Hello everyone! It's been a long time! Imma be honest, I'm completely blown away by the amount of people who have joined and keep joining this community, it's so great to see you all found us! So it feels like a great time to update our welcome message to announce, among other things, a new Discord server we've been working on so we can all hang out and talk about various things. Check it out! https://discord.gg/E2XabTSdEG (Fixed link!)

If you're more of a lurker than a poster, you might be interested in (or even come from) one of the various channels that have made videos about the posts on this sub: Strange Æons, One Topic At A Time, Jammidodger, The Queer Kiwi, Lil Orange Plum, and a handful of other wonderful creators that like to bring you the best of this community so you can enjoy. However, if you're into posting and commenting, that's excelent news! We always welcome new posts and enjoy the conversation that forms around them. We do, however, have a few rules and considerations to keep in mind, in order to keep this community happy, healthy and learning. I've you've already read what's ahead you can go on and have fun; however, if you're new here or you haven't been paying much attention (as happens to all of us sometimes), you probably want to read what comes ahead so we can all have a good time here.

We are focused specifically on making awareness of LGBTQ erasure. That means all posts should be explicitly about people failing to acknowledge homoerotic or gender-binary-nonconforming people and situations. We don't use the words "gay" or "trans" as hard labels when we talk about historical people, because culture evolves and language with it, but they are useful identifiers if we want to talk about what they did or how they felt. We know these labels might change from year to year and from culture to culture, so don't feel obligated to stick with them when we talk about a pre-modern context, though it's okay if you do use it because we all understand what you mean. If something is not entirely clear, asking is encouraged.

That said, when we talk about modern people who have made their identity explicit we very much enforce respecting that identity. If someone is a declared bisexual, for example, and you insist they're straight or gay, you're being rude, and we don't like that. Please use the labels and pronouns people have chosen to go by. Deliberately misgendering people is a bannable offence.

On that note, we have pronoun flairs for the most common identities and you can customise one in case it doesn't perfectly fit you. They're optional, but if someone uses them you should refer to that person with those pronouns. There is room for mistakes but we can also see when someone's being rude on purpose, so don't. This is a place for everyone to feel welcome and respecting their gender identity is a huge part of that. Be welcoming so you'll continue to be welcome.

Finally: our rules are very short and concise. Please read and follow them. We want this place to be full of learning and fun, but we need your help with that. If you came from the videos or if you read the comments, you know the vibe. Let's all vibe. If someone is breaking the rules, please use the report button; some people have messaged us over chat or inbox but the report button is much more useful to us. That way we can deal with situations as soon as we see them.

With all that said, I hope you know we're all trying to do our best to give our community a place where we can enjoy ourselves and talk about our history and experiences. Also, be sure to check our sister subreddits: r/LGBTHistory, r/LGBTCulture and r/SapphireAndHerFriend. Have a wonderful time browsing and participating [EDIT: it's come to my attention that Reddit is currently acting against what was previously said in this part so we're not gonna say it out loud because keeping this place up and running is priority, but you guys know how we feel towards Nazis and Fascism]. Cheers, good luck and good day!

/r/SapphoAndHerFriend is only for examples of erasure. But people often post history and historical figures without the erasure component nonetheless. To accommodate this, we made another subreddit: /r/LGBTHistory! It's been around for a while but remains underutilized, so hopefully bringing more attention to it will help it grow. Join it if you would like more posts about LGBTQ history and historical figures!

Also, if you have any ideas for the subreddit's icon and banner, lemme know!