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This blog is a table of contents for my Twitter threads, starting in 2012, and working through toward the present. I include links to the threads, as well as quick descriptions of the threads.
From time to time, I like to do a blog post reflecting on the time frame of the threads I've most recently posted to this blog.
The threads between this post and my previous "quick thoughts" post are from the first two months of 2018.
I was surprised, as I researched this time period to find my threads, by how active I had been during this period. I knew I had been somewhat active politically. But I was also surprised to find out how active I had been in the arts scene.
As I've mentioned previously, I'd been a pretty regular art spectator since my arrival back in Denver in January of 2012. But in April of 2015, I got involved with an art gallery in Denver. My friendship with that gallery fell apart in May of 2017. And, as I remembered things, I really stepped completely out of Denver's art scene at that time.
It turns out, however, that that wasn't the case. And, especially as 2018 began, I involved myself a lot in Denver's art scene. I think I was trying to find my way back to being just a spectator -- or just trying to find my own way, given my odd, paranoid, and standoffish temperament, to involve myself in Denver's art scene. So I was way more involved than I remembered being!
I also even made a first step toward developing my own style of collecting art, by purchasing a work by a UK artist named Megan Angus, who had had her work censored by her high school because it depicted lesbian love. The work made the news. I contacted Angus and bought the work.
But that was, I hate to say, my first and last step toward developing my own style of collecting art. And I've basically stagnated ever since then.
I think during this time frame, however, you can also see my development in terms of using Twitter as an art form. I began thinking of how to direct my studies and sort of curate my Twitter threads. In particular, I planned out a lot of my threads for Black History Month and followed that plan. That sort of planning out of my threads has helped me focus and thematize my studies -- as well as force myself to study things my free-flowing brain might otherwise put off and put off.
I honestly was also a lot more involved in Denver's political scene during these two months than I'd remembered being. I attended all kinds of rallies and marches and political meetings of all different kinds on all different subjects. It's been pretty fun to remember all of those moments.
However, this time period is capped by an event that traumatized me -- possibly way more than it should have -- and also, slowly but surely, began to focus my thought very strongly in one specific direction -- again, possibly focusing me way more than I should have let it.
The event was FOSTA-SESTA. This was a law that was discussed by Congress and passed over the first few months of 2018. It ostensibly protects victims of sex trafficking. But it actually builds on anti-sex and anti-obscenity laws to make sex workers more vulnerable to state violence and other forms of violence, as well as, essentially, put any form of sexual expression online at risk of being further censored and marginalized by being lumped together with sex trafficking.
I learned of FOSTA-SESTA on March 3rd, 2018 -- way late in the progress of the bill -- from some people I was following at the time on Twitter, who were in the porn industry.
The folks on Twitter made it clear that FOSTA-SESTA was about limiting freedom of sexual expression, not stopping sex trafficking. And I could see that this could hurt not only me, a fetish artist and a fetish writer who specializes in the more marginalized fetishes, including ageplay, but more importantly a lot of my friends in the fetish art fields who had a lot more invested in making their art than I did.
I was mad at myself for not having heard anything about this law, as you can see in the tweet below.
I was mad at myself for missing this news for a number of reasons. I was trying to be deeply involved in politics, to be engaged and fight for equality, including for people like me (in all my/our aspects). And yet somehow I missed the discussion and passage of a law that struck people like me at, I'd argue, the core of our existence -- our creative existence.
FOSTA-SESTA also came at a "perfect storm" sort of time in my intellectual development. I was trying to be more politically active. But I had also spent almost two years researching issues about youth/adult love and sexuality. I had spent about five years creating visual art that questioned conventional conceptions of both youth and adult sexuality. And I'd spent about nine years exploring the meanings and self-doubts of my own ageplay and ABDL fetishes and identity.
I had already been coming to conclusions for myself about the meanings of sex laws, and what those laws actually meant to enforce. I had already been arguing that most sex laws imply that human beings are the sexual property of the state. FOSTA-SESTA, in what I perceived as its limitations on freedom of sexual expression online, further reinforced the concept of human beings as sexual property of the state.
I did what I could to raise awareness, among my Twitter followers (around 850 at the time) and among my local politicians and political organizations, about FOSTA-SESTA. I also studied FOSTA-SESTA more, to figure out what it was really all about, what its history was, etc. And so all of these issues, slowly but surely, became the main focus of my studies.
However, some of the threads above will discuss this. And so I'll leave a summary of my findings, and my developing mindset toward FOSTA-SESTA, for another "quick thoughts" post.
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