regarding Substack and writer-centric boycotts

photo of the CEOs of Meta (Facebook/Instagram),
Amazon, Google (YouTube), & "X",
all of whom "platform Nazis",
prominently supporting Trump
at his 2025 inauguration

Hello and welcome to my blog! If this is your first time here, well, that’s likely because I hardly ever post here these days.

For years, this was where I routinely penned my essays. But by the mid-2010s, readers had tapered off from visiting blogs, even when I would share links to my posts on other platforms. Increasingly, people tended to stick to their preferred social media ecosystems. And for those interested in reading and/or writing articles and essays, Medium was the most popular ecosystem at the time. There, you could follow other writers and they could follow you back. And because so many people had created their own Medium accounts, they were more likely to click on and share your posts and potentially follow you. So naturally, I began publishing my essays there.

I am still on Medium. But gradually, most of those readers and writers have since migrated to Substack, which is why I began cross-posting my essays there a couple years ago. I explained my reasons for doing so in my first Substack post. Later on, amidst a new round of protests against the platform, I penned a 2,500 word essay on the matter, entitled On Being an Artist, Author, and Activist in a World Where All the Major Online Media Platforms Suck. Don’t worry, that link will take you to an archived version of the essay, so you don’t need to actually visit Substack to read it.

In that post, I made a few main points that I will quickly touch on here TL;DR-style:

why do straight people sexualize LGBTQ+ people? (a video & essay)

Last month was the 3rd year anniversary of the release of Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back. And since this is Pride month, I figured I'd share this video of me reading from the “queer chapter” of Sexed Up! The video is called Why Do Straight People Sexualize Queer People? LGBTQ+ Stereotypes, Sexualization & (imagined) “Contagiousness” – please watch & like & subscribe & share widely!

The YouTube show notes contain the following "chapters" of the video – you can use the time stamps there to skip ahead to particular sections if you wish: 

• 0:00 Introduction (defining sexualization & the Predator/Prey mindset)
• 3:07 Queer people are “marked by sex” and stereotyped as “fakes”
• 6:30 Sexualized stereotypes of gay men
• 7:00 Sexualized stereotypes of lesbians
• 8:45 Sexualized stereotypes of asexuals
• 10:10 Sexualized stereotypes of bisexuals
• 13:30 Trans people and the “worst of both worlds” & “sexual deceiver” tropes 
• 16:40 Anti-queer stigma is viewed “contagious”
• 19:15 Recurring claims that LGBTQIA+ & people of color “prey on women & children”
• 23:50 Critiques of “respectability politics” and “contagiousness politics”
• 29:00 Sexualization-centric approaches to queer activism

As if that wasn't enough, I wrote a companion essay entitled The Worst of Both Worlds: How Straight People Sexualize Queer and Trans People that places my Stigma-Contamination model of sexualization (discussed in the book and video) in the context of other feminist perspectives on sexualization. It also shares a different excerpt from the chapter (on how trans & intersex people face "The Worst of Both Worlds") that is not covered in the video. You can read it on Substack (no paywall) at the above link, or via this friend link to Medium.

As always, please share widely and give it lots of claps and likes and such!