#And decided to base all your queer politics on that for the next decade

[bisexualseraphim]

I can’t believe this needs explaining but a same-gender relationship by definition cannot be “heteronormative” lmao. The way two WOMEN date or have sex with each other or get married will never be heteronormative because they are not in a heterosexual relationship. And yes, this includes butch/femme relationships.

Like do you really think homophobes are looking at a twink and a bear holding hands and thinking “well the idea of them being inside each other turns my stomach but one is slightly more masculine than the other so I suppose it’s okay. Oh and they’re wearing T-shirts that say ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ which basically means ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ even better.” What world are you living in

[liskantope]

Since the "LGBT+ content in schools" issue keeps coming up, here are some of my thoughts directly on it.

Charitably speaking, I think conservatives are afraid of a particular, narrow, modern, very SJ-ish social agenda and belief system being shoved down their kids' throats. I do have some sympathy with this concern, although I'm not sure the extent to which anything is actually being taught that I as a (more progressive-thinking) parent would object to: I do hear what I would consider disturbing stories but have little way of knowing how embellished and/or unrepresentative they are.

So anyway, a bunch of conservatives have whipped up a moral panic about it and are fighting back with legislating (what are, at least according to some) bans against talking about the existence of gay or trans people at all, or anything about race that might possibly make white kids uncomfortable in any way. Which is absolutely absurd, a "cure" worse than the (possible) disease.

(And disallowing gay/trans/queer teachers from, for instance, disclosing that they have a same-gender partner, even though it's been normalized for decades and is still permissible for a teacher to bring up their opposite-gender partner, is just outright homophobic, period. That shouldn't be too hard to see.)

I've tried reading the legislation (for instance, the so-named-by-opponents "Don't Say Gay" bill), and I'm bewildered as to what it actually adds up to or how it can even function as legislation. What a lot of it says amounts to moderate, common-sense-sounding guidelines that don't actually appear to demand that "gay" not be mentioned in any way, but it relies on phrases like "appropriate for their age group". Well, who gets to decide that? How is this legislation ever enforced or teaching ever policed based on it?

My only guesses as to what conservatives think they're doing is that (1) the laws are almost meaningless but serve as a grandstanding move meant to signal "Hey look, we're on the right side, we're doing something about it!"; and (2) since the wording of the law requires a ton of individual judgment and interpretation, perhaps in the most conservative school zones where all the people in power are sufficiently conservative it really could be used as a sledgehammer to ban ANY mention of anything they don't like.

Meanwhile, I think there could be some common-sense guidelines that allow teachers to bring up the existence of gay and trans people and allude to the issues and even (to kids above a certain age) discuss some of the civil rights battles surrounding them, without shoving any particular highly controversial political ideology down their throats. The idea is to stick with basic facts about social reality. Gay and bi people exist (at the very least, in the sense of people who choose to pursue same-sex relationships). Trans people exist (at the very least, in the sense of people who identify as a different gender than indicated by their sex at birth), and some of them choose to go on hormones or get sex reassignment surgery. Gay and trans people are people too. There has been and still is a lot of stigma against them, and there have been struggles to secure them rights for certain things -- for instance, same-sex couples couldn't get married in most places until last decade! By the way, kids, I prefer they/them pronouns. You're encouraged to think for yourselves about what that might mean and how to feel about it, but it's a preference I'm asking you to respect and you should respect such preferences among your classmates. Mr. So-and-so who teaches in the next classroom has a husband. You probably know several other gay and bi people, and they're people too. Some of you may come to identify or already identify as not straight or not cis.

Of course that won't satisfy everyone, and it can't be done in an entirely non- politically biased way, and conservatives may see plenty of reason to complain that these things are even being mentioned or that the teacher has gone as far as normalizing people who fall under the queer umbrella as human beings without at least criticizing them as having lost their way.

But it's, to my view, subtly but significantly different from very positive actions that go beyond neutrally describing reality with an underlying default of respecting others. That would include enthusiastically pushing kids to analyze their genders and sexualities all the time, telling them "You can be whatever gender you want; what gender would you like to be now?", teaching highly politicized lessons on social justice which involves students rating their degrees of marginalization and separating the room into "oppressors" and "oppressees", constantly centering everything around a scrupulosity-triggering activist mindset, and many more things.

[vergess]

Copying this to my main for the sake of my organization.

TLDR: some self-aggrandizing asshole decided to vomit some egregious levels of ignorance while pretending to be an authority on the sociology of fandom.

Anyway, to save us all some trouble, the point by point is going under a cut.

Not only because of pervasive issues of (especially anti-Black) racism, misogyny, transphobia/homophobia, and the like, but the particular way those things take shape within fandom.

There is no "particular way" racism "takes shape" in fandom. You're thinking of GENERAL SOCIETY, the supergroup that includes fandom.

Your ignorance of fandom specific and society-wide sociological information is already a screeching red flag, btw. This is why so many "intellectually incurious" people stopped listening at word one. People have been saying that the vulgar masses need to have our culture and art shaped by academic, political, or religious "trained thinkers" since the dawn of civilization. You're literally bringing up an argument OLDER THAN LITERATURE ITSELF and pretending that you have new insights. No wonder people fucking ollied out.

What I mean is that people almost invariably approach fandom at the level of character, often at the level of ship - your primary way of viewing a text is filtered through favourite characters and favourite relationships, as opposed to, say, favourite scenes, favourite themes, favourite conflicts.

Yes. You're literally providing a textbook definition of transformative fandom here. But you're presenting it disingenuously as fuck, by acting like that's the ONLY type of fandom that exists. Again, your ignorance is on display, and it's going to get bigger quick!

Because in the very next pgaragraph we find:

This is reinforced through the architecture of dominant platforms that host fan content, particularly AO3

And here we go. Because if you thnk AO3 is the major platform for fandom, you're WILLFULLY IGNORANT.

Youtube is the major platform for fandom. Next up is tiktok. After that comes other socials, like Reddit, FB, twitter and tumblr.

AO3 is AFTER all of that. It's a small, indie platform. Even in the scope of fanfic, FFN and Wattpad both are larger.

You picked a small site MADE SPECIFICALLY FOR HOSTING QUEER SHIPS FOUND UNACCEPTABLE TO HOMOPHOBES, and then looked around asking yourself, "wow, why are the people on the gay sex website so obsessed with gay sex."

I would like to believe you are simply ignorant, and inadvertantly malicious. But I do not think that is the case, as I will detail later.

Dead Dove: Do Not Eat,” which doesn’t indicate perspective or theme but rather that there is, broadly, some kind of “problematic content” contained therein - often of a sexual nature, frequently as a warning about “bad” ships.

You literally just made this up based on rumours you heard from antishippers. This has ZERO relation to reality.

Dead Dove contains everything from graphic violence to body horror to rape to surrealist meditations on the way the human mind cannot cope with the scale of the universe.

But you wouldn't know, because you're cheerfully ensconcing yourself in an enclave of people telling you what you want to hear, and pretending that's "decades of study and experience." You haven't been 'engaging for decades' you've been swimming in a tiny corner of a tiny pond and claiming the ocean doesn't exist.

Now this is not an inherent problem, as in, it is not inherently incorrect to approach a text and primarily derive pleasure from it by focusing on a given character or relationship,

The sheer HYPOCRISY on display. "Oh it's fine to do this, but don't do it on the websites you MADE SPECIFICALLY FOR DOING THIS ON, because I personally would like to see you do other things. What? Those things are available on dozens of much larger and more active platforms? No, no, I want to see YOU obey MY demands specifically."

It's "not incorrect" to do, it's just that the people doing it are incorrect, for magical mystery reasons that you'll never actually specify, because you can't. You cannot actually give a reason why any of the things you dislike are bad because they aren't. There is no harm being done. Your disliking something does not mean is is harmful to you.

If someone were FORCING you to engage with this disliked stuff, sure, thats actually horrific! Fucking beat the shit out of them!!

But as far as "I opened this fic and I didn't like it" goes, that's not harm, that's someone making a thing you didn't like. Just close the goddamned tab.

And I think a lot of mainstream media encourages (even requires) audiences to engage with their stories at these character- and ship-levels. […;] If you do not care about the familial drama […] because you think the institution of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is stupid and violent and heternormative, then you will have a difficult time engaging with the show in general.

Okay, I'm going to give you the benefit of my doubt here. Either this is you saying fandom self selects for people who enjoy garbage, a shocking condescending and fundamentally untrue but at least plausible statement.

Or you're saying fandom is responsible for the actions of major media producers, violating basic concepts like linear time. Which would be absurd, but not wildly out of keeping with the rest of this essay.

Let's assume the former.

That's not just a thing we've studied to death and found to be untrue after decades of sociological research.

It's also just demonstrably, on the face of it, nonsensical.

Transformative fandom appeals to people who wanted MORE from a piece of media, not people who hated it enough to walk away. It's specifically about making an experience greater than it was when you first encountered it, by engaging with it communally. By ripping at the facade heteronormative white supremacy creates in art, and forcing diversity, sexuality, and liveliness into an otherwise sterile space.

Which you would know if you had engaged with or studied transformative fandom in any meaningful capacity whatsoever.

A standout example I recently encountered was browsing the fandom tags on tumblr for the movie Prey. […] It is a movie that makes the argument that, despite this alien monster running around killing people, the villains of the franchise are these occupying soldiers and settlers, an alien force who themselves have just as little regard for (indigenous) human life. And when browsing the tags on tumblr, what I found was dozens upon dozens of horny posts about how hot the predator monster was

And here's the crux of the issue revealed. You want other fans to enjoy art in a way YOU approve of specifically. Not any actual concern with addressing systemic issues of racial, sexual, etc violence. Just a desire for more of the fan content YOU like, and less of the hornyposting you dislike.

But you went on tumblr, the famously sexual mosterfucker website, and were confused to find a bunch of people want to fuck the monster!

Meanwhile, on youtube, the LARGEST FANDOM PLATFORM IN THE WORLD, searching "prey 2022 racism meta" provides dozens of hours of essays on that very subject.

And if this is your takeaway from an extremely straightforward film with a very clear message, this is not merely a failure to comprehend the content of a text, this is something beyond it

Oh the sheer vanity on display. The assumption that people cannot be hornyposting AND still have complex feelings about a racism narrative?

Man, the book about holocaust survivors who fantasize about fucking nazis is almost a century old. You're operating under DECADES AND DECADES of misinformation, and you're wallowing in it so gleefully. To the point that you act like anyone trying to provide you with even a single piece of legitimate information are worthy of mockery and derision for not Speaking High Academia Goodly Enough All The Time Forever.

I don't know how to explain this to you, but someone can find the monster sexually appealing in spite of, and indeed even because of, the colonial implications of its narrative. AND people can still be critical of colonial racism while being horny for a FICTIONAL MONSTER THAT I NEED TO EMPHASIZE IS NOT REAL AND IS NOT ACTUALLY KILLING OR COLONIZING ANYONE BECAUSE IT DOES NOT EXIST.

People can enjoy fiction without that meaning they want to fuck racists IRL. I'm sorry that you somehow believed that sexual interest in a fictional character makes you TOO STUPID TO EXIST, but fortunately, you're wrong.

a phenomenon wherein fans will move from one fandom to the next in search of two (usually white, usually skinny) guys to draw and write porn of, uncaring of any of the surrounding context of the stories they are embedded in, and consequently dominating a large sector of fandom discussion.

Again, the gays are not "dominating" fandom. The gays are dominating fandom websites made or popularized for being accessible and welcoming to gay sexuality.

Do you also go into the sexual studies aisle at the library to complain that THOSE are too sexually focused, while ignoring the whole rest of the library, too?

The actual dominant voices in fandom are Straight White Men Ages 18-40. Do you really think Star Wars was made with a bunch of teen and middle aged trans people in mind? Do you REALLY?

Because you keep SAYING that the dominant force in fandom is presumed young, presumed white, presumed female, presumed straight fans. But it isn't. It never has been.

Only in the rare enclaves of transformative fandom spaces made by and for people marginalized for their sex or gender is this "obsession" with sex and gender apparent.

Because we MADE SPACES for those subjects to be engaged with.

And now you march into these spaces, made for engaging with these subjects, and demand that instead we do things your way.

