Unfortunately Not a Real Pony

Hey, blogger, are you normal about Eastern Europeans?

Okay, you post about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is bad, but do you understand the differences between Eastern European cultures? Do you listen to our voices about our experiences both in our homelands and as immigrants? Do you respect that our cultures and histories belong to us and aren't up for grabs? Are you normal about Russians, or are you delighted to have a group to gleefully threaten genocide toward because their government is awful?

I grew up in the sort of family where "we should round up all the queer people and kill them", followed by a very lengthy and detailed description of how, exactly, this should be done, was totally noncontroversial dinner conversation. So, you know. I grew up more than a little bigoted. And growing up in 90's Eastern Europe and then 00's Upper Class America... I knew zero openly queer people.

My first exposure to queerness was when some of my friends made a queer couple for our big tangled roleplay web. I couldn't very well just ignore these characters, so I had mine interact with them, and I put their sims into the little RP neighborhood and dutifully played them, and eventually I was like "okay, they're cute and nice and stuff, they're nothing like what my parents say queer people are like"... and I slowly started unlearning all the crap my parents and society in general taught me.

But I guess the fact that I wasn't morally pure from birth and didn't have access to actual queer people makes me horrendously problematic or whatnot.

Seriously, Youtube, you can't even delete people whose usernames explicitly glorify the Holocaust? You can even give me, a person who lost tons of family to Hitler's policies, that much?

I love it when people who have no connection to the Holocaust tell me, a person who lost 3/4 of his family in the Holocaust, that I'm not allowed to talk about the Holocaust or make Hitler comparisons.

And by "love it" I actually mean that it makes me ragey.