To everyone who self-identifies as queer but worries about claiming that ID publicly b/c of passing privilege: You are real and valued and seen. We love you. We need you. We want you with us.
To everyone who isn’t or can’t be or chooses not to be visible in their queerness; to everyone still in the closet by choice or necessity; to everyone who doesn’t yet know where they fit: you are no less real. We love you always, and we are holding space for you.
How Can We Say ‘It Gets Better’ After Orlando?
How Can We Say ‘It Gets Better’ After Orlando?
(The link is an article by my friend Anthony Easton, for MTV
news. Please prioritise the article, not the thoughts of mine it prompted.)“Don’t politicise”, people are told after terrible events.
But politicisation is inevitable – much of the time, it’s just a symptom of the
need for context and meaning, the urge to fit events into a story. Narratives
are how we process our lives and the world: breaking this urge is not easy.And narratives are readily available. The murders in Orlando
slotted into two very familiar ones. The first narrative was of Islamic terror,
the malign force of ISIS directing its attackers from outside and within “the
West”, constantly seeking to harm. The second narrative was of gun violence,
the lethal ease of American murder.Both these narratives have the support of powerful actors.
The Republican party, the European right, the right-wing media and ISIS itself
back the first. President Obama, the Democratic party and liberal US media back
the second. The stories are not contradictory, of course – no nationalist
European demagogue, keen to bang the drum against ISIS, also wants US-style gun ‘freedom’. It’s only the
battle for primacy that makes them feel that way, as each side accuses the
other of ignoring its chosen story.But with Orlando a third story fights to be heard. The
narrative of decades of homophobic violence against LGBT people and communities
in America and beyond: physical violence, state violence, legal violence, acts
of terror. All ongoing. This narrative is inconvenient, just as LGBT people are so often
seen as inconvenient. Watch, if you can bear, the clip of Owen Jones (a gay
man) being shouted down to the point of leaving a Sky News studio by
commentators desperate that their narrative about Orlando – it was an “attack
on humanity”, on “all of us” – gets to dominate. “It was an attack on LGBT
people-“ Jones says about a slaughter in a gay club during Pride month .”ON ALL
PEOPLE” the presenter thunders. No. For a trivial example, this was not an
attack on me.The LGBT people I know, and those I read on social media are
not a unit. They have not been unanimous that this third inconvenient narrative
is the lens through which to view Orlando. Other voices are always available.
But from what I have seen they have felt overwhelmingly that it is the lens. The
story that homophobia continues, that violence continues, is in the interest of
no major political party. It is inconvenient not just at this immediate framing
level. It cuts across mainstream political stories from right and left about progress or its
supposed costs; stories of lesbian and gay people as liberated by marriage; of
young bi or genderqueer people as pampered; of trans women as threats themselves.The inconvenient story demands space, and volume.
Scarborough looked into the camera to address Trump directly: “Hey Donald, guess what, I’m not going to support you until you get your act together. You are acting like a bush league loser, you’re acting like a racist, and you’re acting like a bigot.”
“This is called art of the deal,” the former Florida congressman continued. “I’m taking my deal off the table, Donald, until you come back to the table and get on the other side of the table and prove you are not a bigot and and prove you’re not going to take my party down in the ditch, you don’t have my endorsement and you can’t use Hillary Clinton as a gun against my head.”
Raising his voice to a shout, Scarborough told Trump it’s in his hands to prove to the party and to him personally that he’s not a bigot.
“I’m not scared of you and I’m not scared of the base because they are just as pissed off as me. It’s called art of the deal, it’s what Donald Trump has been preaching all his life,” he said. “Don’t use Hillary Clinton as an excuse as your blank check to say racist things about people born in Indiana. No, Donald! You don’t get to play it that way.”
Several minutes later, Scarborough hijacked the panel again to admonish party officials, calling the current scenario “the worst of all worlds.”
“Listen to me, guys!” he began. “You embrace a guy making racist comments, you lose the presidency and then you lose the Senate and you lose the House.”
In a faux-baby voice, Scarborough begged party officials to “stop running scared” and stand up to Trump.
Trump responded on Twitter to say “Morning Joe” has “gone off the deep end – bad ratings.”
Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”
Take the combative statement after the Nevada showdown.
“I don’t know who advised him that this was the right route to take, but we are now actively destroying what Bernie worked so hard to build over the last year just to pick up two fucking delegates in a state he lost,” rapid response director Mike Casca complained to Weaver in an internal campaign email obtained by POLITICO.
“Thank you for your views. I’ll relay them to the senator, as he is driving this train,” Weaver wrote back.
From here. On the plus side, at least no-one can argue that Sanders is being controlled by handlers.
How to Be a Guy — MEL Magazine
How to Be a Guy — MEL Magazine
I’m writing a new, monthly column for MEL Magazine! It’s somewhere between social deconstruction and personal cartography: interacting with manhood, masculinity, and gendered spaces through a trans lens.
This is a weird one for me. On one hand: I’m really excited about this column. I’ve been wanting to write this column for a long time now. My editor is amazing and tremendously supportive; and MEL is a publication I’m really excited to be part of.
On the other hand: Over the last few years I’ve built up a lot of weird and obsessive rules about what I write about and, more, how visible I’m allowed to be in my own work. They’re not rational rules, but they’ve very much become a security blanket I cling to in the uncomfortable process of navigating public visibility as a private person.
“How to Be a Guy” breaks pretty much all of those rules.
And while I know those rules weren’t healthy, and that moving away from them is good for me as both a writer and a human, it is goddamn free-fall terrifying.
Very excited to read all future installments of this column, and not just because Jay’s one hell of a writer (which, y’know, is true). This is the crossover of a bunch of fascinating topics – masculinity, personal identity, gender as a whole – handled by one of the smartest folk I know who navigates these waters on a regular basis. In the unlikely chance that you’ve not already checked this out, you should.
A rule of thumb: when there’s an article that gets angry about a lot of
different things, look for the one that seems weirdest and pettiest.
That is probably the thing that’s really got under the writer’s skin,
the tail which might be wagging the dog of the entire piece.