You are so ignorant you've looped back around to accusing transformative fandom of being a nasty gay hypersex conspiracy, literally no different from the latest Fox News "special guest scientist" who uses academic language incorrectly to create an illusion of authority, such that hopefully the audience will obey.

Your stance on engagement with fandom itself historically was (and still is) always first filtered through one of these two labels

YOU JUST! MADE THAT UP!!! AND PRETENDED LIKE NO ONE ELSE WOULD KNOW???? Do you think everyone else on this website was born after 2014, the year antishipping started?

Antishipping, proshipping, and even shipping itself have NEVER been the primary, central function EVEN of TRANSFORMATIVE fandom.

Let alone the archival and analytical fandoms you're looking for while claiming they TOTALLY don't exist.

But at least now we can say with authority that you're being a misinformational twat on purpose!! Because you want to REDUCE fandom to something you perceive as "drama" so you can shit on it and demand that it obey your whims and desires.

Meanwhile, just for the sake of pointing it out AGAIN: antishippers have literally killed people. Literally, no metaphor, people have been KILLED by antishippers. Dead.

Lives ended.

That's not touching on the constant spread of videos/photos showing real, actual child sexual abuse. Nor the dozens of admitted cases of raping shippers to punish them. Now the hundreds of adittmed carses of adults using the label "antiship" as a way to prey on and sexually abuse children.

No, setting all of that aside, because apparently you're the kind of Both Sides cunt that want to put random authors on the same level as CHILD RAPISTS?

THAT. ENTIRE.PHENMONON. ISN'T EVEN 10 YEARS OLD.

2014 was NOT EVEN A DECADE AGO. "Historically," my ass. NOTHING you just said there is true. Do you really think you can get away with lying that brazenly if you use the formal tone?

Because you cannot. Well informed, well educated fans who LIVED THROUGH AND STUDIED the events you're describing exist, and will continue existing. Or did you forget that many of us are "real" academics too? That this is our HOBBY where we engage with our INTEREST INFORMALLY.

Your claim that anyone who is involved in fandom is too fucking stupid to be ABLE to engage with a text in the way you want is based, wholecloth, on the assumption that there is a hard line between literary academia and fandom. Meanwhile, A LOT OF THE INFLUENTIAL FANS ARE ACADEMICS, AUTHORS, AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS.

But, with classic vanity, you assume that anyone who disagrees is too stupid to listen to, and dig deeper into your cavern of joyous ignorance where something that started 9 years ago and that most people wouldn't even recognize the terminology of has always been a "defining" factor?

No.

That is a lie. Full fucking stop. You are a liar.

Nowhere in this binary is space to describe any other perspective you might take

You're just repeating yourself over and over. "Oh, why do the people on the gay sex website obsess over gay sex." "Oh, why do the people whose hobby is indie romance lit keep talking about indie romance lit on this, the indie romance lit website."

JUST! GO! TO! ANY! OTHER! FANDOM! THEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! STOP DEMANDING THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE GAY FUCKING WEBSITE REPURPOSE IT TO YOUR WHIMS YOU WEIRD PRESUMPTUOUS CUNT!!!!!

It’s not just that the pro/anti divide is juvenile and overly-simplistic

Bold words from the asshole still equating the child-raping death cult to people who read/write for fun, but I mean… we've established that this is a purposefully misleading shitstorm already so.

it is a declaration that all fan conflict must be read through the lens of shipping and shipping only

Do you think that the fandom meltdowns about the removal of Biologically Evil Races from D&D was about shipping????

Do you think that the backlash against the Black storm trooper in star wars was about SHIPPING?

You just throw out anything outside your blinders, huh. You just ignore EVERYTHING ELSE that ever happens, so you can claim it's 'all' about shipping.

My friend, fandom isn't obsessed with shipping, YOU are.

Which, again, I think is a fundamental error of methodology.

Okay, you keep saying "methodology" in a way that makes me think you don't actually know what it means. It's not a special magic term for "critical lens that will make you agree with me."

There isn't even "a" fandom methodology to speak of. Now, at the more precise level of AO3-centered, transformative, romance based fandom SPECIFICALLY, there are some methodoloGIES (PLURAL) that occur fairly frequently. And THOSE are, I assume, the things you have an issue with. But since you continue not to define what methodologies you disapprove of, it's meaningless filler word to make yourself sound smart.

And don't point to your paragraph about capitalism heteronormativity; that's not a fandom methodology and it's not even discussing a method at all, just contextualizing how a method might arise without actually specifying what the method is.

Don't point to your paragraph about Prey, either. You still didn't actually specify any methods, let alone full methodologies. You simply said, repeatedly, that you personally feel like people were missing the point. Nothing about how many times they read the original text; nothing about note taking; nothing about citation; nothing about research; nothing, nothing, notheng methodological whatsoever. Just your personal disgust that people might be horny in a way you think is "too white."

the thorny issues of representation not just as expressed through individual characters but entire worlds, narratives, settings, and themes

So you've just not been tracking the meltdown of the Harry Potter fandom over the last 5 years, either, yeah?

Because these days, that fandom is LOADED with people explaining in exquisite detail all the ways the world building is, itself, deeply racially, sexually flawed.

Or is that too cringe for you to talk about?

Because the Lord of The Rings fandom is also known for this trend. Star Wars too.

There's shitloads of this stuff out there, you simply refuse to leave the Gay Sex For Monster Fuckers website to find it. Instead, you lounge around here complaining about how the monsters are too fuckable and the gays too sexual.

You keep harping on about how this is a western individualism problem, but you're literally just refusing to acknowledge that other things exist. Do you think there are no shippers in Vietnam? Because buddy, there for sure are. I'm friends with some.

And this issue is best perhaps epitomised by reader insert fanfiction, circumventing any need for you to project onto a character by literally inserting yourself into fiction, primarily in order to write/read about a character you want to fuck

Ah, you see? You think the gay sex website has too much gay sex on it.

This then intersects in particularly disgusting ways with real world politics, such as reader insert fics about Pedro Pascal going with you to BLM protests.

Wow, you just really uniquely hate shippers, huh. You really went all in on the "people writing fanfiction are sex criminals" thing instead of "people forcing Mr Pascal to read porn on camera are sex criminals."

Do you also think that the guy who made the camera my rapist filmed me with as a child is the real sex criminal, not the rapist holding said camera?

Even if this is (incredibly over-generously) interpreted as a very poor attempt at being “progressive,” it still demonstrates that many (white) fans are often incapable of thinking about anything outside of a character-centric perspective, quite literally centring themselves in the process, and consequently they think it’s totally appropriate to do things like that

Again the assumption that any fan you dislike is white. No wonder you've convinced yourself no other POC are left to speak up: you call us white when we disagree.

The fact that this is also frequently a racist lens is not coincidental, because again, a chronic focus on (fictional) individuality prohibits any structural perspective from entering the discussion

"Why doesn't this character piece focus on systemic issues more!!!!!"

Mate, just go back to reading "real" literature until you've pulled your head out of your ass enough to answer that question.

To say nothing of the bold audacity displayed in the assumption that a character study cannot comment on social issues, because…. because what? Because it's written by a hobbyist? Because it's not in an 150 year old anthology?

Do you also think poetry is incapable of analyzing systemic issues because it has a narrow focus, too?

Your ego, ignorance, and anger have combined to render you absolutely abominable, yet you wonder why people aren't falling over themselves to fulfill your every wish??

Oh it must be because your sycophants are being excluded, not because you've gone off half-cocked and wholly ignorant, making the same stupid, unfounded arguments based on your own assumptions about other people's beliefs, values and actions.

where people come to the conclusion that the topic of police brutality is little more than a fun stage to enact whatever romantic shenanigans you want to get up to with a hot guy.

No, mate, YOU came to that conclusion. That's not "fandom" that's you. You did that. The writer's reasons for producing that fic are unknown to you. You decided all on your own that it was written by a white person for fun, and not by a person of colour who wanted to imagine that someone they idolize would hold similar moral values to them.

You didn't need any straight white fangirls to do it for you. YOU reduced it to sex all on your own.

But I think that this being the dominant mode of engagement

STILL not the dominant mode of fandom. No matter how many times you say that, it's still not true. It remains false and, at this point I feel confident in saying it is a willful lie.

inherently excludes and marginalises all other approaches, and creates a fandom space where the most valuable way to talk about media is to discuss which two characters you most enjoy imagining fucking each other

Finally, and in conclusion, your experiences are not universal. You surrounded yourself with people insisting that This Is The Only Thing Fandom Is, and then you ignore and deride anyone pointing out that you're wrong.

I can, right now, go on my dashboard and ask people to drop me their favourite meta and haedcanons and get dozens or hundreds of replies from people with the most beautifully complex, nuanced grasp of character, setting, causality, and more and be blown away by the connections they make to real world issues.

You, however, it seems can just go on your dashboard and be flooded with things you hate.

But here's the thing: YOU decide who you follow on here. YOU decide which fandom platforms you frequent. YOU, in this one TINY arena, get to have the actual final say.

Use. That. Power. Revel in it. God knows that as QTIPOC we're not given that kind of authority ANYWHERE ELSE in life.

Use it.

Make your fandom space look the way you want it to, instead of making up a bunch of gibberish.

PS: Some (just a small sample) fandoms active on tumblr you definitely forgot when you were pretending you have authoritative knowledge about how all fandom is about The kind Of Sex You Hate and not about engaging with art wholly and joyfully.

Shakespeare.

Dante.

Other renaissance lit, especially italiana.

Queen (band).

Dracula and assorted Victoriana.

Classical Chinese literature.

Classical Greek and Latin literature.

Poetry (western)

Poetry and calligraphy (eastern, incl middle eastern)

Botany (the science) (VERY popular on here)

[yegarts]

“I am YEG Arts” Series: Cindy Baker

Things I’ve Forgotten, performance at Southern Alberta Art Gallery 2018, photo by Jane Edmundson

Cindy Baker: a contemporary artist with an interdisciplinary research-intensive practice, working at the forefront of queer, gender, race, disability, fat and art discourses. From early on as a performance artist with what she describes as a “taboo body,” body politics and fat liberation have been integral to her artistic practice. Cindy’s next project not only pairs exceedingly well with some of her most-oft visited themes, it will also exercise her well-honed research chops. The Edmonton-based artist was recently recommended for the Coronation Recreation Centre public art project. Currently under construction, the Coronation Recreation Centre will serve as a community hub for central-north Edmonton that meets the leisure, health and wellness needs of residents of all ages. For the project, Cindy will create site-specific freestanding sculpture(s) for the facility’s large exterior entrance plaza.

This week for the blog, we talked with artist Cindy Baker about her initial plans for her new public art commission and got the scoop on her solo show currently on at dc3 Arts Projects.

Tell us about yourself and your connection to Edmonton.

I'm a queer, fat, disabled, contemporary, interdisciplinary and performance artist based here in Edmonton. I was born and raised in Leduc, and I moved to Edmonton in the 90s to go to school at the University of Alberta, where I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts. And I worked at the Fine Arts Building Gallery, the Works Art & Design Festival, Latitude 53 Gallery, Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, and Metro Cinema. So, I was deeply involved in the arts community before I decided it was time to move away. I was away for several years but Edmonton's home to my family, my support system, all my networks of people, my communities, and I just couldn't stay away.

States of Resolution, performance at Edmonton private residence 2021, photo by Grace Lee

How did you get your start as an artist? Was it always plan A for you?

My parents were both teachers, so I always thought that I had to grow up to be a teacher too, but I always really wanted to be an artist. My mom's sister was an artist and I just idolized her and everything she did. And I was always drawing, painting, sewing, sculpting, crafting — doing crafts and art of all kinds. I never had a preferred medium, but I was just always making and working with my hands, so I always knew that no matter what I did for a living, I was always going to be an artist. I don't think I ever expected to make a living at art, but there is no way that I wasn't going to make art throughout my life.

Is there a narrative or discourse you find yourself returning to in your work?

I have a few major themes running through my work. To start with, the body, especially fat bodies and othered bodies are a major theme in my work. As a performance artist with a fat body and — what I call a taboo body — I knew it was always going to be read into the content of my work, so very early on in my career I made a point to become involved in body politics and fat liberation, to really inform the work and enrich the content. Productivity is another theme running through my work, questioning and resisting the moral imperatives of body, health and self-care that imply there are good bodies and bad bodies. That to strive towards being a good little productive cog in the wheel is a moral good. Therefore those who can't, or who fail to be this really strident definition of productive from our work lives to how we enact self-care, are inferior humans and less worthy of care or social support. So that's one of the major themes I think that has run through my work in the last decade.

