#40 years retrospective

[fashionbooksmilano]

Albert Watson UFO

Introduction by Gail Buckland

Hardie Grant, Melbourne Lindon 2010,408 pages, ISBN 9781740669603

euro 98,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

One of the world’s most successful photographers, Albert Watson is known for graphic, sculptural images that capture the essence of people, places, and things. His has been a career of unparallelled productivity, ranging from fashion to iconic portraits to reportage. His first book, Cyclops, published in 1994, established him as a leading photographic talent who combined a brilliant vision with extreme technical excellence.

UFO—which stands for Unified Fashion Objectives—presents a 40-year retrospective of Watson’s best work, pulled from his vast archive. In its pages, a memorable era of style, beauty, fashion, personality, and power is captured for posterity. UFO is a landmark publishing event from one of the world’s greatest photographers.

This retrospective of Albert Watson's (*1942) best photos from the past four decades reflects a history of an era, capturing cultural aspects such as design, fashion and beauty as well as their protagonists.

Through his carreer that has lastet more than 40 years, the scottish photographer portrayed various moviestars, musicians or politicians for magazines and made more than 250 covers for Vogue magazine.

Although graphically constructed, his pictures still reveal the soul of the person or object portrayed, while seeming like sculptures at the same time. One of his special abilities is to find the defining difference in his motives. For the catalogue "UFO - Unified Fashion Objectives", a special selection was compiled to present Watson's special abilities as a photographer, chosen from a huge archive.

"The photographs by Albert Watson show harmony and empathy. They are inspired by art itself, by landscaped, books, architecture and natural artefacts. Watson always builds new connections that build on his own experiences and observations." (G. Buckland)

21/05/24

[random2908]

Frustrating when a VC-funded company gets credit for being the "first" and the "leader," when they had a sub-component demo the same week we had a full-system demo. Like, we are easily 5-10 years ahead of them, it's ridiculous; their approach isn't even yet proven to work. But they get science youtubers talking about them.

Because they're VC-funded, they have a marketing/press department.

And because we're an employee-owned company working off of government contracts, well, most government contracts get slapped with an ITAR label (an old Cold-War-era law saying basically sharing scientific information counts as illegally selling arms/munitions). So if you want to publicize your work, including your company's products, you have to appeal that label. (Universities have specifically negotiated a blanket exemption, so if you spend your whole life in academic science you might never even know about this.)

(My previous employer filed those appeals several times a year in order to do press releases and publish journal articles and apply for patents. I think every single information-release appeal they filed went through, because there's no reason any of this stuff should be labeled as arms--it's literally the same stuff universities are doing. My current employer is afraid to, which I think is wrong-headed; at worst they'll just say no, and anyway, our non-restricted competitors are giving fucking lab tours to youtubers.)

[headless-horsepossum]

one time in third year when i was 14 and living in scotland a popular girl asked if she could copy my homework and i looked at her with 100% sincere surprise and disapproval and said "but then how will you learn the material?" and they still didnt screen me for autism until i was twenty four years old 😑

[iscariotapologist]

just read all of my little poem journals from lent last year . good lord

[batmandarkknightuniverse]

Superman III(1983)Andres Pop Culture Guy Retrospective/Reviews

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Beastie Boys - Intergalactic 1998

Hello Nasty is the fifth studio album by American hip hop group Beastie Boys, released on July 14, 1998. It sold 681,000 copies in its first week, debuting at number 1 on the Billboard 200 album sales chart, and won Best Alternative Music Album at the 41st Annual Grammy Awards in 1999.

"Intergalactic" was released as the first single, on June 2, 1998. The single reached number 28 on the US Billboard Hot 100, making it the band's third top-40 single, and reached number five on the UK Singles Chart, where it remains the band's biggest hit. It received a Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group in 1999.

The wonderful "Intergalactic" video was directed by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch under the pseudonym Nathanial Hörnblowér. The storyline revolves around a giant robot causing destruction by fighting a giant octopus-headed creature in a city. Various scenes are filmed in the Shibuya and Shinjuku train stations in Tokyo, Japan. Throughout the video, the band wear bright uniforms of Japanese street construction workers. The music video won the award for Best Hip-Hop Video at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards.

