#also one of my best friends is a media studies major and queer. she is truly being hit the hardest of us all

[neurotheatre]

i’m obsessed with this “holding space” meme and here is why. as a liberal arts theatre student (derogatory), i unfortunately knew EXACTLY what that interviewer meant upon first watching the clip. everyone’s walking around asking wtf holding space means, while my friends and i are walking around talking about how much our professors would love if one of us said that in class. like oh you BET dr.[redacted] takes a deep inhale before writing on the board whenever a student makes an intentional effort to add to the conversation by expanding on their peers but also making space for a potentially new idea about the larger societal implications about this. and you also bet that dr.[redacted] goes by their first name, as well as the rest of the theatre department. anyways, shoutout to the concept holding space and normal people finding out abt it bc it is truly so silly.

[renthony]

Hi! Could you talk about what it’s like being an independent media researcher and how you became one? Did you go to school for communications or media studies? How do you make money?

I’m about to graduate college and I really want to go into the media studies field but I haven’t really figured out what the best way for me to do that is. I have a lot of similar research interests as you (animation, censorship, media analysis, queer media) and I’m disabled so I’ve been worried about not having the energy for a traditional 9 to 5 sort of job, so I’d love to hear more about how you’re able to do the research you’re passionate about!

Honestly, I got here by accident, and I'm still figuring things out as I go. I don't make much money and right now I feel like my work is in a period of transition. I have plans, but some days it feels like I'm barely making baby steps.

I started writing when I was pretty young, and I read every single "how to write" guide I could get my hands on via the library or bookstore. I wrote constantly. Short stories, various false starts at baby's first novel, even newsletters for school activities and community clubs. I was most focused on fiction at first, but I learned a lot about nonfiction as well.

I got involved in online writing communities back when forums were still a big deal, and I joined Twitter back in 2009 when it was still new and there was a massive author and freelancer community. (Anyone else remember before retweets were a thing? We had to copy, paste, and manually type out "RT @[user]" like barbarians.) I learned an absolute fuckton about the craft and the industry by talking directly with other writers, literary agents, editors, and various other people in the field. From the time I was like 14, I was interacting with professional writers, sharing my work for feedback, and racking up rejection letters from magazines and literary agents (which was a badge of honor in the communities I was hanging out in, because it meant you were working hard and refusing to quit). When I was 17, my best friend even scraped together money from their shitty fast food job to pay for us to attend a major writing conference in Denver, where we participated in all kinds of classes and panels with industry professionals.

My mother was also writing at the time, and I got a lot of support from her. She had a blog that got a decent amount of interaction, because this was right around the rise of the Mommy Blogger and my mom wrote from the perspective of a socially-isolated tattooed punk mom who never planned to have kids (which was unusual in a landscape of perfect housewives with perfect photogenic babies with weirdly-spelled Mormon names they chose when they were kids). Eventually my mom started writing for a website owned by Yahoo, to supplement the household income while staying home to care for my little siblings. When I decided I wanted to take a whack at freelancing, she gave me a lot of advice on how to get started. I also had a writing class at school taught by a teacher who made it a class project to submit to magazines, so I basically got a head-start on freelance life. I wrote a lot of random articles for a website that's since gone defunct, and I submitted a lot of short stories to contests and magazines. Didn't really make a lot of money, but I learned a ton and got a lot of experience.

When I made it to college, I studied anthropology and French. I'd planned to study history, but switched my track after a single semester because anthropology suited me better. I took a lot of AP classes in high school and did well on all the standardized testing, so I managed to get a full academic scholarship and skip right past a few of my gen eds. Unfortunately for me, I had a lot of difficult life experiences during that time period, and I started to struggle in pretty much everything that wasn't directly related to my degree. I failed Latin so bad I didn't bother to go to the final exam, because even a perfect grade wouldn't have saved me. I fucked up my algebra grade beyond salvation. Those two classes alone tanked my GPA enough that I lost my academic scholarship, and I wound up dropping out entirely. Grades in my required courses were solid, but the scholarship requirements meant I had to do well across the board or lose my funding.

My mother still has debt from getting loans to pursue a master's degree, and I knew damn well I didn't want that kind of student debt piling up on me, so I opted for dropping out. Sometimes I regret it a little, but I honestly think it was the best option. I was having so much emotional upheaval on top of the academic stress that I needed time away to figure myself out. I graduated high school early, so I was like two years younger than everyone around me, and I didn't have many friends. I lived at home and came to campus just long enough to go to class, so I had nothing in common with my classmates who lived in dorms and participated in campus activities. I missed orientation because I registered late, the administration sent me to the transfer student registration day instead of the new student registration day, and I didn't get any "here's how you navigate university life" support. I didn't know I was supposed to have a one-on-one academic advisor for a year and a half, and when I finally met him, his only comment on the matter was, "wow, I wondered why you hadn't come to see me yet!" without any sort of inquiry into how a fuckup on that scale was allowed to happen in the first place. I wasn't set up for success by university administration, and I burnt out hard. I dropped out.

My wife encouraged me to do what was going to be best for me mentally instead of letting finances dictate my next step. She had a steady job, and even though we were still pretty broke, her support let me drop out of college and focus on recovery. A lot of people gave me shit because their perception was that I was dropping out of college to become "just a housewife," and they couldn't fathom why. From my perspective, I'd been given a lifeline.

I took care of our shitty little one-bedroom apartment. I read a lot of books and played a lot of Minecraft. When I felt up to it, I did some more freelancing. My wife was working unholy hours in a factory and we didn't get to spend much time together. I started doing tarot reading as a side hustle, and we started making vague plans to move somewhere better for us, but saving up was hard.

Things felt stagnant for a long time. I didn't write very much, I wasn't really doing anything related to my studies. I wrote when I had energy, and I kept scraping together extra cash doing tarot readings while my wife started working a new job in a lumber yard. Her support is the only reason I was able to recover and figure myself out, so big shout-out to my beloved working woman wifey. God, I love her.

Eventually we packed up and moved to a different state so we could be closer to my family. I got a job baking for a coffee shop. I wrote whenever I could. When I got laid off from the coffee shop, I realized there was no way in hell I could keep working a regular job without sacrificing my health, so I went back to writing full-time. (The Queen of Cups was written during this period.)

At some point I started getting back into anthropology and history research, just for fun. I didn't have money to finish my degree, but I had enough academic experience to know how to track down and evaluate good sources. I wasn't really trying to do anything for career purposes, I was just incredibly bored and wanted to study something again, so I got really, really into studying local history. Once I read everything I could about that, I jumped to another topic I was interested in, and then another. Media studies became my biggest focus as a natural outgrowth of my interests in speculative fiction, animation, and the history of the entertainment industry. I studied anthropology in school because I loved learning how and why humans do the things we do, and media studies always felt like an obvious facet of that. It's part of why I was always obsessed with cave paintings and paleolithic sculptures--people make art! It's what we do! It's what we've always done!

Anyway, I now live in a university town that has resources available to the public, and I have friends who work in various university libraries or as professors. I started making use of whatever I could get access to. I read a lot of nonfiction books from independent researchers pursuing their own passion projects, I got really into video essays on YouTube, and I had the epiphany that you don't actually have to finish college to study and write about things as long as you put in the quality research and source all your information. At some point I started calling it my "DIY academia," which my university-employed friends found utterly delightful.

Honestly, I credit my formal-academia friends with a lot. They've all been an incredible source of support and reassurance, and have helped me track down quite a few sources I was having trouble getting my hands on. Everyone do yourself a favor and make friends with someone who works in a university library.

I started a Patreon several years ago (in like 2017 I think?), primarily for my fiction writing, but there's plenty of other things that have shown up there over the years (art, cosplay, essays, etc.). As I started getting more into my DIY academia, folks started expressing interest in seeing me write about it. My tumblr posts about media generated a decent amount of attention, I'd managed to build up a platform, and it wasn't hard to say, "okay, screw it: I have freelance experience and I know how to write a paper, does anyone want to pay me for it?"

I haven't been submitting to existing publications like I used to, mostly because I don't have a decent portfolio assembled. My old freelance work in high school and college was for a platform that closed down a decade ago, and no matter how popular they get I can't bring myself to include tumblr posts alongside professional credits. My current plan is to build a portfolio on my website showing off the commissions I've been taking, and then start submitting to magazines and newspapers again between my other work. I'd love to eventually write for something like Polygon or IGN.

It's hard. I love research, I love writing, and I love sharing information with people, but having to DIY everything is really, really hard. I often feel like I'm just throwing nonsense into the void in the hope someone will like it and leave a tip in my Ko-Fi. I don't have formal academic credentials beyond "I was planning my senior thesis about the ethics of investigating ancient burial sites, but then I dropped out." I just have a neurodivergent brain, a handful of special interests, a wife who works the graveyard shift in a lab to pay our bills, and the ability to hyperfixate on research for absurd lengths of time.

The most common advice I used to get about freelancing is that you just have to keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. It's been years since then, but I think the advice still applies. Read a lot, learn a lot, and write about the things you're most interested in. Search around and look for magazines and newspapers and websites that accept unsolicited freelance submissions. Read the other articles they publish to see how your work stacks up. Submit, submit, submit. Rake in rejection letters and keep them as a reminder of how hard you're working. If you're up for it, start a Patreon to post the things you don't submit elsewhere. The worst thing that can happen is that people don't give you money, but maintaining it still helps you lay the groundwork for a portfolio and a reader base.

I deal with a lot of hellacious impostor syndrome. I worry a lot that I'm just a hack who doesn't actually know what they're talking about. Like I said, I got here totally by accident, but whatever I'm doing seems to be working for me. I'm broke, but my work is being read, and opportunities for more work show up when I least expect them. I'm not sure what's next for me, but I'm excited to figure it out. Money's tight, but I keep enduring despite the chaos. I throw things at the wall, I see what sticks, I clean up whatever flops and then try it again later. Wash, rinse, repeat.

It's hard, but so is everything else. I like it better than a lot of other things I could be doing.

[decodingellipses]

Alexis Nikole, The TikTok Forager

This piece is part of the Person of Interest vertical at @bonappetit

Alexis Nikole considers her TikTok fame a fortuitous accident. She knew nothing about the platform until she started an account for her day job as a social media manager. But when the 28-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, began experimenting on her personal page during the pandemic, she got more than she bargained for. Specifically: over 600,000 enthusiastic followers and 10.3 million likes.

Since April of last year, Nikole’s now viral account has been showcasing her immeasurable knowledge of foraging and cooking with wild plants: a sorbet made out of Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica), hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) turned into lush salads, and common dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) battered and fried like fritters. She studied environmental science and theater at Ohio State University, and often combines her two passions on the platform—where you’ll find her singing original songs about cattails and sassafras.

By sharing excellent foraging tips laced with undiluted humor, Nikole’s intentions were for people to take agency over their meals and make the most of foods that were free and readily available all around; especially after COVID-19 hit American shores and shopping was anxiety inducing. During the early months of the pandemic, Nikole’s TikToks focused on how foraged goods could extend groceries and increase access to fresh ingredients, especially for those living in food deserts. This is precisely why Nikole’s videos are so grounding; in these times, it’s crucial to feel some sense of self-sufficiency and stability.

Amid global adversity, Nikole forages because it reminds her that she’s human—and humans, at their very core, are part of the ecosystem, no matter how much we distance ourselves from that truth. I called up Nikole to learn more about her foraging background, how she practices gratitude for what is all around, and why the world needs more hyper-localized food systems.

Foraging makes me feel I am a part of something bigger… and that feeling is really good at chasing the depression away. Typically I go out between two to five times a week on average. In the dead of winter, I might only go once, and during the dog days of summer, I’m in the woods and nearby parks every single day. I’ll jam to ’80s funk the entire walk to the creek, but the earbuds go away when I get there. I want to hear everything—the crunching leaves under my feet, the babbling brook, and people conversing and laughing in the distance.

