The Gaptangle

Rogan: In my post about a physical newsletter, I forgot another thing we’ve been considering doing to circumvent the bans: make our digital work free and run it on donations like LiberaPay.

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As many of you know, within the past three months, we've been dealing with a lot of crackdowns on our work online. Our blog is unviewable in Mississippi and our #1 bestseller, All in the Family, got kicked off itch.io. This has nothing to do with the works themselves (oh no, a minor might read our very adult essay about TAXES and BUSINESS EXPENSES!) but wealthy, powerful people trying to control others.

As annoyed as we are by this, we are not surprised. We've seen this coming for years, we have a plan, and we want to hear how YOU feel about it, fans and readers!

Getting double vaxxed means we spent yesterday on our ass, reading all our backed up library books. So, what’d we read? (Combining with other books we finished a week or so ago.)

( queers and multis and cat people, oh my! )

Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!

As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes.  (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here!  (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.

Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month?  YOU CHOOSE, readers!

Just a one-pager, which means we're popping it up straight here! These are what all our pencils look like before inking; eventually all these Mori and Rawlin comics are going to end up in a book called (for now) Xenogals in Love.

Beneath the image is only the textual transcript, no commentary. Rawlin was going by male terms at the time, thus why Mori asked Biff first.

Mori: that weeklong headache, the worst part of it was, it tended to hit (or get worse) at night. Nothing worked, not ibuprofen, not ice packs, nothing. It was the PITS.

( My girlfriend took pity on me and helped fix it with touch! )

“Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant ‘existing things’ does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like ‘woman,’ ‘butch,’ ‘lesbian,’ or ‘transsexual’ are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.” —Gayle Rubin, “Of catamites and kings: Reflections on butch, gender, and boundaries,” The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader, Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992, pg. 477-478

Rubin was talking about lesbian political fights about trans people and the overlap and boundaries between butch and transsexuality (and there’s LOTS of expressions of what we’d nowadays call trans and gender dysphoria in A Persistent Desire), but I think the same ideas apply to multi/plural/many-selved stuff too. Goodness knows I spent enough time chewing on my arm because I couldn’t figure out how to express a concept without it turning into a hopeless argument over the terms in use. This whole essay has a lot of great quotes (“sexual preference, gender roles, and political stance cannot be equated, and do not directly determine or reflect one another”) and is worth reading.

Also it’s just really nice to see an essay over thirty years old saying “cool your jets about trans people, it’s fine. Your politics will survive.”

Mori wants this book like burning. Too bad used paperbacks start at $100.