Beastie Boys have sold 20 million records in the US and had seven platinum-selling albums from 1986 to 2004. They are the biggest-selling rap group since Billboard began recording sales in 1991. In 2012, they became the third rap group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the same year, Adam Yauch died of cancer and Beastie Boys disbanded. The remaining members have released several retrospective works, including a book, a documentary, and a career-spanning compilation album.

"Intergalactic" received a total of 62,4% yes votes!

[henrykathman]

The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion

From the same artform that brought you Coraline and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, comes three stories that evoke the existential fear of art.

Original Music by Molly Noise

Bibliography below

Atrocity Guide. “The Animators Who’ve Spent 40 Years on a Single Film.” YouTube, 9 Oct. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hip3pz0Xs&pp=ygUMdGhlIG92ZXJjb2F0. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Brubaker, Charles. “The Japanese Studios of Rankin/Bass.” Cartoon Research, Jerry Beck, 14 Apr. 2014, cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-japanese-studios-of-rankinbass/.

Bute, Paris. “Introduction to “a Rankin/Bass Retrospective from a New Perspective.”” Citizen Jane, Stephens College, 19 Nov. 2021, www.citizenjane.org/home/cwwicd2ucb2fvs64kgfaocfykjhaum. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Crome, Althea. “Coraline.” Althea Crome | Micro Knitter, 2012, www.altheacrome.com/coraline. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Harold Halibut. Directed by Onat Hekimoğlu, Slow Bros., 16 Apr. 2024.

Hekimoglu, Onat, and Gabriel Schmitz. “Unite Berlin 2018 - Harold Halibut and Making a Stop Motion Game.” Unity, YouTube, 6 Aug. 2018, youtu.be/9usssSQc0wQ. Accessed 6 May 2023.

Jon "Sikamikanico" Clarke. “The Making of Harold Halibut.” XboxEra, YouTube, 21 Mar. 2024, youtu.be/WMyxM9t3o7A. Accessed 19 June 2024.

LAIKA Studios. “Sweater and Gloves: Knitting Coraline by Hand.” YouTube, 11 July 2017, youtu.be/zUvkfcGR-7U. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Mad God Productions. “Phil Tippett’s “Mad God.”” Kickstarter, 17 May 2012, www.kickstarter.com/projects/madgod/phil-tippetts-mad-god/posts.

Olson, Mathew. “Report: Michel Ancel Accused of Abusive, Disruptive Practices on beyond Good & Evil 2.” VG247, 25 Sept. 2020, www.vg247.com/report-michel-ancel-accused-of-abusive-disruptive-practices-on-beyond-good-evil-2. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Ono, Kosei. “Tadahito Mochinaga: The Japanese Animator Who Lived in Two Worlds.” Animation World Network, AWN, Inc, 1 Dec. 1999, www.awn.com/animationworld/tadahito-mochinaga-japanese-animator-who-lived-two-worlds.

Orland, Kyle. “Claptrap Voice Actor Accuses Gearbox CEO of Assault, Underpayment.” Ars Technica, 7 May 2019, arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/claptrap-voice-actor-accuses-gearbox-ceo-of-assault-underpayment/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Pilling, Jayne. A Reader In Animation Studies. Indiana University Press, 1998. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/40033.

Prehistoric Beast. Directed by Phil Tippett, Tippett Studios, 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlaXIRTjNfo

Randles, Jonathan. “VFX Studio with Star Wars, Jurassic Park Credits Goes Bankrupt.” Bloomberg Law, 1 May 2024, news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/vfx-studio-with-star-wars-jurassic-park-credits-goes-bankrupt. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Shanley, Patrick. “Gearbox Software CEO Accused of Contempt in Latest Filing.” The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Aug. 2019, www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/gearbox-software-ceo-accused-contempt-latest-filing-1235064/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

The Making of “Jurassic Park.” Directed by John Schultz, Amblin Entertainment, 1995. https://youtu.be/8r01mk6F_Pk

The Making of Mad God. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2021. https://youtu.be/sfUOHh0xmwc

The Tale of the Fox. Directed by Irene Starewicz and Ladislas Starevich, UFA GmbH, 10 Apr. 1941. https://youtu.be/Us_Pn6Q1dBQ

Wikipedia contributors. "List of films with longest production time." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of media notable for being in development hell." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of Rankin/Bass Productions films." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 9 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "Tadahito Mochinaga." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Nov. 2023. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wilson, Josh. “Phil Tippett: 24 Frames per Second < the Fabulist Words & Art.” The Fabulist Words & Art, 5 Nov. 2021, fabulistmagazine.com/24-frames-per-second-the-phil-tippett-interview/.