I used to dream of being a pop star… by night and a scientist by day. I’ve been surrounded by music for a long time. I was three when I joined the childrens’ choir at my dad’s Baptist church, I started classical piano at age five, I was in choir every year through junior high and high school, I performed a cappella in high school, and was on the e-board of ukulele club in college. I was never a prodigy, but music brings me so much joy, so I love being able to sneak that into my TikTok videos.

The best meal I’ve made using a foraged ingredient is probably… chicken-of-the-woods mushroom (Laetiporus sulphureus) “crab cakes” and an American sea rocket (Cakile edentula) and steamed beach pea (Lathyrus japonicus) salad tossed in olive oil infused with goldenrod (Solidago). Very gourmet!

My curiosity for the outdoors… was nurtured from a very young age by my parents. My two sets of grandparents knew that scouting was good for building connections and recognized the importance of getting outside, and thus got my parents into it early. My mom scouted longer than my dad did and went to sleepaway camp in New Hampshire in the summertime. Eventually, while working at Procter & Gamble, she gardened on the weekends to decompress. I would help her, spreading mulch or digging into the earth with a tiny trowel while she quizzed me on the plants. Unbeknownst to my mom, I was picking up a lot of information. From there it grew into a love of all things growing plants outdoors.

You don't have to go full forager… to reduce your environmental impact. Over the past few decades society has trended away from a localized food system, toward a global one. On the upside, it’s much easier to find ingredients like star anise at the grocery store. However, access to tomatoes year-round means they’ve got a higher carbon footprint because they traveled thousands of miles to get to your plate. Even shopping at your local farmstand helps with lowering your carbon footprint; it’s also a little easier than identifying a plant and bringing it home to eat.

Everyone was afraid of going to the grocery store… when I started my TikTok foraging videos in April 2020. So I thought: Hey! Here are a few plants that are really common and probably growing in your neighborhood that you can gather, and maybe that’ll stretch your groceries a bit.

Poor and POC communities are hit hardest… when major disasters hit. We saw the same thing playing out in Texas with the massive winter storm. So I offer my knowledge to help someone who needs to get some fresh food on their plate.

As a Black, queer female forager on the internet… I’m not the person people expect to see excited about foraging, the outdoors, biology, botany, and history. I have delightful forager friends who are white, and I notice they don’t get questioned nearly as much as I do. That’s heartbreaking. When my dad learned that my account becoming viral also meant me becoming susceptible to online harassment, he got angry and told me, “I’ve been alive for 65 years. It doesn’t feel good that you’re still called into question because of who you are.”

Though, it all feels worth it when… a follower sends me a thank-you message saying, “Because of you, while I was out walking I recognized this plant and it made me feel like my neighborhood was a cooler and happier place.” To be less unacquainted with plants or more connected to surroundings because of me is a huge win. We take better care of the things we know.

[thebestpersonherelovesbucky]

Get your copy today!

Queer Sci Fi's annual flash fiction anthology is finally here - and this year the theme is Ink. There's a giveaway too!

Every year Queer Sci Fi holds a flash fiction contest that solicits stories from writers around the world, and publishes the best stories as an annual anthology. 

INK (NOUN)

Five definitions to inspire writers around the world and an unlimited number of possible stories to tell:

1) A colored fluid used for writing

2) The action of signing a deal

3) A black liquid ejected by squid

4) Publicity in the written media

5) A slang word for tattoos

Ink features 300-word speculative flash fiction stories from across the rainbow spectrum, from the minds of the writers of Queer Sci Fi.

Super excited to be a part of this! Out of so many stories submitted, mine (a fantasy/horror with a cursed faery prince and his enby lover) was one selected to be featured in the book!

@luninosity​​ is also in this!  So, y’know, lots of reasons to look into getting a copy!!

Available now for pre-order. Official release date is Tuesday August 10th

Publisher | Amazon Kindle | Amazon Paperback | Amazon Hardcover | iBooks |

Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Scribd | Thalia | Vivlio | Goodreads

Giveaway

QSF is giving away an Amazon gift card with this tour:

Direct Link: https://kingsumo.com/g/gp47qq/win-a-25-amazon-gift-card

Excerpts

“Vervain had watched, one by one, as her childhood friends blossomed with red, the words of their soulmates inked into their skins. The stories of their lives together, from the day they met to the day they would die, unfolding each day. Her sister Iris, an aspiring bard, had woken one morning after meeting a girl in the village, the words poet meets potion-makershining bright and scarlet. Vervain’s friend Raven had dashed across the marketplace the day two separate lines had sprung forth on their skin—two loves, three souls entwined in the ink of their hearts.” —Lauren Triola, The Unmarked

“I love our sentient AI high school, EduTron 6000 (kids call her “Edie”). She plays soothing classical music in study hall and always listens when you have a bad day. But she’s a stickler for rules, and hates graffiti, which put a major damper on my epic prom-posal plan.” —Brenna Harvey, EduTron 6000 + Principal Vertner 4Ever

“I get out of the shower and it's there. Dripping down the mirror—splip—and forming a rivulet of color across the tile floor. Thinner than paint, more vibrant than water. Sometimes it's iridescent, but today it's just...bright. A stream of colorful consciousness leading me across the bathroom, down the hall, out of...wait. I go to my bedroom and hastily put on whatever I can reach. Yesterday's bra, the jeans from the floor, finger comb my short hair, a random t-shirt—purple. The same color the ink is today. Does that mean something?” —Geneva Vand, The Colors of Fate

“Marianne paced the length of the small hall that connected the living room, and the door to the outside, to the bedroom, and the door to the inside. Temporary steps, tracing a path towards a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Beyond the crack of the door, she saw her wife sleeping soundly in the cool of the late night. Temporary wife, temporary bedroom.” —Brooke K. Bell, Temporary/Permanent

“The round stone room that they lock the poet in contains nothing but a writing desk. The desk, of course, is fully stocked. Piles of creamy paper, elegantly carved sable-fur brushes, a pyramid of neatly-stacked inksticks, and an inkstone, its well full of perfectly still water. Sunlight streams down from a single window, high overhead and barred. Too high to reach even when she stands on the desk, its thin legs wobbling beneath her.” —Jamie Lackey, Inksticks and Paper Swans

“Rna’la arrived at Intergalactic Date-A-Thon and signed in using zir own gelatinous fluid (no scratchy ballpoint for zem, thanks!) The human woman collecting signatures blushed pinkly. Rna’la’s hearts throbbed in zir throat. Probably not attending. Ze passed several individuals in the hallway. Some bowed, some ignored zem. Not everyone recognized the current ruler of Th’ul.” —M.X Kelly, To Have and to Hold and to Hold and to Hold

[freddiekluger]

Why Cap Being Internally Closeted Is Not Only Possible, But Valid Representation 

i wrote this to a lot of mitski and onsind, so you can’t blame me for any feelings that bleed through

now i don’t know if it actually exists, but i’ve heard of there being a lot of discourse surrounding the captains story arc regarding his sexuality- i believe the general gist is that having a queer character that remains closeted to themselves is either unrealistic or ‘bad’ representation, and as someone who really treasures the captain and relates to his story so far a lot, i thought i might break this down a bit. 

i’ve divded up every complaint i’ve heard about this into four main questions which i’ll be covering below the ‘keep reading’, because this is gonna be pretty comprehensive. full disclaimer i reference my experiences as an ex-evangelical non binary butch lesbian a couple times, and i spent a year studying repression and the psychological impacts of high demand sexual ethics for my graduating sociology paper, so this is coming with some background to it i swear

the big questions:

can you EVEN be gay and not know it????

but isn't this just ANOTHER coming out arc, and aren't we supposed to be moving beyond those?

but if cap can't have a relationship with a man because he's a ghost, what's the point?

since cap's dead, isn't this technically bury your gays, and isn't that bad? 

1. "but is it really possible to not know? Isn't that bad representation?"

short answer: no and no.

before i get into the validity of the captain's ignorance about his own orientation as 21st century rep, let's break down how the hell the captain can be so clearly attracted to men and still not even consider the possibility that he might be gay, as brought to you by someone who literally experienced this shit.

the captain's particular situation is both a direct result of the lack of information around human sexuality he would have had (aka clear messaging that it's actually possible for him to be attracted to men. i don't mean acceptable or allowed, i mean physically capable of happening- the idea that orientations other than heterosexual exist and are available to him, a man), and a subconscious survival mechanism. the environment in which he lives is outright hostile to gay people, while the military man identity he has constructed for himself doesn't allow for any form of deviation from societal norms, let alone one so base level and major. as a result of this killer combo of information and environment, instincts take over and the mind does it's best to repress the ‘deviant’ feelings until a. one of these two things changes, or b. the act of repression becomes so destructive and/or exhuasting that it becomes impossible to maintain. the key to maintaining a long-term state of repression of desire is diverting that energy elsewhere, and a high-demand group such as the military is the perfect place for the captain to do this (this technqiue is frequented by religions and extremist ideologies worldwide, but that’s not really what we’re here to focus on). 

while the brain is actively repressing ‘deviant’ feelings (aka gay shit), this doesn't mean you don't experience the feelings at all. when performed as a subconscious act of survival, the aim of repression is to minimise/transform the feelings into a state where they can no longer cause immediate danger, and something as big as sexual/romantic orientation is going to keep popping up, but as long as the individual in question never understands what they’re feeling, they’ll be able to continue relatively undisturbed. you know how in heist movies, the leader of the group will only tell each team member part of the plan so they can’t screw things up for everyone else if they get caught? it’s kind of like that.

this is how the captain appears to have operated in life AND in death, and it’s a relatively common experience for lgbtq people who’ve grown up in similar circumstances (aka with a lack of information and in an unfriendly-to-hostile environment), and accounts for how some people can even go on to get married and have children before realising that they’re gay and/or trans. 

personally, while i can now identify what were strong homo crushes all the way back to childhood, at the time i genuinely had no idea. there was the underlying sense that i probably shouldn't tell people how attached i was to these girls because i would seem weird, and that my feelings were stronger than the ones other people used to describe friendships, but like-like them in the way that other girls like-liked boys? no way! actually scratch that, it wasn't even a no way, because i had no idea that i even could. i even had my own havers, at least in terms of the emotional hold and devotion she got from me, except she treated me way less well than cap’s beau. snatches of the existence of lgbt people made it through the cone of silence, i definitely heard the words gay and lesbian, but my levels of informations mirrored those that the captain would have had: virtually none, beyond the idea that these words exist, some people are them, and that's not something that we support or think is okay, so let's just not speak about it. despite only attending religious schools for the first couple years of primary, until i got my own technology and social media accounts to explore lgbtq content on my own- option a out of the two catalysts for change- the possibility of me being gay was not at all on my radar. don’t even get me started on how long it took me to explore butchness and my overall gender, two things which now feel glaringly obvious. 

when shit starts to break down, you can also make the conscious choice to repress which can delay the eventual smashing down of the mental closet door for a time (essentially when the closet door starts to open, you just say ‘no thanks’ and shut it again by pointedly Not Thinking About It). in the abscence of identifying yourself by your attractions, it becomes quite common to identify with a lack- in my case, this meant becoming proud of how sensible and not boy crazy i was, and in the captain’s case, this means becoming proud of how sensible and not sensuous/wild (aka woman crazy) he was, identifying with his LACK of desire for women and partying (which, even in the 40s, involved the expectation of opposite sex romances and hook ups). i’m not saying that’s the only reason he’s a rule follower, but i think the contrast between About Last Night and Perfect Day pretty much support this. (the captain getting on his high horse about general party antics that he inherently felt excluded from because of underlying awareness of his difference & his tendency to project his regimented expectations of himself onto others, vs. joining in the reception party, awareness of how the environment supports difference in the form of clare and sam, and relaxing his own rules by dancing with men- the captain doesn’t mind a party when feels like he has a place there.)

so the captain was operating in a high demand, highly regulated environment (primarily the military, but also early 20th century England itself), with regimented roles, rules, and expectations. working on the assumption that he wouldn't have had out/disclosing lgbt friends, he would have had little to no exposure to lgbt identities, and what information he did receive would have been hushed and negatively geared. while my world started to open up when i started high school was allowed to have my own phone + instagram account, resulting in me realising something wasn't quite 'right' within a few years (making me a relatively early realiser compared to those who don't come out to themselves until adulthood), in life the captain never had that experience. he didn't receive the information he needed, his environment didn't grow less hostile. with the near-exception of havers related heartbreak, his well disciplined and lifelong method of repression never became destructive/exhaustive enough to permanently override the danger signals in his mind and allow him to put his feelings into words. neither of the most common catalysts for change happened for him, so he continued as usual, even after his death.

