argumate:

intrigue-posthaste-please:

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

dude had guts, someone needs to update his Wikipedia page

thelittleblackfox:

portraitoftheoddity:

Headcanon that the reason Steve is always so willing to jump–

– out of windows, off buildings, out of airplanes –

– Is that in that moment of freefall, he can close his eyes and imagine it’s the winter of 1944 again

And that he’s the one falling

instead of Bucky.

Every fall he survives, every landing he walks away from, it drives home the fact that Steve should have jumped with him

stfustucky:

nomadssteverogers:

“Steve.”

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Can I just step in here for a second and point out that when Steve found Bucky, he was all alone, repeating his name rank and serial number (which is what soldiers are trained to let be the only things they say under torture or interrogation) to an empty room. They’ve clearly broken him to the point where all he can do is just keep saying that over and over again. And what’s the first thing he says when he snaps out of it?

When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?

plaidadder:

aenariasbookshelf:

anaisnein:

xenoqueer:

The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.

Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.

good luck with your plan to sell ads targeting a user base that doesn’t exist any more, @staff.

@staff @support you may want to read this. No one seems to think this nsfw ban move is a good thing. Your credibility is circling the drain at this point.

This has all been done in such a tragically stupid fashion. And it makes it worse that they actually planned it for six months before initiating it. 

The Vox piece doesn’t even really portray the extent of the devastation. They’ve broken this website for ALL of their users.

When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?