Scott Long (@scottlong1980) / X

Scott Long

114.5K posts

Scott Long

@scottlong1980

Named one of world's top 10 tweeters on sexuality & development by @Guardian. Founder, @HRW LGBT Rights Program. They/them; he/him. Signal +1 267-249-3310

Misplaced.

Joined January 2011

Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
This gay man is 36. He insists for most of his life, "gay rights" had nothing to do with trans people or gender. It's all a recent perversion of the movement. I'm a gay man, 23 years older than he. From the moment I came out in 1982, I understood trans rights as connected to me.
2M
Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Nov 5, 2023
In the 70s, historian Max Hastings interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu extensively, after the the Netanyahu family recruited him to write an official biography of Bibi's brother Yoni. Here Hastings, in his memoirs, recalls Bibi's racism and enthusiasm for total ethnic cleansing:
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
When I came out--five years before this bizarre dude was born--I saw my sexuality faced social repression not just because of Bible verses but because it menaced what manhood was supposed to mean. I realized I wouldn't be free till others' bodies were also free from those norms.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
He's rewriting the history of gay rights, erasing what they meant to an older generation he's never tried to understand. But he's also written himself as gay in a way that's incomprehensible to me--in its solitude, its echoing emptiness, its refusal of coalition or connection.
57K
Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
How did I experience rights, and myself, and the gay movement so differently from this arrogant guy--who now claims the experiences and relations I value only came along later, when in fact I know they were a coalescent part of the political world in which my desires emerged?
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
I accepted my gayness--after a long struggle--because it connected me to other lives, other battles, other aspirations for liberation; it wrapped me in an invisible web of hope and dissidence, it linked me to bodies I didn't know,
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
Andrew Sullivan says the "gay rights legacy"needs to be protected from "trans extremists." No, it fucking doesn't. And don't tell me what the "gay rights legacy" is, because I know it. I was part of it. So were the "trans extremists."
Andrew Sullivan
@sullydish
Mar 10, 2023
This may be one of the grossest abuses of the gay rights legacy by trans extremists.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
it invited me into their utopias which were strange to me as new continents, it permitted me to visit their inchoate dreams, it told me that the identical is false and there is no solidarity without difference, that we could understand each other even without the same desires.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
I know there are gay men for whom gayness just means meeting other men who call themselves gay, and not having to think about it. But their worlds are arid and empty to me compared to the world of new understandings, new connnections, that opened when I came out 40 years ago.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
Kids don't need to be protected from trans people, "trans extremists," or trans ideas, any more than I needed protection from the dread gays who supposedly menaced my innocent Appalachian childhood. I trust kids. They'll make the connections. They'll figure themselves out.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
But I'll keep insisting on gayness as I experienced it 40 years ago--a radical encounter with what's beyond the skin, a revelation of an unknown kind of open self, an understanding that your oppression is not your private possession but is shared, and only overcome when shared.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
Only connect. Dispossess yourself even of the oppression you treasure as your particular possession, and walk naked into the solidarity of the dispossessed. Without a utopia in mind, a commons of the persecuted where all losses can be salved, there is no point to being gay.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Mar 11, 2023
Replying to @scottlong1980
Sullivan and @ComradeDoom1 are welcome to their version of gayness--one that's sealed, self-sufficient, unconnected to anybody else's aspirations or agitations, fucking away in the Fortress of Solitude. It's theirs. Honestly, nobody will take it away from them.
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Scott Long
@scottlong1980
Dec 26, 2023
Horrifying testimonies of summary executions by the IDF are growing & so far I have not seen Western media cover a single one. Given their click-hungry willingness to republish sensational war propaganda from one side, this omission seems a commercial oversight, if nothing else.
Laila Al-Arian
@LailaAlarian
Dec 26, 2023
He survived by playing dead the way Americans survive mass shootings. Israel is killing Palestinians in bombings, shelling and drone strikes but also in mass shootings
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