• she/her 🏳‍⚧

26, cartoon and video game liker.


Occasional NSFW rechosts, ask me to tag if necessary.


You can find art I made under #bvart!


A low resolution website banner depicting a close-up of Xenia, the Linux Fox's face against a red background. To the right is large, bolded text reading "LINUX" accompanied by smaller text underneath reading "the choice of a GNU generation."

A deviantART styled stamp containing a photo of an elderly person's face to the right of white text reading "I'm thinking about those beans" with grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. The background is a photo of baked beans.A deviantART styled stamp containing a screenshot of Mario from Super Mario 64, edited to be giving the viewer a realistic middle fingerA deviantART styled stamp containing a photo of a hairless pet rat next to a toy keyboard with rainbow-colored keysA deviantART style animated pixel stamp featuring cropped artwork of femtanyl's mascot. "FEMTANYL" is spelled out in white pixel letters on the mascot's forehead that individually turn red from left to right in a loop
An 88 by 31 pixel banner of an abstract floating head creature with a liquid eye facing away from the viewer, a closed eye with an eyelash facing towards the viewer, and teardrop-shaped gems coming out of the eyelash. Xhe is accompanied by text reading "Charm will protect you!" and is depicted in front of a purple background.an animated 88 by 31 button. it is a parody of the classic "Netscape NOW! 3.0" button, replacing the Netscape Navigator logo with alternating photos of Laura Les and Dylan Brady's faces screaming, sourced from the back cover of the album "10,000 Gec". The word 'netscape' in 'netscape now' is replaced with a crude scrawling of the word "GECS".an animated 88 by 31 button. along the top is text reading "SPONGEHEAD" in a font from Spongebob Squarepants, colored in black and cohost's plum color. below is smaller Spongebob font text reading "prof-badvibes" in green, with one letter at a time in sequence flashing white. To the sides are Incidental Number 7, a background character from Spongebob, and Eggbug, the cohost mascot, colored to resemble Spongebob.an 88 by 31 button of the transgender pride flag against a gray background next to text reading "trans rights now!"
an 88 by 31 button featuring animated pixel art of Reimu Hakurei from the Touhou series against a gray background. she is pictured next to text reading "powered by Reimu."an 88 by 31 animated button. the button starts showing a blue color, but the point of view zooms out to reveal a blue variant of Tux, the Linux penguin, against a gray background. text reading "Linux powered" appears in the banner to the left of Tux.an 88 by 31 button. it is a parody of the classic "Netscape NOW! 3.0" button, replacing the Netscape Navigator logo with a photo of Weird Al Yankovich's face. The word 'netscape' in 'netscape now' is replaced with the word 'Yankovic'.an 88 by 31 animated button of the Lapfox Trax logo, which is the word 'LAPFOX' in bold serif font with a cartoon fox's head replacing the 'O'. The logo is in front of a rainbow color-shifting grid
A parody of the "Netscape Now!" 88 by 31 pixel button. To the left is a rotating marijuana leaf, and to the right is text reading "Legalize Now!" along with the letters M and J in the bottom right corner.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner with a yellow-to-green hue-shifting background. To the left is a cropped piece of clipart showing the top half of a newspaper cartoon-styled individual's face looking at the viewer in a goofy way. The clipart is accompanied by text reading "FREE STUFF" in bolded all capital letters to the right.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting two photographed women looking up and to the right against a white background. Text reading "GAY WOMEN" in bolded all capital letters can be found to the right, with the word "gay" being larger and emphasized.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a sprite of a blinking one-eyed green alien from the Commander Keen games. To the alien's right is text reading "Accursed Farms".
An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a rainbow peace symbol to the left of blue text reading "Peace Now!", both against a gray background.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting an inverted United States flag with the stars replaced by a 'no' symbol. On top of the flag is black handwritten pixel text reading "ACAB".An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting Super Mario running to the right through a 'window' to the left. To the right is blue text reading "Dave's Videogame Classics".An 88 by 31 pixel banner containing sprites of Kris and Susie from the video game Deltarune. Susie is looking at Kris with a cartoonishly angry expression. Below the two is white text against a black background reading "kris where tf are we."
An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner with a gray background. To the left is a 'window' showing a sprite of a dove against a black background. The dove is shown flying and being covered up by a red X symbol in two alternating frames. To the right is black-and-gray flashing text reading "DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT" in all-capital letters.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting an illustration of Hatsune Miku against a gray background. Miku is blinking her eyes and smiling on alternating frames. To the right is text reading "This site is Miku Approved", with 'Miku' in large, bolded blue letters and 'Approved' flashing rapidly between blue and red.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the transgender pride flag, with beveled edges to give the impression of mild three-dimensional depth.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the blue Sega logo against a white background.
An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a screencap of Blender version 1.X, with a classic-styled logo and a wireframe cube in the centerAn 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the words "download SBURB" next to a logo of a minimalist lime-green house separated into segments. The word "SBURB" is rendered in a bold, cartoony, lime-green font.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the lesbian pride flag, with beveled edges to give the impression of mild three-dimensional depth.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting character art of Sonic from the fangame Sonic Robo Blast 2 against that game's title screen background.
an 88 by 31 button of the blue-and-orange logo of the Doom video game series to the right of the Doomguy's grinning Heads Up Display face against a gray background.

