I'm setting up a queer meetup group in my town (Charlotte, NC) and I want it to be punny as heck because that's my personality, but I need help coming up with puns. This group is for ALL sexual orientations/gender identities, so I want a lot of inclusive puns that play on all sorts of different identities. This seemed like a group that could help me out. Here's what I need puns for:

• Hikes and nature adventures
• Arts and crafts activities
• Book club
• Movie viewings
• Writing sessions
• Game nights
• Pot-lucks
• Food and drink outings
• Witchcraft and magickal activities
• Baking and cooking parties
• Anti-racism education and action

Any ideas you have are more than welcome!!! Thank you!

Warning: This is a lot of feels

I had a terrible coming out. My parents turned it into an argument about religion that seemed to last for months, denied that I was gay, and still say things like “Don’t label yourself, you’re a human!” (To be fair that one is mostly my dad). It’s been almost a year now and their personal views really haven’t changed. I just want them to love and accept me! I want them to go to pride with me and put HRC stickers on their car and laugh at my pantastic queer puns. I want them to get upset about queer discrimination and I want them to have my back when I come out to others. I want them to use my friends’ proper pronouns and real names.

But it hits me too often that it will probably never be this way. So, once again, I have to be strong for myself and somehow continue to love them even though they made my life a living hell for months. Somehow love them even though they refuse to educate themselves and make an effort to fight with me. Love them even though they deadname my friends and ask what’s on their birth certificate. Somehow, I love them.

I’ll never get the coming out that I deserved. I was afraid, and my fears didn’t even come close to the reality that followed.

But I do have hope, and that is to make a better future for my children. They won’t need to explain why I should care about their label, why I should fight for their rights. They won’t have to be afraid to come out. They won’t be confused when a man loves a man or a woman loves a woman or when someone doesn’t fall in the gender binary. I’ll give them the open minded life that I never got, and they’ll never have to deal with the internalized homophobia (straight or not) that I have had to overcome.

It’ll be ok, because we can change the coming out experience for future kids.

Hey all,

I want to share my efforts to make Curse of Strahd even more queer-friendly for others who are running this game for a very LGBT-friendly group. I have my MA degree studying queer media so I like to pretend I know what I'm doing.

This is a living document that I will update as my party progresses further and further into the story. As such, a lot of how I interpreted these changes reflect my own group and their needs/wants. Be sure to customize to your group as needed. :) I also want to preface that while I'm an experienced TTRPG DM, I'm not a 5e expert by any stretch. If you have any mechanical suggestions I'm all ears.

Feel free to take all of this (and have a rainbow-blasted Curse of Strahd adventure) or to select which gay spice you want to sprinkle onto your game.

Bigger Changes

What to do about Ismark, Ireena, and Strahd?

There are a few ways to slice this onion.

The first is the well-documented gender switch for Strahd, for which you can see posts scattered around Reddit. You essentially keep everything the same except you change Strahd into a queer woman. Does this play into the predatory lesbian vampire trope that's been alive since Carmilla, a novel that literally predates Dracula? Sure. But everyone loves a queer villain so the key is to balance it with queer heroes as well. (Which is, in fact, my biggest piece of advice to avoid harmful stereotypes.)

There have been great interpretations of Sergei being not only a love rival, but a rival of inheritance whose appearance threatens to take away everything from female Strahd. Imagine securing the lands for your father, spending your adult life on the battlefield only for your younger brother to pounce in and take his "rightful" spot as Count of Barovia. The quest for immortality and her issues with Sergei and Tatyana now become even more complex and aren't just "I'm horny and old, wah." This actually might be my favourite part of this mod since it paints Strahd as a sympathetic character in a real way without taking away the genuine evil she would later inflict.

As I mentioned before, Carmilla is the go-to resource for this change. Watching Dracula's Daughter also wouldn't hurt.

For my own party, I went another route. I knew my gay group would love to go against a corrupt man and would have more fun negging Strahd as a man than as a powerful woman they'd begrudgingly respect. So, I set out to make Strahd the queer villain I love to hate. Strahd in RAW is canonically

Hey lovely folks! I came on here about a month ago asking for advice for how to make my online conference more accessible and you all gave me wonderful advice. I thought I'd just let you know that the conference is now less than a week away, and if you're interested in improving your skills or just upping your awareness of the queer community and how you can be an ally, this conference is one you'll want to attend.

It's online April 21st at 10:00 am EST and is available for download after it's done. It's a full day online conference, centering LGBTQIA+ voices, exploring the intersections of queerness and mental health across Canada (but all of the topics are quite relatable across the queer and mental health fields).

Here is the link to the eventbrite page.

Hello there, It's Jeremy! I'm currently sitting in this dingy bookstore/cafe and I don't know where I am going and how I'm going to actually make a living here.

To be honest, I don't even have an apartment. I'm only 19 years old, dropped out of Albany State to find a place where I can fit in. I assumed the best place for someone questioning their interest in women would be Castro Street, but that's the most I've thought about this trip. It was all very last minute, you have to understand, but it was absolutely necessary that I leave this place and the queer (pun not intended) memories of New York State behind.

I guess that while the idea of my last minute escape sounds incredibly romantic, it's not really very intelligent and I was just wondering if you had any ideas on what I should do now?

If not, feel free to just stop by and say hello, ask any sort of question about me, really. In the meantime, I'll be reading awful comics behind a Whitman book and stirring this horrid coffee in an attempt to look cultured to anyone passing by.

Any resources for breaking cis-heteronormative tarot views and interpretations. I’m a gay male and sometimes it like 😑how tf this relate to me.

Edit: I understand how to “translate” the energies to read the person or situation. It’s the terminology, art work, etc. that can be frustrating at times. Also why do we have to give character qualities gender roles? By no means do I have an issue using the Hetero lovers to indicate a queer relationship. I just want more diversity and inclusion in the tarot community. Which there is but the foundations are built on a cishet POV.

Mechademia: Second Arc; Fall 2020, 13(1): pp119-130

DOI: 10.5749/mech.13.1.0119, No PMID, URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/mech.13.1.0119?seq=1

Hey lovely folks! I thought I'd just let you know about my online conference "Queering Mental Health: A Canadian Perspective". If you're interested in learning about a variety of LGBTQIA+ mental health related topics, or just want to up your awareness of the queer community and how you can be an ally, this conference is one you'll want to attend.

It's online April 21st at 10:00 am EST and is available for download after it's done. It's a full day conference, centering LGBTQIA+ voices, exploring the intersections of queerness and mental health across Canada (but all of the topics are quite relatable across the queer and mental health fields).

Here is the link to the eventbrite page.

Also, if you are experiencing financial hardship but would still like to attend, you can apply for an angel ticket or pay what you can here.

I'm setting up a queer meetup group in my town (Charlotte, NC) and I want it to be punny as heck because that's my personality, but I need help coming up with puns. This group is for ALL sexual orientations/gender identities, so I want a lot of inclusive puns that play on all sorts of different identities. This seemed like a group that could help me out. Here's what I need puns for:

• Hikes and nature adventures
• Arts and crafts activities
• Book club
• Movie viewings
• Writing sessions
• Game nights
• Pot-lucks
• Food and drink outings
• Witchcraft and magickal activities
• Baking and cooking parties
• Anti-racism education and action

Any ideas you have are more than welcome!!! Thank you!