Voting Now Open for Icon Challenge 162 at Otherworldlyric

[red_satin_doll]

http://otherworldlyric.livejournal.com/222404.html

What it says on the tin - vote now for your favorite entries in the challenge contest (link above because I'm away from home and this PC hates me *grrr*). And then check out challenge 163 now up. I may have to enter that one as well because I'm having way too much fun with this; and the song lyrics the mods choose have endless possible uses.

I'm eager to see which icon win - and in fact I don't care if I win because I'm genuinely pleased with the icon sets I did for this challenge and I can't wait to share them with y'all.

In other news - a friend told me this morning that Ellen Page, self-proclaimed "little Canadian", just came out of the closet. Which, no surprise to me (my dyke detector was off the charts when I saw her in Juno) but I'm still tickled lavender because it's still a risky thing to do, even if more states in the US and more countries around the world have gay marriage laws. (Spain? Uruguay? SRSLY?) Things really are getting better but in terms of discrimination and prejudice we're not all the way there by a long shot.

Kudos to eilowyn btw for turning me on to Ellen's fierce feminist politics and humor a few months back.

Comments

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

Sweetie, my dyke detector has gone off at women who wear makeup and heels. Hell, I still have long hair and wear jewelry and long skirts. (Makeup and heels not so much anymore.) I loved confounding people in college because they were shocked that I was a lesbian because I didn't look like one.

It's really a sort of intangible thing, an intuitive sense about somebody, you know? Conversely, some of the most "butch" women I've ever met in my life have been married self-identified heterosexual women. It should be noted however that nearly every lesbian I have ever met over the age of 40 at one time identified as straight because of societal pressures and the lack of awareness that there was such as thing as "lesbianism."

So, it can be confusing and I make mistakes esp with women because yes, we are more "fluid" in our sexuality than men in many instances. And it's more ok for us to be "androgynous" than it is for men - to a degree. Just not TOO masculine (think of Maggie Walsh in btvs - if she's not coded "butch" then I'll eat my hatpin.)

In this case I just had a feeling about Ellen I can't quantify.

With celebrities and people in the public eye, an additional clue is a lack of a partner, mention of a boyfriend or girlfriend etc (look how long the media has maintained a discreet silence about Jodie Foster's partner, or Lily Tomlin's.) Most celebrities are hounded about who they are dating, who they are married to, etc etc - the media love that stuff.

When I was in my teens I was watching an episode of Oprah with Johnny Mathis, who was a famed singer of romantic ballads for decades by that time. And not once did she ask him about a partner, spouse etc. Whereas when she had Tom Cruise on a few weeks earlier she grilled him very hard about his new wife Nicole Kidman, really poking to get information. And I realized that Mathis was gay.

It's a double-edged sword because our silence does not in reality make us safe.