BUT, and here’s where we come to why this is actually great representation, arrival of mike and Alison represents the opening up of new world. for the first time, the captain is actively made aware of the fact that his environment is no longer hostile, and better than that, it’s affirming. he’s also getting access to positively geared information about lgbtq people and identities, so option a of the two catalysts for change is absolutely present, and resoundingly positive. 

the captain’s arc is also relatively unique as it acknowledges the oppressive nature of his environment, but actually focuses on the internal consequences, and the way that systems like those that the captain lived in succeed because they turn us into our own oppressors. for whatever reason, we repress ourseslves, and often can’t help it, and i find that the significance of the journey to overcome that is often overlooked in more mainstream queer media. perhaps it’s just not very cinematic, or it remains too confronting for cishet audiences, but ghosts manages to touch on it with a lovely amount of humour and hope. Jamie Babbit’s But I’m A Cheerleader is another favourite piece of queer media for the same reasons.

not only does it show this, but as the captain continues to get gayer and lean into some of his less conventional traits (like an interest in fashion and the wedding planning), it shows lgbt people who have been or are going through this that there CAN be a positive outcome. it takes a lot to unlearn all the things that have painted you as wrong, especially when a massive institution is desperate to continue doing so, but you can do it, you can be happy, and it's never too late. (i've been meaning to say that last point for ages for ages, but a mutual beat me to it here)

2. not just another coming out arc

i absolutely support the demand for queer stories that don’t center around coming out (it’s like shrodinger’s queer: if you’re not coming out on screen, do you really even exist?), but i don’t align with the criticisms that the captain should already be out. for the reasons mentioned above, the captain’s particular story is fairly different to the ‘young white teenager who mostly knows gay is fine, it’s just everyone else that’s got the problem, but have a unremarkably straight sounding soundtrack, a trauma porn romance, and a cishet saviour’ that we keep seeing. the captain’s ongoing journey with his sexuality emphasises the overaching theme of the show: recovering from trauma and humanity’s endless capacity for growth, and i think that’s worth showing over and over again until it stops being true.

additionally, while the captain’s journey regarding his gayness is a big part of his character and story, ghosts makes it clear that it’s not the ONLY part, and being gay is far from his ONLY characteristic or dramatic/comedic engine. the fact that i’m even having to congratulate ghosts for doing that really shows how much film and television is struggling huh.

while all queer media is, and should be, subject to criticism, i think if it helps even one person then it absolutely deserves to exist, and i can say i’ve found the captain’s journey to be the lgbt story i’ve found that’s closest to my own, which says a lot considering he’s a dead world war 2 soldier who hangs out with other ghosts including a slutty Tory, a georgian noblewoman, and a literal caveman. 

3. if captain gay, why he no have boyfriend???? 

another complaint that’s been circulating is that since the captain doesn’t, and likely won’t, have a boyfriend, that makes him Bad Representation because it follows the sad single gay trope. i kind of get the logic from this one, and a lot of it is up to personal interpretation, but part of me really enjoys the fact that the captain’s journey towards accepting himself is separated from having a relationship.

coming out is often paired with having romantic/sexual relationships (either as the reason or reward for doing so). my own struggle with repression didn't end the second that came out, and i still struggle with letting myself develop & acknowledge romantic feelings as a result of actively shutting them (and most other feelings in general) down for years, and statistics show that lgbtq youth in particular tend not to live out their 'teen years' until their twenties. by not giving cap a relationship straight away, ghosts separates the act of claiming identity and sexual orientation from finding a partner (two things which are, more often than not, separate), and also provides some very nice validation to folks who have yet to have the relationship they want, especially when lots of mainstream queer media is now jumping on the cishet media bandwagon of acting as if every person loses their virginity and has a life defining relationship at sixteen. it’s essentially a continuation of the earlier theme of “it’s never too late”, and who’s to say the captain won’t get a gay bear ghost boyfriend to go haunt nazis with??? people die all the time, it could happen.

(also, i think him and julian will have definitely shagged at least once. it was a low moment for both of them and they refuse to speak of it.)

lots of asexual/ace spectrum fans have come out to say how much they’ve loved being able to headcanon cap as ace, and while that’s not a headcanon i personally have, i think it’s brilliant that ace fans feel seen by his character- we’re all in this soup together babey (and sorry for cursing everyone still reading this with that cap/julian headcanon. i’m just a vessel)

4. “okay, but cap’s a GHOST- doesn’t that make this Bury Your Gays?”

this is a bit of a complex one, but i’m going to say no as a result of the following break down.

Bury Your Gays (BYG), aka the trope where lgbtq characters are consistently killed off (and often with a heavy dose of trauma, while cishet characters survive) is probably one of my least favourite lgbt media tropes. BYG has two main points:

1. the lgbt character is killed, thus removing them from story entirely- hence the use of the phrase ‘killed OFF’ (killed off of the show/film)

2. the character’s death reinforces the perception that lgbtq people’s lives must end in tragedy, instead of being long and fulfilling, or are inherently less valuable. bonus points if the character is killed in a hate crime or confesses same-gender love right before they die (that one implies that queer love genuinely has no future!)

not every death of an lgbtq character is bury your gays, and i personally feel that the captain is an example of an lgbt death that isn’t. 

first of all, while the captain is dead, so are the vast majority of characters in ghosts. the premise of the show means that death is not the end of the line for its characters- for most of them, it’s the only reason we get to see them on screen at all. as such, the captain being dead doesn’t remove him from the story, so point one is irrelevant.

at the time of posting, we don’t know how or why the captain died, but we've had nothing to suggest his death was in any way related to his latent sexuality, so his mysterious death doesn’t actively play into the supposedly inherent tragedy of queer lives, nor the supposedly lesser value. that’s as of right now- since we don’t know the circumstances of his death it’s a little tough to analyse properly. while the captain’s life absolutely features missed opportunities and it’s fair share of tragedy, hope and growth (which seems to be the theme of this post) abounds in equal measure. the captain may not be alive, but we DO get to see him growing and having a relatively happy existence, that for the most part seems to be getting even better as he learns to open up and be himself unapologetically- that doesn’t feel like BYG to me.

while writng this, it’s just occured to me that death really is a second chance for most of the ghosts, especially with the introduction of alison. from mary learning to read, to thomas finding modern music, they’ve all been given the chance explore things they never could have while they were alive, and hopefully grow enough to one day be sucked off move on.

in conclusion,

i love the captain very much and i hope his arc lives up to the standards it’s set so far. i don’t know where to put this in this post, but i’d alo like to say i LOVE how in Perfect Day, the captain wasn’t used as an educational experienced for fanny at all. i am very tired of people expecting me to be the walking talking homophobe educator and rehabilitator, so the fact that it’s alison and the other ghosts that call fanny out while the captain just gets to have fun with the wedding organisation made me very happy.

here’s a few other cap posts that i’ve done:

the captain’s arc if adam and the film crew stayed

a possible cap coming out 

the captain backstory headcanon

if you’ve read this far,

thank you!

also check out @alex-ghosts-corner , this post inspired me very much to write this

[the-cookie-of-doom]

Good morning! Whats your favorite show/movie? Who are your favorite characters? Why do you like them so much? Also!! Did you have a good sleep?

Okay so I was a film major for a while, and I have opinions. 

Penny Dreadful 

I love this show. Like, so much. I adore it. I can not get enough of that show. Just all of the imagery, and the fantastic writing and acting. The episode intro alone is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Eva Green is a goddess and I love everything she’s been in. The take on classic horror stories is So Good, and it actually became the inspiration for my Gay Frankenstein story! (Started as a stitch AU, and then went completely OC after I had Ideas) but the show itself is so intimate? I think it’s largely that the period they’re in, everything was so repressed and restricted. So when the characters break out of those moments, it’s more meaningful. And the love-hate relationship between Ms. Ives and Malcolm in season one? Exquisite.  I could literally write essay’s about this show, but I’ll restrain myself and just say: it’s the best ensemble show I’ve ever seen. The characters come together, but they also each have their own distinct lives that sometimes intersect, but in s2 especially, are quite separate. They are constant with one another like ensemble shows usually portray. Also gothic horror and romance? My absolute favorite. 

Anything by Guillermo del Toro

This man Owns My Entire Soul. I’m not even joking, everything he writes and directs is perfection. Crimson Peak is probably my favorite (I have a stitch AU for this too ;) ) because again, Gothic horror and romance. I’m a slut for that shit. Also Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain? Delightful casting. I think it’s obvious by now that I love tragic relationships, so their dynamic is *chef’s kiss* amazing. they’re so damaged. And this quote right here is one of the BEST things I’ve ever read: 

“But the horror... The horror was for love. The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all.”

Engrave that on my headstone, please?? I’ve got a sort-of Dorian Gray AU (it’s delightful) that’s basically built on this entire premise. Mitch makes the mistake of falling in love with Stiles, and does many terrible things because of it. Mostly to himself, at least. 

I think my love of Crimson Peak is very closely tied with The Shape of Water. another beautiful movie, I could wax poetic about this forever. it was beautifully written, and such an artistic movie. I love the way it was filmed, and the set design, and all of the subtle imagery. Such as Elisa’s apartment being cast in cooler tones, it always felt very damp and had evidence of water damage, compared to Giles’, a mirror image of her own, in more warm tones. This is another one I could (and have) write essays about. There is so much packed into this movie, from the themes on toxic masculinity and entitlement, to the conversation on queerness and race and disability, and how all the various relationships are portrayed. Like. there is so much to pick apart in this movie. 

Aside from that, ofc Hell Boy deserves an honorable mention because i grew up on those movies. I’m pretty sure the Golden Army especially is responsible for who I am today, given all the lore on the fae in that universe. Wow, that explains so much about me... Also one of my first WoW characters was an elf named Nuala xD I still have her, too, and it’s been like 12 years lol

Near-Future Sci-Fi

Sci-fi is one of my favorite genres, I am a huge nerd for theoretical and astrophysics. But my favorite kind of sci-fi is the stuff that still takes place on Earth, rather than epic battles in space. Ex Machina and Annihilation are at the top of that list. Alex Garland is another writer/director that I love. He has the same kind of approach as del Toro, where he puts a lot of fine details into his work. And I love that it’s very cerebral; there are so many layers to Ex Machina. My English 101 prof actually refused to analyze it in class when I suggested it to him, because he didn’t think my class could. Basically handle? Dissecting that movie? Because a lot of it comes across as very surface level, but in some cases when you look deeper, it’s actually suggesting the opposite of what you might think at first glance. (And he was right, my fellow students were awful. I miss that class though, it was one of my favorites T_T Mr. Ryder was an awesome dude and super chill.) 