And there are a lot of beds in my art and not on purpose, that's just kind of how it goes, beds and relaxation and toys and leisure activities like hot tubs and tricycles and swimming pools. I just keep coming back to rest and that idea of resisting productivity in the name of privileging and honouring the body's needs and care for one another being just as important as self-care.

Dream Come True, installation at Remai Modern 2020

These are subjects that have become very topical in recent years, have you noticed a difference in the reception to your work?

I think my work used to be a bit ahead of the curve and now I think it's very sort of right in what's being talked about in the world right now, especially to do with self-care and these neoliberal impulses towards productivity. And the world falling apart has us all questioning what we should be doing with our lives and our time. I think, especially since the pandemic started, we've all been rethinking what it is that we want to do with our time and our lives.

Tell us about the Coronation Recreation Centre public art commission that you've recently been awarded. What drew you to the project?

I'm really excited about it. I think the fact that the work will be connected to a leisure centre, which is also paradoxically basically a triathlon training facility, meshes so well with the themes I come back to again and again in my work. There's nothing leisurely about athletic training. It's work, and it should be valued as work, even if it's not the productive kind of capitalist labour that we've been taught to value. And on the flip side, I want to talk about leisure in a way that disconnects it from any need to perform, to perform work especially. I want to honor those who train and who engage in leisure activities as well, and those who can't or don't or won't, for any number of really valid reasons connected to bodies and time and desire and priorities and ability. Whether that's a body ability, financial ability, or what have you.

Is this your first foray into public art? Tell us about how it overlaps or differs from your overall art practice. 

It's not exactly my first foray into public art, considering that my performance practice is often interventive and happens in public spaces, and is meant to be encountered by and engaged with by a general public. But it's definitely my first permanent public sculpture project. I don't consider myself a sculptor in the traditional sense, but I do make a lot of objects. And in my object making practice, no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to stop making big things that really have a presence. So, I do feel like this project is a natural extension of my practice and hopefully a new direction for my practice to grow into.

The Three Graces, performance with Mary-Anne McTrowe and Shanell Papp at MacEwan University 2021

Tell us about your interdisciplinary research-based approach. Will it be an important part of your creative process for this commission?

Yeah, I don't think any other project that I've done has put my research chops to the test as much as this one will. It'll be a really integral part of the creative process for this project. In research-creation practices in general, the research exists as much in the making as in engaging in traditional research methods. Which for me, and for this project specifically, means that all the making I've done in my practice to date exists as a body of research that's led me to this commission and will really inform and shape the work, and then in turn, the making of this work is its own research that will lead me to my next projects; be they new artworks, journal publications, conference presentations or incorporation into my university teachings. They're all one big whole in my work.

As you're working on this commission is it spurring on new ideas or potential new directions that you'll take from here in your practice?

As I develop the ideas for this project, I can see the threads coming out of other work that I've done. I don't think that that's unique, I think most artists have common threads that run through the work. But it's really interesting as I've grown and progressed in my career. It used to be that things felt very individual and from one project to the next, I didn't necessarily see those threads, but now I really see them throughout all the work.

What does community mean to you and where do you find it? What will your community engagement approach be for this public art project? 

Community for me is family, whether that's blood family or chosen family, social networks and support systems. Community is my stomping grounds, workplaces, and favorite haunts. So, I find community where I find my people and that's for me, artists, fat community, queer community, thinkers and lovers of culture. For this project, more than talking to geographic community, I want to consult with people and organizations that are attached to communities that are traditionally underserved by public art projects and by recreation centres too; people with reduced access to financial resources, people who feel disconnected from that kind of facility, queer people and disabled people, people with mental health concerns. All those whose various demographics put them into the categories of those who don't fit those definitions of moral good, as defined by their abilities or their bodies or their productivity.

Tell us about your current solo exhibit at dc3 Art Projects.

The show is called Things I've Forgotten, and it's part of an ongoing work about my dreams. I spent about 10 years collecting a journal of my dreams. I would wake up every morning and write down my dream from the night before, and then never look back on it again. After 10 years I decided to start rereading my dreams and I was fascinated by the fact that they were so old and had long been forgotten because even though I wrote them down, I would forget about them shortly afterwards, like I think most of us do. I would read these dreams and they would be completely new to me and were completely foreign. So, I got to experience them for the first time, but then slowly the memory of the dream came back to me, and I could see all the images vividly and hear the sounds and smell the smells. It was as though the dreams had really happened and I was remembering them as a memory and at the same time I was kind of going through having heard stories about this trauma that happened when I was a kid but not remembering it, and I thought what if by reliving these dreams and pulling them to the surface what if I could bring this trauma to the surface as well? So, it sounds a bit like it was meant to be therapeutic, but I'm an artist and nothing is quite so literal, so I went about this project of working with my dreams to try and change myself as a person and see how I could be affected by this.

One of the works in the show is a collaboration by Scott Smallwood and me — he's a local audio artist — and together we recorded 20 different voice actors reciting my 10-year journal of dreams and created this really beautiful cloud of sound of all these overlapping voices, it's an 8-channel audio installation of all these overlapping voices. It's difficult to pick out any individual dream or any individual voice, but it does create this soundscape when you go in, that adds to the surrealness I think and beauty of it. It's very dreamlike.

What excites you most about the Edmonton arts scene right now?

I think Edmonton is exciting in general. I've only been back in a permanent way for a few years, but I think growth and change is what's most exciting to me. The arts scene here kind of feels like it's breathing and changing and growing and maybe that's exciting to me because I feel like I'm changing and growing too, which is exciting in its own way and makes me feel connected to Edmonton. I have to say that I love Edmonton cinema, theatre, festivals, music and dance, but my heart really belongs to visual and performance art. So, the galleries and the artists and the public art are what really grounds me to this city.

Want more YEG Arts Stories? We’ll be sharing them here and on social media using the hashtag #IamYegArts. Follow along! You can catch Cindy Baker’s exhibition Things I’ve forgotten at dc3 Art Projects. It’s on until May 13, and as part of the exhibit programming, there will be performances on April 27 at 7 pm and a closing reception on May 13 from 6 – 10 pm. Keep up with Cindy on Instagram, Facebook, or visit her website.

About Cindy Baker

Cindy Baker is a contemporary artist based in Western Canada whose work engages with queer, gender, race, disability, fat, and art discourses. Committed to ethical community engagement and critical social enquiry, Baker's interdisciplinary research-based practice draws upon 25 years working, volunteering, and organizing in the communities of which she is part. She moves fluidly between the arts, humanities, and social sciences, emphasizing the theoretical and conceptual over material concerns. Baker holds an MFA from the University of Lethbridge where she received a SSHRC grant for her research in performance in the absence of the artist's body; she has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally. Helping found important community and advocacy organizations over the course of her career, Baker continues to maintain volunteer leadership roles across her communities.

[unrestedjade]

Baseless Ferengi headcanons no one asked for and that get increasingly queer-navel-gazing and self indulgent because the horrible space goblins have consumed my brain:

- Mobile ears, because if hearing is so well developed and important to them they should be able to aim those big stupid radar dishes. Also because then they can emote with them and that's cute. THE AESTHETIC IS PARAMOUNT.

- Since they canonically sharpen their teeth with chew sticks and sharpeners, their teeth must grow continuously. So I submit: subcultures that let certain teeth grow out as a fashion/political statement. Ferengi punks and anarchists with 5" tusks. Ferengi with all their teeth filed flat (mom and dad HATE it).

- Corollary to the above, most of their teeth are crooked. At the least, they don't share our fetish for straight teeth. What if their teeth are deciduous, and there's no point in trying to force them into perfect alignment, since they'll just fall out and get replaced? So like, sharks but their teeth can also grow longer with no limit. WHAT HAST EVOLUTION WROUGHT ON FERENGINAR :V

- Parents nagging their kids to sharpen their teeth "or they'll grow up into your brain and you'll die :)"

- Personal space? Don't know her.

Okay I need a cut because there's too many now. WHOLE SOCIETY OF GAY HOMOPHOBIC UNCLES AND AUNTS GO I HAVE A PROBLEM

- I can't remember who on here put forth the idea of them having retractable claws but Yes. :3

- Pushing back against the worst canon episode a bit but: relative ear size being the only obvious sexually dimorphic trait, and even that having enough of a gray area that the only way to be 100% sure you're talking to a male or female Ferengi is if you do a blood test. Unless they're intersex! *shrug emoji*

- This is why they're so fanatical about gender conformity and their Victorian "separate spheres" attitude to men and women's roles. Capitalist patriarchy is fragile! And as artificial to Ferengi as it ever was to Humans! (self-indulgenceeeee about gender shiiiiit)

- You know how with domesticated rabbits, the rabbit getting groomed and paid attention to is the boss? Yeah. Go ahead and paint your bestie's nails, just don't be surprised if she cops a little bit of an attitude with you from then on.

- Their fight/flight/freeze/fawn instincts skew heavily toward the last three, and what a lot of other species read as annoying sucking up is the Ferengi in question feeling anxious and unsafe. Especially if they don't feel integrated into the group. Even being at the bottom of the pecking order is better than not being in the flock at all.

- If they DO opt for fight, it's ugly and typically their last resort. Bites or scratches will get infected without intervention-- microbes that their immune system can handle could cause big trouble for aliens. You might wanna check for full or partial teeth that break off and get lodged in the wound, too.

- Too many of these are tooth related but I don't care. :B More teeth stuff: you know what else has teeth that grow constantly? Puffer fish. Likewise, Ferengi can chew up mollusk shells as easy as potato chips, and they need the minerals for their teeth. (Imagine grandpa Sisko offering Nog a crayfish for the first time and watching as he just...pops the whole damn thing in his mouth and crunches away...)

- Their staple foods seem to be grubs and other arthropods, high in protein and fat. I've unilaterally decided their cuisine also involves a lot of edible fungi, ferns, plant shoots and seeds. Gotta get those vitamins. Overall flavor profile leaning toward umami, vegetal, and fresh herbs, and pretty mild (or "delicate" if you wanna be snooty about it, which a Ferengi probably would let's be real).

- Not much sugary food. I'm basing this solely on Quark's aversion to root beer as "cloying". Which could definitely just be his personal preference, but most of the people I hear hating on root beer cite the actual sassafras/sarsaparilla flavor (saying it tastes like medicine) not the sweetness. Nog might be the weirdo outlier for being able to enjoy it.

- Their home planet isn't bright and sunny, so their eyes are better at discerning shades of gray in low light conditions, with relatively weak color vision. Which could explain why they dress Like That.

- Conversely, human music has a reputation for stinking on ice because a lot of it is juuuuust lightly dissonant or out of tune because we can't pick up flaws that small. Ferengi can, and it drives them up the *wall*.

- Music? So many different kinds. Traditionally, maybe lots of percussion and winds, and water as a common component of many instruments to alter pitch or tone. Polyphony out the ass. Some of the modern stuff is an impenetrable wall of sound if you're not a species with a lot of brain real estate devoted to processing sounds. Pick out one melody to follow at a time.

- Yes, back to teeth again I'm sorry. It's a sickness. At some point in their history, pre-chewing food was just something you did for your baby or great grandma as a matter of necessity. Possibly your baby gets an important boost to their immune system and gut biome from your spit. At some point takes on a more formal intimacy aspect and gradually drifted from something all adults and older kids do to something only women do. Your husband and older kids have perfectly functional teeth, but you love them, right? =_= (Think old memes about husbands being useless in the kitchen if little wifey isn't there to cook, but even more ridiculous. Ishka was right about everything but especially this. Thank you for making your family chew their own food, Ishka. Not all heroes wear capes. Or anything!)

- How did they get started on the whole men: clothed vs women: unclothed nonsense? My equally stupid idea: men just get cold easier. Those huge ears dissipate a ton of body heat. Cue Ferengi cliches like "jeez, we could be standing on the surface of the sun and my husband would put on another layer." At some point, again, this got codified and pushed to ridiculous extremes in the name of controlling women and keeping everyone in their assigned box, to the point that women just have to shiver if they really are too cold and men have to pass out from heat stroke if the alternative is going shirtless, because That Would Be Inappropriate.

