wacky shenanigans they’ll get themselves into, and how their husbands will get them out!

          i am imagining this as something like I Love Lucy, except the husbands are never given names or faces, and are always conveniently off in the garage fixing cars or going on fishing trips or at the office, et cetera, while Joyce and Becky navigate the perils of the Betty White type Witchy Good Christian Busybody, and are tempted to drink mimosas, and help their kids figure out school and bullies and the like while having loads of gay subtext and tension that constantly gets filtered through The Str8.

          pretty much straight up a oldschool happy family sitcom with shades of nightvale dystopia and The Gay

        7. Ansel

          definitely got me thinking of Jill Sobule- I Kissed a Girl

        8. Shiro

          Right, but that’s still where her mind is at the moment. Having internalized homophobia as a bi woman isn’t abnormal in such a hetero-centric society, it just means she needs gentle education and time to adjust.

        9. nightsbridge

          Heck, I wouldn’t crucify her for it. Her words here make it clear that she’s dealing with it in the right way, and taking steps to not hurt people because of it. It’s still there. But I’d venture to say, for now, assuming Billie doesn’t backpedal and keeps going on the road she’s on, it’s not a problem.

        10. StClair

          In an earlier conversation with Joyce, she claimed that everyone thinks about and/or experiments a little. So that’s “normal”, by her lights. Being a lesbian, exclusively into girls, that would be “something else.”

        11. Lin

          I was definitely 18 when I found out that not all straight girls were attracted to women (something I still find dubious, but okay, heterosexuals, you do you). I grew up in Montana in the 1980s and 1990s and I didn’t know anything about queerness beyond “gay.” I figured that, because I was able to be attracted to men (though never as often as I’m attracted to women and genderqueer people), I must be straight. Heteronormativity’s a motherfucker.

      2. Foxhack

        An old classmate would’ve used the word “mundane” – so… typical?

      3. vlademir1

        To be perfectly fair (and quite pedantic) the history, definition, connotations and etymology of the word “normal” are quite at odds with each other. The modern common usage meaning didn’t really start to become normalized until around the time of Gauss’ works on statistics and analysis got published (whether that’s causation or just correlation I have neither time no inclination to really dig into enough to say) and wasn’t typically applied to people until late in the 19th century. The meanings of “typical or common” and “at right angles to” are quite a bit older of course.

        That aside it’s not until you get to those of us who fall outside the most normal range of the distribution curve (at least between 1σ and 2σ if not between 2σ and 3σ from mean) that people have to think all that much about their romantic and/or sexual leanings and identities which suggests that “normal” may by definition, though certainly not connotation, be the correct term to use. Mind you this is coming from a guy who has a long held viewpoint that being abnormal is absolutely not the bad thing that society likes to pretend it is and who is significantly suspicious of anyone who tries to propagate the notion that anyone is “perfectly normal”.

        1. Egg

          I was thinking about this the other day WRT the equivalent of “normal” in Mandarin (zhengchang). It’s literally composed of two words meaning “proper” (/upright/expressing rectitude) and “frequent”. It is possible to argue in English that “normal” just means “common”, but in Mandarin the connotation of “proper” is, well, not connotation any longer, but part of the word itself.

        2. Jhon

          Like ‘orthodox’ and ‘orthogonal’. (See also: ‘righteous’ and ‘upright’.)

    2. Smiling Cat

      I’m sure Billie will have to clarify that it doesn’t necessarily mean “both at the same time”, since Howard was educated by Game of Thrones and all.

      1. Fart Captor

        Also that usually, no one gets beheaded

        1. Spaz

          Dear David Willis: Please put a new word in the auto-replacer.

          Replace “blowjob” with “Behead”

          As in “I got the best beheading last night! My significant other gives the best beheadings!”

        2. nightsbridge

          That is the first time I remember seeing that word on here period. Might be a waste.

        3. Aletheia

          shhhh…. it won’t be a waste if he slowly, randomly replaces other words with “beheading,” too. Then it’ll be beheadings all around! 😛

    3. Cerberus

      It’s interesting, but so far, pretty much every explanation of bisexuality to a bisexual has come from a non-bisexual character (as far as we know).

      Dorothy explained it to Danny. Howard to Billie.

      1. Leorale

        I don’t have Patreon, but I think Sierra explained it to Becky?

        1. nightsbridge

          She did!

  25. Tenzhi

    What you are, Billy, is “subject to sexual whimsy”…

  26. Carms

    I mean, I geddit, given current social conditions, identifying as a lesbian (or even Bi, IFF you know that’s a thing) is a bit of a hefty buy-in. “ugh identity politics” “YOU FUCKERS HAVE POLITICISED MY EXISTENCE SO YEA”
    In my little world ‘lesbian’ isn’t a big deal but man my world is not representative.

    1. Schpoonman

      I’m big on not passing on guilt because you share a race/gender/etc with an instigator (there are wonderful and shitty people in every subsection of life, you HAVE TO approach every person equally), but I grew up in the South and treating every human being like a human being until they give you personal reason otherwise is something I still struggle with.

      I have never and will never understand the desire to attack someone out the fucking gate because they have a different lifestyle.

      My friend Jack is brilliant, charismatic, and funny, and when he came out to me as gay my thoughts were as such: “Okay. You’re gonna take a while to stop being a fucking asshole internally, but he still likes Eva, he still likes Smash Bros, you can still bongo about Ben (my older brother) when he’s being a dick. Jack hasn’t changed, only your perception of him, and the sooner you get your head on straight the sooner we can all get on with our lives.”

      For all I dislike about Greek life, the members of his fraternity went from “Dude, you need help getting her number? You’ve been flirting all night,” to “Dude, you need help getting his number? You’ve been flirting all night,” and I’m extremely happy they did.

      1. Lin

        Frats can get a bad rap. I actually had a fraternity bro take my Introduction to Queer Studies class because (and I literally quote because I couldn’t believe these words were being said): “One of my fraternity brothers came out to us and we don’t really know anything about all of that stuff, so I figured I’d learn.”

        I have no idea what he learned about white gay men in my queer of color critique and critical trans politics class, but he was actually one of my most enthusiastic learners and a delight to have in class. HE TOOK AN ENTIRE THEORY CLASS SO HE CAN BE MORE SUPPORTIVE OF HIS GAY FRIEND.

        1. Leorale

          <3

  27. Grethelwvier

    “I watched a ‘Football’ once. ( =m=)”

    Omg same, small, pink cube boy… Same…

  28. Ivy

    Your hovertext is exactly what I was thinking

  29. RashRaikou

    Representation matters~ I’m glad Howard has Game of Thrones.

    1. Rukduk

      Ironically enough, I did not realize Renly and Loras were gay until the show came out. Then I reread the books and had a “oh, that makes more sense now” moment. I’m not quite sure how I missed it.

      1. Fart Captor

        A lot of people somehow managed to miss that those two jedi monk dudes from Rogue One were gay, despite them being totally gay for each other.

        1. Rukduk

          Ok. Baz I was pretty sure about but I had no idea about Chiwytte. Makes sense though now that I think about it…dammit how do I miss these things? I mean, if it hadn’t been spoiled for me I don’t think I would have know LeFoy was gay in Beauty and the Beast. How am I this bad at noticing gay people in works of literature and cinema when I’m so spot on in real life?