Morgan is another good example. As you can see, I fucking love androids lol. Which brings me to another of my all time favorite movies: Cloud Atlas. I could literally watch this movie endlessly, I love it so much. The acting, the writing, the filming, all of it is top notch. And one thing they did in the movie that didn’t come across in the book, was reusing the same actors through the different eras in the book. That was just so neat, because it really encapsulates how connected these souls are, as we follow the threads of their story throughout time. If you haven’t seen the movie, I can’t recommend it enough.  

Another one I always think of alongside Cloud Atlas, even though they aren’t related at all, is Predestination. It’s a great movie that explores the idea of fate and free will in a really clever way, utilizes time travel in a very organized way that I think was neat (think Umbrella Academy. They even use briefcases! As you can see, I love sci-fi bureaucracy, it’s fun. In fact The Bureau is another movie I enjoyed) and the main character is actually, explicitly trans, which was cool. You basically get to see the entire story of their life, and I don’t want to spoil anything, but it’s just. So good. Mindfuckery galore. 

Shoot, and I almost forgot! Arrival! That is one of the best movies, and another one I could watch nonstop. It focuses on mathematics and linguistics and I swear to god, I almost altered my entire college course because of this movie. Amy Addams is brilliant, Jeremy Renner is so soft and nerdy, and again, it has an amazing take on time travel. I am very particular about how time is handled in Sci-fi, and this portrayal was one of my favorite. (Most of my physics studies have been dedicated to the theory of time, so like. Strong Opinions.) 

Fantasy

Stardust! It wasn’t until Good Omens can out that I realized Neil Gaiman is responsible for most of the stories I loved as a kid lol, and I had no idea he wrote stardust! But that is such a beautiful movie (I have a Stardust AU lol) and it’s definitely one of my comfort movies. Captain Shakespeare is one of the best characters ever, bless Robert de Niro. I would die for him. Fun fact, i had no idea Ipswitch was a real place until like. 2019. I 100% thought it was made up for the movie 😂

Alongside Stardust, I’ve always loved The Golden Compass. It’s fantasy, but also with that old-timey steampunk science feel, which is so fun and surprisingly difficult to find! 

Mortal Engines also has the same kind of feel, and it was such an epic movie in every sense of the word. I’m a little sad that after all the work that went into it, it didn’t get a dedicated following or fan base, because I feel there’s so much potential in it. But at the same time, fandom tends to gather around media that has plenty of flaws for us to repair with gold, and there wasn’t much room for that in Mortal Engines. 

I’m going to put Jupiter Ascending here even though it technically fits with the sci-fi, because that section is long as fuck and also this movie has such a fantastic feel. Mila Kunis? beautiful. The CGI? beautiful. Eddy Redmayne? One of the best villain portrayals i’ve ever seen. The whole oedipal vibe he had was immaculate, as was their portrayal of reincarnation, and just. The world building. GOD. I get so weak for through world building. Also the fkn intergalactic bureaucracy when they’re basically at the space DMV? One of my all time favorite scenes in movie history. 

Horror

I have very little room in my life for horror. As I said, I have strong movie opinions, especially when it comes to horror movies. I don’t like how most of them rely on cheap jump scares and overused gore and gratuitous rape scenes, instead of, y'know, actual good writing. 

Which is EXACTLY why I adore It: Chapter 1 & 2. It has none of those things, but still manages to be so terrifying. They are my favorite horror movies, and I’m saying this as someone who has genuine childhood trauma bc of the novel. Like. I couldn’t shower/take baths alone until I was almost 10 T_T When I was 6-7 and saw kids play by storm drains, I would run over screaming about how Pennywise was going to get them. Like, I had issues man. I was terrified to see the first one, and wouldn’t go until I could go with my best friend after she had already seen it, so she could warn me when something scary was about to happen 😂

And, one of my favorite aspects of the movie, and the thing that gave me Mad Respect for Any Muschietti? The way he filmed Bev and her father. They have a character who is literally being molested, but they never once have to show it. And yet their interactions are still so viscerally upsetting to watch. Sexploitation puts me off of most horror, and the fact that Muschietti doesn’t use it here, even when it would be actually somewhat justified? *chef’s kiss*. I love him. 

I love horror as a concept, I’m just really picky about it because I expect the writing to be good. I don’t like short cuts. But in a lot of cases, even if I don’t enjoy the movie itself, I love to watch analysis videos on youtube! I love to see the philosophy and symbolism in different horror movies, even if i don’t like to watch the movies themselves. It’s a fun hobby. 

Misc. 

Then in general, some other stuff I love in no particular order:

The Internship (Bless Dylan, Stuart is such a bitch and I love him) 

American Assassin (ofc. The writing itself is eh, but Mitch is my man) 

Dylan’s episode of Weird City. (I actually have a lot of feelings about this one. Jordan Peele is another amazing writer/director, I really need to catch up on his works.) 

Dorian Gray (*chef’s kiss*)

Rogue One (Makes me cry every time) 

WARCRAFT (Obviously this is a fav. It made me so happy, words cannot express.) 

Coraline and most other stop motion animation. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for that. 

Literally anything associated with Tim Burton. Fun fact, when I was 12 and in middle school, I planned to decorate my future house inspired by tim burton. Like, i had Plans. 

Most adaptations of Alice in Wonderland!

So! this got long as fuck! But you said you like that kind of thing lol 😂 I had kinda Eh sleep since I was up so late lmao, and I kept waking up (as usual, rip). And I’m so mad I go up for nothing! The dude I was supposed to show my listing to never showed, and is refusing to answer my calls >_> It’s been 2 hours now, and I still haven’t heard from him. But whatever, I already have a full price cash offer on the house so who cares. And that means I can play WoW all day, now! 

[stripyhorse23]

TV of 2020

1) I May Destroy You

I May Destroy You might not have been written during the pandemic, but when it arrived in June it felt like the sort of complicated, cathartic show that could have been.  Detailing one woman’s experience of rape and its aftermath, Michaela Coel (who wrote every episode) continually found rich narrative avenues in which to explore her characters’ individual experiences of sexual assault and consent.  If that makes the series sound concept-driven, it always placed its characters first; the push-and-pull between Arabella, Terry and Kwame is key to the ways in which Coel’s tender, curious writing is able to explore power dynamics within relationships, friendships and hook-ups.  Other, lesser shows that are this deliberately open-ended might feel opaque: it’s testament to the show’s confidence of voice that isn’t the case here.

2) Normal People

Like plenty of others, I binged the entire series of Normal People in a weekend, although one of its many pleasures is how Sally Rooney and Alice Birch’s adaptation teases out the episodic nature of the former’s bestseller.  From Connell’s early days at university, to a Tuscan holiday turned sour, and an exchange year in Sweden, Normal People was about the ways in which the people we love move in and out of our lives over the years.  It wasn’t immune to mis-steps (the show draws something of a crude line between the abuse Marianne suffers at home and what she seeks out in romantic partners), but the sheer emotional heft of the show was undeniable, nowhere less so than Paul Mescal’s floodgate-opening performance in Episode 10.

3) Adult Material

Perhaps one of the year’s most overlooked shows, Adult Material follows Hayley Burrows as she attempts to balance life as the harassed mother-of-three and the twilight years of her career as adult performer Jolene Dollar.  The slyly comic edge of the first episode is quickly eroded after Jolene becomes embroiled in the abuse of another actor on-set.  A stark portrait of alcohol abuse and loneliness, it’s also a sharp indictment of how little the so-called ‘culture wars’ surrounding pornography are meaningfully impactful on sex workers themselves.  Hayley Squires gives the sort of white-hot star performance usually reserved for 90s Hollywood rom-coms, a veneer of frustration and resignation overlaying even her character’s most abrasive moments.

4) Cook, Eat, Repeat

Why not in this interminably shitty year, choose the one show that offered the sort of balm it’s impossible to reverse engineer?  Following hot on the heels of a disappointing series of The Great British Bake-Off, Nigella Lawson’s warm, inviting half-hour new series was the televisual equivalent of a long bath and a facemask.  Her fish finger bhorta, brown butter colcannon and black pudding meatballs have already made it into this household’s repertoire, but there’s something innately comforting about the luxurious silliness of Nigella that almost transcends criticism.  Whether it’s the giddy nonsense of her liquorice box, the ‘did I hear that right’ moment when she revealed her pronunciation of ‘microwave,’ or the seductive self-care of making a creme caramel for one, no other show elicited such pure enjoyment from me this year.

5) I’ll Be Gone In The Dark

The true crime documentary series boom has increasingly leaned into a focus on the victims, from last year’s The Yorkshire Ripper Files to Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, but none so effectively or compassionately as I’ll Be Gone In The Dark.  Less a story about the hunt for the Golden State Killer and more a study of trauma and obsession, the series splices together home footage of the late Michelle McNamara’s investigation with survivor testimony to create a haunting portrait of one man’s legacy of pain.  The early episodes are replete with skin-crawling tension, anguish and tears, but the later episodes allow that to fall away, focusing on the mental fortitude necessary for the survivors at its centre and the sense of community fostered by meeting other women like them.

6)The Salisbury Poisonings

I had no interest in watching this BBC limited series initially: the advertising made it look dry, the story itself (the Novichok poisonings of 2018) seemingly devoid of juicy narrative material.  That I’ve watched this three times in the space of a year speaks to its robust, urgent filmmaking.  Like several other shows on this list, it arrived into the context of a pandemic it couldn’t have foreseen, but watching the rapid, careful response of local government (crucially and deliberately obstructed by Whitehall) to this crisis presented a sort of horribly watchable what-if scenario.  What seemed at first blush to be middle-of-the-road programming evolved over three episodes into the sort of spare, quietly terrifying journalistic drama that invites comparison to last year’s Chernobyl.

7) We Are Who We Are

It turns out that Luca Guadagnino’s woozy, seductive style transfers perfectly to television, and despite We Are Who We Are lacking the timelessness that typifies I Am Love or Call Me By Your Name it thrillingly captured the turbulent adolescence of its teenage characters.  Equally effervescent and raggedly emotional, the show’s joy always felt hard-won, bumping heads with the often cynical, unreadable motivations of the adult characters.  A tender and frank depiction of queer identities within traditionally restrictive environments, it’s also a love letter to young friendship and the lifeline that can provide during our formative years.  Spellbinding.

8) Selling Sunset

Perhaps the year’s most impressively constructed reality show, I was slow on the uptake with Netflix’s Selling Sunset only to have it take over my life for a few weeks during the summer.  Manufactured reality series are tough to get right, but much like The Hills (surely this show’s biggest influence) Selling Sunset gains a lot of mileage from gaming pre-existing friendships for maximum impact.  Christine and Mary’s beleaguered relationship and, obliquely, their respective responses to fame continued to provide wildly watchable fireworks, but the build-up to Chrishell’s separation from husband Justin Hartley was exquisitely handled.  Suddenly Davina’s strangely uncharismatic shit-stirrer and Christine’s predictably OTT wedding were forced to take a back seat to something approaching genuinely moving television.  Trying to tease out what was real and what wasn’t, and following the ways this all spilled out onto social media, was pure, unmitigated pleasure in a year sorely lacking in just that sort of unfettered escapism.

9) My Brilliant Friend

Two seasons in and there might not be another character on TV that I’m as continually frustrated and fascinated by as Lila, the eponymous ‘brilliant friend’ of the show’s title.  Sparingly warm, often cruel, seductive, Season 2 of HBO’s masterful adaptation sees her trapped in a loveless, abusive marriage but as ever it’s her fractured relationship with Lenù that forms the emotional spine of the show.  There’s often a strange sort of snobbery around the term ‘prestige drama,’ as if all that money on the screen is a smokescreen for a dearth of anything to say; My Brilliant Friend uses every colour in its paintbox to portray the yawning void that opened up between Lenù and Lila as they entered adulthood, from the lavish, provocative outfits Lila’s adopts after she marries Stefano to Max Richter’s evocative score and the detail poured into the show’s supporting characters.  Rewardingly complex.

