the queer folks thread

pandacular said:
I also LOVE pots, which is a lot cheaper if I stick to smaller trees.
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I kind of envy the people who haven't fallen down the pot rabbit hole and are perfectly content with a mica pot for the foreseeable future o_O. I think for the next few years my new material acquisitions are going to be fairly modest in favor of locking down future vessels for bonsai I already have in development. Only problem, I'm trying to start as many lengthy projects as I can now so they've panned out by the time I've been invested in the hobby a while.
 
Pots, knowledge, and a Korean lilac are all I have left from my early years in bonsai.

I started in deciduous trees and I love a good end of the year discount. I was 13 when I began bonsai so I mostly cut my teeth on the mulberries that grew in our yard or shrubs that were heading to the burn pile at my garden center job. I also like trying out non-traditional species. I have three small poinsettia that I'm trying to develop. Now that I am older (37) I can afford Japanese Black Pines and I'm spending more time learning advanced refinement techniques for conifers. I am super in love with larches though.

As my name suggests I am mostly into shohin and smaller bonsai but I have a few larger ones like a Japanese Hornbeam forest that's about 27" tall and a collected limber pine from Todd Schlafer that's 24" tall. I'm in a small urban lot and I have no garage so I'm limited on what I can grow.

I also have been growing carnivorous plants for a very long time so I have a lot of plant knowledge in general.
 
pandacular said:
gorgeous! any recommendations for species that do well in a regular house plant setting
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I keep most of mine under grow lights but Nepenthes can handle bright indoor light. If they're too dark they'll drop their pitchers. Once they get larger you can fertilize them by putting maxsea in the pitchers. I also recommend sundews and pinguicula for anyone struggling with fungus gnats.
 
that's fascinating, because personally i see quite little queer representation in bonsai. now houseplants i can see...speaking of, why are houseplants seens as a feminine hobby? but gardening isn't? seems really odd.
 
pandacular said:
see...speaking of, why are houseplants seens as a feminine hobby? but gardening isn't? seems really odd.
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What do mean gardening isn't gay?😱

I've mentioned this story around here before, but I'll tell it again here because it's germain to the topic.
I recall when I was young - 6 or 7 years old - my mom refused to let me help plant the vegetable garden 5hat summer. She said, "but boys don't usually like to garden." I told her that I wanted to, but she still refused, and tried to make my older sister to help without success. Later that summer mom couldn't get any volunteers to help with weeding, so tried to convince me that this was my opportunity to get in on the garden. I made the obvious argument and refused. (She apparently told on me to dad, because he asked me about it when he got home from work. I explained the same thing, and he wasn't able argue it any further.) Eventually my dad convinced her that if she wanted my buy in on the garden she would have to let me plant it, and that's what finally happened.

A few years later I was at a school that gave everyone free pine tree saplings to plant on Arbor Day. Each year I would bring mine home and excitedly ask for a pot to plant it in so I could make a bonsai tree of it. This is where it got interesting.
First there was the same old argument about boys not liking to grow stuff. Older and wiser now (all of 10) I said, " farmers grow stuff."
"But that's just to make money and take care of their families."
"The British have a long tradition of flower gardening, and it's just as much for men as it is for women."
"You're not British. BTW, you know it takes a very long time to grow a bonsai tree, right?"
"So I better get started now."
She never relented, and I finally just planted the thing in the ground in the front yard by the driveway. Later that year my dad ran it down with the lawn mower.
The next year we went through the same motions, and I finally planted the tree in the back yard just off the back patio. I placed logs and rocks around it and mulched it in with leaves so there would be no mistaking that it was supposed to be there. Later on (some weeks at least as I recall it) my dad was going out to mow, and I reminded him not to run it over this time. He rolled his eyes and reminded me with a rye smile that I don't get to tell him what to do. Then my mother called him to speak with him about something before he got started.
I watched from the window to keep an eye on the little pine. My dad started at the back of the yard, and slowly worked his way towards the house. When he got to the tree he initially went around it very carefully. Then when he went to move on, he stopped looked back at it, and stopped the mower.
I watched in anger as my dad frustratedly gathered up the rocks and logs and threw them to the side before starting the mower again and running the tree down.
He fought with my mom again that night.