Worse than the Demon. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2013. https://youtu.be/ghKqvDNRe4c

[andmaybegayer]

Wait what are the hilarious reasons you're bad at chess

The hilarious reason I'm bad at chess is that the chess club at my primary school was populated almost entirely by clowns who were so comically bad at chess that I played them for years without learning a single iota of strategy.

These kids. Man. They would blindly mirror my opening and then let me put them in a bishop pin and then distract their knight and take a queen in under ten moves multiple games *in a row*. Truly astonishing in retrospect. You could just clean them out and take every piece and perform some rudimentary checkmate without thinking at all.

There was one other guy who knew anything about chess, who was actually good at chess in the conventional way, and I could occasionally beat him and so I was like yeah I'm second best at chess of these 40 kids that's pretty good right? I had no idea that I had been checkmates georgd.

I didn't really play much chess after I left that school and when I finally picked it up again my opponents were like. Do you know how to play chess? You know the rules and the notation and even some relatively niche terminology but you play like shit. And eventually I figured out that I had gone through some kind of horrible fucked up reverse-gauntlet that allowed me to play hundreds of games and learn nothing.

[fashionbooksmilano]

Albert Watson UFO

Unified Fashion Objectives

PQ Blackwell Ltd, Auckland NZ 2010, 408 pages, 28,7x36cm, ISBN 978-3-941 459-14-4

euro 85,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

One of the world's most successful photographers, Albert Watson is known for graphic, sculptural images that capture the essence of people, places, and things. His has been a career of unparallelled productivity, ranging from fashion to iconic portraits to reportage. His first book, Cyclops, published in 1994, established him as a leading photographic talent who combined a brilliant vision with extreme technical excellence. UFO which stands for Unified Fashion Objectives presents a 40-year retrospective of Watson's best work, pulled from his vast archive. In its pages, a memorable era of style, beauty, fashion, personality, and power is captured for posterity. UFO is a landmark publishing event from one of the world's greatest photographers.

11/02/24

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Greta Garbo (Camille, Anna Karenina, Queen Christina)—Enigmatic and alluring and made me bisexual. The perfect example of the eroticism in silent films that literally transcends text. Could literally not change anything about her expression but you knew by looking at her eyes what she was thinking. She’s so gorgeous.

Kay Francis (Jewel Robbery, I Loved A Woman, British Agent)— kay francis was an icon of glamor in her time and a top star of the 30s - she was the highest-paid actress at warner bros from 1930 to 1936. she tended to play characters who were charming, sophisticated, and elegantly dressed, and starred in at least one legitimate masterpiece, the sublime 1932 comedy trouble in paradise. her first big role was in the marx brothers movie the cocoanuts in 1929, and she and william powell made seven movies together between 1930 and 1932. even in her sillier movies she always elevates the material with her charm and presence - she never phones it in and there’s a sort of warm, knowing wittiness about her. a really good short promo from a retrospective of her movies that i think really gets her Vibe across

This is round 3 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Kay Francis:

Jewel Robbery clip

"From 1932 through 1936, Francis was the queen of the Warner Bros. lot, and, increasingly, her films were developed as star vehicles. By 1935, Francis was one of the highest-paid actors, earning a yearly salary of $115,000, dwarfing the $18,000 Bette Davis – who would one day occupy Francis's dressing room – made. From 1930 to 1937, Francis appeared on the covers of 38 film magazines, second only to child sensation Shirley Temple's 138." Source: Wikipedia. Kay Francis is like the MOST FAMOUS Actress from the 1930s you've never heard of--and it was her and Norma Shearer who wore and made classic the 1930s tall, slim, bias cut silhouette. She ALSO has a WHOLE PODCAST episode devoted to her life and career in Hollywood--it's fascinating! She is both tough and a total wet cat.