10) Mrs. America

I laboured over what would take my tenth spot this year since there was so much TV that I loved, and especially this year so much of it felt essential to how I was receiving the world around me.  Ultimately, Mrs. America’s mixture of astute political commentary, character-driven writing and host of enjoyable performances tipped the scale in its favour.  Cate Blanchett’s all-timer of a performance as Phyllis Schafly understandably received the majority of attention, but Mrs. America gave us so many memorable moments: Sarah Paulson’s Alice ringing the bell at reception whilst high, Uzo Aduba’s Shirley Chisholm speaking to a potentially bugged hotel ventilator, Margo Martindale’s Bella Abzug quietly realising she’s no longer the radical of her youth on a busy New York street.  This sort of deft, smart political drama isn’t often this much fun to watch, and what an ending...

11) This Life

An honourable mention to a show made almost twenty-five years ago that nevertheless helped define the year in TV for me.  Shows that were once considered part of the zeitgeist can often feel quaint and old-fashioned in retrospect, but Amy Jenkins rambunctious flatshare drama isn’t one of them.  Whilst it can sometimes feel like the show’s characters are universally adverse to making even one good decision between them, there’s a compassion and care underpinning This Life that means it never comes across as overly cynical or sneering.  There’s also a lot to be said for discovering a performance that you genuinely consider to be one of the best of the decade, and no other character this year frustrated and moved me in the ways that Daniela Nardini’s Anna did.  Bonus points for the genuinely chaotic final episode, perhaps one of the best I’ve ever seen.

And FWIW, these are ten performances from shows not on the list above that I loved this year: Marielle Heller in The Queen’s Gambit, Nicholas Hoult in The Great, Sarah Lancashire in Last Tango in Halifax, Poorna Jagannathan in Never Have I Ever, Michael Sheen in Quiz, Imelda Staunton in Talking Heads, Leila Farzad in I Hate Suzie, Alison Pill in Star Trek: Picard, Gillian Anderson in The Crown and Andy Allo in Upload.

And ten episodes of TV that I loved too: ‘Terry and Korvo Steal a Bear’ (Solar Opposites), ‘The Gang Deals With Alternate Reality’ (The Good Fight), ‘Uncle Naseem’ (Ramy), ‘The View From Halfway Down’ (Bojack Horseman), ‘The Vat of Acid Episode’ (Rick and Morty), ‘I Am’ (Lovecraft Country), ‘No Small Parts’ (Star Trek: Lower Decks), Seven-Spotted Ladybug’ (Everything’s Gonna Be Okay), ‘Daytona’ (Cheer), ‘Whenever You’re Ready’ (The Good Place).

[buffynha]

Naya Rivera: A Film Critic’s Appreciation of a TV Star

https://medium.com/@tomcendejas/naya-rivera-a-film-critics-appreciation-of-a-tv-star-8857ddf4e69

Naya Rivera: A Film Critic’s Appreciation of a TV Star.

I was much older than the target demographic for ‘Glee’, but I watched it semi-faithfully for these reasons: A) the intentionally diverse casting and primetime representation of many marginalized groups B) the clever reinvention and integration of pop songs and C) Naya Rivera.

Truth be told, since the show could be so wildly uneven, Rivera was often the ‘A’ reason I tuned in, always hoping she’d get a scene or a number.

Naya Rivera portrayed Santana, the tart-tongued (to put it mildly) captain of Glee’s cheerleading squad. By casting an Afro-Latina actress in the part, the show’s producers were already trouncing on stereotypes; by the year of the show’s debut, curtly dismissive cheerleaders were a staple of teen-centered entertainment, but they were usually white and hetero. As the show progressed, Santana fell for her teammate Brittany, came out to her family and friends, graduated from high school, tried to make her way in the big city, and eventually married Brittany. As a queer Latinx young woman with entrenched defense mechanisms, the character of Santana had to bear a lot of ‘representation’ duty, like an extended cheerleading ‘shoulder sit.’ But here’s the thing: Naya Rivera made it all seem as if it were as easy as a pony-tail toss.

Re-watching the early episodes, with Santana barely getting a cutaway, it’s easy to believe Ryan Murphy that the producers didn’t realize the size of talent they had on their hands when they first cast her. Rivera didn’t so much fight for more screen time as her talent compelled it, willed it. She’s mostly background in the first few episodes, until Santana and Brittany (Heather Morris) get drafted by Jane Lynch’s villainous cheer coach Sue Sylvester (the show does not lack for antagonists) to infiltrate the new Glee club and destroy it from within. From her earliest numbers and ultra-snippy encounters with the other kids, Rivera’s Santana starts to steal scenes.

This wasn’t just a function of the writing and directing. In fact, as clever, campy, sincere and delectably witty as ‘Glee’ could be (rewatching it this week, I chuckled at lots of throwaway lines) it could also be clumsy and over-reliant on whimsy and parody, sometimes in the same scene. In order to make the repeated point that Santana was caustically tough on the outside because she was hiding deep anxiety on the inside, the writers gave her so many withering and cruel things to say that emotional reality was often sacrificed on the altar of ‘Bitchy Quirkiness’ and frankly, because you imagined the writers were cracking themselves up at the saltiness of their latest insult. (Some were classics; too many of them hung on the lower rungs of humor, including easy body function jokes.)

But here’s the next thing: no matter how ridiculously florid the abuse Santana hurled at a classmate or teacher, Naya Rivera delivered the lines with alacrity and impeccable timing. And that’s what really made me sit up on my sofa and take notice.

Here was an actress who seemed to have the range of the marquee women from Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ of the 30s and 40s. The tumble of words the ‘Glee’ writers gave her didn’t faze her; she could deliver them with the rapid screwball comedy chops of Rosalind Russell or Jean Arthur. In an era of more tentative, introspective actors, Rivera had the steely drive of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Her larcenous way with a wry line was reminiscent of the great character actress Thelma Ritter; her ‘brassiness’ recalled Joan Blondell; the blaze in her eyes felt like the one emanating from Ida Lupino. (The comparisons had a visual equivalent — Rivera’s red-carpet personal style often favored form-fitting pencil skirts, modern iterations of a forties ‘dame.’)

Probably no greater compliment I can give is to say Rivera reminded me of the legendary Barbara Stanwyck. Able to navigate romantic comedy, drama and detective noir with husky-voiced fervor, Stanwyck could be devastating when she was furious yet hard to resist when she worked her charms. She was slight of figure but imposing of presence. Rivera had those cinematic assets as well. Because she started as a child actor, on ‘The Royal Family’ and especially on the great ‘The Bernie Mac Show’, by the time she got to ‘Glee’ she knew how to work a camera, as self-possessed and confident in her talents as Stanwyck was. Why this is important is that when an actor is too self-critical or tentative, we get uncomfortable or pulled out of the story. Reading testimonials from her cast mates (Chris Colfer says he sometimes was so in awe of her performance he’d forget he was in the scene with her) we see they also marveled at her self-assurance, and Rivera cannily used it to make Santana both poised and poignant.

Where Naya Rivera carved out her own space, different from most of our past silver-screen sirens, is that she could sing, and she was Afro-Latina, multi-racial, far from the whites-only casting of the Warner Brothers and MGM eras. That meant something to me; as a Chicano man of a certain age, I can remember times when I was a kid when my family would count all the ‘Latin’ movie stars we could think of and we often stopped literally with the fingers of one hand.

As someone who studies and loves writing about film, my head was nearly scratched raw from trying to figure out why Naya Rivera wasn’t swooped up from ‘Glee’ by the 2010s studio gatekeepers and given the chance to be a film superstar in vehicles that were worthy of her, bypassing the B-movie stage. She didn’t even get the big-screen ‘best friend’ parts in Hudson or Witherspoon rom-coms, which is what actresses of color with comic chops were often relegated to in the 2000s. Why this oversight happened, and I’m sure there’s a lot of background showbiz politics and personal reasons as to why, the result is we were denied someone who could have been a major screen star and given us the pleasure of an above-the-title, singing-dancing-acting triple-threat. If Rivera had been white, the big-screen star-making machinery would have overcome all obstacles to not just take a risk on her, but bet on her.

It really felt like Naya Rivera could do it all. Stanwyck and Davis had formidable talents, but singing wasn’t considered one of them, so that made Rivera a modern-day extension of their bravura, as though they’d been reincarnated in a child actress who was bristling at the confines of Disney channel and tv screens.

And Rivera had that voice! Some of us have our own version of a sort of ‘opposite ASMR’; we derive pleasure from singers who have a husky rasp in their voice, and rather than whisper, know how to belt. In this regard, Naya Rivera was a godsend. It gave her the ability to tackle songs associated with Tina Turner and Amy Winehouse and Stevie Nicks, no small feat. Yet Rivera could also narrow the grit in her wide voice to just a few flecks of hurt and hope, as in the poignant moment when she confesses her love to Brittany in a plaintive version of Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Songbird.’ (This will sound like sacrilege to other Fleetwood Mac fans — I’ve seen the band in concert many times — but I just never really responded to McVie’s performance of her song except in cool, admiring ways. But I found Rivera’s vulnerable cooing of the song transfixing.)

Rivera’s musical performances on ‘Glee’ traversed many genres, but nothing seemed to catch her off-guard. I enjoyed many of the singers on ‘Glee’ —the show had over 700 musical numbers! — but if Rivera was given the lead, you knew you were about to get a showstopper, complete with signature focus, considerable ebullience and precision as a dancer. These gifts were captured best when ‘Glee’s’ hyper-active camera and editing stood still and just let her perform.

Rivera tackled Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’ with ferocity. It’s too bad that the way she was filmed — with the aforementioned slice-and-dice, even leering editing — forever leaves us with a case of ‘what might have been.’ We get precious snippets of seeing Rivera singing, while the musical filming style of ten years ago, influenced by ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘Chicago’, attempts to whip us into an erotic frenzy with close-ups of halter-top abs and pom-pom zooms. This was a shameful miscalculation, because it has the opposite effect. If the camera had just stood planted and simply recorded the performance, Naya Rivera would have delivered the sexual fire and then some.

The best musical numbers with Rivera showcase all her talents — the ability to act out a lyric, the Fosse-flavored choreography, and a singing voice alternately tender and roof-raising. Her performance of Winehouse’s ‘Valerie’, in which she gets to ditch the ‘Cheerios’ uniform and stomp the stage in a party frock stands out as one of ‘Glee’s’ best and most effortless songs overall — it really looks like a romp that captures teenage brio and which would be electric to see live. (Later in the show, when Rivera sings ‘Back to Black’, you even got a glimpse that, as criminal as it might seem to suggest to purists, there’s a helluva Amy Winehouse jukebox Broadway musical waiting in the wings somewhere, and Rivera could have easily been its star.)

As commanding as Naya Rivera could be as a solo singer, her duets were full of a delicious tension. The job in a duet is to share the scene as democratically as possible while still bringing out the best in your partner and elevating the song. These were skills many in the cast had, though they occasionally had to juggle the meta-element that when the show became a phenomenon, the behind-the-scenes who-likes-who, who-hates-who gossip that fascinated early social media audiences could be at odds to the show’s scripted plot (though it seems the show’s creative team also deliberately worked the real-life stuff into the fictional stuff. A notable example of this was when Rivera and Lea Michele, who were rumored and since confirmed to be clashing backstage personalities — and as recent reports show, Rivera wasn’t the only one to find Michele difficult — sing a sweet song called ‘Be Okay’, almost as though they were ordered to by the network. Both are thoroughly professional, and by the end you don’t just think that maybe Santana and Rachel are really friends, but that Rivera and Michele had buried all their hatchets in a Fox studio wall as well.)