- Marriages default to five years, but they're also the only avenue for women to have their own household or any stability. Plus their religion places no emphasis on purity save for pure adherence to the free market and the RoA. So, curveball to the rest of their patriarchal bullshit: female virginity isn't a concern in the least. Bring it up and they'll rightly side-eye you.

- Family law is absolutely bonkers and lawyers that specialize in it make BANK. I feel like custody would default to the father usually but oh wait, the maternal grandfather has a legal stake in this, too, and your next father-in-law is asking HOW many kids are you dragging into my daughter's house, etc etc. Growing up with a full sibling is way rarer than growing up with half or stepsiblings, since it usually takes both men and women two or three tries to find someone they vibe with. (Not love, unless you're super cringe.)

- A misogynistic society is a homophobic society. Imo those flavors of shittiness just come in pairs. Homosexual behaviors are fine within certain parameters (aka "always have sex with the boss") but not on your own terms. To add spice, bisexuality is their most common mode (because I'm bi and these are my hcs for my fics I'm not writing, so there), but capitalism demands fresh grist for the mill so you better get het-married and pop out some kids you lowly peons. You have a choice so make the proper one. :)

- Corollary to the above, that doesn't keep all kinds of illicit "we're just friends with quid-pro-quo benefits for realsies" affairs of every stripe and every gender from going on everywhere. Many Ferengi have a lightbulb moment somewhere in early adulthood when they figure out their dad's business partner or the "auntie" who visited their mom every month had a little more going on.

- Plus there's way more gender non-conformity and varying degrees of trans-ing than the powers that be have a handle on. Pel isn't unique, even if most would have to somehow make it out into space to be able to thrive.

Damn a lot of these are just my personal bugbears plus THE GILDED AGE BUT WITH HAIRLESS SPACE RODENTS ain't they

- Women can't earn profit, okay. But lending or "lending" things to each other isn't commerce, riiiiiiight? To be assigned female is to master navigating a vast, dizzying barter/gift economy. Smart boys and men leverage this, too, and there are splinter sects that view this as the purest expression of the Great Material Continuum.

- Of course plenty of women make profit anyway, and just do their bast to dodge the FCA. The tough thing about insisting on using latinum as currency is that cash can be so hard to track, you know?

- Because of the RoA, guys are discouraged from doing favors or giving gifts without setting clear expectation of getting some return on investment. This can twist into an expression of friendship (and of course women do it too), and the ledger will keep cycling between debit and credit among friends for decades. A common mistake aliens make is to tell them recompense isn't needed without explaining why, or return their favor or present with something that zeroes out the debt. The Ferengi will assume you want to break off the friendship. (I cribbed this from dim memories of an African studies course I took in 2007 and whose textbook I know I still have but I can't frigging find it...)

- Flirting, they do a lot of it for a lot of reasons. Roddenberry made it clear that they're just straight up pretty horny, but there's no reason it can't pull double duty for building alliances with other people, smoothing over feuds or disagreements, or cementing friendships. Ferengi who are ace and/or sex-repulsed are possibly viewed similar to the way we'd view someone who's "not a hugger/not big on touching" and if they flirt just don't get offended if it doesn't go any further; aro Ferengi don't garner much comment aside from an occasional "wow how badass, never falling in love with anyone."

- where to even start on making sense of the Blessed Exchequer??? Like seriously, what is this literal prosperity gospel insanity, I need to force myself to re-read Rand and like, some Milton Friedman for this shit. Help.

- fuck I'm probably going to actually do that, RIP me...

[star-anise]

Physician, know thy own queer history

I've come to suspect that a lot of LGBTQ+ discourse these days is conservative Protestantism with a gay hat because it's pushed by people who literally are conservative gay Protestants whose worldview hasn't been broadened beyond "now you can have 2.5 kids in a house in the suburbs... with a spouse of the same gender."

My girlfriend Marna has been a queer activist since the late 80s. She’s told me about the incredible deliberation and debates LGBTQ+ activists had, in the late 90s and early 00s as the community began to see past the AIDS crisis and immediate goals of “surviving a plague” and “burying our dead.” There were a lot of things we wanted to achieve, but we had to decide how to allocate our scarce reserves of money, labour, publicity, and public goodwiil. Those were the discussions that decided the next big goals we’d pursue were same-sex marriage equality and legal recognition of medical gender transition.

From hearing her tell it, it seems like it was actually a wrenching decision, because it absolutely left a lot of people in the dust. A lot of people, her included, had broad agendas based on sexual freedom and the rights of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and consenting partners—and they agreed to put their broader concerns aside and drill down, very specifically, onto the rights of cis gays and lesbians to marry, and the ability to legally change your sex and gender.

As a political tactic it was terrifically effective. In less than two decades, public opinion in many countries has totally reversed on gay marriage, and we’ve won some truly enormous legal landmarks. Gender transition has entered public consciousness and the first landmark battles allowing people to define their own gender have been won. Marriage equality means that husbands and wives are protected from being banned from their dying spouse's bedside, being forcibly separated from their children, or not being recognized as an important part of their spouse's life.

The LGBTQ+ community knew they were taking a gamble, focusing so exclusively on marriage equality, and trans activists knew that they wouldn’t be able to achieve anything else until they’d gotten basic medical transition recognized. By and large, prioritizing things this way paid off. But they knew going in that there would be costs—and we're reaping them.

Activists of 20 years ago chose to sideline and diminish efforts to blur and abolish the gender binary. Efforts to promote alternative family structures, including polyamorous families and non-sexual bonds between non-related adults. Efforts to fight the Christian cultural message that sex is dirty, sinful, bad, and in need of containment. Efforts to promote sexual pleasure as a positive good.

Those efforts have been going on for the last 20 years, but they're marginalized—activists who had to decide where their finite time, money, publicity, and social capital went literally sat in committee meetings and said, "Marriage equality is our top priority. Legal gender transition is our top priority. Everything else will have to wait."

This happened especially because sex education, sex positivity, and youth outreach were incredibly dangerous areas. Our enemies have been saying for years that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, perverts, seeking to corrupt and recruit children to our cause; anyone trying to teach children basic facts about how to avoid disease, what’s happening to their own bodies, or what possibilities they have for identity and orientation, risks having their name, career, and life ruined. As a sex educator in the 90s, Marna had to tell teenagers, “I can’t answer your questions about safe sex now. Come back when you turn 18.”

So kids who grew up being told that girls and boys are different and ought to lead different lives, and sex is dangerous and sinful and gross, and you definitely shouldn't want sex UNTIL you get married to your One True Love, only had that message tweaked a little bit. Now you can cross the floor from the Girl Side to the Boy Side or vice-versa. Now your One True Love doesn't have to be a different gender from you. But those kids could survive with the rest of their worldview relatively intact. And I think that's what we're seeing in fandom, with an emphasis on "pure" OTP ships, on only including LGBT+ identities that use crisp, clear gender binaries and result in nuclear family life. The rest of those cultural messages about sex and love remain: men’s and women’s worlds are and should be different, "impure" sex degrades and defiles you, sexual urges that do not contribute to your One True Love and family life should be repressed, shamed, or destroyed, and sexual thoughts are every bit as bad as acting on them.

This isn't because kids today are bad or stupid. It's because as a community, we had to decide where our effort was going, and now we need to pay down the debt we've racked up over years of prioritizing marriage equality and legal trans recognition over sex positivity, sex education, and deconstructing gender.

TERFs, SWERFs, exclusionists, and transmedicalists have stolen a march over liberal queers because they're doing the work to educate youth. While liberal queers have been staging protests and lobbying politicians, half a dozen of my undergraduate professors were radical feminists. Communities of exclusionists and anti-sex activists have honed their expertise at engaging teenagers with their ideas and theories. They're the ones writing the FAQs, answering the asks, and doing the groundwork of saying, "Here is a basic framework of sexual ethics for you to follow."

If we want to win back the culture wars, we have to step up our own efforts. Go back to the sex educators and gender activists whose good work has been ignored or underfunded for all this time and support them. Let major LGBTQ+ activist organizations know that their work so far is very nice, but it's time to renew our focus on youth outreach and mentoring young activists. Brainstorm a way to help angry, isolated, disenfranchised young people form communities based around positive action and a sense of belonging. Get into mentorship or education yourself. Help us pivot as a community, to reach out to the kids who have obviously been underserved.

People doing the good work who need our support: San Francisco Sex Information Sex & U Scarleteen Sexplanations Making Queer History

We won a few battles. That's nice. But now it doesn't serve us to whine that they're not all won. We've still got work to do.

(@star-anise: Patreon | Paypal)

[kalinkaquest-blog]

Lore question: What about this world is markedly different from what we experience in the real world, that we wouldn't expect?

Oh boy howdy, here we go.

We actually have an entire googledoc dedicated to worldbuilding, which may take Some Time infodumping so let’s break it down to some basics so this doesn’t turn into the next War And Peace, eh?

Ancient Greek Automata– BC, the ancient greeks invent, build, and subsequently forget how to build automata. These automata are primitive and can only due small repetitive tasks, though they are re-discovered by Victorian archeologists and improved upon. This is actually slightly based in historical fact, though not to the same extent.

Clockwork Dolls– 1860s, Victorians take the idea of automata and expand upon it to create the first true utility automata to do tasks deemed menial and inelegant. Japan furthers the idea and makes it a literal art form, crafting dolls that can dance and sing. Also somewhat based in historical fact. We’ve been gypped, I tell ya.

The Turing Machine– 1936, Alan Turing uses an automaton shell to run complex algorithms, creating the first rudimentary Chinese Box-type AI robot. We’re starting to go on a tangent timeline properly here.

The Third War and the Luna-2 Satellite– WWIII in essence. 1954-1975. The Cold War turned hot through multiple simultaneous proxy wars and the invention of warbots who could carry modified diseases or nuclear waste into enemy territory, as well as early plasma technology (read; weaponry) and geothermal energy. True AI begins to be developed, though little thought power is given to warbots. In 1967, many scientists from around the world who banded together in secret literally launch themself into space with bits and pieces of a complete satellite which put itself together on reaching the intended orbital range under stealth until completed. The tidal and volcanic drama caused by the slow but definite additional gravitational pull of the secret satellite was initially seen as an omen from god by the more religious that the Third War was the end of times, until Luna-2 revealed itself on full completion. The combination of bad press, an orbital laser, and the colonist scientists extreme distaste for the world they left has resulted in them being extremely isolationist, though recent sabotage of their algae-growing vats has forced them to begin trade.

The Mother’s Day Revolt/The May Riots– Both in 1975, people in both the USSR and USA start throwing massive riots. The USSR disintegrates into many new nations, and the USA is forced to impeach damn near everyone in office. The Third War ends. China shatters into three nations around the same time.The Asimov Accords– Late 1975, the remaining governments in the world decided to collectively blame early AI’s lack of control for the greatly decimated state of the world, despite AI not actually having enough true thought power at the time, and instate the Three Laws. This also establishes the Robot Master system, as each level of robots will have a leading robot who will report to a higher level until the robot master, who reports directly to humans. This is begun because much field work is no longer viable for humanity due to its decimated population and much destruction of the land at large.Light Labs Founded– 1978, Light Labs is founded by former war vets Dr. Thomas Light and Dr. Albert Wily, who begin Project Orchestra; an experiment to create true AI, one that can learn and think for itself even in-spite of the laws.

THIS IS JUST THE BACKGROUND SHIT

Fastforwarding through character-related backstory such as the death of Dr. Light’s wife Emily and Wily going kabonkers, it’s currently 1994 in-series. There is in fact a rough form of internet and early-2000s-esque technology, a decade or so ahead, and of course many of the New Generation were actually raised with or by robots since the population took a nasty hit. Gender Equality is actually very high as due to said mass dying there is no point practically nor socially to prevent women from having the same rights. Unfortunately there’s a breeder emphasis so queer rights has taken a huge shit, and robots of course pretty much count to be as much of a person as your car, even though most Robot Master and above-tiered robots are no less human on the inside than their detractors are on the outside.

There’s some more details like cults and activist groups and different political figures maybe some elder gods, but that’s all the basic beats of the backstory and current setting of the story.

