Libraries are where you go to find yourself in the record. Proof you existed. Proof you weren’t the first.
For queer people, and for disabled and neurodivergent people, that proof is often the thing institutions worked hardest to bury. Lilypad Library keeps it. This Pride Month we’re celebrating with the library project we became fiscal sponsors of in May — because the work of holding the record, keeping the door open, and making a place where you don’t have to explain yourself is work we share.
Libraries are more than books; they’re places for learning, belonging, and community 💕✨
This Pride Month, Lilypad Library is celebrating the many ways libraries support LGBTQ+ communities through stories, archives, resources, and events. Libraries help preserve history, foster understanding, and create spaces where everyone can feel welcome 🌈📚🏳️🌈
How are YOU celebrating pride month?
When libraries grow, so do community, knowledge, and joy.
—Lotsa
People can learn about the past and be seen in the present.
—Lotsa
For centuries their stories have been hidden away, partly because people didn’t want to be known back then. People often destroyed records, burn your papers, your letters, anything that referenced a gender fluid identity.
Smithsonian curators are digging into their collections for evidence of lives long overlooked.
If your story is not told, then you’re not important. History and objects are like umbilical cords. They’re like a super highway to the past, and to the Future to those who come after us, will want to know: am I the only one in the world who has ever in all of history felt like this? And no matter what you’re feeling, the answer is no. But that’s why you need to have people save stories, so that you can find yourself.
Hidden stories of people daring to be themselves are now coming to light…
The pieces linked below are full of music and art and celebration and defiance and joy.
Queer and neurodivergent liberation are entwined.
For many of us, the two rainbows are one. We built a course about that overlap — seven lessons that take gender apart and put community back together. This is how it begins.
Queer and neurodivergent liberation are entwined.
The same impulse that tells an Autistic kid to put their hands down tells a trans kid their gender is a phase. Both are orders to perform a self that isn’t yours. Both name the performance “normal” and the person underneath “disordered.” The hand stilled and the gender denied come from one root: the demand that you be legible to people who were never going to look closely.
Many of us live under two rainbows. Two coming-out stories. Two minorities. Two sets of people deciding what we are allowed to be. And the pattern is not subtle. Gender-diverse people are far more likely to be Autistic, and Autistic people are far more likely to be gender-diverse. We are not a coincidence the literature keeps stumbling over. We are a population the pathology paradigm was never built to hold.
Across seven lessons, we deconstruct gender and construct community. We move through Gender Copia and bricolage, minority stress, autigender and neuroqueer, chosen family, queerness itself, and the ordinary politics of who is allowed to use a bathroom. Read it to the depth you choose, in the order you choose, at the pace your bodymind allows. The main ideas are up front. The rabbit holes are there when you want them.
This is not a course about what is wrong with us. It is a course about the colors we were told to hide, and the people we find when we stop hiding them. You hit so hard with all the colors that there are.
Neurodiversity and Gender: Queer and Neurodivergent Liberation are Entwined – Stimpunks Foundation
We’re a Double Rainbow All the Way: You hit so hard with all the colors that there are.
This is the centerpiece — a composition of music, art, and history for two entwined liberations. It holds the hard part and the joyful part in the same frame: the shared root of ABA and conversion therapy, and the sheer riot of color that survives it. Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts, stable variations the pathology paradigm was never built to hold. So we don’t argue for our existence here. We celebrate it, all the way, with all the colors that there are.
Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts.
Queer and neurodivergent liberation are entwined.
Two rainbows, two coming-out stories, one root. The hand that stills an Autistic kid’s flapping and the voice that calls a queer kid’s self a phase were trained in the same room — ABA and gay conversion therapy were built from the same behaviorist research, by some of the same people. We name that history here, in full, because you can’t celebrate a thing you won’t look at squarely. We’re a double rainbow all the way.
Enjoy this digital composition filled with music and art celebrating our entwined natures and our entwined liberation.
Featuring music from: AURORA, Screaming Females, Ex Hex, The Spook School, stories, Garfunkel & Oates, The Linda Lindas, Warriors, and Steven Universe.
🌈🌈 We’re A Double Rainbow All the Way.
🌈🌈 We’re A Double Rainbow All the Way – Stimpunks Foundation
Behold the Spectrum: Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason.
Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason; our differences are the genius – and the conscience – of our species.
A Thousand Rivers
Behold the Spectrum is the celebration. Queer people and neurodivergent people are not glitches the species is trying to correct. We are variation, which is how life has always worked. Look closely enough at anything alive and you find the spectrum.
Queer and neurodivergent people are biological facts.
We are stable parts of the human genome.
If you believe in a Maker, Maker built us in.
Look to Maker and behold the Spectrum!
If you don’t subscribe to a Maker,
Look to Nature and behold the Spectrum!
Spectrums and fractals are all around us and within us.
We are emergent!
How Glorious!
Keep on Livin’
And Pride is also survival. The parades and the colors are real, and so is the onslaught they’re celebrated against. Keep on Livin’ is our philosophy for the days the systems don’t get fixed. We show up for each other anyway. That’s the part no one can take.
This is our philosophy of survival. Not the inspirational kind. The real kind — gritty, communal, unfinished.
We keep on livin’. Not because systems get fixed or pain disappears. Because we show up for each other. Because survival is an act of resistance, and resistance is contagious.
This page holds the words, music, and testimony that carry us.
We serve our loved people so we can keep on living through the onslaught.
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