        2. Fart Captor

          I don’t know that it’s official, but that would just mean that even the studio missed it. Those dudes were definitely smoochin’

        3. ischemgeek

          I read an interview somewhere with Donnie Yen where he basically confirmed it without coming out and confirming it (likely because Disney are homophobic jackoffs who are perfectly happy to court the queer community with queerbaiting but will never come out and give actual representation).

        4. BBCC

          TBF, that’s because they put in NO effort in writing LeFou as representation. I believe the general rule of thumb is that if one can get through the media (whether it be a movie, game, etc.) without knowing a character is part of whatever underrepresented group they’re supposed to represent, you’ve failed. And my brother didn’t know until I told him about the press release and I doubt my mom noticed – she though I was joking when I said “LeFou, stop hitting on Gaston, he’s creepy and you’re too good for him”

        5. zoelogical

          one of the really straight people from my old church seriously said “they must be really good brothers”

  30. Bicycle Bill

    “I watched a ‘Football’ once.”

    Obviously he wasn’t looking at it from the proper perspective.  Maybe he should have read this:
    Freud, Football, and the Marching Virgins

  31. Stu

    There IS a tremendous amount of ass-patting in football – but since it’s guy-on-guy, he’d have no interest in it.

  32. Rukduk

    Well, at least Howard’s aware that there are sexual orientations besides heterosexual and homosexual…which is weird, considering he thought girls could get “lesbian pregnant”. Like, what the hell’s going on there? Does he think either Ruth or Billie was going to pop out a demon shadow baby ala Melisandre?
    …
    Dammit he probably did didn’t he.

    1. zoelogical

      where else do babies come from

    2. vlademir1

      Maybe, but I personally have a pet theory that obfuscating stupidity (cf. TV Tropes) may be an ingrained second nature defense for Howard in this universe due to Clint.

  33. Azukar

    And this is why representation in media matters XD

    1. Reltzik

      So that overly sex-crazed teenage kids can apply the right label to your sexuality even as you would rather reject labels entirely?

      1. zoelogical

        ABsoLUTELY

        or ok, more precisely so that applicable words exist in popular parlance so that they can be used even if they aren’t one hundred percent identifiable to a specific person’s experience of their sexuality

        b/c those words exist, those ideas exist, and are accepted as existing, so with howard they have a modicum of…acceptance? they don’t have to fight the “yes gay people exist” or even the “yes bisexual people exist” battle, because he already knows they exist. from…watching game of thrones. that show. always taking one for the team. and then killing their team members off brutally.

        believe it or not this may be one of the best responses they get from their associated families (excepting sal and walky probably)

        1. Reltzik

          Heh.

          Yeah, I get it. I was just being silly in pointing out that Howard’s present behavior isn’t the BEST display of why it’s important.

        2. zoelogical

          lol i misread your tone i think

          anyways i love answering questions seriously, Thanks, Good Night

  34. nightsbridge

    . . . I have mixed feelings about his game of thrones obsession now. This is a good result.

  35. Moose

    He seems disappointed there was no banging in a televised competition between teams of muscly, hulking men. Makes me wonder if he leans that way himself. If so, I’d be afraid of what his grandfather would do if he found out.

    1. C.T Phipps

      Hey, Loras actually mattered to some friends. Game of Thrones had a positive effect the way Tara on Buffy did. Which is unfortunate in a way because one’s a murderous fantasy program and the other a horror comedy.

      1. StClair

        Buffy was the first of those, right?
        :p

    2. Roborat

      There is lots of banging, just no sex.

  36. HeinousActsZX

    Homestuck didn’t update tonight.
    I was hoping it would.
    It had a lot of bisexuals in it.

  37. Gesc

    The only football is the one where you use your feet, and not this “american” play pretend of rugby.

    Come on, fight me on this.

    1. Reltzik

      You use your feet in (american) football.

      Also, you score more than 3 points in a typical game.

      1. Gesc

        Lies and slander and stuff.

      2. foamy

        A. Canadian football is still better

        B. NHL playoffs just started so footballer talk can just go die in a fire now >=|

      3. JBento

        Maybe, but they’re not GOOD points.

    2. JBento

      It WOULD take americans and their crappy language skills to attach the name “football” to something that does not involve an actual ball that they barely ever touch with their feet.

  38. BenRG

    Billie, Howie is a teenage boy. So, no: There is nothing else but porn on television; at least not to him!

    1. Li

      Howie is one type of teenage boy! There are many. Not all of them are this interested in porn, or interested in it at all. This has been a drive-by validation of other types of young boys, with the caveat that I’m sure BenRG was only joking anyway.

  39. Brotato

    OBERYN MARTELL IS MY FAVORITE CHARACTER HOORAY FOR REPRESENTATION OF NI CHARACTERS HE IS THE BEST

    …or

    Well

    He was. :<

    1. Brotato

      Bi*

      Goddamnit

    2. JBento

      Ah, what dark days these are, where a Brotato can say “ni” to helpless little old commentators.

      1. OnyxIdol

        +1

      2. Roborat

        I suppose you are going to demand a shrubbery now.

  40. Liliet

    …I relate to Howard so, so much.

    People have said in the comment section again that they find him ‘offputting’… because of his lack of involvement with popular media and narrow interests, I guess?

    Well I was also found ‘offputting’ in my teenage years, and also bullied pretty badly because of it. I see myself in Howard to an incredible degree: prone to dissociation, disorientation, not knowing what is acceptable to say or do and what isn’t and stumbling into horrifying-in-retrospect situations because of it.

    I will fucking fight anyone for Howard, because I will fight anyone for teenage me. She didn’t deserve the shit she got for being helpless in the big horrifying world of ‘am I a literal alien or what’, and neither does he.

    (‘Autism’, ‘asexuality’, ‘ptsd’ – all those words helped when they came… well Howard is clearly not asexual but the rest of it…)

    1. ischemgeek

      Yeah teenager me was basically Dina, with Howard’s tendency to stick my foot in my mouth on the rare occasions I did speak.

      I sometimes made a game to see how long I could go without speaking because I hated talking so much as a teenager, in part because I did (and do) hate my voice, in part because I had a stutter I was always teased over, and the final part was just because nobody would ever give me the time I needed to collect my thoughts. Longest when my family was in the house was four days. Including the time my folks let me stay and housesit for them while they were off for something with my sister? Six and a half days.

      1. Leorale

        Not talking = literally what my nightmares are about.

        It takes all kinds! 🙂

  41. Bagge

    See – it’s EDUCATIONAL!

    1. Bagge

      “Also, I know seven different ways to dismember a man.”

      “Keep on to that knowledge. That might come in handy.”

      1. JBento

        “What, the same man?”

        1. Roborat

          Yea, just how many members does this poor guy have?

  42. OnyxIdol

    As much as I don’t care for GoT, it *does* have representation.

    Also, Willis, the gift was from me 😉

    1. David M Willis

      THANK YOU, STRANGER

  43. Cerberus

    Comic Reactions:

    Representation matters.

    No seriously. It matters so much. Like, it feels stupid, but show representation that isn’t shit is critical for reaching a lot of people and not only letting community members figure out who they are, but also help dominant group members understand a bit more about their life experiences.

    We’re a very narrative-driven people. We like stories and tales and we like characters we can empathize with. When done well, you get a massive movement of awareness and support. When done poorly, you get a more entrenched backlash that will deny real life experiences in favor of the bad representation they saw in movies and TV.