[yearsblog]

“I’m glad you noticed!” says Olly Alexander with one of his impish smiles. “I’ve come a long way since then.” We’re talking about the difference between the first time I saw him sing with his band, Years & Years, and the strutting peacock that he has since become. In 2015, fresh from winning the BBC Sound Of . . . poll, Alexander had a mean falsetto and a clutch of killer synth-pop ditties (Shine, King), but he cut a diffident figure during his show at the Heaven nightclub, dressed down in a T-shirt and beanie.

The second time I saw him, a year later, he was rising on a hydraulic lift through the stage of a rapturous Wembley Arena, wearing a red tunic with silver shoulder pads, and garlanded with laser beams. Alexander’s ascent to serious, tabloid-baiting stardom continues. Years & Years have a dazzling album out this week and days before we meet he was on Graham Norton’s sofa, regaling Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock with the story of how Meteorite, the song he wrote for Bridget Jones’s Baby, was about “a big dick”. Diffident no longer.

“Looking back, it’s quite overwhelming,” says Alexander, 27, as he lunches on quinoa in a restaurant in King’s Cross, north London. He is slight and conspiratorial, with tiny safety pins through his ears, a ring through his nose and his cropped hair dyed scarlet. “At first you really don’t know what support from an audience is going to feel like. But when people started showing their support for me being honest and being a camp, gay frontman — I just never really expected it and it added so much fuel to my fire.”

Among the things he has eloquently spoken out on are LGBTQ rights (he presented a BBC Three documentary called Growing Up Gay), mental health (he extols the virtues of therapy, which he started pre-emptively, before he became famous) and bullying (at school in Gloucestershire he was regularly “bushed”: thrown into the bushes next to the assembly hall). He is far more vocal than he was at the start of his music career, when an industry person advised him not to talk about being gay. “She was, like, ‘Why do people need to know your sexuality?’ She wanted to protect me.”

Well, it turned out that he didn’t need protection, he needed confidence. That came with experience and a changing musical landscape in which artists as diverse as Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens, Frank Ocean and Perfume Genius felt able to be candid about their sexuality. “It’s quite astonishing,” Alexander says. “We’re seeing a lot more visible queer artists and visible gay people.”

Pop has been missing male stars with strong views, especially those with a sense of theatre; it’s all uber-polite George Ezra or anti-glamorous Ed Sheeran. “It has its place, having someone who’s not dressed up,” Alexander says, trying to be diplomatic. “But the thing I love most about pop music is the fantasy, the escapism. I had this moment when I realised I’m in the best place to engineer that for myself. I realised you could go as far as you want on stage.”

A few weeks ago at Radio 1’s Biggest Weekend in Swansea he wore a lime-green Freddie Mercury leotard and led an onstage conga of his dancers, who seemed to be styled as drugged-up zombies. It felt like a long way from Mike Read and Bruno Brookes. “There was a point where I realised if you embody supreme confidence, you can get away with anything,” Alexander says. “It is quite a religious experience for me, to be on stage.”

Religion is a bit of a theme for Years & Years, whose other members are the keyboard player Emre Türkmen and the bassist Mikey Goldsworthy. Their first album was called Communion and their new one is entitled Palo Santo, after a mystical South American tree burnt as incense. Its literal translation, “holy wood”, joins the dots between spiritualism and smut (“It’s a Carry On album!” Alexander says with a giggle). So too does the recent single, Sanctify, partly inspired by a relationship with a straight-acting man, which refers to two very different things that one can do on one’s knees. “See?” Alexander says, turning to his publicist, who is sitting near by. “Ed gets it!”

He has always been into spiritualism and the occult, he says, albeit in a slightly sceptical way. “The first place I ever had a job was in this shop called Moonstones — it sold gemstones, pagan spellbooks and chocolate dildos.” He grew up loving fairytales and fantasy fiction: Lord of the Rings, The Magic Faraway Tree, Harry Potter. You can see why he might have wanted to escape to other worlds, such was the rotten time he sometimes had at school, where he was mocked and sometimes “bushed” for wearing eyeliner, nail varnish and choker necklaces.

Has being a posterboy for LGBTQ and anti-bullying issues become a burden? He gets Instagram messages from fans every day. “It doesn’t feel like a burden. I think it would be more of a burden to not acknowledge any of that. But I’ve had to learn the ways to cope with my own mental health along the way, and I feel like I’m in a good position now, but if you’re having a bad day and you’re suddenly having to talk about things that you experienced when you were 13 years old, it can feel a bit challenging.”

He’s talking about the break-up of his mother, who ran community craft groups, from his father, who worked at amusement parks, but, tellingly, dreamt of being a musician. After the split Alexander moved to Gloucestershire with his mother and brother; his father has only been in contact sporadically. Alexander has sometimes shied away from the subject because “I was trying to protect him, and I was, like, ‘Why am I still trying to protect someone who hasn’t been in my life for over a decade and who’s actually very difficult and caused a lot of pain to my family?’ ”

They hadn’t been in touch for seven years when his father broke the silence in wincing fashion, by tweeting him. Matters got worse when Alexander’s fans started replying to his dad, even trolling him. It sounds horrific. He has seen him once since then, last year. “It was quite triggering,” he says. “I just couldn’t deal with it at the time, it was too overwhelming.”

Social media can be a perilous place for him, especially deciding what to keep private. “I’ve always been fairly ‘Here’s everything!’ ” He’s also prone to “stalking someone that I fancy, and then getting upset because they like so-and-so’s picture and not mine”.

Yet the lure of Instagram can be irresistible. Take his appearance on The Graham Norton Show, when he met Rihanna, one of his heroes, and posted a picture of them backstage, in which he wears an expression of volcanic ecstasy. He was more nervous about meeting Ri-Ri than he was about singing on the show, he says, but she was lovely. “She was, like, ‘My fans love you.’ I feel like we’re destined to be friends.”

Or, perhaps, rivals. Palo Santo, with its mega-hooks, shimmering melodies and sumptuous production, is an album built to take on the superstar Americans at their own game. It was inspired by the R&B and pop that Alexander grew up on: Timberland, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and, before them, Prince and Michael Jackson.

He’s a better fit for music than he was for his first, slightly accidental career as an actor. “It just feels like people can express their identity easier as artists in the music industry.” Still, acting was where he initially made his mark, straight out of school, first in the film Summerhill and later playing a Bullingdon-style posho in The Riot Club, Herbert Pocket in David Nicholls’s TV adaptation of Great Expectations, and a stage role in Michael Grandage’s Peter and Alice, during which he befriended Judi Dench.

He was quite intimidated, but Dench turned out to be “very cheeky. One day she brought in biscuits that had dicks and balls on them; she was, like, ‘Do you want a cock biscuit?’ ” She has since narrated a short film to accompany Years & Years’s new album.

Acting has some happy associations for him, then, but “Hollywood is the worst culprit” when it comes to diversity, he says. “It’s just so far behind the times, it’s disgusting.” He even felt a subtle pressure not to reveal his sexuality on God Help the Girl, a low-budget British indie film directed by Stuart Murdoch of the band Belle & Sebastian, in which Alexander played a straight musician.

“It gave me a lot of anxiety. It was one of the reasons I wanted to stop acting. I definitely felt at the time it was something you had to be quiet about, because otherwise directors wouldn’t believe you could pull off the part.” That was nothing to do with Murdoch, he stresses. “I got on with Stuart really well, and I felt guilty because I never told him I was gay. I kind of tried to play up to the fact that I could actually be straight still, based on lies, even though everyone else knew I was gay.” During the shoot he met a man in a club. “After filming every day I’d just go straight to his house and spend the night with him. You just feel like you’re living a bit of a double life.”

I tell him my editor will tell me off if I don’t ask about his romantic status. “I’m single,” he replies with a smile. “Let everyone know, including your editor! Is he gay? It’s a she? Maybe she has gay friends. Yeah, I am happily single. It’s been like . . . almost two years. Not that I’ve been a nun in that time, I would like to stress.” Celebrity is double-sided in that regard: adulation on one hand, lack of anonymity on the other. “It obviously has positives,” he says with a smile, “but my sex life’s taken quite a beating.”

Don’t buy the mock self-pity — Alexander is doing just fine. There’s the stellar album and an arena tour in the autumn. Nor have his experiences put him off acting. “I feel like I could do something really, really fun and weird, like play an alien,” he says. “Or, you know, a goblin king!” From dressed-down diffidence to a budding Bowie in three years: he really has come a long way.

Palo Santo is released tomorrow on Polydor. Years & Years play the Roundhouse, London, July 10; Manchester Arena, July 14 and tour the UK from November

[ollyarchive]

Years & Years’s Olly Alexander: ‘Celebrity has positives, but my sex life’s taken quite a beating’

Olly Alexander is Britain’s most exciting new pop star, but the Years & Years singer has also become a poster boy for social change

Ed Potton

July 5 2018, 12:01am, The Times

“I’m glad you noticed!” says Olly Alexander with one of his impish smiles. “I’ve come a long way since then.” We’re talking about the difference between the first time I saw him sing with his band, Years & Years, and the strutting peacock that he has since become. In 2015, fresh from winning the BBC Sound Of … poll, Alexander had a mean falsetto and a clutch of killer synth-pop ditties (Shine, King), but he cut a diffident figure during his show at the Heaven nightclub, dressed down in a T-shirt and beanie.

The second time I saw him, a year later, he was rising on a hydraulic lift through the stage of a rapturous Wembley Arena, wearing a red tunic with silver shoulder pads, and garlanded with laser beams. Alexander’s ascent to serious, tabloid-baiting stardom continues. Years & Years have a dazzling album out this week and days before we meet he was on Graham Norton’s sofa, regaling Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock with the story of how Meteorite, the song he wrote for Bridget Jones’s Baby, was about “a big dick”. Diffident no longer.

“Looking back, it’s quite overwhelming,” says Alexander, 27, as he lunches on quinoa in a restaurant in King’s Cross, north London. He is slight and conspiratorial, with tiny safety pins through his ears, a ring through his nose and his cropped hair dyed scarlet. “At first you really don’t know what support from an audience is going to feel like. But when people started showing their support for me being honest and being a camp, gay frontman — I just never really expected it and it added so much fuel to my fire.” Olly Alexander with Emre Türkmen and Mikey Goldsworthy of Years & Years Olly Alexander with Emre Türkmen and Mikey Goldsworthy of Years & Years

Among the things he has eloquently spoken out on are LGBTQ rights (he presented a BBC Three documentary called Growing Up Gay), mental health (he extols the virtues of therapy, which he started pre-emptively, before he became famous) and bullying (at school in Gloucestershire he was regularly “bushed”: thrown into the bushes next to the assembly hall). He is far more vocal than he was at the start of his music career, when an industry person advised him not to talk about being gay. “She was, like, ‘Why do people need to know your sexuality?’ She wanted to protect me.”

Well, it turned out that he didn’t need protection, he needed confidence. That came with experience and a changing musical landscape in which artists as diverse as Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens, Frank Ocean and Perfume Genius felt able to be candid about their sexuality. “It’s quite astonishing,” Alexander says. “We’re seeing a lot more visible queer artists and visible gay people.”

Pop has been missing male stars with strong views, especially those with a sense of theatre; it’s all uber-polite George Ezra or anti-glamorous Ed Sheeran. “It has its place, having someone who’s not dressed up,” Alexander says, trying to be diplomatic. “But the thing I love most about pop music is the fantasy, the escapism. I had this moment when I realised I’m in the best place to engineer that for myself. I realised you could go as far as you want on stage.”

A few weeks ago at Radio 1’s Biggest Weekend in Swansea he wore a lime-green Freddie Mercury leotard and led an onstage conga of his dancers, who seemed to be styled as drugged-up zombies. It felt like a long way from Mike Read and Bruno Brookes. “There was a point where I realised if you embody supreme confidence, you can get away with anything,” Alexander says. “It is quite a religious experience for me, to be on stage.” With Hannah Murray and Emily Browning in God Help the Girl With Hannah Murray and Emily Browning in God Help the Girl

Religion is a bit of a theme for Years & Years, whose other members are the keyboard player Emre Türkmen and the bassist Mikey Goldsworthy. Their first album was called Communion and their new one is entitled Palo Santo, after a mystical South American tree burnt as incense. Its literal translation, “holy wood”, joins the dots between spiritualism and smut (“It’s a Carry On album!” Alexander says with a giggle). So too does the recent single, Sanctify, partly inspired by a relationship with a straight-acting man, which refers to two very different things that one can do on one’s knees. “See?” Alexander says, turning to his publicist, who is sitting near by. “Ed gets it!”