My 1st wife said things similar to my mother, but did get me one of those mini bonsai kits for Christmas one year. A couple weeks after I planted it, while I was at work, the tiny pot got knocked off the windowsill and left on the floor behind the couch to dry out. I didn't hardly think of bonsai again for years.
My 2nd wife also said similar things as my mother, but indulged me when in 2019 I said I was going to start trying to grow a bonsai tree. She would say the encouraging words, that I'm allowed to spend money on my new hobby, but then looked at me in dismay when I told her I actually spent $40 on a pot, and reminded me constantly that I had no idea what I was doing and that I was terrible at growing things, then tell me to work in the garden with her. The garden she insisted on being the one to plant, but never watered and never weeded.

So, yeah, when someone tells me that gardening and houseplants, or growing anything at all, isn't just for girls; I feel the same sort of frustration I do when someone says that men can also raise children. What they say and how they behave are not often the same, and I got some trauma about that shit.
 
ShadyStump said:
So, yeah, when someone tells me that gardening and houseplants, or growing anything at all, isn't just for girls; I feel the same sort of frustration I do when someone says that men can also raise children. What they say and how they behave are not often the same, and I got some trauma about that shit.
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Thank you for sharing. This part here resonated with me in particular, and gets to the core of the idea of intersectionalism. "Queer problems" affect all of us, particularly with attitudes to gender expression--it's fair to say that the majority of "straight" people never think about gender for themselves, but just accept what they're told. Frankly, it seems that your parents had some issues of their own and were taking them out on you...such a terrible way to treat your own child, I hope you're able to grow over the scars (tho callous formation can be hard!)

I like to think that these sorts of attitudes are changing, but I'm not sure if that is as true as I would like. Perhaps shifting is a better term. And it's likely that my perspective on gardening is shaped by my grandfather, who kept a beautiful garden.
 
It's funny that bonsai can be perceived this way in the U.S.

In Japan, it's considered pretty hairy straight guy masculine. Bonsai is dominated by men there. I think that perception is due to what is typically seen as bonsai in the west--tiny fussy little junipers or azaleas. Like it or not, that fits with the dumbass perception of what "gay" is in the west.

When I first got interested in bonsai I went to see the bonsai collection at the National Arboretum. I was amazed at the sheer scale of the trees and the way they were presented. Those huge pines and even big maples were hardly delicate hothouse plants. They screamed "wilderness" and "wild places" to me. They appealed to the same outdoor spirit I grew up with hunting and fishing in redneck Appalachian and Texas backcounty. I recognized a kindred spirit in them.
 
rockm said:
In Japan, it's considered pretty hairy straight guy masculine. Bonsai is dominated by men there.
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more specifically, it's seen as an old man's hobby. While in Kyoto, I was speaking with our sushi chef and I mentioned that we were in the area to see bonsai, and he said "why do you like bonsai? you are much too young!" I also found that odd, as if I start today, I have maybe 60 years to produce some good trees.

It's certainly still a large issue in the US that bonsai is a "boys club". I certainly don't know how to solve that problem, besides do my best to be welcoming and hope that rubs off on others. Not that I've seen much un-welcoming behavior, and it's just hard to be the only person who looks like you in the room, as mentioned in this thread.
 
[EDIT] Edited for content :) We're all a family here :) - BNut [/EDIT]

Well, Cletus, it can't mean exclusively homosexual because a lot of sexualities are covered under the umbrella.
 