    1. Bagge

      It is, it truly is. It doesn’t have to be perfect either. If we can show ten different ways of being a bisexual (confident like Billie, a wimp like Danny, aggressive like Ruth, casual like Sierra…) then we can truly convey the message that sexuality a) exists and b) does not have to be a personality trait.

      1. C.T Phipps

        Tara on Buffy was a gamechanger for many people, ditto with Willow. It’s just the awkwardness of the fact that people violently die on the show all the time because it was a horror comedy made the clock inevitable for a problem. Game of Thrones has a similar problem. Because all of the safe nice shows where people live apparently are less of a safe place for gay people to live than geek murder dramas.

      2. Li

        “Does not have to be a personality trait” makes me a little wary, to be honest.

        Because of the way that Straight people tend to take that as an excuse to portray their LGBTQIAPN+ characters as “just like you! but with one exception!!”, not letting them have any other LGBTQIAPN+ friends or any community participation, not letting them have conversations or thinking too much about what’s often a really important facet of their identity.

        To use the Buffy example — Tara and Willow meet in a Wicca group, which then conveniently turns out to be really boring and crummy so that neither of them ever go back to what was proooobably the closest thing the show ever actually had to a queer group. Tara emerged from the ether, with no other friends, so she didn’t introduce Willow to the community in any significant way; instead the two of them formed their own community, and very very rarely have actual conversations about their sexualities. (Willow tearfully but also angrily apologizing to Tara for not having established her lesbian street cred…? That’s a very real moment.)

        So yeah. Being LGBTQIAPN+ isn’t someone’s whole personality, but it isn’t nothing either. It does bring with it a community, a culture, and a whole lot of baggage.

    2. ischemgeek

      Case in point: Although I knew that trans people existed, and I related a lot to a lot of the narratives of trans women I knew, I didn’t make the “click” of “maybe I’m trans!” until I’d seen a trans dude friend of mine transition, saw him maybe a year after he finished his transition and was hit with a punch-in-the-gut of, “That’s possible?!” combined with, “I want to look like that!” He was the first trans person I saw tell his story, either in fiction or reality. Full stop.

      Cuz, like – no offence intended on this one Cerb but trans women aren’t trans men and we’ve got different issues to deal with. When I first started questioning, I was able to encounter a lot of trans women narratives and relate to them, but it didn’t click for me until I saw a real-life trans dude narrative. Cuz the things that bug me as a trans dude about being a trans dude (my voice, my hips, fucking Monthly Shark Week, etc) aren’t the things that bug a typical trans woman about being trans.

      Which isn’t to denigrate you at all, or to say you should have less representation. More saying that I really wish I could have encountered a story about a trans dude before my late 20s.

      1. Cerberus

        Oh no offense taken. The absolute dearth of any representation or resources for trans men is fucking criminal and is something that infuriates me.

        Like, yeah, a lot of representation for trans women is shit, but at least its there, ya know?

  44. Cerberus

    Panel 2: Women loving women. Because there’s a lot of arrangements of that that don’t involve a single lesbian.

    Also, I’m loving Billie’s complicated bi feelings here. Shit like this is why it’s so important to have words to describe experiences. Because without them, you’re just scrambling in the dark mostly figuring out what doesn’t fit or doesn’t fully fit.

    Panel 3: Though, oof, I have so many sad feelings about her internalized biphobia. Like she recognizes it and stops herself. She avoids calling being straight normal, even though that’s what she was taught. But she also minimizes her attractions for women, especially as it seems her strongest romantic relationships have both been with women.

    Which makes sense. Society is awful to queer people in general, and society is even more awful to bi folks. And there’s a lot of social pressure to round up or round down so you can “safely” be either straight or gay with occasional “exceptions”.

    And that minimization is heart-breaking in real life. To see someone call themselves heteroflexible simply out of fear of the impact of biphobia if they were to be honest. To see someone too scared to pursue a certain type of attraction because they were taught it was wrong or scary. To see someone scared to call themselves queer because they currently have a different gender partner or they aren’t sure they have “enough” attraction to “count”.

    It’s brutal. And so I have a lot of feelings for Billie trying to navigate that and find a means of describing herself without any vocabulary to help her. Because I remember being there holding my ex’s hand when she was going through all of this.

    Panel 4: Oh, bless you, Howard for dropping in the word.

    And yeah, this is why representation matters. I noted it already above, so I won’t go too much into it, but good representation is worth a fuckton. Both in helping folks find words and models to describe themselves and in helping others understand.

    And when it’s bad, when it’s broken into a standard bury your gays plotline or an awful pile of misinformation, it’s heartbreaking.

    Before my family became awful about it, my mom used the touchstone of Chaz Bono to understand my transness and later my dad and uncle used awful representation like Buffalo Bill to try and discourage me. And I was on the phone with my ex after the finale to Legend of Korra and her weeping to see bi women showing up in a children’s show.

    This shit matters and we see a facet of that here.

    Panel 5: And yet, it’s still one of the most homoerotic things guys will try and insist is straight. Ditto for wrestling, really.

    Now, excuse me, I need to cut this off here before I start rambling about “proper” footie and revealing myself as the giant soccer dork I am.

    1. BBCC

      Yeaaaaaahhhhhh. I have seen people who use heteroflexible because they are legit moreso attracted to the opposite binary gender than their same one, but I’ve also heard of a lot of folks who use it before they’re ready to come out as some form of polysexual

      1. Cerberus

        The person in particular in that example was actually more attracted to the same gender than different genders and was sleeping with more folks of the same gender than people of different genders and openly admitted he was only using heteroflexible because he was convinced women wouldn’t ever want to sleep with him again if he admitted to being bi.

        He was… a very interesting man. Though unfortunately we clashed a lot because he was also aside all that, a massive sexist who regularly mistreated romantic partners.

        1. BBCC

          Blech, sexism. That’s not fun.

          And yeah, that seems to be a common thing, which has caused problems for folks who legitimately feel like heteroflexible fits them best. It’s…gotta be a thing when people refuse to take your ID seriously because other people have used it as a cover for their own (for whatever reason). Or when folks use the same label as you for very different reasons and those folks suck.

        2. Leorale

          Counterexample: I went to Oberlin College, which strives to be super duper LGBTQ+ friendly. I identified as Bicurious until I graduated, mainly so that I could avoid participating in the identity politics of Bisexual. (I wasn’t against identity politics, but I found them overwhelming, and I felt I had enough identities already.)

          I was fully aware that I was privileged not to hafta pick a more defined identity, but Bicurious worked for me til I was sure, even outside of the Oberlin Bubble, that I liked all sorts of people/genders, when I could relax and approach it my way.

        3. Leorale

          (‘Questioning’ would have probably also worked, but that would’ve sounded important/fraught, which is what I didn’t want. ‘Bicurious’ was exactly the level of minimization that I wanted at the time, so I could focus on being a Jewish nerdy circus-star or whatever.)

        4. Scar Man!!!

          you work in the circus? that’s super neato!

          also, hi five as fellow questioning/bicurious Jews!

        5. Leorale

          Yay, hi fives back atcha!
          Yep, I’m in grad school now, but I was a stilt-dancer through my 20s, which was equal parts awesome and stressful. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. ^.^

        6. Jhon

          I had no idea stilt-dancers were a thing.
          (Google is my friend)
          A + for Leorale!