He has always been into spiritualism and the occult, he says, albeit in a slightly sceptical way. “The first place I ever had a job was in this shop called Moonstones — it sold gemstones, pagan spellbooks and chocolate dildos.” He grew up loving fairytales and fantasy fiction: Lord of the Rings, The Magic Faraway Tree, Harry Potter. You can see why he might have wanted to escape to other worlds, such was the rotten time he sometimes had at school, where he was mocked and sometimes “bushed” for wearing eyeliner, nail varnish and choker necklaces.

Has being a posterboy for LGBTQ and anti-bullying issues become a burden? He gets Instagram messages from fans every day. “It doesn’t feel like a burden. I think it would be more of a burden to not acknowledge any of that. But I’ve had to learn the ways to cope with my own mental health along the way, and I feel like I’m in a good position now, but if you’re having a bad day and you’re suddenly having to talk about things that you experienced when you were 13 years old, it can feel a bit challenging.” Olly Alexander: “It’s quite a religious experience for me to be on stage” Olly Alexander: “It’s quite a religious experience for me to be on stage”

He’s talking about the break-up of his mother, who ran community craft groups, from his father, who worked at amusement parks, but, tellingly, dreamt of being a musician. After the split Alexander moved to Gloucestershire with his mother and brother; his father has only been in contact sporadically. Alexander has sometimes shied away from the subject because “I was trying to protect him, and I was, like, ‘Why am I still trying to protect someone who hasn’t been in my life for over a decade and who’s actually very difficult and caused a lot of pain to my family?’ ”

They hadn’t been in touch for seven years when his father broke the silence in wincing fashion, by tweeting him. Matters got worse when Alexander’s fans started replying to his dad, even trolling him. It sounds horrific. He has seen him once since then, last year. “It was quite triggering,” he says. “I just couldn’t deal with it at the time, it was too overwhelming.”

Social media can be a perilous place for him, especially deciding what to keep private. “I’ve always been fairly ‘Here’s everything!’ ” He’s also prone to “stalking someone that I fancy, and then getting upset because they like so-and-so’s picture and not mine”.

Yet the lure of Instagram can be irresistible. Take his appearance on The Graham Norton Show, when he met Rihanna, one of his heroes, and posted a picture of them backstage, in which he wears an expression of volcanic ecstasy. He was more nervous about meeting Ri-Ri than he was about singing on the show, he says, but she was lovely. “She was, like, ‘My fans love you.’ I feel like we’re destined to be friends.”

Or, perhaps, rivals. Palo Santo, with its mega-hooks, shimmering melodies and sumptuous production, is an album built to take on the superstar Americans at their own game. It was inspired by the R&B and pop that Alexander grew up on: Timberland, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and, before them, Prince and Michael Jackson.

He’s a better fit for music than he was for his first, slightly accidental career as an actor. “It just feels like people can express their identity easier as artists in the music industry.” Still, acting was where he initially made his mark, straight out of school, first in the film Summerhill and later playing a Bullingdon-style posho in The Riot Club, Herbert Pocket in David Nicholls’s TV adaptation of Great Expectations, and a stage role in Michael Grandage’s Peter and Alice, during which he befriended Judi Dench.

He was quite intimidated, but Dench turned out to be “very cheeky. One day she brought in biscuits that had dicks and balls on them; she was, like, ‘Do you want a cock biscuit?’ ” She has since narrated a short film to accompany Years & Years’s new album.

Acting has some happy associations for him, then, but “Hollywood is the worst culprit” when it comes to diversity, he says. “It’s just so far behind the times, it’s disgusting.” He even felt a subtle pressure not to reveal his sexuality on God Help the Girl, a low-budget British indie film directed by Stuart Murdoch of the band Belle & Sebastian, in which Alexander played a straight musician.

“It gave me a lot of anxiety. It was one of the reasons I wanted to stop acting. I definitely felt at the time it was something you had to be quiet about, because otherwise directors wouldn’t believe you could pull off the part.” That was nothing to do with Murdoch, he stresses. “I got on with Stuart really well, and I felt guilty because I never told him I was gay. I kind of tried to play up to the fact that I could actually be straight still, based on lies, even though everyone else knew I was gay.” During the shoot he met a man in a club. “After filming every day I’d just go straight to his house and spend the night with him. You just feel like you’re living a bit of a double life.”

I tell him my editor will tell me off if I don’t ask about his romantic status. “I’m single,” he replies with a smile. “Let everyone know, including your editor! Is he gay? It’s a she? Maybe she has gay friends. Yeah, I am happily single. It’s been like … almost two years. Not that I’ve been a nun in that time, I would like to stress.” Celebrity is double-sided in that regard: adulation on one hand, lack of anonymity on the other. “It obviously has positives,” he says with a smile, “but my sex life’s taken quite a beating.”

Don’t buy the mock self-pity — Alexander is doing just fine. There’s the stellar album and an arena tour in the autumn. Nor have his experiences put him off acting. “I feel like I could do something really, really fun and weird, like play an alien,” he says. “Or, you know, a goblin king!” From dressed-down diffidence to a budding Bowie in three years: he really has come a long way.

Palo Santo is released tomorrow on Polydor. Years & Years play the Roundhouse, London, July 10; Manchester Arena, July 14 and tour the UK from November

[fibula-rasa]

A Century of Glamour Ghouls: 1930s

The Countess Marya Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

The Movie

Dracula’s Daughter (1936) gives you that weird feeling, apparently. Use of the term horror to describe these weird films had finally caught on by 1936, just in time for Universal to have producer turnover and stop making them. So Dracula’s Daughter would be Universal’s last (for a few years anyway) and a fitting intermezzo for the genre in America.

Directly connected to the Universal horror films of its own decade, Dracula’s Daughter also operates as a spiritual predecessor of Val Lewton’s horror films in the 1940s. Dracula’s Daughter is atmospheric and wistful, driven more by character psychology and internal conflict than Universal’s previous monster movies.

Dracula’s Daughter picks up directly after Dracula (1931). Police officers have arrived to cart Von Helsing away for murder (the sudden name change has never been explained). Quick to the scene is the Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), who uses her vampiric wiles to retrieve her father’s body. Zaleska intends to destroy her father once and for all in an effort free herself from vampirism. This doesn’t quite do the trick and Zaleska is left hopeless and depressed until she meets a psychologist, Dr. Garth, who believes he can cure any obsessive behavioral trait. When this also doesn’t work as quickly or easily as she expects, Zaleska plans her revenge.

From the very start Zaleska is a character at odds with herself. She’s not alive and not dead. She’s an ancient monster who carouses in polite high society. She’s an (awfully British) Eastern European immigrant trying to operate within English culture. Her thinly veiled queerness adds another layer to these conflicts of identity and informs the film’s narrative closely. The primary tension of the film comes from her interlacing identity crises and the self-loathing that follows. The film is driven by the suspense of when or if she will snap under the weight of it all.

If the last film I covered was written about too much, Dracula’s Daughter hasn’t been written about enough. The primary focus of most writing is on the film’s lesbian subtext, but honestly more bi people need to write about it. I’ll give it a whack at a later date.

The Look

The Countess Marya Zaleska isn’t just a vampire, she’s a Dracula and her costuming shows it. She’s primarily costumed in gowns (what would a daytime wardrobe even mean for a vampire?); regal with an artistic bent and painfully fashionable throughout the film.

The Clothes

I decided for the daytime look to put together a more casual version of one of her gowns, but sticking to a 1930s silhouette.

For the hair, I wound a few dark colored ribbons together to wear as a headband because my hair is on the shorter side. If you have longer hair, this simple milk-maid braid tutorial by Rachel Maksy would be perfect.

For the full costume I honestly donned a dark bedsheet as a cape. If you have a long black cape at your disposal, you’re more goth than I. Congratulations. I also took a large glass bead from the dollar store, glued some tin foil to the backside of it and then glued the whole thing to a plain ring to create something like the ring Zaleska uses in her hypnotism.

The Makeup

First I had to tackle brows. While I already have the ends of my eyebrows shaved off, the heads are thicker than Holden’s. Very thin brows were en vogue in the 1930s. So, to demonstrate two methods for you, I used a glue stick for one eyebrow and just a cream concealer for the other. In the photo below, the glue has dried and I laid down my base, using a foundation with a semi-matte finish.

Contour time. Gloria Holden has very strong features that I wanted to emphasize, but this is still a daytime look, so I used a light hand and a warm gray powder. (1.) This is where I put the lines of my contour to make the shape of my nose more sloping at the upper bridge and a little sharper at the tip. I also brought my cheekbone contour quite far forward and rounded it out. (2.) To illustrate the shapes I’m going for a bit better, I mapped out the highlight and contour with a little dodge & burn. (3.) And here it is blended. It’s subtle, but with contour it’s better to go subtle and add than to try and neutralize too much shadow. (Sorry for the lighting change, I was doing this in the middle of a storm.)

Using a taupe gray shadow, (1.) I focused in on the crease and blended both upward and outward. With what was left on the brush for each eye, I ran the shadow all along my lower lashline. Because the eyebrow and eyeshadow shape compliment each other in this look, (2.) I drew out the long, rounded eyebrow shape next with a little flip up at the ends. For daytime eyeliner, (3.) I started with a kitten flick (a small upward angled triangle) then drew it out across my upper lashline using a dark brown shadow. (If your skin is considerably deeper than mine, black is better.) (4.) I then applied a few coats of black mascara, touched up the brows and eyeshadow to make sure they were still deep enough and added some highlight to the browbone.

Last, but not least, are lips. Holden’s upper lip is fuller and extends further at the corners than her bottom lip, so (1.) I used concealer to make my lower lip smaller. I blended the concealer down to make my chin look more prominent as well. (2.) I then drew out the shape of the lips with liner. I rounded out the shape of my upper lip and sharpened the cupid’s bow. (3.) I chose a medium-dark pink to fill in the lips, but you could use any color for this look since the eyes are so neutral. Be sure not to smoosh your lips together to spread the color with this look, you’ll ruin the line you created.

For the full costume look, I went back over my brows with black eyeshadow. For the eyes, I deepened the eyeshadow a bit with a deep purple (not historically accurate but hey). I extended and thickened the liner across my entire lashline in black and added a trimmed set of lashes. (This was the most useful false lash tutorial for me.) I deepened the contour a bit as well and changed the lip color to red.

And that’s the look! I think The Countess is a great costume choice and I hope this help guides your look this Halloween. The 1940s are just around the corner!

The 1910s | The 1920s | The 1940s | The 1950s | The 1960s | The 1970s | The 1980s | The 1990s | The 2000s

[depthsoftheriches]

Hertiage or Hate

Now-a-days, here in the south we have this mantra of “Heritage, not Hate”. In the next few paragraphs, as Christians, I will argue that this situation with the statues of various Civil War “Heroes” has oppressions, hate, racism, sexism, and if you want to claim it, Heritage? What makes “Heritage” of the Civil War so great to the people of the South? Why would anyone want to align with the ugly truth that slavery was on the agenda, among other things, of the Civil War?

I grew up in an area where you get mixed reviews on the topic. We have extreme liberals that are offended and terrified of anyone that has a strong sense of mind. Everything in their eyes is raciest or too religious. Anything you want to do to better your life you better think twice because you’re going to be just adding worth to “The Man”. Also, we have extreme conservatives who will fly the Rebel Battle Flag and argue the history behind it, and do whatever they have to feel better about it. These people are terrified that some “queer” is going to bust in their bathrooms and attack their little boy. Since we know that ALL openly gay men just love little boys. Also, if you’re a Muslim you better get the hell out of my country because you’re not welcome here. Both are terribly wrong and I wish would just hurry and leave this place so we can all get along. Am I right? Come on both sides I know you hate the other…..I digress…..no I don’t.

This is my Blog and you will sit here and read EVERY WORD I HAVE TO SAY!