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pandacular said:
It's certainly still a large issue in the US that bonsai is a "boys club". I certainly don't know how to solve that problem, besides do my best to be welcoming and hope that rubs off on others. Not that I've seen much un-welcoming behavior, and it's just hard to be the only person who looks like you in the room, as mentioned in this thread.
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One thing that really helped me stay in bonsai as a kid was the amount of women in my club. I would guess that the Milwaukee Bonsai Society is pretty equal number of men and women. I became good friends with two women who were in my novice class and they made sure to take me along on all the fun events. They were both teachers so had no problems hanging out with a 14 year old kid. When I was 18 I somehow ended up on the planning committee for the MABA 2006 symposium. When I was 19 I traveled with a group of women from my club to the BCI symposium in Washington DC. Having the support of a good bonsai club really makes a difference.
 
I recently listened to Bonsai Mirai's podcast on the experience of women in bonsai, with Shelly Svobada, a bonsai practitioner and neurologist from southern Oregon. It was a really interested discussion and one of the conclusions was that it's a self-fulfilling bonsai; doesn't have many women because there aren't many women doing bonsai. They brought up the Portland club as a great exception to that, and Shelly felt that she had experienced relatively few obstacles because of the substantial amount of women in the club.

I'm really glad to hear that the Milwaukee club is the same, I think that's a sign of health. At the risk of generalizing, I've felt that women are usually the first to leave a bad or toxic situation.

Also discussed at length on that podcast episode was how when Ryan was coming up in bonsai, there were similar discussions about getting more young people involved in bonsai, but that had been somewhat "solved" and he didn't the same level of attention there any longer.
 
pandacular said:
Also discussed at length on that podcast episode was how when Ryan was coming up in bonsai, there were similar discussions about getting more young people involved in bonsai, but that had been somewhat "solved" and he didn't the same level of attention there any longer.
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That's always something I find a little funny and a little sad. If you're younger and your parents have money bonsai is easy to get into. I am the same age as Bjorn Bjorholm and we started bonsai at about the same time. I also wanted to go to Japan and apprentice for bonsai. I had struggled to focus on my biology degree as a first generation college student and most of my trees died in the care of my parents while I was away at college. I ended up switching to a local technical college and got an associates in Horticulture. I didn't grow up with money and I had no idea how to get to Japan. I was cleaning hotels at the time and at $8.50 an hour couldn't actually save enough to get there. I was able to get a data entry job and pivoted it into a junior web developer position. I went back to school for computer science while Bjorn and Ryan were apprentices in Japan. I just let that dream die. I stepped back from the bonsai club by the time I was 22 because my web development job was too demanding and I couldn't make it to the meetings. I always kept a few bonsai trees in my various apartments and in the back yard of duplexes I rented. When I started house hunting in 2020 I rejoined the bonsai society. Now I have money to afford bonsai and I am finally going to Japan this November at age 37 and I will probably be ugly crying at all of the beautiful bonsai gardens. I am hoping when I hit my retirement at 45, I can then go and apprentice somewhere.
 
I’m technically pansexual. I’m attracted to men, women and trans. And this is likely due to sexual manipulation by an older child when I was a kid. I’ve been with men before, but because I’m a Christian, I actively seek to abstain from sex in general unless I’m married, let alone with other men as this is a sin in my worldview.

But of course we’re all adults here and we can accept different worldviews and not resort to being snowflakes and seeking the banishment of people who might disagree with us, right?
 
Peter.Constantine325 said:
I’m technically pansexual. I’m attracted to men, women and trans. And this is likely due to sexual manipulation by an older child when I was a kid. I’ve been with men before, but because I’m a Christian, I actively seek to abstain from sex in general unless I’m married, let alone with other men as this is a sin in my worldview.

But of course we’re all adults here and we can accept different worldviews and not resort to being snowflakes and seeking the banishment of people who might disagree with us, right?
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If you can't POLITELY disagree with someone, you're the problem.

Though some folks would happily debate translations of the Bible and how they might influence your world view. That's totally on the table, too.

I am of the mind that there is in fact a psychological/environmentally determinative factor to sexuality, but that is not the same as mental illness. No more or less than, "I have a type," is a substantive indicator of mental health.
Can it be part of an unhealthy relationship style? Sure thing.
Is it an indicator of an unhealthy relationship style on its own? Not at all.
 
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