        7. Li

          Let’s be honest, though:

          That some folks insist on taking ‘heteroflexible’ seriously is not actually the fault of bi people who are afraid of facing biphobia if they call themselves bi.

          In the end, it’s absolutely a choice that the anti-heteroflexible people are making, to invalidate other people’s sexualities. And they’d absolutely still be invalidating it even if no actual bi people existed who “misused” the label. (They’d just invent straw people who MIGHT misuse it to defend their prejudice.)

          They don’t like it because it “sounds weird”. They don’t like it because it has the word “hetero” in it. They don’t like it because there’s huge swaths of them who would still rather every bi person stop “pretending” to be bi and just “come out” as “fully” gay. (Or “fully straight”, depending on the nature of the biphobe.)

          “…when folks use the same label as you for very different reasons and those folks suck” — this is every label ever. There are people who suck who also use that label. It’s still the choice of the person who decides to let that color their perception of the whole group, to go from saying “this one X person was awful, so I’m going to say that no one with that identity is valid.”

    2. Rukduk

      About the Panel 4 reaction, George Martin can put in some good representation when he tries. But they do mostly end up dead. But, on the other hand so do even more of their straight peers. Also, I was so worried that the Legend of Korra finale was going to pull a Mako/Korra pairing due to interference from Nickelodeon, despite the fact that seasons 3 and 4 clearly showed that Korra and Asami were one of the most emotionally healthy relationships on the show and that they had slowly been realizing that they had a mutual attraction to each other.

      1. StClair

        My impression is that GRR Martin is very much an equal opportunity murderer, yes. No One Is Safe. 🙂

        And then some people still tried to pull that silly “feudal lord and handmaiden” thing. Which, thankfully, was immediately and generally recognized as so absurd that it became a joke meme.

    3. Rukduk

      Also, I want to admit something. I’ve mentioned before that I’m straight but I’m honestly not entirely sure. I mean I’ve never been sexually attracted to another man but I have been very much so emotionally attracted to a few before. I think, maybe I might be biromantic with a preference for women,but I’m not entirely sure. Also, I don’t want to claim an identity that turns out not to be true, because then I become that one “example” homophobes use to argue that sexuality is a choice. Sorry to bring this up Cerberus but, are there any sources you can think of for someone in their late twenties who’s just…not entire sure about their orientation anymore? I’m only really asking because that whole cancer diagnosis kind of has me thinking about who I really am, and if I might be hiding something even from myself or something like that. I’m…really not good with words.

      1. Cerberus

        *giant hugs*

        I will say this unequivocally.

        Your identity is valid no matter what and the actions of bigots have no bearing on what you are or aren’t. And there is no minimum standard for identifying as a queer identity. No required amount of people fallen in love with or being attracted to. If you have only fallen in love with one non-differently-gendered partner in your entire life, you are still allowed to identify as biromantic and that is still very true.

        Similarly, it is perfectly okay to try on an identity and see if it fits even if it turns out it doesn’t. It’s a key part of why “Questioning” tends to be in the longer acronym string for the queer community. Because it is okay to be Questioning and figuring stuff out even if the final conclusion is heteroromantic heterosexual.

        Heck, I’m pretty much doing that myself right now with the term demigirl to encompass my womanhood but also the parts of me that are agender. If it fits, it’ll fit. If not, at least I’ll know. And my fiancee has been all over the map trying to figure out what words encompass their sexual and romantic orientations and gender identity.

        Homophobes are homophobes. They don’t matter. Do right by you no matter what.

        Know at the least that I support you 100% no matter what your identity ends up being.

        And for good reading on bi stuff, I’m fond of this storify collection from Ana Mardoll: https://storify.com/AnaMardoll/bisexual-visibility-week

        1. Krys Brynhildr

          Demigirl is definitely a catchy seeming turn of phrase. Well, to me anyways.

          Not sure if there even is an answer to this, or if you’ll check back in time to see this message, but are there any resources you’ve found helpful in trying to come up with self identifying phrasing in general? Like the sexual and romantic orientations alone are perhaps too complex of a jumble for me to try and put together any sort of quick way to try and quantify my own, beyond generally being too uptight about talking about my own situation in that regards…

          But trying to quantify gender maybe seems even worse, if only because its harder to map all the terms together when your identity tends to dabble in both of the genders that are largely referred to as well as stuff that kind of seems like it falls into the agender pool by default of not fitting in either other set. Its super confusing when you don’t even have a clue what to start researching.

        2. Cerberus

          Thanks. I’m still just starting to try it out this year, but so far it feels an elegant way to honor the fact that I’m a trans woman without having to erase the agender feelings that are coming from two of my major alters. So… fingers crossed.

          Hmm, for non-binary resources, the ones I usually like to throw out to my students is the nonbinaryresource tumblr site or ChaosLife’s Agender Agenda (both should be the first google entry for those terms).

          But if you’re specifically looking for potential terms to search out in more depth, there’s always this:
          http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Non-binary

          Which is pretty bare-bones but can give you words and basic ideas to look for in more depth. And based on what you described, I’d say the terms Pangender, Genderqueer, or Genderfluid might be good starting points.

        3. Krys Brynhildr

          Ah, yeah I’ve read all of ChaosLife’s Agender Agenda stuff, which is where I started deciding to maybe give classifications a chance, instead of just being a sassy brat with the “Gender is stupid” approach.

        4. Krys Brynhildr

          Also, thanks for the advice for sites and stuff.

        5. Vivid Grim

          I would also suggest that agender is in fact a totally viable term. I started off identifying as genderfluid, briefly considered that I was a trans man, then settled on agender. ‘Genderqueer’ probably works – I use differently gendered terms for different things, b/c I have different facets – but it just doesn’t feel right. I’m not striving for super androgynous or anything. It just fits, somehow.

          It’s ultimately, I found, less about strict definitions and quantification, and more about finding a label you – like the sound of, like looking at, that “clicks”.

        6. Krys Brynhildr

          Well, I like the flag colors for Pangender at least. I’m not sure thats supposed to be one of the “important factors” that one is supposed to try and make a decision on though.

          I mean, I’m not super big on identifying period, and it tends to be irksome when forms or the like make me do so. That said, I only really understand gender from a basic correlation of traits to characters in media, or when the way I act gets negative attention from other humans, so a lot of the thoughts on each of the identifiers tends to fall more towards a combination of “is it aesthetically pleasing to me” and “is the term something that hasn’t been tonally attributed as some sort of slur”.

          My most recent joking attempt at gender classification is me being an “I’m complicated, okay?”…which I’m pretty sure is not an accepted gender term by basically anyone anywhere.