So what is hate? Feel intense or passionate dislike for someone. This is the definition of hate. I know, I know, some of you feel like “Hey I don’t feel that way so I’m good.” But let’s take a deeper look into our hearts. Where does our motivations come from? Let’s ask some deeper questions to see if I can pull the hate out of you. Do you have that feeling of unease when you are at the fair or amusement park and a collection of African-Americans come close? Have you ever felt annoyed of the conversations that publicly take place between a groups of people of the opposite race? Have you found yourself making presuppositions about another race? I believe that this is something deep within us that we are raised in. I believe that we have been predisposed to racism from our parents, families, and friends. Natural segregation happens in School cafeterias, recreational sports, workplace, even our churches. In my own family there are stories about my great-grandmother saying “Let the little n-word put the groceries up”. Language like this is sickening. That was 100 years after the Civil War. Now do I think that some Statues made my Nanny say those things, no? But what I am saying is that they were never forced to stop being racist. We are never told to just stop and regardless of history or not, keeping statues, flags and other racist artifacts in the public eye placed on a pedestal tells us that we don’t have to evolve from that mindset. What if in Germany it wasn’t illegal to hang Nazi flags? We would all be disgusted. Instead, a few decades ago they made it illegal to have anything Nazi visible. They took a stance and eliminated any chance of holding onto that history. Things like this do nothing to help our society and do everything to hurt it. Can’t we just enjoy your civil agenda in our outdated and poorly wrote history books? We have to become, as a Christian community, without a doubt a loving culture. We have to be as David Platt says “Counter Culture”.

Why, oh why, do we have to be so unchristlike? This past week/2 years has been the demise of our country. So much hate and violence has been spread throughout our country. We have to get it together, especially as Christians. So, what does it mean to be Christ-like?  In the Bible we see several references of this on how we treat others. Jesus spoke in his beautiful “Sermon on the Mount” Matt Ch. 5-7 that we should treat others how we would want to be treated. You know, the little thing called the Golden Rule. Jesus preached full acceptance of everyone totally and completely. I hate to beat a dead horse but are we missing something. Is there a reason that we are making things so complicated, it seems pretty simple to me. Christ sat with sinners, prayed for tax collectors, hung with prostitutes, and healed those that weren’t even going to join him…. Sometimes I step back and think….”Are we missing the mark?” the modern Christian is so disheartening. When did we go wrong… when did we start becoming the problem…when did we decide we had all the answers? Jesus has become our Idol not our God.

When is that last time you spoke to someone and they said they like the little baby Jesus the best. Not really but you know what I mean. Jesus has been molded into this deity of hate mongering and slander. Jesus that the majority of the church portray has become this clay mold of the best Jesus that fits their agenda. “We must baptize as many people in a year as possible because that is what Jesus says to do.” “We should set goals on how many people we can baptize per month”. Then we will just throw some lousy doctrine at them that is partly bible based but most likely completely ripped out of context. We will completely abandon the rest of the “Great Commission”. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold I am with you always, to the end of the age”. Make Disciples….that doesn’t mean just tell people about Jesus and baptize them even though they don’t understand what they are doing. Disciples comes first in the passage….live with and show them Jesus. Speak truth into people. LOVE people. Tell them the beauty of Christ. Then when they fully understand the Gospel and know who he is then baptize them into the family….rant over…

When you say the name Jesus in conversation it’s so sad how much disgust you receive in looks or verbally. That is a reflection on us as Christians. And yes I said “us” because I’m in there with you. Being a Christian is the hardest thing in this world. We are called to be counter culture when the world is full of anger, greed, hate, and “Heritage”. Our God has been terribly portrayed by both bible thumping Baptist and prosperity gospel preachers. All ends of the spectrum have got it wrong. Sure, they are bringing in “converts” by the thousands but what are they doing for the Kingdom of God. When is that last time you cried for or got down on your knees for the lost? When is the last time you got down on your knees and cried for your leaders? When is the last time you got down on your knees and prayed for your church? When is the last time you got down on your knees and wept for your community? If you have no answer for that maybe that’s the problem.

We have gotten so locked into politics, doctrine, what grows the church, what looks bad, and what looks weird. We have neglected that Jesus, Our God, is the exact imprint of the nature of God (Heb 1:3). When we look back on Jesus life, we see that everything we do will be for the glory of God. Glory of God for either our punishment because he is a just and righteous God, or for the Grace extended to us when we absolutely do not deserve it. Have you looked back and reflected on yourself lately or just too busy sitting on your high horse. Jesus didn’t say we have to understand why some people do things, but he did ask that we love them unconditionally. Christ did the most beautiful thing he could have. He took on human form, loved on people, did miraculous things, saved sinners, deconstructed lives, built people up, empowered a people, went counter culture, walked thru the heart of Samaria, extended love to the woman at the well, fed the hungry, hydrated the thirsty, healed the lame, Died for our Sins, Conquered Death, was Victor over sin, Walked out of the Grave, forgave Peter, had fish with his brother, walked up a mountain, ascended to Heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God. He is the nature of God, He is God, and He is the second God-head of the Trinity.

 Love and Peace to you, my church family

 God Bless

[janeaddamspeace]

LBGT Lambda Literary Awards and Pride Book List #JACBA Newsletter 30Jun2017

LGBTQ Women of Color Win Big at Lambda Literary Awards

Nine women of color took home prizes at this year's 29th Annual Lambda Literary Awards. With 24 categories in all, ranging from "LGBT Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror" to "Transgender Poetry," the event celebrated 13 writers of color and 16 women.

The Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys," honors books written by writers in the LGBTQ community.

One of the evening's most prestigious awards, the Visionary Award, went to Jacqueline Woodson. The author of the 2014 New York Times bestselling memoir "Brown Girl Dreaming" received the award to commemorate her lifetime achievements. Tony Award-winning actress Cynthia Nixon introduced Woodson, declaring her a "writer who is part of the institution but stands outside it and critiques." Nixon also said Woodson is "the writer, the friend, the citizen these times demand."

Read More

Each Kindness written by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E.B. Lewis 2013 Awardee

From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun by Jacqueline Woodson 1996 Awardee

I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This by Jacqueline Woodson 1995 Awardee

Award-winning children's author comes to new Open Book/Open Mind Series event

Newbery and National Book Award-winning children's author Jacqueline Woodson will be the next guest in the Montclair Public Library's Open Book/Open Mind Series this coming Friday, June 16.

Woodson will discuss her adult novel, "Another Brooklyn," with Tayari Jones, author of "Silver Sparrow," "Leaving Atlanta," and "The Telling." Woodson is also the author of such titles as "Miracle's Boys" and "Brown Girl Dreaming."

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Pride Books You Need To Read This Month, Based On Your Hogwarts House

"I want to get in as much Pride reading as I possibly can within the month, even though I do read books by queer writers, and about queer characters all year long. If you feel the same way, but are trapped under a pile of Pride TBR picks, why not turn to your Hogwarts House for inspiration?"

Slytherin: 'Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights' by Ann Bausum

Sometimes Slytherins need to come at a subject right from the beginning because they were a little too self-focused to be caught up on its entirety. And that's totally cool because this book about the Stonewall Riots (which many say was the catalyst that triggered the demand for gay rights in the U.S. and around the world is the ideal introduction for any Slytherin who needs a crash course on Pride Month history.

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WLRN #FridayReads: Pride Edition

Stratton Pollitzer, deputy director of Equality Florida

"I am currently reading The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, by Sy Montgomery.”

"Social justice work is hard. You spend years pushing towards a hopeful breakthrough often unsure how much the needle is moving. Sometimes I need to take a break from the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and for me escaping into nature restores my wonder in the world and helps me maintain perspective. If my "to-do" list is overwhelming me, exploring something as everlasting as a mountain or swimming on a coral reef can remind me that there are more important things than an empty in-box. Also, I love octopuses. They are boneless, have blue blood, can change color and texture in a fraction of a second, have thousands of suction cups each of which operates independently, and they are crazy smart!"

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Temple Grandin: How the Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World by Sy Montgomery 2013 Awardee

Stubby's story: All about the iconic World War I 'war dog' ... and star of an upcoming animated film

The story of Stubby, commonly referred to as Sgt. Stubby, is one of great service, trust and loyalty. It began in Connecticut, crossed the Atlantic into the battles of World War I, and returned home to a hero's welcome.

However, the details that make up the stuff of legend - the animated "Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero," is set to hit theaters in April - are a bit hazy. Chief among them: The dog's rank.

"I'm quite convinced that he was promoted by the internet," said Ann Bausum, who has written two books about Stubby. "It sounds so good, we want it to be true ... and one of these reasons I think this isn't true is that there is not a single contemporary story from his lifetime, and I looked at hundreds of newspaper articles of Stubby, there is not a single one that calls him 'Sgt. Stubby.'"

"He was just 'Stubby,'" Bausum said. "And that was good enough for him."

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Marching to the Mountaintop: How Poverty, Labor Fights and Civil Rights Set the Stage for Martin Luther King Jr's Final Hours by Ann Bausum 2013 Awardee

Books to Read with Your Child to Celebrate #LovingDay

June 12 marks 50 years since Loving v. Virginia determined that the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which banned marriage between people who were deemed "white" and people who were deemed "colored," was unconstitutional.

"This is the way that society is moving. We need to reflect that in the literature. We need to show children that this is a reality. Kids need to see themselves," said Selina Alko, author and co-illustrator of the children's book, The Case for Loving.

Black is Brown is Tan by Arnold Adoff, illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully

"Black is Brown is Tan" was the first children's book published to feature a multiracial family when it was published in 1973. The book is a story poem and uses color imagery to show the many different skin colors that can exist.

Jalapeño Bagels by Natasha Wing, illustrated by Robert Casilla

The son of a Jewish father and Mexican mother struggles to decide what he will bring to school for International Day. The book comes with recipes and a Spanish and Yiddish glossary.

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All the Colors of the Race by Arnold Adoff 1983 Awardee

The Escape of Oney Judge: Martha Washington's Slave Finds Freedom by Emily Arnold McCully 2008 Awardee

Dolores Huerta: A Hero to Migrant Workers, written by Sarah Warren and illustrated by Robert Casilla 2013 Awardee

7 Ways To Support The Diverse Books Movement, According To Experts And Activists

By spending money on diverse books and diverse authors' books, you're sending the message to publishers that these books can make money. Unless a publishing house is a nonprofit, most publishers operate as a business - meaning that sales speak volumes. If a diverse author makes a lot of sales on their first book, they're also more likely to sell a second book and get a higher advance when they do.

You can show up at your local library and look for the diverse books you want to read. Talk to your librarian and ask them for the books you're looking for. If you need recommendations, ask.

"Librarians play a key role in promoting diverse books!" Edith Campbell, an education librarian in Indiana, tells Bustle.

Support organizations like We Need Diverse Books with donations or by volunteering your time, so you can directly support initiatives such as the OurStory app, the Walter Award, and the Internship Grant. There are other organizations and events like Children's Book Council, Multicultural Children's Book Day, and plenty of book awards that focus on diversity such as the Coretta Scott King Award, Pura Belpre Award, Lambda Literary Award, or the Dolly Gray Award.

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Carla Hayden, Louise Erdrich Win WNBA Awards

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and novelist, poet, and bookstore owner Louise Erdrich have been named the winners of the 2017 Women's National Book Association Awards. Hayden and Erdrich will be honored at the WNBA's centennial celebration on October 28 in New York.

"These two women, via their work, have made significant cultural and societal contributions [that] are deserving of this prestigious award."

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Writer's Voice receives NEA Big Read grant

An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA Big Read broadens understanding of the world, our communities, and ourselves through the sharing a good book. The Writer's Voice is one of 75 nonprofit organizations to receive an NEA Big Read grant to host a community reading program between September 2017 and June 2018.

In partnership with the Montana State University Billings Library, the NEA Big Read in Billings will focus on "The Round House" by Louise Erdrich. Activities will take place beginning in October.

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The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich 2000 Awardee

Faith Ringgold Story Quilt is Among Acquisitions Marking National Museum of Women in the Arts 30th Anniversary Year

NMWA presented "American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold's Paintings of the 1960s" in 2013. After being largely known for her story quilts made in the 1970s, the exhibition brought to the fore Ringgold's bold political paintings made in the previous decade in response to the civil rights and feminist movements.

The museum's newly acquired quilt, "American Collection #4: Jo Baker's Bananas" (1997), documents a major icon. Demonstrating the mix of craft and fine art painting Ringgold employs in her story quilts, the work features a repeated image of Josephine Baker dancing across the top. At the bottom, a racially diverse group enjoys cocktails surrounded by jazz players.