One of the TALLEST Warner Brother stars at 5’9” and known as a “clothes horse” for her glamorous roles wearing the height of 1930s fashion. She fell out of popularity in the 40s, but her 30s work sizzles. The scene with her and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise where she says she doesn’t care about his reputation (because she’d rather sleep with him?) HAWOOGA

melted my gay heart with her butch look in stolen holiday

"My life? Well, I get up at a quarter to six in the morning if I'm going to wear an evening dress on camera. That sentence sounds a little ga-ga, doesn't it? But never mind, that's my life ... As long as they pay me my salary, they can give me a broom and I'll sweep the stage. I don't give a damn. I want the money ... When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can't wait to be forgotten." —From Kay Francis's private diaries, c. 1938

Garbo:

A cold-ass Swedish WLW Sphinx. Had plans to murder Hitler that she never got around to. "She will remain always a child of vikings, moved about by a snowy dream."

First of all, she's on the money; that's how much of a treasure she is. She's beautiful in such a distinct way you need very few lines to draw her. (Drawing by Einar Nerman) She managed to be mesmerizing in both silent and sound films. She kissed a woman in Queen Christina (and probably several more in real life). She was super dry and really funny in Ninotchka. She got the hell out of Hollywood and stayed out, living for almost 50 years after her retirement.

Garbo is one of the many reasons why I'm gay. If you haven't seen Queen Christina please do, She is so gender in that film. Also her accent makes it sound like she's always talking in cursive and it's so hypnotic (or at least I think so).

She's a gay introvert, like all of us here on Tumblr.

Mysterious and aloof, charismatic and enigmatic, with beautiful androgynous characteristics, Garbo is undoubtedly the most eccentric and unique Hollywood vintage star. Her aversion to fame and stardom makes her even more desirable to the audience, and her insane chemistry with the camera, an actress one of a kind! Her particularity and her oddity is what discerns her strongly from her hollywood co workers at the time, noone was like her and would never be like her. I think, to the utmost extent, that she deserves the title of the hottest vintage star, even though that would be an understatement of what she is!

SO gorgeous, her thick Swedish accent makes will turn your brain into pudding

Probabaly a lesbian, absolutely a mood when she retired

[motheatenscarf]

Amidst all the James Somerton fallout, I think it's important to remember not to moralize whether or not you or others fell for his grift.

Obviously, if you were rallied into being one of his attack dogs on social media when he put some pretty heinous hits out on people, uh. You might have other problems and should probably evaluate how you spend your time online and how you treat other people before you start caring about the rest of the points I'm about to make. Priorities, etc.

But for the rest of us, it's surprisingly easy to miss just how awful a creator can be.

If you only watched his videos that caught your interest, if you don't really follow creators on social media, if you skip livestreams because watching Some Guy talk unfiltered into a bad camera angle with shitty lighting for hours on end sounds like a fucking nightmare to you, you're not really gonna catch most of this shit. At least, you're not gonna catch most of it from any perspective but the one he tries to spin.

This is a reminder to be skeptical and to trust your gut and check sources if something sounds wrong, but also. Uh. That's still the creator's responsibility not to plagiarize and to fact check their work. You're not morally obligated to be as thorough in curating your experience as someone who is making sure they take every ethical precaution before absolutely destroying a "creator's" credibility in a video like H-Bomb's or Todd in the Shadows'. You're literally just some guy. Most people, myself included, watch these videos as background noise while doing at minimum one other task, you're not gonna google every damn thing he says, especially not on media analysis, where the POINT is to have one's own opinion. THEY'RE the ones trying to be "influencers," or, laughably, "creators." The standards are on them.

And for the isms, phobias, and misogyny, well. Frankly, for my own perspective, I gaslight myself all the damn time when I see red flags. Good Allyship™ has been telling me for years to ignore my own discomfort when someone criticizes a privileged group, especially one I'm a part of. I'm a cis asexual white-passing and probably neuroatypical woman, I am constantly trying to be aware of my own relative privilege while simultaneously doubting my own reaction to things. Despite this, I'd still liked to think I'm a skeptical person, but nobody's immune to everything. Everybody has weak spots.

If you got duped or fell for James' scam, that sucks. I feel ya. I fell for it too, I've seen probably 40% of his catalog over the last couple years and really liked what I'd seen. I recommended his channel and videos to people even if I didn't always agree with every point he made, but it felt important to at least consider what to me seemed like a unique perspective that had value or added to a conversation. There are red flags within his content, his analysis, his rate of publishing, his weird diatribes, that in retrospect, really all added up into things I should have known better than to ignore. But, for reasons I'm interrogating and am adding to my list of things to be aware of about myself, I didn't ignore them, and got grifted. I donated to his patreon a few times, probably gave him like $20 grand total over the years, about as much as I've given H Bomb. The important take away here isn't to be ashamed of the fact that you were fooled, it's to remember that you're fallible.