        7. boop

          ‘it’s complicated’ is so incredibly true. even if you roughly fit in the heteronormative narrative, gender can be pretty complicated. don’t fit? it gets a lot more complicated as you try to piece together the best description of you. outside the gender binary entirely, or some sort of fluid? good luck! you’re in largely uncharted land x.x and for so long western society has assumed that gender was mostly obvious, so there isn’t a lot of good vocabulary ingrained in us for discussing this stuff.

          personally, i’m nonbinary/genderqueer (umbrella term) agender (slightly more specific umbrella term) genderfluid (i’m agender but my gender *presentation* occasionally becomes inherently important to me, but which presentation i need specifically varies from day to day x.x brain why so complicated) i feel very little dysphoria but my presentation is important for rare moments of gender euphoria (gender presentation euphoria, maybe? blarrr) so apparently i still gotta think about this stuff besides being essentially agender.

          but my brain has a hard time wrapping around all that so i need to use some more familiar sort of analogy. so i flailed around for a bit and finally came up with something helpful. helpful FOR ME, at least. it’s based on my experiences and might not work well for someone else, especially if they don’t already have experience with a gender experience like mine. wow! super helpful! x.x

          –here’s my analogy. say there’s mint ice cream. say there’s vanilla ice cream. most people are either mint or vanilla (they are one of the two ‘standard’ genders). additionally, say there is hot fudge topping and there is caramel topping. and let’s say that most mint ice cream people have hot fudge topping and most vanilla people have caramel topping. even if you can’t see whether a person is vanilla or mint, you can usually make a pretty accurate assumption based on what you can see of their topping (gender presentation).

          i’m not mint OR vanilla ice cream. i’m some sort of unflavored ice cream. like, not even any sugar. just frozen milk. i am agender.

          i do however have mint and vanilla IN me . . sorta. i have mint chips and vanilla cookie dough bites (mmmm)! not the same as most people’s vanilla or mint ice cream, but something a lot like! it’s in very small amounts and it’s mixed in with the unflavored ice cream. so if you take a scoop, you’re not getting mint or vanilla. you’re getting plain ice cream and maybe a mint mix-in or maybe a cookie dough mix-in. or maybe both! or maybe neither.

          in addition to THAT, the toppings i have often don’t correspond with whatever mixin is in the spoonful. sometimes you get cookie dough under hot fudge. sometimes it’s under caramel. sometimes you get mint chips under caramel, and isn’t that an interesting flavor? sometimes you get mint with fudge AND caramel! weeeeird 😮 and sometimes there’s no topping, just bare ice cream.

          so my gender presentation often doesn’t ‘match’ my psuedo-gender identity. you can’t make an accurate assumption of whether i’m feeling ‘more kinda manly’ or ‘more kinda womanly’ based on what i’m wearing or how i’m acting. i mean, usually when i’m feeling a little more en homme, i’m also wanting to rock a cute frilly top. but i might pull out the camo fatigues instead! who knows?? hurraaaaay

          so yeah . . IT’S COMPLICATED

          –a slightly simpler analogy: i’m not pink nail polish, and i’m not blue nail polish. i’m clear nail polish with pink and blue glitter in it. sparkly~ @u@

          BUT FIGURING OUT A GOOD ANALOGY FOR YOURSELF takes sooooo long, and that’s after years of trying to figure out if you even need a good analogy! or at least it took me years. being agender but raised to identify strongly with women and women’s issues in america means i just . . assumed i was a tomboy or something? i had a lot of internalised anti-girlyness thoughts to deal with too, so i identified extra hard as ‘a girl who just doesn’t like girly things uuugh’. and when i started questioning, i thought maybe i was a trans man, but . . . i still had ‘but doesn’t that make me a bad woman, won’t i be letting down the side uuuugh’ and also the fact that i’m . . well . . not actually a man or a woman. but i have no LGBT+ support locally and i’m bad at understanding myself and uuugh it just took so long. so yeah. 32 years old and just recently understanding wtf is up with IT’S COMPLICATED, WHY IS BRAIN SO COMPLICATED

          anyway! YOU CAN DO IT KRYS, keep questioning, don’t worry if it goes slowly, try different things and don’t worry about being ‘not X enough’, keep chasing your euphoria and you will find it eventually <3

        8. Krys Brynhildr

          I’m pretty sure questioning is the thing I’m best at.

          To use the icecream analogy though….I’m the type of person who mashes up my cake into a weird gross looking icecream/cake blend. Which honestly is probably about how gender has gone for me so far. Well, except for coyly dodging any questions about the matter in public when they do come up as far as gender goes.

          Taking parts of things I like and blending them together is maybe a thing I do a lot. Or well, also identifying with things as I come across them even if I end up identifying with contradictory characters in things at times. I mean I’m definitely more prone to identifying with female characters, but that might partially be an aesthetic thing, cause guys are usually boring looking stoic brick walls.

          I have a lot of regular body dysphoria for reasons that are presumably not directly related to gender as well, unless thats the secret real issue behind the dysphoria instead of the other potential health issues that are too minor to even be worth noting by the medical community. Between that and being “too sensitive” in my youth… well theres a lot of disassociation I’ve done to myself.

          So, yeah, honestly the current project of at least 10 years now is how to try and figure out how to be appropriately human and do the self expression thing more effectively on a regular basis. Figuring out gender identity might help with that, but also might be out of my current range of understanding.

        9. Scar Man!!!

          speaking of questioning, I’ve been having similar thoughts and like being in distinct categories and communities. Feels snug and safe. So, the question is, does being biromantic heterosexual (and maybe demisexual for guys possibly) put me in the ace/demi community or the bi community or both?

        10. Spaz

          speaking as a demi, who visits the AVEN site occasionally…..what I see from the AVEN forums, they generally (aside from the assholes who try to gatekeep demis out by saying that if you have even a flicker of sexuality ever you don’t get to claim the ace tag) say something to the effect of “if you think asexuality applies to you, it applies to you. if you think it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

        11. Scar Man!!!

          i mean I dunno cause sex is awesome, but so is platonic romance

        12. Spaz

          basically you can split asexuality into aromantics and asexuals.

          aromantics don’t really antically attracted to people.

          asexuals don’t really feel sexual attraction.

          However, the demi-romantics and sexuals generally need an emotional connection before it’s possible for them to feel romantic or sexual attraction for a person.

        13. Scar Man!!!

          and romantic sex is awesomest

        14. Li

          First of all, both. Always both. Biromantic people have as much place in the bi community as bisexual people.

          Second of all, “sex is awesome” is not a thought that makes you necessarily-not-asexual. Being asexual says nothing about how you feel about having sex or thinking about sex; some ace people are also sex-repulsed, but by no means all.

      2. Krys Brynhildr

        I just want to chime in on this as well, to let you know you really aren’t alone in the ‘questioning, but don’t want to accidentally commit to the wrong label’ end of things at least.

        That said, it might not be so much a “hiding who you really are” thing as much as just not having the concepts available to you to really even understand your own thoughts and feelings in a way you can figure out how to put down in words. Like, don’t feel like you should have to ‘feel bad’ because you haven’t gotten it all figured out yet.

        Also, while I can’t say I know what its like being diagnosed with cancer, I’ve had people close to me who have been diagnosed with it and well, I know it can be really rough in and of itself, so hopefully its the treatable kind and that things are going well on that end as well?

        Like definitely good luck on both those things. I’m not great with words either so hopefully the feelings get across at least.

        1. Rukduk

          Oh, the cancer things ok. Found out about it early and it’s only thyroid cancer, which has a very high survival rate. I gave an update yesterday about my surgery being moved up by almost a month. Plus I’m only going to lose half of my thyroid. Right now I’m still considering everyone’s advice for when I asked what I should do about the neck scar I’ll get.

        2. Krys Brynhildr

          Obviously dress in bright yellow and get a star tattoo on the back of your shoulder. It is the thing to do. Well, at least if you’re a bisexual timestopping vampire.

      3. Leorale

        ‘Questioning’ is a perfectly valid identity. 🙂

      4. Spaz

        Let me share with you my story, as a queer-ish (I think?) gray ace.