Thanks to @framebuffer for my profile picture, @candiedreptile for the Charm button, @softwareangel for the Spongehead button!


Sources of any other profile graphics that weren't made or commissioned by me can be found here:
[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]


deergrace
@deergrace

You've probably seen this piece of Tumblr lore around. I don't think it's true, for any meaningful value of "true," and I thought the process of deducing that might be a fun post about media literacy and critical thinking.

So, starting from the beginning, what we have here is a declaration, or allegation; a statement of purported fact. Specifically: "In the 80s, lesbians who were more interested in cuddles and kisses rather than sex were called bambi lesbians." It seems fairly unlikely that a tumblr (founded 2007!) user with the handle "nonbinarysapphic" was an adult in the 1980s, so where did they learn this from? And when?

Googling brings up a significant clue - this wiki cites a 1990 book called The Alyson Almanac.

The Alyson Almanac: A Treasury of Information for the Gay and Lesbian Community. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1990

As it happens, it's on the Internet Archive and full-text searchable. And so, on page 61, in the section of the book titled "A Dictionary of Slang and Historical Terms," what do we find, between definitions of "BALLS" and "BASKET?"

BAMBI-SEXUALITY. Physical interaction centered more about touching, kissing and caressing than around genital sexuality. Not to be confused with bestiality, a very different concept.

Do you notice what's different here, compared to the original tumblr post?

First, there's no indicated gendering of the term. As other entries in this section are specific when referring to (sigh) (only, most of the time) gay men or lesbians - the definition for CLOSET starts with "The place where gay men or lesbians hide, figuratively speaking" - that's curious. It seems like the writer of the original entry didn't intend in any way to suggest that this was something specific to lesbians.

Second, there is no indication of when, in what context, or by whom this term was ever used, compared to the tumblr post declaring that the time period in question was "in the 80s." This book was published in 1990, and this section covers antiquated historical terms like HOMOPHILE, COUNTERJUMPER, MOLLY, SWAFFONDER, and PUNK (the latter extremely not in the context you're probably thinking). It's not clear in the slightest whether, in 1990, this would be terminology in contemporary common parlance.

Second and a half, I suppose, entirely speculatively... hey, you know Disney's Bambi - almost certainly the source of this, given the connotations - is a boy, right? A very feminine, queer-coded boy? It's kind of a whole thing, in the fucked-up gender politics of this 1942 adaptation of a 1923 novel (I can highly recommend this podcast on its production history), that to become A Man, Like His Father, Bambi has to be dominant and violent.

So again, just hypothetically, what seems more historically likely? That "Bambi" was used as a term of self-description by ace lesbians, or as term applied to femme gay men by others? In the absence of further corroborating evidence, I feel like one line of speculation seems as plausible as another.

Except... as it turns out, there is more evidence. May I introduce Toronto's former monthly local queer community newsmagazine, one that would eventually become the periodically-updated Xtra:

The front cover of The Body Politic, December 1979/January 1980 issue. The headline story refers to criminal charges against several men attending a prominent Toronto bathhouse, the Barracks.

In the December 1979/January 1980 issue of The Body Politic, also on the Internet Archive, there's a letter to the editor, criticizing an article in the November 1979 issue. (I read it. It's not interesting, and the only mention of Bambisexuals is quoted in the screenshot.) And, lo and behold - what was the first mention of Bambisexuality here? It was cited in a derogatory, shaming way, applied to men (specifically men!) the author felt to be insufficiently kinky. And then, what's the second mention? Whoever's signed their letter as the Bambisexual Liberation Front, my word, in this letter to the editor, asserting that they oppose the "straight identified (STIFF) gay men's scene."