And it's good to recognize that about yourself. Everyone is, and the ones who say they aren't are lying. They're either gonna be the next person to feel really stupid and foolish when they fall for a scam, or are themselves the grifter.

No one is immune.

[seat-safety-switch]

For a couple years, I worked in a video store in a small town. In many ways, this was the culmination of a childhood dream: routine, unchallenging labour. If you were a particularly annoying labour analyst, all I actually ever “did” was ring up rentals, restock returns in the morning, and clean the windows. Customer service has its own way of filling the space left by the actual work, though.

People who have worked retail are a sort of elite corps. For one thing, you’re never rude to another retail employee for the entire rest of your life. You’ve been in the trenches, too, and even if you somehow managed to escape, you’d still have had that shared trauma to know how bad that shift could get for that shelf-stocker at Maybe’s Drugs off I-40.

I have all the usual complaints, but there’s something else, too. My unique problem is this: I had this one customer who came in every Monday morning, asking for the same movie. We never had that movie, which is the crux of our conflict. He – and I can’t remember his name anymore, even if the electroshock therapy had been effective – never took “no” for an answer, and would come back the next week. He’d ask for the same thing, by title. No other details: no barcode, no publisher, no actors. Not even a description of the plot (he hadn’t seen it yet, obviously.) Now, this was before broadband internet was widely available, so I’d have to dial up after hours to America Online, and see if the movie had been added to their database. It never did, except one night I saw some folks talking about it in a video store chat room.

Their customers, too, were asking for this film. Insistently. After talking about it that night, we decided that we would form a bit of a trade union group. If any of us heard anything on this mysterious VHS, we would share the knowledge with the rest of the group. That retail-worker camaraderie at work again, you see. Nothing ever came of it, but I did end up becoming good friends with a manager at a Hobart’s Movies in Ames, Iowa, and we were even roommates for awhile before he got a new job at Seaworld. I moved on, too, making my slow, but inevitably in retrospect, drift towards the coast. Still, the whole thing bothered me. For years afterward, I would turn on my computer every Monday night, long after I had left the job, and search for any clue as to the existence of this film.

Once, on a day off, I called a librarian, who got pissy at me for even asking about it, and demanded to know who had put me up to calling her as a prank. I hung up in a panic, but she called back for hours. Obviously, she was also undergoing the same situation, and I felt shame at having brought a momentary pain to another proud Retail-American.

Now, video rental stores are a thing of the past. Even in small towns, they have been reduced to just a fond memory and an abandoned corner of a strip mall. Maybe my customer’s quest doesn’t matter anymore. The aggregation of the world’s knowledge into one hissing, unseen beast at the centre of our collective technological hallucination is complete. If they don’t have it, pick a different one. All I know is that, one day, someone will find a copy of this movie, and I’ll be able to go back to that town and shove it in the ground where the video store once stood. On that day, I can finally rest, freed from the slavedriver that is Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.

[batmandarkknightuniverse]

The Dead Zone(1983)Andres Pop Culture Guy Retrospective/Reviews

[tigerwolfdemon21]

Korra(chilling in the spirit world): wtf why are you here?!!

Earth avatar: I'm dead

Korra: You're not even 30 ??! How?

Earth avatar: Oh I was shot.

Korra: but you were discharged from the United Forces?

Earth avatar: Ya know how I did all those talks when I got back about peace and calling for an end to the war and calling out the United Republic for sending forces because one side gave them a better financial advantage?

Korra: yeah?

Earth avatar: yeah they didn't like that very much

Korra: Did you at least defend yourself

Earth avatar: they were like 200 yards away and I didn't see it coming. One minute I was waving at people at the avatar day parade next thing I knew I was in the hospital and well now I'm here.

Korra: shit man. I knew people were always trying to kill the avatar but damn

Earth avatar: I just hope it doesn't set a trend.

Korra: there is no way it works like that

(like 40 years later)

Earth avatar: in retrospect I shouldn't have said anything

Korra: (died in her mid 30s) I also apologize as technically I started this trend.

Fire avatar(died in his mid 20s)

Air avatar(died in her mid teens)

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

by Elana Gotkine

COVID-19 is associated with long-term risk for autoimmune and autoinflammatory connective tissue disorders, according to a study published online Nov. 6 in JAMA Dermatology.