        Basically I grew up in a super conservative house, but thankfully my parents never really had any homophobic tendencies….no major ones, anyway. My dad was super concerned about Pokemon being demonic, but I could get away with that by being super careful about hiding my cartridges and trying not to let him see my fanfiction.

        As an aside here, as an ace I find it hella weird whenever someone’s first thought about fanfiction is “I get to write my favorite characters screwing my other favorite characters.”

        For me, fanfiction is about worldbuilding and stories. I actively dislike limes and lemons in any fiction (fan- or non-).

        Growing up, I was super opposed to romance in movies and tv shows, and was super excited whenever there was a movie without a romantic subplot (name one. No, really, name ONE that came out this year). At times, I went so far as to fake gag whenever there was kissing on screen. Annoyed the hell out of my siblings.

        As a teenager growing up in a super religious, very conservative house, I didn’t really know how to express my aceness, and ended up becoming known , very vociferously, as the “bachelor to the rapture” kid. I just had no interest in romance ever.

        Looking back on it, I can understand that was my Asperger’s kicking in, along with a healthy dose of “If they laugh with me, they won’t laugh AT me” reasoning. This is also where my (self-given and much beloved by me) “Spaz” nickname came from.

        All though this time period I didn’t really ever have any romantic feelings, and didn’t really consider it. Cue to my early twenties, where I was dating a girl for a second time (first time she dumped me after three weeks. in a text. because she was “embarrassed” that she said I Love You after two weeks. Although this did nothing but make me try to step up what could be charitably be called “game”), and, I believe, for the first time ever my sex drive kicked in.

        Not long after, she dumped me again, in a text. This time I don’t know why.

        Because 3-5 months later, she was fucking married. That tore me apart when I found out.

        See, I’m a demisexual. For 99% of the time, I’m a straight ace. But when I get attached to somebody, then the hormones kick in and the sex drive turns on. It’s happened to me exactly twice in my life.

        Scared the shit out of me both times. The prospect of it kicking back on AGAIN is somewhere between horrifying and terrifying for me. I do not like losing control like that. I’ve never *really* done anything, but it was an eye-opening experience. Those of you with sex drives running all the time, try to imagine not having any sexual drive at all. Then have it suddenly cranked up to 11, with no prior experience nor context to what was going on.

        It wasn’t until about 5 years ago that I found the (A)sexual documentary on Hulu, and I realized exactly what I was. With some refinements.

        In the time since then, I’ve dived into the various sexual sociological stratum, and been fascinated ever since, finding myself in various places.

        I’m fairly certain I’m hetero-demi-romantic, but when it comes to sexuality it becomes a lot more complicated. I started calling myself a Kinsey 1X but I’m not entirely sure that’s accurate. And that’s very…..static and without nuance nor explanation.

        I….THINK the best way to say it would be I’m some indefinably queer-demisexual with a definite heterosexual bent (prefer the ladies, not necessarily closed off to everyone else).

        Dunno if this helps anyone.

        I have to say, I haven’t really experienced anything about my aceness. Maybe because with my aspergers, anxiety, and depression I tend to find curtains and stay behind them as much as I can, staying out of the limelight and helping with background tasks.

        Then, too, I consider basically a “what you see is what you get” approach and don’t really share a whole lot of myself with others. My aceness is part of me, and it’s just a part of the whole package. I usually don’t see a reason to shout it from the rooftops.

        Because then lots of people would be looking at me, which is horrifying to me at present.

        1. Spaz

          Rukduk, I’m 29. So, yeah. example of someone questioning their sexuality right here.

        2. Spaz

          also when I said “straight ace” I meant it as “purely ace.” not the sexual connotation.

        3. Krys Brynhildr

          I’m 30, so its interesting to see vaguely similar thought processes and path to realizations about stuff. I mean, I’m some range of Demi myself, though I haven’t defined past that.

    4. ScarvesandCelery

      Relatively unrelated to this discussion, but as a Brit I find it funny that “proper” football/ soccer, is the biggest sport in the world, but is so niche in America that it ends up being a “nerdy” sport.

      1. Danni

        huh…..

      2. ValdVin

        It used to be even more niche here, but getting slightly better.

        But when a team in the US or Canada commission a throwback (specialty uniform commemorating a previous team) it’s about the NASL, from their popularity in the mid-70s to early 80s.

        That’s mindbogglingly new compared to your experience. I can’t think of a thirty-year-old team there, yet fans here recently celebrated the league’s 20th year of existence.

      3. Roborat

        The good news is it is getting more popular. Another generation of so of kids growing up playing it should be enough to put it into the mainstream. It helps that it is a lot cheaper to get into the sport than the others, and for the most part, less dangerous. I am Canadian, and it started earlier here than in the U.S., however I got into it even earlier, as I lived on air force bases with a lot of german/dutch/English exchange people who introduced the sport to us Canadian kids, who up to then only played hockey, in the late sixties.

    5. missilentmurmur

      I first heard of biphobia here (like some other things too). Because in my parents circles being bisexual is way less frowned upon than being gay. Bisexuals at least get part of it “right”.

      1. Roborat

        Well, look at it from their point of view, at least with bisexual, they have better chances of getting grandkids. 🙂

    6. Falcon

      It’d make a whole lot more sense if Americans called American football “rugby” and had arguments with the English about which is the true and proper rugby.

      Calling it football is just bizarre.

      1. Liliet

        Yeah, considering feet aren’t even involved in handling the ball… just like, why

  45. DarkoNeko

    Good. Football sucks.

    1. Danni

      i like soccer though

      1. Gesc

        Real football you mean.

    2. foamy

      In unrelated news, this will be the 48th year the Leafs disappoint Ruth.

      1. Marsh Maryrose

        My first thought was that Ruth is at most 20 years old, so that would be the maximum number of years for her to be disappointed by anything.

        Then I got to thinking about the floating timeline and the eternal now of the DOA world. If I’m not screwing up somewhere, 39 days in-universe have taken up 2,408 days in our world. At that rate, one full year in-universe will take up 22,536 days in our world. That’s about 61.75 YEARS!

        Which means that as of the in-universe Move-In Day, Ruth was old enough to have been disappointed by the Viking raids in West Francia and the Battle of Ostia.

  46. C.T Phipps

    It’s interesting how even small acknowledgements can have a disproportionate effect. I’m no HBO or Joss Whedon but I put a adult Trans woman as basically an EXPY for Samus Aran as a backup character in my book The Rules of Supervillainy. I got a flood of positive e-mails and Twitter from readers despite her limited role. They just liked SOMEONE having a character who existed in the superhero world who was one of them and not full of unfortunate stereotypes. I got some hate mail too and 0-star reviews for the usual “you’re a SJW” or “You have an agenda” but I usually frame those and hang them on my wall. It also inspired me to bring her back a as a recurring character.

    Also, I don’t think Howard is lecturing Billie on bisexuality so much as illustrating how popular medica can change things. I like how Willis is showing how media can be important in these things like the fact Carla loved Ultracar.

    1. tangled_z

      And now I’m going to get that book!

    2. Spaz

      As a writer this interests me, but I’d probably be far more terrified of getting it wrong and doing damage to the trans community.

      1. tangled_z

        If you approach it with that attitude then, as a trans person, I’d say that you’re already doing better than most cis people in this regard. I’d say google what The Danish girl and the Dallas buyers club did wrong and what sense8 did right in their portrayal of trans women and you’ll get the gist!

