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Fashion is Smashin

I have just created a new reddit: r/FashionIsSmashin. (No, it isn't misspelled and I didn't run out of space for letters. I want it to RHYME. Okay?)

I've had that name for a project in my head for more than two years. It dates to around the time I wrote a post elsewhere called An Ounce of Prevention. I did nothing with it at the time because I KNEW for a FACT someone was stealing ideas from me, there were people expecting me to WORK FOR FREE for them while they heaped abuse on me and etc, so I wrote up a very general blog post and left it at that.

I have a son who is Ace -- Asexual -- and likely on the ASD spectrum and he does not care about clothes or what YOU think of him, but I raised him, I like him, I accept him and I also know a lot about clothes, so he's very comfortable in his clothes and with himself and not because he's One Of The Beautiful People or anything like that.

And it's not like he never gets homophobic shit from people. He does. But I know for a fact it could be so much worse and he's good at de-escalating and part of that is he is not in agony over his own mother being unable to accept him or some shit, so there is no means to get your emotional hooks in him.

He just sees YOU as an asshole with personal problems. He's not all wrapped around the axle with some need to prove himself or find acceptance or whatever, so I'm very clear that public image can be a projection of the internalized hatred that some LGBTQ individuals carry.

It ends up being a case of "You can't get there from here" or "The key is in the safe." You need to feel acceptance to look better, you need to look better to get acceptance from someone else and you end up failing to find your way out of this trap someone tossed you into when you were a kid -- that someone like YOU is "too ugly" in some social or moral sense in their mind and that internalized "ugly" gets worn on your sleeve as a visual kind of ugly.

I don't know where I'm going with this. If I didn't have a serious medical condition and blah blah blah, I might ENJOY doing something with this in person similar to Creative Mornings, which meets once a month in person.

I do a lot online because I have a permanently compromised immune system and people can't breathe on me via internet, much less cough on me. How this does anything meaningful and substantive online, I do not know.

Some thoughts:

There are already LGBTQ fashion subs. For a time, I somewhat regularly read one or more of them. I never really felt welcome to try to be helpful there.

How best to position this? I don't know. When you create health clinics to get birth control into the hands of teens, they need to offer OTHER services so that going there doesn't de facto mark you as a "slut."

I don't really want this to be a "gay thing." I want this to be an INCLUSIVE thing that somehow serves the LGBTQ community.

Maybe I'm stupid and too idealistic.

Or maybe like my asexual son has said about me: If I tell you I can walk on water, I have a prototype water-walking set of boots in my fucking closet.

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