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Hayward's first black teacher recalls lessons from the classroom

Monegan ... began working as a third-grade student teacher at an elementary school named after Edwin Markham, one of her favorite poets. The school campus is now the home of Faith Ringgold School of Arts & Science.

"My mom always told me, 'Well, you better do a good job because you may be paving the way for someone else,' " she said."

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Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky by Faith Ringgold 1993 Awardee

The Truth About Child Labor

In the book Kids at Work, it tells the story of Manuel, a five year old boy who gets up at 3 am and goes to the shrimp cannery where he peels shrimps for the whole day. He has been doing this since he was four. Manuel is just one out of the millions of kids that have stories just like his.

In the book Kids at Work by Russell Freedman, a Newbery medal winning author that writes biographies, it says, "Because children could be hired cheaply and were too small to complain, they were often employed to replace adult workers."

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We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler by Russell Freedman 2017 Awardee

Freedom Walkers by Russell Freedman 2007 Awardee

The Bessie Coleman Story, presented by Sweet Blackberry

Sweet Blackberry is an award-winning organization whose mission is to bring little-known stories of African-American achievement to kids.

Sweet Blackberry is currently developing its fourth animated short sharing the inspiring story of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female pilot.

Celebrated children's book illustrator R. Gregory Christie (who has worked with the New Yorker and New York Times, as well as in over 50 books) has signed on to create the look of the film (including the great illustrations above).

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The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth & Harlem's Greatest Bookstore by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie 2016 Awardee

25 Picture Books to Promote Kindness, Empathy, and Justice

To Discuss POVERTY

1. Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson

"'I have new name for her,' Kendra whispered. 'Never New. Everything she has came from a secondhand store.'"

To Discuss IMMIGRANTS/ REFUGEES

9. We Came to America by Faith Ringgold

"In spite of where we came from, Or how or why we came, We are all Americans, Just the same."

11. How Many Days to America? A Thanksgiving Story by Eve Bunting

Bunting's young Caribbean protagonist states, "It was nice in our village 'til the night in October when the soldiers came. My mother hid my little sister and me under the bed."

12. One Green Apple by Eve Bunting

Farah, Bunting's young Muslim protagonist states, "I would prefer to go home. My father has explained to me that we are not always liked here. "Our home country and our new one have had difficulties," he says. "But it will be good for us here in time." How much time, I wonder.

To Discuss CIVIL RIGHTS:

15. Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and the her Family's Fight For School Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh

"Go back to the Mexican school. You don't belong here." Years before the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, the Menedez family integrated California schools. Young protagonists make the story simple enough for any child to understand the power of never giving up.

16. Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney

"This was the law's recipe for segregation. Its instructions were easy to follow: Do not combine white people with black people. Segregation was a bitter mix. Now it was the friends' turn to ignore and refuse. They ignored the law, and refused to leave until they were served. Those kids had a recipe, too. A new brew called integration." This powerful retell of the Woolworths' lunch counter sit-in includes a civil rights timeline for young historians.

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Each Kindness written by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E.B. Lewis 2013 Awardee

From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun by Jacqueline Woodson 1996 Awardee

I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This by Jacqueline Woodson 1995 Awardee

Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky by Faith Ringgold 1993 Awardee

The Wednesday Surprise by Eve Bunting 1990 Awardee

Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and her family's fight for desegregation, written and illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh 2015 Awardee

Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Brian Pinkney 2011 Awardee

Sojourner Truth's Step-Stomp Stride, by Andrea Davis Pinkney & Brian Pinkney 2010 Awardee

‘Towers Falling’ brings 9/11 to life for middle schoolers

Greenfield Middle School welcomed the author of the highly-reviewed book about New York City kids growing up in the wake of terrorist attacks, which has been written up in the New York Times and highlighted on National Public Radio.

Rhodes hopes her book can be implemented with other schools’ curricula, speaking about what she sees as a lack of formal 9/11 education going on in the country today.

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Sugar by Jewell Parker Rhodes 2014 Awardee

The Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes 2011 Awardee

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Since 1953, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award annually acknowledges books published in the U.S. during the previous year. Books commended by the Award address themes of topics that engage children in thinking about peace, justice, world community and/or equality of the sexes and all races. The books also must meet conventional standards of literacy and artistic excellence.

A national committee chooses winners and honor books for younger and older children.

Read more about the 2017 Awards.

[mightbedamian]

#TMIishTuesday #46 - The Trumpet - But why?

Hey there mighty people of the internet! And welcome to issue #46 of #TMIishTuesday - my weekly Tumblr post about what goes through my weird mind and what you guys want to know more about. It can be something very personal, it can be something political, it can be completely pointless - but in 99.9 % of the cases, it involves opinions. And mine as well. // Last week I talked about make-up. On girls, but more about it on guys: Society's general perception of it, some male YouTubers who look ACE with make-up, and my opinion on whether or not men should or should not wear make-up. Not telling you to read it, but… YOU SHOULD! // Disclaimer: I can't treat certain people the same as everyone else. People who just disrespect of groups of people for one, and only one, reason: Belonging to this group. And by saying this, I do exactly that, I know... And I’m still gonna do it. You know, if they were at least a little bit open-minded or didn't treat people like they're sh*t, I'd respect that. I wouldn't cheer for them, but everyone has different opinions - and that's awesome! But I won't respect people who hate on others for having one attribute that the haters don't like: Gender, sexuality, race, color of skin, this list goes on and on. Okay, so if you're not living on the Moon (and even then), you'll most definitely have noticed that the U. S. have a new president. For the reasons stated above, I will not call him by his name, but rather refer to this person as "the Trumpet". Not much of a difference anyway, right? And now you know who I'm talking about, we can start this post. Did I mention that it's about reasons why this person could even become president? Oh, I didn't? Well… Now you know! There are obviously lots of reasons why the Americans eligible to vote voted like they did. I pick three that seem most important to me.  1. The devil vs. the deep blue sea With the elections coming up one thing that I read a lot in polls and assessments of the candidates is: "I can't possibly choose between two inacceptable candidates." As expected, Democrats and Republicans had voted two extremely opposing candidates to go for president - Clinton: the impersonated establishment who still lives on her father's achievements as president and who is rather conservative for a Democrats candidate. And - the Trumpet: the impersonated American dream: business man, self-made millionaire, the exact opposite of the establishment, who bluntly told his opinions on basically everything, even when not asked about it. And I had the impression that people didn't feel that ANY of the two would be a good president. But given the American political situation, with only these two parties standing a real chance to win the election, most people did choose to distribute their votes between the devil and the deep blue sea - or simply didn't turn up to the polling stations. 2. Jobs vs. trade There is a common misconception that many Europeans might have fallen for: The Trumpet's only focus seemed to be on immigration politics. Constructing a wall at the U. S.-Mexican border and getting rid of TPP* and TTIP* trade agreements, before the latter was even signed. These seemed to be the Trumpet's only political goals. At least if you believed European media. Oh my, were we wrong! The Trumpet actually got lots of votes in the Mid West states promising people to get jobs. Of course that's part of the getting-rid-of-TPP-and-TTIP deal. But that's not what was the most important aspect of this issue. The U. S. still suffer from the global economic crisis that was sparked by the failure of the banking industry in the late 2000s. The most important promise of the Trumpet was jobs. Jobs, jobs, and more jobs. And, please correct me, if I'm wrong, dear Americans, but to me it looks like most Americans don't bother too much about what is going on in the world, if the U. S. is not involved. Am I wrong in assuming that? And to be honest, it's looked to me like that over the last few years/decades. Rather, you guys are more focussed on your own country. You know, I'm not a big fan of overly demonstrated patriotism. But it makes sense that you voted the Trumpet then: He promises to get you all into jobs again. Sure, that will work. But there'll also be massive inflation, if he basically closes down foreign trade and goes back to producing everything domestically. But people don't seem to see that. Or they ignore it. Well, if you don't see it, let me give you a quick tour, okay? The Trumpet wants to put import tariffs into place again against any country out there. Sure, most still have import tariffs - the EU certainly isn’t the norm - but over the last couple decades there has been worldwide understanding that we should thrive for lower tariffs and less trade restrictions. In 1947 32 nations signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which wanted to "reduce tariffs and other trade barriers" among the signing countries. Over the years, with globalisation hitting in more and more, more nations joined the agreement and tariffs and trade restrictions got less and less. Based on the work that had been done under the GATT framework, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was established by 123 nations in 1995. A huge part of this hard work is at stake now that one of the biggest economies of the world threatens to leave the WTO. As I'm typing this, the Trumpet has just announced that the U. S. will not ratify TPP. A small step for a Trumpet, but a huge one for humankind. Anyway, I'm drifting off. And the effects of the U. S. leaving the WTO and other international trade policies could fill another #TMIishTuesday. Let me know, if you are interested in that! * TPP - Trans-Pacific Partnership * TTIP - Transatlatic Trade & Investment Partnership 3. Ego vs. opinions This might even be the most important factor that got him the crucial votes in the swing states* which ultimately led to the Trumpet winning the entire election. All the way during his candidacy - in the internal Rep duels as well - he has been very straightforward about basically anything he represented. He made clear his goals basically on day 1 of the Rep internal campaign and, from what I can tell, he sticked to them. All this "The U. S. don't need any foreign trade" thing, all this "I don't give a f*ck about minorities" hatred, all this "I'm the king of the world" behaviour - it was there from the very beginning. And even if Clinton didn't change her campaign too much, too - just by not letting anyone exert ANY influence on his campaign, the Trumpet really presented the "I am me, I won't change for others" attitude. When most candidates try to take on some viewpoints of the other candidates of their party to rule out competitors, he didn't do that. Cause he didn't need to. The whole "I won't change for others" thing was already bearing fruit. Many Americans are apparently still looking for a father figure to look up to. And that's EXACTLY what they got. ...Although you might argue that someone, who is as bold as the Trumpet, is not exactly a father figure… Granted, but he's definitely "the strong man" the people were looking for. And I guess the Americans just thought Obama didn't take measures drastic enough to cope with the (perceived as well as existing) problems the U. S. were faced with. * swing state = "a state that could reasonably be won be either the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate" Finally: Judging from the younger history, it just made sense that a Republican was elected president: The last three presidents all took two terms in office - and after each 8 year period a president of the other "big" party - Democrats and Republicans - was elected into office. Right, I'll leave you with that. This post turned out way more subjective than I planned to. But I never promised that. And remember how I started this post? "Disclaimer: I can't treat certain people the same as everyone else." I guess, that's exactly what's happened now. Sorry not sorry! :P Before I go, please let me know what you thought of this post and what your thoughts on the new president are. Do you hate him, do you respect him, do you like him? Place a comment, tweet me, dm me, or do anything else you can think of to get to me. Oh and today's TMIish Queer Shoutout goes to: Anyway Köln TV, the queer YouTube channel of youth centre Anyway in Cologne. I stumbled across the their YouTube channel last week and really liked the videos in which the team took to the streets to interview the people of Cologne on queer topics: Can they tell who identifies as straight, lesbian, or bi just by appearance? Does it work better when the choices are straight, gay, and pansexual? What do you imagine gay sex to look like? And the one that I liked best: How do people react when they are asked to film two guys for a minute and suddenly one proposes to the other right in front of the Cologne Dom cathedrale? Their videos are well thought of and, most of the times, involve strangers they meet on the street. If understand German, check them out and drop a sub! As always: Next #TMIishTuesday next Tuesday. If you have any questions in the meantime, just ask away. Whatever you’re curious about - I don’t bite. :) Until then: Stay mighty! Linkage: - Wikipedia on TPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership - Wikipedia on TTIP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership - Wikipedia on swing states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_state - Anyway Köln TV channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/AnywayKoelnTV - Anyway Köln website: http://www.anyway-koeln.de/ Oh, and here’s some self-promo: - Last #TMIishTuesday: http://mightbedamian.tumblr.com/post/156001271441/tmiishtuesday-45-guys-cant-wear-make-up - More #TMIishTuesdays: mightbedamian.tumblr.com/tagged/tmi - Poll to decide next week's topic and more very cool stuff: www.twitter.com/mightbedamian - Even more very cool stuff: mightbedamian.tumblr.com