        1. C.T Phipps

          On my end, I approached it with the view, “This person is trans and had a struggle to get where she is but it’s backstory to who she is, which is a person in a robot suit punching aliens.”

        2. Krys Brynhildr

          Being a person in a robot suit punching aliens is a pretty solid sell right there. Especially if the character is actually competant…unlike recent retcons of Actual Samus (Well, unless they retcon Other M Samus into just being a clone. It’d make as much sense as anything else in that game).

  47. Danni

    howie! theres deadpool! for all your banging needs!

    1. Scar Man!!!

      he’s pansexual though. And his alt universe counterparts are 90% of the pansexuals on the marvel wiki :-p

  48. Skoyatt

    Oberyn Martell. <3 T_T

  49. Tarmaniel

    Well, this strip is definitely topical for my life right now. I have a friend who is bisexual and his parents are, well, I hate to use the term homophobic because they’re definitely not full-on “purge the sinner” types, but it’s pretty close. Their opinion of same sex relationships is something like, “Everyone experiments in college, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to grow up eventually.” Now, we’re definitely not in college anymore and the last few years he had a boyfriend that they definitely did not approve of. AFAIK they never said anything directly but the, “Aren’t you ever going to grow up?” vibe was definitely there.

    They broke up last year and now he has a girlfriend. I got to be present at the lunch where he decided to inform them of her existence. Most awkward hour and a half ever. They were just so HAPPY and ECSTATIC over his newfound maturity! I didn’t say anything because I was waiting for him to say something, and he didn’t.

    He full on panicked as soon as we got out of there. “Holy shit, did I only start dating her to placate my parents?” You’ve been together 6 months, if you were just seeking approval you’d have mentioned her earlier. “But I didn’t TELL them I’m still bi, if it was important I’d have said something! Holy shit I’m the worst fucking person.”

    He calmed down pretty quick but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more than a little worried. I was honest and said there’s no way I could answer that for him, but who is he going to talk to? Family is kind of out and that’s probably not something he’ll want to bring up with the girlfriend.

    1. ischemgeek

      There are degrees of homophobia. It’s not like a switch, more like a spectrum. The guys who’ve called me a dyke when out with prior girlfriends (or current boyfriend, whose hair is long and much better cared-for than most womens’ hair so he’s often mistaken for a woman from behind) out of their car windows are homophobic. The guy who threatened me with corrective rape after school the day I mentioned off-hand in sex ed class (those were naieve days) that I might be one of those ‘bisexual’ people mentioned in the textbook was homophobic. My mother was homophobic and transphobic when she policed my gender expression and would often send me to get changed if I wasn’t feminine enough lest “someone think” I was a lesbian because I “want to look like a boy.” (I wanted to look like a boy because I was a boy but anyway…). The gang who beat up the only out gay boy in school so badly he was hospitalized for three months were homophobic, and the were still homophobic when they did it again after he got back to school and made him have to switch schools for his safety. The school admin was homophobic when they suspended him, too, because of a blanket “no fighting” policy that punished the victim often worse than the perpetrator. The school admin was also homophobic when they held an assembly about homophobic bullying that basically amounted to “gays should stay in the closet and then we won’t have any trouble.”

      I could go on. But, not all homophobia is of the pitchforks and torches variety. People making it very obvious that having SSA is in their minds disgusting or laughable is also part and parcel with homophobia – and in fact it’s key in the dehumanization that enables the pitchforks and torches variety of homophobia.

      Tl;dr: His parents definitely are behaving in a homophobic way, just not a stereotypically homophobic way.

    2. Cerberus

      Yeah, that parental response to bisexuality is so damaging, because it does make you doubt your own attractions.

      I’ve seen that excited “oh, I’m so glad you’ve got that out of your system” response to bi folks dating different gender partners in person before and it’s fucking horrifying in how openly dismissive of sexuality it is and how much it makes the bi person feel like absolute garbage for loving someone.

    3. Lin

      Ugh, that reaction. My parents are good people and have worked through a lot of their homophobia since I came out (jesus, it was this long ago) 19 years ago. I didn’t date any men as primary partners between the ages of 22 and 31 and then … I started dating my current partner. And he’s lovely! But my parents were SO EXCITED TO MEET HIM. And even though my mom keeps assuring me that it’s because he’s good to me and not because he’s a man, it sure as fuck is clear that they felt really relieved when they met my partner. Because now it’s less awkward to introduce my partner to their friends or talk about our lives at work.

      It sucks. You’re a good friend to be aware of how much it sucks.

      Also, you never know. His girlfriend might be a good person to talk to about this. My partner is well aware of how differently some of my extended family treat him than how they treated my ex-girlfriend and he’s the first person to remind them that I’m still queer and, as a matter of fact, so is he. He’s a good ally when people want to straightwash us.

      1. Roborat

        Heh, straightwash. First time I heard that term. Will have to remember that one.

    4. Leorale

      Thank you for supporting your bi friend!

      Yep, the parents definitely qualify as homophobic and biphobic, even though they aren’t the terrifying hate-crime variety. Same-sex attraction = immaturity? Sheesh.

      Even when he’s in a straight-looking relationship, he’s still bi, and they’d do well to respect he’s the same mature person, no matter whom he dates.

      The girlfriend may or may not be cool about it. Some women are taught that bi dudes are all secretly gay (this is untrue/dumb). Some women would be into a MMF threesome (which your pal may or may not ever want) and would be excessively delighted. Many women are also bi, and may be happy to date somebody else who might understand it. Some women understand that bi folks are all different, and that they can love each person, and hooray, they love you.

      Any way you can feel her out on the topic? Or ask her?

      What state do you live in? Rural or city?
      Given that his parents are that public about their ridiculous misconceptions, it sounds like we’re not talking San Francisco, here, but perhaps you can find a guidance counselor or therapist who doesn’t totally suck… I hesitate to suggest it, though, because the sucky ones would only make him feel worse.

      I bet the comments here can think of some wise and identity-affirming books for him and his biphobic folks!

      1. Leorale

        TL;DR: Hey y’all what are some good bi-affirming books or resources for this bisexual adult, and also some for his doofy biphobic parents?

        1. Spaz

          This comment makes me imagine a family photo here the parents’ faces have been replaced by Doofenschmirtz.

          or possibly the Pokemon Bidoof

          http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/phineasandferb/images/7/78/Da-da_doesn%27t_work_for_doofenshmirtz.png/revision/latest?cb=20120106215038

      2. Tarmaniel

        I’m sure his girlfriend knows he’s bisexual, it’s the “I’m not sure if I’m just dating you to satisfy my parents” thing that would probably not go over well.

        This is in Michigan, we both live in Livonia, the parents are further out in the suburbs but I still wouldn’t call it “rural.”

        1. Yumi

          Hey, Michigan! Suburbs! Livonia! (Okay, I only go to Livonia rarely, but the the other aspects of that setting I know well.

        2. Leorale

          Ah, that makes sense. Yes, he wouldn’t share that particular what-if, until they’re both so secure that they’ll find it funny that he ever doubted their luuuve.

          He probably got confused about his motivations because his parents were effectively gaslighting him. He can remind himself that he’s the sole authority on whether he likes somebody and whether he wants to date them.

          Is she still awesome, does he still dig all her great qualities? If so, he likes her for herself, he’s in the clear.

  50. ValdVin

    My wife basically likes football in very small doses.