Yeon-Woo Heo, M.D., from the Yonsei University Wonju College of Medicine in South Korea, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study to examine the long-term risk for autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases after COVID-19. The analysis included individuals with confirmed COVID-19 from Oct. 8, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2022 (3,145,388 patients) and controls who participated in the general health examination in 2018 (3,767,039 controls) with an observation period of more than 180 days.

The researchers found that COVID-19 was significantly associated with an increased risk for alopecia areata, alopecia totalis, vitiligo, Behçet disease, Crohn disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren syndrome, ankylosing spondylitis, and bullous pemphigoid (adjusted hazard ratios, 1.11, 1.24, 1.11, 1.45, 1.35, 1.15, 1.09, 1.14, 1.13, 1.11, and 1.62, respectively). Demographic factors, including male and female sex, age younger than 40 years, and age 40 years and older, showed diverse associations with the risk for autoimmune and autoinflammatory outcomes in subgroup analyses. Higher risk was also seen in association with severe COVID-19 infection requiring intensive care unit admission, the delta period, and not being vaccinated.

"Understanding the specific vulnerabilities and disease patterns among different subgroups is crucial for mitigating the long-term impact of the pandemic on global health," the authors write.

More information: Yeon-Woo Heo et al, Long-Term Risk of Autoimmune and Autoinflammatory Connective Tissue Disorders Following COVID-19, JAMA Dermatology (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamadermatol.2024.4233 jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/2825849 (PAYWALLED)

Lisa M. Arkin et al, COVID-19 as a Risk Factor For Autoimmune Skin Disease, JAMA Dermatology (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamadermatol.2024.4222 jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/2825853 (PAYWALLED)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jun 25, 2024

The impact of the riots at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 has often been overblown. Those few summer days when the beleaguered gay community fought back against the police on the streets of New York City are rightly considered a milestone in the struggle for equal rights in the West. But endless arguments about ‘who threw the first brick?’ have obscured the truth that gay equality was achieved by the activists who persisted in the aftermath, harnessing that energy and changing the world forever.

Perhaps a more important milestone was the march organised by a handful of campaigners a year after Stonewall. Craig Rodwell’s idea had been to make this a yearly commemoration that would supersede the ‘Annual Reminder’ picket events that he had been holding every Independence Day in Philadelphia since 1965. It would be known as the ‘Christopher Street Liberation Day’ – later retrospectively rebranded as the first New York ‘Pride’ march – and it was orchestrated chiefly by Rodwell, Fred Sargeant, Linda Rhodes and Ellen Broidy.

The march took place on 28 June 1970, and it was an audacious display. Police hostility to gay people was rife, the local media were overwhelmingly unsympathetic and there were fears of violent repercussions from observers. The day passed off peacefully, perhaps because of a general sense of astonishment that thousands of gay people would assemble so openly. A reporter for the Village Voice wrote that ‘no one could quite believe it, eyes rolled back in heads, Sunday tourists traded incredulous looks, wondrous faces poked out of air-conditioned cars’. At the head of the march, Fred Sargeant carried a bullhorn and called out instructions to the marchers as they made their way from the West Village to Central Park.

Fifty-four years later, and Pride has transformed from an important act of resistance into a month-long orgy of corporatism and virtue-signalling, full of heterosexuals desperate to identify themselves into an oppressed group with the help of trans ideology. ‘Progress Pride’ flags flutter from every high-street store. This relatively new design – a kaleidoscopic eyesore that has replaced the traditional six-stripe Pride flag – is emblazoned on schools, universities, hospitals, civic buildings. In the city of Arlington in Texas, this year’s family friendly Pride event included displays of dildos, half-naked drag queens and human dogs in bondage gear, all co-spon.sored by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest producer of armaments. In London, numerous pedestrian crossings have been repainted with the ‘Progress Pride’ motif. Police horses find walking across the coloured stripes confusing and disturbing, so the animals have undergone special training to overcome their fears. After all, it is essential to address the rampant homophobia within the equine community.

What might the thousands who turned out on that summer day in New York in 1970 make of this distorted version of Pride? Those gay men and lesbians who risked social ostracism and physical violence to gather in public have little in common with this garish and unsettling facsimile. A poll from 2021 determined that almost 40 per cent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 now identify as LGBTQ. Given the vast majority identifying as such do so as ‘trans’, ‘nonbinary’ and ‘queer’, this means it is statistically certain that gay people are now the minority in this coalition. The early pioneers of gay rights didn’t risk so much for their movement to be usurped by fetishistic heterosexuals with a martyr complex.