The duet partner for Santana I liked best was provided by one of ‘Glee’s’ other volcanic vocalists, Amber Riley. As Riley has since shown in her London West End role as Effie in ‘Dreamgirls’, and in TV productions of ‘The Wiz’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’, she is a formidable talent. Yet watch one of their songs together, ‘The Boy is Mine’, and see if your eyes don’t want to stay just watching Rivera’s performance in its entirety?

To see a more dynamic and perfectly matched dual performance, ‘Glee’ gave us the galvanic gift that is Amber Riley and Naya Rivera alternating and harmonizing into their own ‘wall of sound’ on the Tina Turner classic, ‘River Deep Mountain High.’ Turners vocals on the original are so singular, nothing can touch them. Just the way she crests the first line with a jagged crag in the middle of a note lets you know this is going to be sung from a place of both ache and power.

The ‘Glee’ version leans into the power angle. Santana and Mercedes brim with the ‘girlpower’ term used at the time, the youthful brio of being able to dream of scaling mountains. The choreography then counter-points and really gets it right by giving the singers the dance moves reminiscent of 60s girl-groups, and while it starts out sort of cute and ironic, by the end the choreography becomes mature and electrifying. When Riley sings the first verse, she has gospel runs and exquisite phrasing. She could easily overwhelm anyone. Rivera’s choice is to find her own place to put the appealing but melancholy cracks in her voice, harmonize beautifully, and then release her own blasts of power. The performance says more about ‘empowerment’ than pages of script could. ‘River Deep Mountain High’ is also notable for giving Rivera a chance to be charming in ways she usually didn’t get to be with all her ‘mean girls’ posing; when they get to the part about the ‘rag doll’, both singers mug, but Rivera’s brief clownishness when acting out that rag doll is unexpectedly loose and charming.

Of course, the journey for Santana on the show, and you’ll find many ‘Glee’ fans and pop culture critics who will argue that the show ultimately was about Santana, crucially centers on the classic ‘finding your voice’ view of young adulthood, and central to that, the relationship between Santana and Brittany. Nearly any news or lifestyle site of the past week that had a space for pop culture featured the heartbroken, deeply affected voices of many lesbians and queer people writing about the deep connection they felt towards the relationship and the visibility and identification it gave them.

Of more than passing interest, depending on how transgressive you thought of it, was the pairing between an Afro-Latina character and a white blonde cheerleader who could have stepped out of the background of a Taylor Swift video. Think of where we were in 2009 and that still would have been pushing boundaries. (The show was one of the first to normalize same-gender kisses.)

In Rivera’s scenes with her non-accepting Abuela (the great Ivonne Coll), she is as real as it gets — not only deeply hurt, but uncomprehending in the way so many gay kids can be when they are rejected simply because of their orientation. “But I’m the same person I was a minute ago.” One can imagine these scenes (and the contrapuntal ones between Kurt and his more accepting father) provided a lifeline to young queer people themselves caught up in the process of making decisions about how to come out, and in particular, to Latinx queer people, who found representation and resources hard to come by and certainly not in the media.

And in real life, Rivera, who did not identify as gay, proved to be a significant ally. She responded to queer fans, particularly young women, and she represented by hosting the GLAAD media awards, advocating for The Trevor Project and by speaking responsibly and articulately about what her fans had confessed to her.

The way the show frequently featured LGBTQ imagery was playful and willful. They weren’t representing all queer women; they were representing these two using a particular transgressive iconography. Teen lesbian cheerleaders weren’t invented with ‘Glee’; the queer film ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ was released in 1999. But by keeping Santana (as well as the other ‘Cheerios’) in their squad outfits 24/7, Rivera started to look like it wasn’t just her cheer attire, it was her superhero uniform. You have your masked and fully-covered marvels; here was a fearless teen titan in sleeveless emblematic mini-skirt cutting through the hallways. Her superpowers? A withering glare that could refreeze the Arctic, an ability to shoot insults like a laser beam, and a pinkie-finger-linking with Britney that could heal your heart. Most of all, a voice that could fill a canyon and fleet feet that could leap over all calamity.

Until she couldn’t. When superheroes die, mere mortals look to the sky and feel, perhaps unreasonably but still undeniably, abandoned. Shocked, stunned, grievous. We look backward, because looking forward has just been removed as an option, and the realization of what will never be is too excruciating.

I couldn’t figure out what happened to Naya Rivera after ‘Glee’, given my hopes and expectations. She released quite a catchy single, ‘Sorry’, and later a memoir, ‘Sorry (Not Sorry.’) I didn’t realize she had joined a new show, the Youtube continuation of the ‘Step Up’ series, but now I do and she’s terrific in it. But to those of us who dropped our eyes from her a bit, I just remember it was because it seemed like there was tabloid stuff, personal tumult, a few seemingly misguided appearances or comments here or there. I was a hopeful, hopeful fan of her talent, not slavish to any TMZ notorieties — but those great female stars of the 30s and 40s? They were no strangers to splashy headlines either.

When I did watch ‘Turner Classics’ or my library of DVDS with some of those ‘Golden Age’ actresses, more than a few times I’d think of Rivera, search IMDB to see if she was getting that Oscar-worthy role yet. Or when there were increasing public discussions that called for better representation of people of color in media, I’d think: Naya Rivera! What’s she doing now? Why isn’t she in a big movie, headed for her superstardom? How did Hollywood’s famously white-screen blindness eclipse even gifts this generous?

So I’d check in the way we do now, with her IG feed or in passing hear about the occasional tweet. There would be a picture of her beauty, sometimes posed in the ‘sexy’ currency that builds and keeps ‘followers’ entranced and ‘promotes content.’

But occasionally Naya would post a picture with her son Josey, who she eventually was raising as a single mom. As many of her followers saw, in those fateful days of early July, I ‘liked’ a beautifully tender picture with Mom and Josey, eyelash close, captioned ‘Just the two of us.’ It seemed so peaceful. This must be what she wants to be doing, I thought. Happy for her. One of the miracles of ‘Glee’ was how they put on hour-long musicals once a week for six years, with 18-hour days. Who could begrudge anyone some rest after that?

But selfishly I also still wanted that album, that movie, that new film directed by her, something more from the force of nature that is, was, Naya Rivera and I gave more than a passing thought that with today’s reckonings, with greater sensitivity to the racism that undergirded so many institutions, the world would finally open up to her in the way it did for so many white actresses before her. It was her time.

Until it wasn’t.

That’s hard to reconcile. We’re supposed to say, as fans from afar, our grief is nothing compared to that of her family, friends, cast mates and of course that’s true. But it’s also true that the grief of a fan is not nothing. Those of us who didn’t know her personally, but were in awe of her talent, shouldn’t shut feelings of loss down. I think it honors Naya Rivera to mourn publicly the way so many fans have, ‘Gleeks’ or not. She was someone who had such hard-won achievement yet still such potential. And for some reason, the power brokers that be didn’t see it or find a place for it in time. We can grieve that mistake, and that which can’t be brought back or won’t be left as a long-career legacy.

That someone with so much soulful presence could suddenly disappear from this earth, at a time when we are all so careful not to lose each other, was wrenching. In consolation, I turned to a lot of Rivera’s performances from the show, though now of course they all carry a melancholy, stinging twinge. (For more on this, just look at the many comments on the pages where the videos are originally posted.)

You hear Naya Rivera sing Winehouse, and it’s hard not to think of how they both died young. You see her love for Brittany acted so convincingly, you think about Heather Morris, the actress who played her and wonder how she will weather this — thoughts that are none of your business, but you still have them. I found myself thinking of Kevin McHale who played ‘Artie’ on the show, and who seems so clear-headed; what would he say? You read Chris Colfer’s tribute to her and shed more than a few tears. You hear her sing ‘If I Die Young’ in tribute to Corey Monteith, and you recall that Rivera’s body was finally found on the day that Monteith died. It’s a lot.

There’s a memorable moment in the early run when Monteith’s Finn stops Santana in the familiar Glee alley of lockers and linoleum. She’s annoyed that he has outed her, and indeed he’s done her wrong. But the character is also written as sincere. Finn’s logic may be that of a teenager’s but he tells Santana that he didn’t ‘out’ her to hurt her, but to help her realize that she would still be accepted. He’d heard of someone who recorded an ‘It Gets Better’ video but later killed himself. He doesn’t want that to happen to her; ‘you mean something to me.’ He tells her that if something ever happened to her and he didn’t do everything in his power to stop it, he could never live with himself. Santana is left speechless at the tenderness, even as she’s furious — Rivera could convey both in a single look.

The context we have now in 2020 makes the brief scene heavy with portent and sadness. In actuality, Rivera was saddened that she couldn’t do more to stop Monteith’s untimely death from a drug overdose. That would be subtext enough. But now, with the timing of her death and the anniversary of his? It’s shattering. But I kept watching, and there was something that reminded me of my own experience teaching high school. A few minutes later, or a few episodes later, the kids are singing and dancing and throwing ‘Big Quenches’ at each other, and seldom has the show’s mission to show the fullness of life seemed so clear. I’ve found that to be true when I’ve gone through difficult times, or my school has, and still had to walk through the classroom door. No matter how sad I’ve been, there’s always a student offering, well, cheer.

Maybe we did get the movie Naya Rivera was on this earth to make after all. Because that scene between Santana and Finn was early in the show’s run. By ‘Glee’s’ end several years later, Santana didn’t hurt herself. She survived high school, she stumbled a little but recovered, she found her way, she was able to get onstage at a Broadway audition and sing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ and give us a big, big moment of triumph; maybe she’ll get the part, she’s definitely going to get the girl. Just like an old musical.

And that’s why I wrote this: we talk about ‘Glee’ as a TV show, but maybe it was one long film. If you go back and watch ‘Glee’ with a particular focus on Rivera, you’ll see an extraordinary rise-and-fall-and-rise-again achievement; she’s one of the major leads of an epic. Sure it’s a movie full of silliness, toss-aways, occasional meanderings or repetitive plotlines, but it’s also full of heart and compassion. This seasons-long coming-of-age starred this African/Latina/Queer Ally/Queen who reigned with a crackling laugh, a stunning beauty and vivacious spirit.

If that’s all we were fated to get of Naya Rivera, she hit her mark — the line where enough and not enough meet. Maybe the silvery phantoms of Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, who all knew their own injustices within the Hollywood system, maybe they were all waiting in the wings as she sang the curtain down. “Come on kid,” they might say, in old movie parlance. “You went out there a youngster but you came back: a Star!”

✍️The Couch Tamale✍️

Film, Music, Peak TV, Diversity— Tom Cendejas is sitting on a sofa and unwrapping Pop Culture with a Latino eye, one husk at a time.

[king-of-the-issues]

🏳️‍🌈Happy pride everyone 🏳️‍🌈

I thought I’d make a ‘little’ (sorry, it’s going to be a long one and it’s going to be a bit of a mess) post about my own story and journey within the LGBTQIA+ community. Hopefully it can help educate some, maybe others will be able to relate, or you’ll just find out a little more about me.

I grew up in a fairly liberal family and area - although the area was technically conservative until very recently, I’ve been lucky enough to not have known anyone majorly homophobic or discriminatory (my grandad is a little stuck in his ways though). I’ve always been told that being ‘different’ is good and normal and there’s nothing wrong with liking someone of the same gender. Although we were never really taught anything about same-sex relationships and being the late 00s, sex education was very heteronormative. We were never told that being gay was wrong and we knew of gay teachers in the school and kids with two mums or two dads and it was never really a big thing.

I first started questioning my sexuality in my early teens, I wasn’t very ‘girly’ and I didn’t really have any crushes on boys at school. So I figured I must be gay, or at least bi. Looking back at this I can see that although I thought I was well educated, I was not. And though I may have been right in the long run, my justification and understanding of why it was so was definitely built on a lot of gender stereotypes and I wasn’t fully aware of what it meant to be gay or what my true feelings were. But I still wasn’t sure, so I just assumed that I was straight, I’d never had feelings for a girl, so why would I be gay?

