These are examples of posts that have been hidden without any notification or option to appeal. If i weren’t cross checking, I would have no indication that these posts are no longer visible to users besides me. I actually have very little idea of how many posts like these are hidden, because the “Hey, this post may contain adult content” placeholder also hides captions. I’ve censored these images beyond what I think makes sense - for instance, how much censoring of the Flavia Rando work transforms an abstracted drawing of a vulva into something not recognizable as a vulva? At what point does the Parminder Sekhon photograph, which is modeled after this Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover (and there is so much to say about Janet Jackson and accusations of obscenity and the invocation of innocent American children who were unduly harmed by brief exposure to a bare nipple on a television screen) become not-adult? It is worth noting that the pinching gesture, which appears often in contemporary lesbian art (it is seen twice in this set of images), is a reference to this late 16th-century painting, which was held in a French police station and hidden behind a curtain for part of the 19th century.
This will likely be the last post from LAAA. I’m not interested in, as tumblr puts it, “helping to make these kinds of mistakes happen less often” by constantly appealing (and sometimes re-appealing: many of my posts have been caught in the same net multiple times) decisions about whether or not lesbian visual culture is safe (for work, for children, or otherwise). The blog (such as it is) will stay up for the time being. Thank you for your support over the past five years. If you’ve enjoyed this blog, I hope that you seek out and support lesbian visual culture elsewhere (I’d link to the bibliography I started, but it’s been marked as “adult” and hidden from view). In the meantime: I’m @lesbianart on twitter and @alyssaerinschwendener on medium. If you want to talk about lesbian culture, ideas for projects, or other ways of making LGBTQ histories and cultures more visible and accessible, I’m down.
just wanna mention that this last round was not flagged- perhaps because I didn’t use the word “flagged,” perhaps because the word “lesbian” and the men in makeup are minimized to obscurity. Yet the lizard remains clear and proud, so who can say.
***EDIT***
this post WAS NOT flagged due to its containing the word “flagged.” Therefore, I deduce that the queer stuff is what prompted the flagging. Surprise, surprise .
welp
I noticed today that my post of screencaps I took of totally randomly flagged posts was, itself, flagged. Is this because the algorithms still somehow detect something flaggable in the shrinking images of men in makeup and lizards in rocking chairs? Or is just the mere mention that they were flagged? As an experiment, will this post be flagged? Will I be screencapping flagged posts in an infinite loop?
going through my flagged posts, and they are mostly muppets, androgynous men, gay stuff, and i don’t know what.
I’ve wondered for a few years now what the endgame would be for this odd site: the black sheep of the social media venues. Tumblr is, and always has been, completely un-”monetizable”—i have no idea how it makes any money whatsoever .
But at its best, it’s the last throwback to the internet that I knew and loved in the 1990s. A weird, scitter-scatter, gonzo Wild West sort of place. Ironically its Yahoo acquisition was what truly reduced it to a backwater, a terminally uncool site that was always said to be “dying” by media outlets with a habit of firing most of their staff employees before Christmas. This meant that, quietly, it became a place where marginalized people could thrive.
I’ve come to appreciate its complete uselessness. Apart from El Sandifer, Matt Maxwell, Sylvia K and a few others, I have utterly no idea who’s on here, who follows me, if anyone even reads the stuff I put up here on very rare occasion. It’s the dead channel. Over the years, it’s been the place when in the absolute depths of despair I’ll put up,say, a video of the Beatles “Help!”’ and hope that someone sees it who needs to. Like a lighthouse sending out a signal to some ship out there in the dark..
I’ve come to like the weird rando anonymous questions I get. I like the feeling of this being a shopping mall with maybe 4 stores left- standing–a vaping shop, a sad video arcade, a fabric store, and a place you can buy games and phone accessories (for an out-of-date phone).
You get the feeling some bean-counter finally got around to “the Tumblr problem” and now has big plans to finally Monetize this dump in some ridiculous, seriously doomed way. This censorship initiative is the first wave—what will likely soon come is a more aggressive enforcement on visual/audio copyright, which will wipe out like..70% of all posts? Good luck ,baby.
A last thing. Many years ago, for a while I followed the founder of this site and his then-girlfriend’s tumblrs in a “see how the ruling class live” observation project. And they broke up, and his ex-girlfriend stayed on the guy’s own site to document her vastly improved life, showing herself to be a truly compassionate and cool person. She got married recently, to a sweet-seeming dude—she put up the pictures on Tumblr. All power to her, and to all of you, wherever we go from here.