It would be interesting to see polling data on how many gay people support Pride in its new ‘trans-inclusive’ incarnation. One recent poll on X asked a simple question: ‘Do you want Pride anymore?’ And although 93.5 per cent of respondents replied in the negative, social-media polls are notoriously useless and we would be unwise to draw any conclusions from them. Still, it is surely significant that this poll was reposted by Fred Sargeant, and that his answer was a resounding ‘No’. That the man who led the first Pride march, bullhorn in hand, should now reject the annual event that he co-created because of its embrace of gender ideology is far from trivial. Nor is it trivial that while handing out pamphlets critical of the trans movement at a Pride event in Vermont in 2022, Sargeant was physically attacked by trans activists.

[ A parade through New York City on Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day, 1971. ]

He is not alone. Many gay people have expressed dismay at the metamorphosis of Pride and feel that it no longer represents them. This can be confusing for those who have not been paying attention to its ongoing political evolution, but there is a very good reason why groups of gay men and lesbians are now holding alternative Pride rallies this year. In August 2022, police insisted that lesbians leave a Pride parade because their banners, proclaiming that ‘lesbians don’t like penises’ and ‘trans activism erases lesbians’, were causing consternation. When gay people are being escorted away from Pride marches by the police, we can safely say that the movement has fallen.

Some might argue that the LGBTQIA+ explosion is an example of what happens when liberalism goes unchecked, that it is the natural consequence of an excess of tolerance and the rise of identity politics. Yet while identity politics in its current intersectional form has proven to be deeply illiberal and regressive, there have been sound reasons throughout history for people with shared characteristics to organise and resist. Unlike the various campaigns for imaginary victimhood that dominate today’s ‘social justice’ causes, being openly gay in the 1970s came at a huge cost. At the time of the first Pride parade, every state in the US with the exception of Illinois criminalised gay sex. In services and employment, discrimination against gay people was permitted, and even most progressives assumed that homosexuality was a mental illness. This is a world away from the exaggerated or fabricated grievances of the diversity, equity and inclusion industry today.

Now that gay people have complete equal rights under the law, the protest element of Pride has been appropriated by those with an apparent craving for oppression. Asexual activists, for instance, have taken centre stage at certain Pride events, even though nobody in the history of humankind has ever been burned at the stake for not wanting to have sex. It isn’t the case that those who identify as asexual are facing discrimination; it’s that nobody cares about what they don’t get up to in the bedroom. But of course, for those of a narcissistic temperament, there can be nothing more devastating than being ignored.

[ Furries march on Congress Street during the annual Pride Portland parade, 2017. ]

Many of those who call themselves ‘nonbinary’ are similarly vocal, but there is no serious comparison to be made between the historical persecution of homosexuals and experiencing some pushback when you demand that others refer to you as ‘they’ or ‘them’. Coming out as gay in 1970 increased the risk of being violently assaulted; coming out as ‘nonbinary’ today only increases one’s chances of being employed at the BBC.

Of course, all of this must be symptomatic of the developing cult of victimhood in the Western world. Ironically, there is now power in being the victim. Those who claim to be ‘marginalised’ are able to get people fired, drive them from public life, and harass and bully them in the name of ‘progress’. Who would have thought there was so much clout in being oppressed?

Far from being a collective gesture of unity, Pride is now widely interpreted as a celebration of homophobia. This is because it has become infected with gender ideology, which seeks to eliminate gay people from their own history. Although trans-identified individuals were rarely seen at activist meetings and events in the early decades of the gay movement, revisionists are now insisting that gay people owe their rights to the hard work of trans campaigners. We are told that a black trans woman, Marsha P Johnson, was the key figure at the Stonewall riots. This is wrong on many counts. The riots were overwhelmingly dominated by young gay men. Although Johnson took part in the demonstrations, he wasn’t present when the rioting began. Most significantly, by his own admission, he was a transvestite who didn’t identify as female.