    However, her spectator preference is for teams wearing metallic pants, and as a uniform geek, I can predict for her which team are gonna wear them, college or pro. Does that make me an enabler, or just a good husband?

    1. Krys Brynhildr

      Can’t it make you both?

      I mean, personally I can’t into sportsball but, its not like liking it is a horrible thing for people to do.

      Pretty sure liking people for their metallic pants isn’t innately bad either. I mean as long as it doesn’t result in any crimes?

      1. ValdVin

        Well, there was a game-worn jersey from the Super Bowl-winning QB, this year, which had gone missing. If it were a pair of that team’s silver pants, I might have wondered about my wife :-).

        1. Krys Brynhildr

          Yeah, I’m pretty sure stealing people’s pants is a crime.

          Like, I mean, it isn’t something I’ve ever tested to see if it was…

          And thats generally not what “Wanting to get into someone’s pants” generally means, but…still, probably a crime. So uh, maybe try not to enable to that degree.

  51. nothri

    Well, he’s not wrong…

  52. Yarrr

    Bi the way <3

  53. katerly

    I volunteer with a girl like that. If you replace Game of Thrones with the entirety of the SuperWhoLock fandom.

    1. Delicious Taffy

      Why is that even a thing?

      1. Scar Man!!!

        wholock I get, but the Super part confuses me

        1. Katerly

          Really? Cause I could accept the SuperWho part but the Sherlock bit is what sticks in my craw.
          Not that I’ve watched any of the shows, I’ve just heard pretty much all the major plot points through her

        2. Spaz

          I think it’s the prospect of a Castiel-Sherlock-Doctor Ten(nant) orgy that attracts them.

        3. Scar Man!!!

          hot

  54. Yumi

    I remember that I learned the word “bisexual” when I was nine. I saw the movie Dodgeball with my mom, and at the end one female character declares herself bisexual in between kissing a woman (who she may have been dating? It was unclear) and kissing the male lead. It wasn’t the best representation, but

    Aside from that, my only memory of hearing the word bisexual off the Internet before high school was in middle school health, where we got to hear about how bisexuals spread AIDs.

  55. Spencer

    The current conversations about bi erasure and acceptance in the queer community reminds me a lot of how I’ve lately been thinking about how I’d be happier if I weren’t bi.

    I just feel it’s created a huge amount of hassle for me, I act like an entitled dick, there’s these new expectations put on me that I never asked for if I want to count. It makes me wish I were straight so I wouldn’t have to care about it.

    1. Delicious Taffy

      Wait, there are expectations placed on bisexuals, now? Other than “bang whoever you want”?

      1. JBento

        From what I pick up from the anecdotal evidence that are website comments, bisexual folk that don’t keep a balance between the genders of whom they date get dismissed as not bisexual. Like, you dated 4 dudes and 1 girl? “You’re not bi, you’re just into dudes and experimented with girls once” seems to be a common response from BOTH the hetero and homosexual communities.

      2. Scar Man!!!

        tons. Hearing about them is part of what scares me away from ever dating guys even if I do eventually figure out that I am biromantic (currently questioning). No one would get me and the guys would be mad at me for only sexually liking girls and not believe me about romantically liking guys. Or both sides would try to pressure me into screwing a guy, which is something I’m not at all comfortable with.

        1. Leorale

          Maybe all the bi people should date each other from time to time. There seem to be a lot of us.

          That said, if you aren’t into any of your bi acquaintances, I hope you’ll date open-minded people who don’t pressure you into stuff! If they’re the way you fear, that would not be cool of them; you do not have to put up with that.

        2. Scar Man!!!

          alas, my tiny fists are only able to internet punch jerks with my words though

        3. Jhon

          Use bigger words.

        4. Krys Brynhildr

          Or just double down and start bludgeoning people with dictionaries.

    2. Cerberus

      Yeah, that’s the worst part of bigotry. How it creates “prices” simply for being a certain way. And those “prices” are so brutal that it makes conditions like depression or PTSD even more awful to deal with even if that’s still better than trying to live in denial of your truth.

      I’m queerromantic and trans. Growing up, I really thought I was straight, just a different type of straight and so I coming out as my various things, I got to see first hand how quickly and violently society turned on me for each of those things and make life that much harder to push through. And I got to see first hand how I was suddenly held to weird societal rules designed to try and limit what I was into something that was more comforting to them.

      And I think that’s what ends up driving my activism. Wanting desperately to make it so the next generations don’t have to deal with all the bullshit we did just because of who they are, who they love, or who turns them on.

      1. Spencer

        Honestly I feel like an asshole even complaining about it considering how much good people like you have put up with whereas I just bongo about things on the internet.

        Sorry.

        1. Cerberus

          Nothing to apologize for and your experiences and feelings are valid no matter what others have dealt with. Minimizing your own hurt because you see others hurt worse is an easy trap to fall into but is a trap nonetheless.

          *supportive hug*

  56. Scar Man!!!

    purely platonic ass-patting would be a great name for a band

    1. AlexanderHammil

      Would it, though? Would it REALLY?

      1. Scar Man!!!

        yes, yes it would. Strangely, not a good tumblr blog name as well though.

        I’m thinking a comedic ska punk band

        1. Spaz

          I dunno. Platonic ass-patting (patters?) rolls off the tongue.

          purely platonic ass-patting doesn’t.

        2. Scar Man!!!

          rule of three and alliteration combine for sweet magic

  57. Remmington Steele

    Do they even have American Football north of the 49th? I thought Howard would have watched a “hockey”?

    1. John

      Howard lives in Carmel, Indiana, with General Gramps.

      1. foamy

        The Blackhawks aren’t all THAT far away.

        1. Roborat

          Yea, but they suck right now, Nashville is kicking their ass. I mean, Nashville!?!?!

  58. Nenja

    Howard makes me smile in this one. “aha, I know what you mean, and I’ve learnt this from Game of Thrones!”

    1. Scar Man!!!

      “see! see! it -was- useful!”

    2. Leorale

      +1, it’s totally the best — no judgment, either, just happiness that he knows the word.
      Representation is so great.

  59. Deanatay

    “I also tried the ‘sitcom’. Nobody banged there, either.”

    1. Leorale

      Lengthy misunderstandings about who wants to bang whom, that’s the least fun part of banging.

      1. onetwoduck

        Yes the best part of banging is basically when your pai up and start doing it.

  60. Austin

    Jesus kid, did you eat a bag of salt? WHY ARE YOU SO DAMN THIRSTY?!

    1. Krys Brynhildr

      Well, he’s obviously a “Healthy Male Teenager, with a sex drive to match”? Or something? That is what teenage boys are supposed to be like, right? All hormone crazed all the time? Thats the general story handed out anyways.

    2. Liliet

      I vote ‘autistic and convinced that’s how he is SUPPOSED to feel’

  61. trlkly

    This reminds me of an old comedy album by Andy Griffith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xus57BaY3hI

    I’m quite happy I misremembered, and it wasn’t by a certain other clean comedian with vinyl comedy albums.

    1. trlkly

      And just in case you think he’d making fun of the “hillbilly,” I, as someone who grew up one, don’t agree. He’s using the rube as a way to comment on the silliness of the sport, while also making it acceptable to laugh at it even if you’re a huge fan.

  62. Black Bumblebee

    I think I’m more impressed that Willis has actually decided to read / watch Game of Thrones now 🙂

    1. David M Willis

      I haven’t. Google exists!

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