I finally started to better educate myself when I joined tumblr in 2013 as a ‘Wholock’ fan blog. I started following other fan accounts who just happened to be part of the LGBTQ+ community and so would post things about themselves and their community. Through this I definitely learnt a lot more about sexuality. There wasn’t just an L,G and B, but there was a P and an A and a Q and so much more. I started watching more LGBTQ+ you tubers, tv and movies and educating myself further.

At this point I was doing my GCSEs (16 years old), I’d never been in a relationship hetero or otherwise. I hadn’t even had my first kiss and I still hadn’t really had any crushes. A boy hadn’t paid any attention to me in anything other than a platonic way in about 4 years. Some of my friends were in relationships and getting male attention, so I was still thinking, was there something wrong with me? If I’m not gay, do people think I’m gay and that’s why they don’t pay me any attention? So I started dressing more feminine and wearing more makeup in the hope that something would change. It didn’t.

When I started Sixth form in 2014 (17) I saw a film in the cinema that truly opened my eyes and I think I can say that seeing that film was the turning point and the moment I started to educate and question myself further. That film was ‘Pride’, the true story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Something about this film really got me, like many other films and tv shows I fell in live with the movie and it’s characters. Only this time they weren’t just characters, they were real people, who played a huge part in LGBTQ+ history. So I learnt more about these people and their stories. I posted about it a lot on tumblr and found other lovers of the film and they taught me more about their lives. This film was also my first major introduction to pride, London Pride in particular. I had missed the parade that year, but was hoping to attend the next year. This was also the year that same-sex marriage was legalised in England and Wales. There was a lot of things in the news and on tv about the history and struggle of the LGBTQ+ community, including ‘Our Gay Wedding the Musical’. As a lover of musicals, I wasn’t going to miss this, but not only was it an excellent musical, but I learnt so much more about the history and ‘legal side’ of being part of the LGBTQ+ community. It also introduced me to a lot of LGBTQ+ musical artists, personalities and songs.

In both AS and A2 Level art, I completed projects focused on sexuality and gender identity. I explored a range of artists, historical figures and other influential people within the LGBTQ+ community. I was able to better understand the many different identities that existed and the work that has been made to get where we are now as well as questioning my own identity.

For A Levels I had picked Art as one of my subjects. I have always loved art and at this point it was the direction I was planning on taking my life and career. I was still very much continuing to educate myself about the LGBTQ+ community and was discovering LGBTQ+ art and artists. This was also the time that Grayson Perry’s second tv series ‘Who are you?’ was airing, which looked at various aspects that affect a person, including gender and sexuality. With Grayson discussing his own relationship with gender and sexuality. At this point in time, A Levels were all split into ASs (year 12) and A2s (year 13). Which at the end of both would be an exam in all the subjects you took (4 for AS, 3 for A2). In art we were given a selection of titles and had to pick one to work from. From this we would have to create research pieces and supporting work, leading up to a final piece, which we would complete in a 5 hour exam. At this point I had been looking for a way to represent the LGBTQ+ community in my work and when ‘Community’ was given as one of the possible exam titles, I knew what I was doing.

I began with studies of people I had learnt about through general media, Pride and Our Gay Wedding the Musical. On a side note, this was when I developed my love for graphite portraits, my first of which was of Nathan Taylor and Benjamin Till the couple who both created and were married in OGWtM. I continued my general research into artists and styles, when one of my teachers introduced me to the work of Paul Harfleet. Paul created the Pansy Project, where he would plant a pansy (historically a derogative term for a gay man) in a location of homophobic abuse (verbal or physical). He would also edit photos to put Pansy’s into the mouths of famous people who were homophobic or used homophobic language. I used this idea as my inspiration and my final exam piece featured well known people who have used such language or hold such views, with handmade pansies in their mouths, with Oscar Wilde in the middle, who was imprisoned for being gay, holding a bunch of pansies as if he’d put them there. My research for this piece had introduced me further to the political movements, fights and protests, the work that had been made and was still being made to help people just simply live their lives as themselves. When I finished my AS Level, I was hoping to carry this theme onto my work in my A2s.

Because I was hoping to do this I decided that I now had to go to Pride as it would be a great opportunity to take reference photos. I intended to go with some friends, but they all bailed, so I ended up going with my mum. My mum has always been reasonably liberal, but she never really had the knowledge to educate myself and siblings on the different types of relationships, gender and sexuality. By going to Pride, it definitely opened her eyes and she has since become a huge advocate for equal rights for all and as a childcare provider is trying her best to educate the children she looks after and make her environment inclusive. I absolutely loved Pride and collected so many great photos and saw so many inspirational people. Including the cast of the Pride movie and originators of LGSM.

In A2 art, we were required to complete coursework that would feature various pieces and research that would accompany an illustrated essay. In order to continue my focus on the LGBTQ+ community, the title I created was ‘How has art reflected society’s attitudes towards sexuality and gender’. I continued to look at the work of Grayson Perry as well as the story of Lily Elbe. During Pride I had taken a picture of a drag queen dressed as the Queen and used this as a reference for a painting. From this I edited picture of well known people to be the opposite gender. Looking back at this, I do regret doing this, as well as other aspects of my following work. I feel that although my intention was to show gender as fluid and present some ‘what if..’ questions, I feel that the way I went about it could have been insensitive and seen as mocking those with gender dysphoria and identity issues. Continuing from my queen portrait I decided to look specifically at the royal family and at monarchs and members of the family throughout history who are believed to be part of the LGBTQ+ community and how that has been ‘covered up’ or ignored. I also looked at drag artists and how the royal family who, though are typically seen as being very conservative and modest, have in fact historically been very flamboyant in the way they dress and present themselves, with the line between feminine and masculine clothing once being very thin. Again, although my intentions were good and the questions I was presenting were important, I don’t feel I went about it the right way. Although I did try to justify it at the time, I feel I shouldn’t have been presenting these people who may or may not have been LGBTQ+ as so, especially when suggesting that some monarchs who may have cross-dressed, could have in fact been transgender.

Aside from the artistic side my research greater deepened my understanding of the range and fluidity of gender and sexuality. Including gender non-conformation, gender-fluidity, gender-queer, demisexuality, polysexuality and being queer. At this point I was still confused about my own sexuality, but would tell people that I was just a straight ally. I remember being asked by both a classmate and university interviewer whether I identified myself as within the LGBTQ+ community and both times I answered no. Looking back, I wish I had said that I wasn’t sure, that I was confused. Because it is okay to not be sure and be confused, no matter your age.

After leaving school I was starting to look more at asexuality and wonder if I was on the ace spectrum. I didn’t think I was 100% asexual because I do want to be in a relationship, but maybe I just haven’t had the opportunity to explore that yet. I have been subscribed to Evan Edinger for about 5 years now and he has spoken openly about his own experiences and as someone who is on the asexual spectrum, specifically being demisexual. I started to consider that I could maybe be demisexual and watched more of Evan’s videos as well as reading about others who identified as demi. I felt comfortable with this label, it felt like it answered a lot of questions and gave an explanation for why I hadn’t experienced crushes like my friends for many years.

I then began to realise that if I was to imagine myself in a relationships, it could be with a guy or a girl, it didn’t really matter and maybe I was bisexual, or at least biromantic. This was something that I had considered in the past but I was only just accepting as a true part of myself.

I was able to go to my second London Pride in 2019, this time with my mum, sister and a couple of friends. We had a great time and I met and spoke to some incredible people. This further made me consider my sexuality and made me feel even more comfortable.

So, on New Year’s Eve of that year I came out as demi and bi to my friends, who were all very accepting and supportive. I am yet to come out to my family and I don’t really intend to, not because I’m ashamed or I don’t think they’d be supportive, in fact quite the opposite. Since going to pride, my mum has been very vocal in her support of the LGBTQ+ community and I feel that if I were to come out to her, she would make quite a big deal out of it, which as someone with anxiety who likes to live a reasonably quiet life, I don’t really want. I also never really talk to my family about my ‘love life’ and relationships, existent or not, so I don’t really feel the need to tell them this. If I was in a relationship with a girl, then yes we’d probably talk about it, but until them, I don’t intend on telling them.

Although I have come out, I still wouldn’t say that I am 100% sure my exact labels, but I think that’s okay. If I am asked I normally say that I am Queer as I find it sums up that I don’t identify as heterosexual without going into too much detail.

I think the main thing to take from my story is, it’s okay to not be sure about your identity. There is no age that you should have had your first kiss etc by. You do what is right to for you, maybe you’ll have the answer soon, maybe it’ll be a while, but that’s okay.

[transstudiesarchive]

Objects as Sites of Transition and Self-Expression

**Author’s Note: I am conducting these interviews and writing this post from the perspective of a white, nonbinary transmasculine, masc-leaning pansexual, queer college student who is majoring in Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies. I am not claiming that these experiences detailed below are indicative of the feelings of an entire group of individuals, nor am I claiming that my analysis represents anyone’s opinion but my own. I also recognize that there are many voices and experiences missing from these interviews that are essential to creating a larger picture of the trans experience. I was given explicit permission to share the information and personal stories that are detailed below.

Transitions are complex. Every person has their own experiences and individual hurdles that they’ve had to overcome while working towards the goal of becoming their full selves. I’ve been asked countless times to share my story of transition-- the story of how I came to be who I am and how I continue to grow-- but rarely have I felt truly seen by those listening. We spend a lot of time talking about the large and overarching ideas of what transition looks like, but rarely do I see emphasis on the specific and deeply individual stories of trans people. When I do, I often feel as if we are again being fed someone’s watered-down, generic, and often very westernized version of themselves.

I think that we often forget to look at the little details that make our transitions feel real to us. We forget that our stories are about more than just when we came out or when we started hormones or when we had surgery. Our stories are about humanity, attachment, and finding joy and comfort in the little things that help us understand ourselves, which is why I set out to hear and document the personal stories of trans individuals as they shared their intimate connections to the objects that they felt were a manifestation of their trans experience-- objects that the general media would never care to ask about.

My theory behind this work is that people’s transitions can be found within some of the most mundane objects. Humans have always found connection and meaning within the inanimate. We collect things and pass down family heirlooms and reminisce over items that bring back memories. I think that we often overlook just how integrated the material world is to a person’s transition. I wanted to hear people’s individual stories of their transition and identity through reflecting on and examining a personal object of their choice. To do this, I gathered up a group of trans people who were willing to share their stories with me. We spent an evening reminiscing together over tea and cookies while connecting with each other over the minuet similarities and differences between our transitions. I then let each person arrange their item among an artsy scenery in whatever way they felt compelled to before photographing each object myself.

The following three stories are stories of identity, resistance, and individual expression.

~~~

Rowan (he/she/they)

“Okay, so this wasn’t the first masc shirt I got, but it was one of them,” Rowan smiled and laughed a little as they pulled out a red and gray flannel button up, “I wore a t-shirt and button up to school every day and I feel like this is like… the “classic young trans masc button-up” look, ya know?” We all laughed at that because oh boy, was it true. Rowan said that they’d had that shirt since about 2014, and that despite the years of growing and the natural wear-and-tear, the shirt was still at least two sizes too big for them. They talked about their experience of going to the store for the first time and picking out clothes from the “men’s” section, and how that was extremely validating. They had been having a lot of dysphoria surrounding wearing leggings at the time, so it was “really nice to pick out some men’s jeans and stuff.” Rowan then proceeded to share a story about their purple, seashell-adorned “dancing pants”, stating that “they might just be the best thing I own.”

Rowan asked for their personal identities not to be shared.