Fred Sargeant has been much vilified for exposing the truth of what took place in these early years of the gay rights’ movement, and he is now a thorn in the side of activists whose worldview depends on a narrative that runs contrary to the truth. Recently he posted a link to the Digital Transgender Archive on the Third International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, which explicitly outlines how gay and trans movements in the 20th century were completely separate. The conflation of the LGB and T is an invention as recent as 2015. As the document explains, while the gay-rights movement in the US began in the 1920s, ‘the existence of a transgendered community that seeks reforms did not come into existence until the 1990s’.

The historical revisionism doesn’t end at Stonewall. Activists have attempted to claim that certain gay historical figures were mistaking their true trans identity for homosexuality. Just as Mormon priests have been known to baptise the dead and thereby convert them unwillingly to their cause, trans activists have been busy harvesting the annals of history for potential recruits. Those falsely claimed as trans include George Eliot, Dr James Barry, Radclyffe Hall and Joan of Arc. People who were gay and gender nonconforming are particularly vulnerable to this kind of retrospective ‘transing’. It’s very convenient for activists that the dead can’t complain.

While many trans campaigners consider themselves supportive of gay rights, overt homophobia is nonetheless often tolerated and encouraged within their circles. There are innumerable examples online of trans activists claiming that homosexuality is a form of transphobia and that only bigots have ‘genital preferences’. ‘If you’re a cis gay man’, writes one, ‘and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave’. A video recently went viral featuring an activist explaining to gay men why they should transition to female and that ‘maybe being gay is an outdated concept’. An online influencer called Davey Wavey uploaded his attempt at gay conversion therapy in a video entitled ‘How To Eat Pussy – For Gay Men’. One can imagine it being shown to young men at an evangelical Christian retreat for those who wish to find a ‘cure’ for their immoral urges.

This isn’t simply a case of a handful of lunatics on the fringe – this idea has also been normalised in mainstream gay culture. Australia’s Human Rights Commission prohibits lesbians from holding female-only events on the grounds that it discriminates against men who identify as female. Sall Grover, the founder of women’s app Giggle, is currently in a legal battle in Australia because she refused to allow a man to join. Stonewall has even redefined ‘homosexuality’ on its website as ‘same-gender attracted’. Its former CEO, Nancy Kelley, once suggested that women who don’t wish to date trans people are ‘sexual racists’. No, Nancy, they’re just gay.

We have seen all this before. In the 1980s, it was a common trope for gay men to be told that they ‘just haven’t found the right girl yet’ and to suggest to lesbians that they ‘just need the right dick’. The rights of homosexuals depend upon a recognition that a minority of people are attracted to their own sex. Once sex is eliminated from the equation, gay rights are no longer tenable.

The most obvious example of how gay rights have been threatened by trans ideology is that young gay people are disproportionately at risk of surgical ‘correction’. Given that between 80 and 90 per cent of adolescents referred to the NHS Tavistock Clinic were orientated towards their own sex, it is clear that in many cases homosexuality was being treated as gender dysphoria. I am usually mistrustful of accusations of various ‘phobias’ which can be used as a rhetorical technique to discourage disagreement. But if medicalising people for being same-sex attracted doesn’t qualify as homophobic, I’m not sure that anything does.

And so Pride and its accoutrements have come to represent an ideology that seeks not only to erase the foundations of gay rights, but also to re-conceptualise same-sex attraction as a condition that requires medical treatment. When police officers decorate their cars with the Pride colours, when NHS workers display the rainbow lanyard, when schools decorate their halls with bunting in solidarity, they are almost certainly doing so with the noble intention of promoting equal rights. But they are inadvertently promoting a movement whose end goal is the eradication of homosexuality.

This is not to deny that the ‘Progress Pride’ flag and all it represents have been embraced by many gay people. It is clearly the case that a majority have not realised the extent to which the flag has been hijacked for a cause that actively works against their interests. The situation has hardly been helped by prominent celebrities, often now referred to as ‘Vichy gays’, who have cheered on this sinister development. Homosexuals are not immune to the condition of useful idiocy.

Given that Pride has become so divisive, and given that so many lesbians, bisexuals and gay men now consider it to be an essentially hostile enterprise, it would be prudent for corporations and government bodies to stop pretending that there is a consensus on this issue. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. By flying the ‘Progress Pride’ flag, they are taking a side in a highly contentious cultural debate, one that alienates as many gay people as it attracts. Those who are serious about gay rights need to distance themselves from Pride once and for all.

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When the demand for 'oppression' outstrips the supply.

Time to resist again.