“How many fics are in your ao3 history” this and “what’s your most read fic” that. Listen. Listen to me. I don’t go into my ao3 history. Whatever is there is between the archive and god and it is quite frankly none of my business what past me decided to open.
Grandma needs to come hang out, the Austen fandom is thriving on here. Or maybe that’s just my little microcosm of Austen fanatics.
Man. The generational divide between “what do you MEAN least intuitive, ao3 is the easiest site I’ve had to navigate in the past 8 years” and people saying “oh yeah ao3 is almost impossible to learn” sure is something.
I know I’m getting old but the UI is so simple and clean and efficient? Especially compared to something like snapchat (which I used for about a week and then decided I would hunt down whoever designed the ui and punch them in the back of the knee) or Instagram (marginally better but still very bad). I don’t get how ao3 is so confusing to The Kids
Anyway with anti-sodomy laws back on the discussion table I’m going to repeat that you can personally be squicked out by the consensual sex someone else has, but saying that their consensual sex between willing, active, adult participants should be illegal and is indicative of some sort of moral failing is L I T E R A L L Y a major facet in extreme homophobia and absolutely has gotten people killed.
You don’t have to like their business but as long as everyone involved in the encounter is saying yes, it’s also really not your business.
This is the precident you are helping further by digging your heels in and saying ‘but I think it’s gross and makes them bad people’. This is what happened last time that was the reasoning for law, and what is being threatened to happen again.
“but Jaz, how would they enforce it”
Easily.
People would report you to the police for any hint of it. Whether real or imagined. You held hands with someone of the same sex. Someone started a rumor that they saw you kissing. You bought a sex toy and the vendor automatically reported you. You clicked a web page or picked up a magazine that had a different suspected deviant on it and the shop owner or internet service provider automatically reported you. You had certain mannerisms. You hung out to much with a specific friend. You seemed too close to a family member. Literally anything.
In some cases people would literally peep through windows, listen at the door, even wait across the street for your guest to come over and then call the police to kick the door down and catch the two of you in the act.
Never forget that the Stonewall riot was started by one such raid where police stormed a gay bar looking to arrest as many “sodomy” and “public indecency” suspects as possible.
That’s how. By encouraging people to barge into other people’s private, consensual sex lives and make reports to the authorities. By encouraging people to lay traps so unsuspecting gay people could stumble into them. By encouraging people to stalk and harass anyone who showed any sign of 'being a pervert’ in the name of 'protecting neighborhoods from predators’. By weaponizing the real concern for predatory behavior against people who were engaging in consensual intimacy in a way they happened to not like.
By doing exactly what I’ve been continuously saying is bad behavior that has gotten countless LGBT people jailed and killed.
We’re not turning this against our own community. Homophobes and transphobes have already made it plenty clear they don’t care how good or respectable we are, they just want us all dead.
“how would they enforce it”
well in 2012 a guy named snowden let us know they’re basically wiretapping us at all times and have gigantic collections of all our metadata and we have been living in a nice little surveillance state since 2001’s patriot act
My uncle used to hang out in those public parks after dark where gay men would solicit sex - from each other, from sex workers, and (when they were particularly unlucky) from undercover cops.
Having sex with a partner in your home was dangerous because it was too identifiable. Your neighbors, your landlord, your family, your friends, any one of them could happen to notice if you brought a boyfriend or a one night stand home, and this was before we had any right to privacy in our homes.
So anonymous sex in the park was SAFER for gay men. As long as you didn’t draw the short stick and snag a cop. A cop who would, just as they often do today with sex workers, happily have sex with you before cuffing you, walking you into the station through every reporter in town, and splashing your name and face across the morning paper with a sodomy charge. Then your life was effectively over. And they would leverage that to make you tell them names, give up others to have their lives ruined in the hopes of salvaging what was left of your own.
My uncle came a little too close one day, nearly got caught up in a raid at the park he was at with some friends. He illustrated children’s books for a living. If he was caught he would never work again. So he fled. Borrowed some money from my mother and *fled the country*. He only came back once a year, long enough to fulfill visa requirements. He only came back with his boyfriend in 2005 when my mother assured him that things were safer.
If the enforcement of these laws could ruin lives like that back then, how badly do you think it could go for us in the era of unprecedented near total surveillance? Our memories need to be long enough to remember that these laws and the methods used to enforce them are not hypothetical. They have already happened and ARE already happening. There is precedent, there are known mechanisms, and there are known ways to gum up the works too.