A letter to the editor of The Body Politic, criticizing an article in the previous issue for using the term "bambisexual" to refer to men who are interested only in "your straight, ordinary, fucking and sucking, cuddly-wuddly sex." The letter proceeds to explain the views of the writers, the "Bambisexual Liberation Front," who reassert that they are gay men.

It's amazing where checking citations gets you, isn't it? Here, in "Bambisexual," we have what's clearly a term of derision (reclaimed by at least one letter-writer!) applied to insufficiently kinky gay men, when it was in common enough parlance to be mentioned in a community news source in 1979. By 1990, someone's compiling a glossary of historical slang, and the political edges have been worn away; "Bambisexuality" is memorialized in a simplified, twee, cutesy way that omits any specific mention of its application to gay men or lesbians.

And - here's where I'm hypothesizing again - I think I know exactly where nonbinarysapphic made the connection that this referred to lesbians, specifically: this 2012 Autostraddle article. The text is clearly (and cited at the head of the article!) drawn directly from The Alyson Almanac, 22 years later. But now the context has been stripped away, because Autostraddle - a lesbian-focused publication - compiled this brief excerpt. And Autostraddle - a lesbian-focused publication - must surely always be discussing lesbians whenever it's not specified otherwise, right, and...

So, yeah. The fact that there are people right now who identify as Bambisexual, and they're principally ace or aro-spec lesbians - I think that's new. That was invented fully anew, sometime in the 2010s, with an incorrect historical sheen. And, last part aside, that's great! More power to anyone for whom that term vibes. But - just speaking from the perspective of a history major and lawyer - I think it's important not to invent fictitious queer history, or erase real queer history, generally.


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in reply to @deergrace's post:

That's the aggravating thing - they didn't! Autostraddle just republished a list of slang definitions from this book, which aren't inherently lesbian-specific, and cited the source... but it only takes one person jumping to conclusions in a memeable way to create lore like this.

I don’t think that’s quite fair. The article headline promises 20 lesbian slang terms, and the one in question is listed as #1. Autostraddle absolutely is responsible for this in this case.

Not that I think that’s particularly wrong or egregious or anything, but it does not take any jumping to conclusions whatsoever by anyone, it just takes reading the headline and assuming the 20 numbered words listed are what was meant by “lesbian terms”.

That all said, I’m 100% here for this kind of debunking, excellent chost!

Hmm, good point - and one that we could, perhaps, blame on the editorial disconnect between whoever probably assigned a listicle to one of Autostraddle’s staff writers or freelancers headline-first, and the content of the listicle as published not quite matching the headline as grist for the content mill.

(This is precisely the kind of thing I love about parsing miscommunications between primary and secondary sources, godddd)

Good post! I always thought the term/idea was cute (being on the ace spectrum myself), but questioned it's actually history given "queer history" is just something usually made up on Tumblr.

I remember there also being a lot of silly made up identities because "butch and femme are strictly for wlw lesbians only" 🙄

Gosh yeah. The aphobia I used to see online (esp on tumblr) was downright rancid. I know it's still out there ofc, but it was pretty bad ~10 years ago on Tumblr. and I feel like so many folks just acted like it was okay?? to just fully oust ace/aro folks from LGBT spaces?
i had people who I thought were my allies straight up tell me "well that's too bad, but that's not real discrimination" when I talked about my doctor trying to 'fix' me. Pepperidge farm remembers

Yeeeeep…and then the big shift to "is dysphoria required to be trans" where…ow, RIGHT AS I WAS QUESTIONING MY GENDER…long story short am I trans? "Yesn't. It's not inaccurate but it's also not a label I use for myself; besides, nonbinary fits me better anyway"

This is a really good deep dive, thank you for your investigation!

I do personally use the term bambi lesbian for myself, as in the modern context it's been a good way to quickly explain to people a general vibe of what I'm about. To be honest knowing it's full history, I'm now feeling a bit shaken on the term and will have to work through that, but I also prefer to be accurate about history and use labels appropriately...

I just want to express that I'm interested in women but not sex in a way that's quick and easy to communicate. Queer terminology will always be a complex thing though I suppose.

oh my gosh, THANK YOU! I did enough research to realize the "bambisexual lesbian" thing was mostly astroturfed history, but it's so cool to get the full story! oh, also, that artist is Yamino. She's super cool! I can reblog with the source, or you can edit if you're up for it?