I’m a long-term reader of LGBT romance and I have to say I’m appalled by what I’ve seen recently in the “queer romance community.” A few days ago I heard about some whack shit going on in the genre and decided to do some digging. Now I kinda wish I hadn’t because the transphobic, gaslighting garbage I found flipped my stomach and tbh I can’t believe no one else has picked up on this yet.

Evidently, this stuff has been going on for months and several authors, many of them LGBT, have been targeted by a toxic group of readers and pushed out of their own genre as a result. It’s horrifying, so buckle on up y’all cuz we got some serious shit to talk about. 

For at least six months (possibly longer, I didn’t go back further than that because honest to God I couldn’t read anymore of it), a super vocal but small group of readers using the #getloud hashtag on Twitter and Facebook have been targeting authors in the space for “scamming” readers in Amazon’s Kindle program. That “scamming” seems to be a flavor-of-the-week situation covering all manner of shit that’s not really relevant to this conversation. If you wanna know more, go surf the #getloud hashtag on FB and Twitter, it’s all there. 

There are legitimate discussions to be had about the ethics behind some of the stuff these authors are accused of doing, but this group skipped right the hell on past discussing it like adults and moved to doxxing the authors they thought were doing something wrong to shut them down. 

The craziest thing though is that after this group, which I repeat claims to be a group of allies for the LGBT community, decides they don’t like an author, they do everything in their power to break into that author’s social media accounts, email accounts, and anything else they can break into. Then they’ll either pose as that author using the hacked account and reveal every other pen name that author has written as, exponentially raising the risk that the author will be outed, or they’ll just post whatever damning things they find all over Twitter. I don’t think I need to remind y'all how dangerous that can be for queer authors using pen names to protect their identities in the first place, particularly those who are closeted IRL.

But speaking of outing, they did it to a trans author named Xen, who was previously closeted, most recently. They started by sending him cryptic DMs using his deadname under a Twitter handle they hijacked that previously belonged to his abusive ex:

It forced Xen to write a very long post basically outing himself, which itself led to him leaving social media:

Far and away the craziest part of all this though is that when the group was called out on what they did they not only admitted to doing it, they explained how they did it and revealed that legal action’s been brought against them in the past for the same thing. 

There are several receipts of this:

Wow, alrighty then. There’s plenty more insanity where that came from, though. These same people seem to have a habit of subtweeting and harassing the authors they have a beef with using the information they’ve hacked about them before revealing it to the rest of Twitter — again, LGBT authors:

In case you’re wondering, Xen, aka Cole McCade, shown in the screenshot above, is their newest author target in a whole ass string of targets. It’s way too damn complicated for me to follow, but from what I understand the long and short of it is that this group of readers doxxed, deadnamed, and forced a trans author to out himself to prove he wasn’t a woman pretending to be a man to sell more books — because according to the group, there’s evidently some sort of bias among readers to prefer books written by gay men. Yeah, I’m not even gonna touch on how fucking transphobic and misogynistic that entire notion is. 

The group claims they never intended to out Xen as trans, but what the fuck else could they have been trying to accomplish by hacking his Livejournal and sending him cryptic DMs using his deadname that they found via the LJ hack? He had no other choice but to out himself before they did it for him.

But whether or not they knew he was trans is a moot point anyway because they’d been warned by the other LGBT authors they’ve harassed in the past (surf their timelines, you’ll see all their victims, they aren’t bashful about what they do) that they’re quite literally putting some authors’ lives on the line by exposing their personal information. But they didn’t care, they kept right the fuck on trucking. 

Most of the authors they’ve targeted — again, LGBT writers, I can’t stress that enough — have had their careers ruined. They totally disappeared from publishing all because a group of readers took it upon themselves to out their identities for being “catfish” authors posing as men, when the entire reason these authors were operating under pen names was to protect their identities in the first place. Because, you know, some people can be killed for their identities in certain communities, especially in this day and age.

But this group is seriously out there appropriating SJW culture and treating an LGBT author’s use of a pen name or assumed identity as a “trick” or “scam” without ever stopping to think that “trick” or “scam” might be an attempt by that author to protect their fucking livelihood. Oh, and I dunno about y’all, but whenever I see anyone referring to any trans person as a “trick,” I get real fucking heated.

They’re easily one of the best gaslighting groups on Twitter I’ve ever seen. They’re now actually out there demanding that Xen apologize to THEM for saying he felt forcibly outed even though that’s exactly what happened, and by their hands. When a person has their personal information compromised after being harassed for months, of course they’re not going to feel safe to come out, yet this group continues to harass Xen and call him a liar when he literally has every receipt he’d ever need to prove he’s not lying. Talk about invalidating feelings. Some allies, right?

Their claim that breaking into people’s email accounts using recycled accounts isn’t hacking is beyond absurd. Using a recycled account to then do password resets to access further personal information that isn’t yours is patently illegal, no matter how you spin it. There are even people among them saying it’s fine to do but to maybe keep it “hush hush” the next time they do it. Proof:

What’s even more galling is that there seems to be a cult of personality among the group, all centered around this Nikki person. They’ll defend her until the very end, even while publicly “condemning" hacking/doxxing/whatever else their members have done. When asked if they condoned Nikki’s hacking, this is what some of them had to say:

Unbelievable.

All that doesn’t even begin to touch on the fact that they’re literally ruining queer lives and careers for what, exactly? So that they can feel good about themselves for exposing alleged “scammers” and “catfishes?“ Bravo. Good on y’all. Those are some great fucking allies right there, I’m so glad we have them on our side. 

Make no mistake, this is a pattern among these people and Xen definitely won’t be the last queer author they go after. Authors used to be free with the info they shared with their readers on their social media and newsletters because they thought it was a safe place in a safe community to do so. That’s why it’s been so easy for this group to dig up Livejournals and email addresses and everything else. They clearly have no remorse about it either:

Right. It’s a “loophole” so therefore everything’s fine and dandy, right? Using that “loophole” to gain access to a person’s other accounts and information is totally legal because it’s not really hacking, right? Outing and ruining a trans man’s career as a writer, the latest in a long string of instances, is perfectly acceptable because it was just a “loophole” that you happened to “take advantage of,” right?

LGBT authors are now afraid to share anything anymore because they don’t want to be the next target, they don’t wanna leave a bread crumb for this group to follow. Hell, they’re afraid to even publish books anymore. That’s fucking insane. This is their genre and they’re being pushed out of it by toxic, abusive people online who claim to be their allies while stabbing them in the back and exposing their most personal information online at the same time.

I repeat: What. The. Actual. Fuck.  

Maybe it’s time the LGBT community “gets loud” about this bullshit.