Our last handful of articles have been far more serious than was ever intended for this blog. When I originally imagined NoGoldHere, the idea was relatively simple: I want to talk about degenereate art, queer art, "bad" representation, hentai, porn, and everything the far-right (and pseudo-left) despise. I wanted a space to rant about the ignorance of puritanical culture, the crushing affects of a fascist society that has been growing in popularity for decades longer than I, or any of our writers, have been alive. A space to be unapologetically, disgustingly queer.
However, as the US eeks into more and more dangerous territory, hosting more CSAM than any other country and a trans genocide happening right now, I feel it's our duty to push into more uncomfortable, more real events. Discussing the horrors happening today may be the last thing I had ever wanted this website to be, but the nature of artwork and censorship is political; this was inevitable from the start.
What does that mean for the site?
We will be discussing more serious topics when able. This includes CSAM (as previously seen with the Pawoo article), present events (such as the TERF/Nazi march in New Zealand, also briefly covered- though in a way that relates to the blog's stance on pornography and censorship), and researched-backed psychology (academic articles on paraphilia, sexual fantasy, rate of offense, and the legal actions related to them).
Our sources will be more comprehensive. In the past we saw no issue in using Wikipedia as a source, as Wikipedia itself lists sources in its articles. The assumption was that a reader would be able to access those links for further reading. However, Wikipedia asks that it not be used as a source, and it's come to our realization that people don't actually check the sources Wikipedia offers.
An acknowledgement- and attempt to communicate- academia. The language of academia and the average US citizen is a frighteningly wide gap. Very few people are aware of what is widely accepted in academia and why, which is a direct cause of anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, and demand for abstinence and shame in sexual education (the evangelical church is also a major factor in many of these, but it should be noted that, for the average person, that Venn diagram is a circle). It is our hope that we can not only provide sources, but explain them to those uninitiated in academia in a way that can be understood.
Antis will be referred to as TERFs and alt-righter grifters. We may still use the word "anti" as a shorthand, but we will no longer be pretending that they are a separate entity. Antis are groomed by TERFs and fascists into their ideology, and hopefully, if we are as transparent with that as possible, someone might second-guess their horrific opinions about their fellow queer folk (as it is almost always young queers without any guidance from their elders that are brought into the ideology).
We will HAVE to push our Support links a lot harder. At present, there is one single person handling the entirety of the website's costs. It costs around $300 a year to keep our domain and Wix premium, and at present, we are not making a penny off of NGH. That's $300 which I may not have in the future. On top of this, our guest writers don't work for free. In order to have those articles, we need to be able to pay them. If you're able, please donate using our SUPPORT tab.
While NGH hasn't had a strict schedule since its inception, we hope to offer more moving forward. Yet, we won't be able to do so without community help. Please take the time to share our articles, boost our posts on Aethy or Twitter, and our Ko-Fi, BMAC, Boosty, and SubscribeStar.
We want to be able to work with more artists and writers, keep these discussions going, and do our best to bring properly sourced information to other queer folk who may not have many places to learn about their own culture. We want to keep doing this, but will need help going forward.
The site may also undergo a few minor changes, such as the switching around of our categories, updates to our Support page, fixing our comments (hopefully, Wix is fighting us on that one), and even push into other projects, such as an anti-censorship roleplay forum that we have been working on for as long as we've had NGH.
We thank you all for reading, and hope to do more for the community in the future.
Comments