~~~

Robin (he/they)

When I asked everyone to pull out their items, Robin offered to speak first. In their hands was a gray waistcoat, adorned with black buttons and gray lining. They smiled fondly at it and said, “I got this waistcoat for $7 from Wish. I wore it to my Junior prom and that was the first time I was able to go out in fancy men’s clothes.” At the time they wore this, Robin hadn’t yet changed their name and was only out to a small after-school GSA group. Robin also mentioned that they were instrumental in getting their school’s dress code changed to something more gender-neutral, rather than the classic binary options. Continuing to reminisce on their roaring 20’s-themed prom experience, Robin described more of their memories attached to the waistcoat, “It was the best feeling. Even my mom noticed. She wanted to like… take pictures and stuff, and I was smiling so much that she was like “This is the most confident I’ve ever seen you!” So that was really cool.”

Robin is 19 years old, white, and is a college student majoring in History. They are a nonbinary trans male and are bisexual.

~~~

Sapin (he/she/they)

As they dug through their bag to find their item, Sapin began their story by prefacing that their first inclination was also to bring an item of clothing. “My first idea was to bring this shirt I shared with my first girlfriend, but it’s at their house and they live far away. We called it the “male lesbian” shirt-- we’re still friends-- but I brought this instead,” they said, triumphantly revealing the small white bottle of Minoxidil Hair Regrowth Treatment for Men from their bag. We all shared a laugh and they explained that they had been using it for about three months now and were super happy with the results. “Every time I talk about going on T with my family, they shut me down,” they shared, “So this was really the first thing that I could use to outwardly express my gender-- and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

Sapin is 19 years old, white, and is a college student majoring in Arts and Letters. They use the term “fagdyke” to describe their gender and sexual identities.

~~~

My Thoughts

After spending time with these people and recording their stories, I noticed a few trends between all three objects. First, I found it to be really interesting that the first thing that all three people thought to bring was an item of clothing. And while they weren’t able to bring these items, I still enjoyed hearing Sapin’s anecdote about the “male lesbian” shirt, and Rowan’s story about their “dancing pants”. It makes me think about how clothing influences our individual transitions and the ways in which we connect certain experiences to certain colors and fabrics and patterns that have played roles in our wardrobes over the years. Secondly, I noticed that each object that was brought held some meaning of self-expression and resistance to socially-imposed binaries. By wearing that waistcoat, Robin was able to truly express themselves to the point where other people noticed their positive change in demeanor. Sapin also caught the attention of the adults in their life by using the hair regrowth treatment to take charge of their gender expression.

One of the most important takeaways from this project for me was the realization that while all these objects were similar in many ways, they were also widely unique and all manifested as significantly different sites of transition. The interactions between these individuals and their objects show a strong correlation between the application of the object and the desire for them to be seen as the gender they truly are, but not once did I feel like their stories overlapped with each other. It’s very interesting to see how a group of items that all have essentially the same function of expression can hold such different meanings for people who are all in the midst of transition.

I’ve come to believe that it is deeply important, especially when working to understand our transitions, that we start to think less about the ideas and tropes that society pushes towards us, and instead start to think more about how little pieces of our lives have shaped us into the people we are today.

[sapphic-kid-blog]

the truth is.

Angela Salmeron

Imagine you’re me. You’re twelve and you’re at a family reunion. Family members sitting around you with Wisconsin-made beer turn from the Brewers game on the television and resort to the one question that you’ve been practicing how to answer in your head: “How’s school?” And truthfully, you’re not sure. So perhaps you respond: “It’s fine.” They nod their heads and you think you’re in the clear. But then they ask you: “What are you learning?” And before you know it they’re tacking on the end: “Any cute boys?”

Now I’m sure it varies from family to family, and I’m sure the questions vary in more or less intrusive. Maybe it was never asked, and maybe it was a family friend and not an uncle or cousin. Maybe it was asked but not directly, or enforced another way. But one question for me, stood tall and it stood out among the rest. 

My brain was no longer thinking about what we talked about in Social Studies or the book we read in English. It was no longer thinking about the new formula we learned in Math, or the cycle of the ecosystem in Science. It was thinking about one thing, and the one thing that I had no idea how to talk about: romantic intimacy. 

From the time I got my period at the end of 6th grade, to the time I finished high school, and even sometimes now, I thought I was the odd one out or the only one who wasn’t experiencing romantic intimacy the way others would. Not kissing or hand holding but even things as simple as a crush. 

What I felt was embarrassment. 

Firstly, I never really had crushes or really knew what they were. Friendships in a way felt like crushes to me, and when I had no idea what romantic or sexual intimacy was, I felt confused. So then, I stopped introspecting and I started observing. 

The romantic relationships I saw were comprised of these aspects: wanting to be around a person, telling that person that you didn’t just like them but you like-liked them, and then saying that you now were exclusively partners or “dating”. 

Most importantly: not only were those girls, who were mostly my friends, doing this but they were, as I noticed, only doing this with boys. 

I followed suit. 

Come the first day of band camp — set in a gym at one of the two middle schools in my small, conservative city. With my clarinet in hand, I watched as other girls talked about boys from different schools. I watched as they giggled and flocked in groups to discuss which ones they’d be excited to see in the starting 6th grade class coming up in a few months. 

I saw the first tall boy, who was decently good looking, and told the girls around me: “He’s cute.”  One of the girls turned to me and said, “That’s (let’s call him) Snazzlepants and there’s his twin, (and he’ll be) Fizzywizzy.” Quickly, I acted as though I was still not only interested, but now blown away by the look of this gangly preteen walking amongst the group of kids. 

This was when everything I knew about myself would be different. 

Luckily when the beginning of September rolled around, this boy was in my 6th grade house, also known as the set of students I’d be sharing a side of the middle school with. So as I eventually made friends, the more I had to absolutely drop the fact that I had a crush on a boy. I had to tell them that maybe it would happen between us because one time, I saw him looking at me (wasn’t true) and one time we brushed hands (definitely wasn’t true). They’d be dazzled, awe in their eyes, and I didn’t feel embarrassed, I felt included and important. 

The more twisted I became in this lie, the more I had to not only convince others around me, but I had to convince myself. Not even the bullying from his friends after they all found out would stop me from speaking my lie aloud to anyone who wanted to hear it. 

I spent the days either convincing myself and others that I absolutely loved him or crying because his friends would call me ugly or stupid and annoying over a lie that I was choosing to spread. But it was better than the alternative, of being singled out and feeling as though I was the only one who felt differently than the rest; it was better than admitting a lie. 

This is the first time in my life I felt like I would rather die.

Growing up in my small city of West Bend, Wisconsin, was strange. The town as I knew it was mostly white and definitely a majority, conservative white. There weren’t many people who looked like my dad, dark-skinned, and Spanish speaking, and there weren’t many people growing up around me that I knew who were part of the queer community. But my family, especially my mom, were active in the Democrat party and sticking up for civil rights. I was lucky, I suppose in a lot of aspects to know that if I ever were to come out as anything other than cis and heterosexual, I would not be living on the streets. 

However, being surrounded by a lot of religious friends, spewing the words of their parents, I quickly found out that not everyone was lucky the way I was. I found out that even though my parents taught me, gay was okay, not everyone felt the same. And not only did they not feel the same, they would hate someone specifically because they were queer identifying. 

I traumatized myself with movies like Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don’t Cry, thinking if I too were to express myself that way, I would meet a violent end. The media told me, I would be hated if I were like them, made me believe that I would find the same fate. It was an ending worse than being alone. 

Loving who I wanted to love, because of where I lived, was not an option. It was not even questioned as an option. And even though I hated myself, for telling a lie, for having to deal with the many shitty aspects of that lie, I would continue to tell that lie.

Moving on, I continued to have so-called “crushes” on boys. I continued to force myself into situations that I was uncomfortable in because I wanted to seem normal, and I wanted to seem like there was nothing gay about me. And so, the lie festered. 

I ignored signs of my queerness, and forgot them or didn’t realize what they were. Stealing my dad’s PlayBoys, hiding them under my bed, searching “girls kissing” on YouTube, watching exclusively Lesbian porn only meant I was exploring other options, and though the only option that appealed to me was women, still, it didn’t have to mean I wasn’t straight. Maybe it wasn’t as complex or scary as my thoughts were telling me. So I told myself, it didn’t matter because I could choose. I chose heteronormativity. 

When it came to high school and crushes in a more traditional sense, dating and going to dances, losing one’s virginity, I became angry. Not because I wasn’t doing it but because if I wanted to do it, I’d have to do it with a guy so to perpetuate the lie. 

Getting rid of the last guy, I had moved on to another: one of my best friend’s boyfriends (who’re still dating). This had become a new trend since the stages after my first “crush”; only liking boys that your close friends liked. And I remember so clearly, stepping on so many toes, making so many of my friend’s angry, and pissed off at me. I remember desperately wanting attention, not just from boys but from anybody because I was so sad, and I didn’t know why. 

This was the second time in my life that I wanted to die. 

Now my journal is filled with pictures of prescription bottles, bleeding wrists, and rants about how I just wanted to go away. How I was so angry to be able to breathe rhythmically and have a working heart with a steady beat, mocking me and reminding me that I was alive and I had this pain inside of me that seemed to have no real source. 

When I read back on my words, I am quite literally stunned by the anger, the hatred, and the wish for a violent death. 

I was 18 when I realized what was different. 

One of the first notable girls I had feelings for, changed literally everything. My life, my experiences in childhood, my views about myself, and so many more aspects of my personal life were all ultimately flipped upside down. I knew that this had to be what I was missing in all those years, even if I was still afraid to say it, or even think it. Up until now, romance had been dramatic, painful, gestures had been grand and demanding, and thoughts had been intrusive and obsessive. But now, romance was soft. It was gentle and uplifting, it was simple and it felt so much more palatable. Until I broke up with her on New Year’s Eve because I still just wasn’t gay— nope, not for me. 

And then, I fell in love for the first time. I loved her voice, her eyes; I loved the way that she said my name. I loved her jokes and the way she made me laugh. I loved that no matter what, everything was comfortable with her. For the first time, I pictured myself in the future, being with someone and being happy. 

Finally, I was able to admit to myself: yes, I love women, and the floodgates opened. 

After my girlfriend and I broke up, I dated handfuls of girls (most of which, never lasted longer than a month) because still, intimacy was such an issue. Maybe, it wasn’t that I liked girls but maybe it was certain girls. Or maybe, I wasn’t pansexual, bisexual, queer, lesbian, or whatever I was identifying at the time, perhaps, I was straight and I just experimenting. It could be possible, I’d never know and maybe, just maybe, this confusion would always be there, no matter what I did. 

I was tired; so tired of not knowing, and I just wanted answers. 

There’s something funny about being a gay woman, that isn’t funny at all. It’s the fear of what your life would be like without men— it’s the shame of imagining what you’d feel without the demanding presence of men. It’s the lie that you can only be serious in relationships with men, have children with men, and your life and everything you know to be true, revolves around men. I couldn't picture myself loving women, without also loving men. 

But someone else could. 

My sister has always been a huge presence in my life. And one day we’d just happen to be feeling the single life, so the conversation between us starts with: “We’ll be alone forever, haha.”

What was so different about this conversation was her so sure statement to me that I’d definitely have a wife. 

I turned to her and paused before asking, “Can you even picture me with a man? Or marrying a man?”

Her response, so simple and so true, was: “Nope.” 

Identifying as a Lesbian, now more than ever, feels so right to me. It feels like an identity in which I belong to. It’s a part of me that I’m proud of and it’s a part of me that I can’t change, no matter how much I lie to myself. It’s a part of me I never realized was there until years and years of thinking there was something wrong with me. I am proud to love women. I am proud to have a woman in my life to love. I am proud of the relationship that gives me hope for the future. And I’m proud of other gay relationships that make me feel a sense of belonging and solidarity. 

Of course, there are still struggles: the question if I’m gay enough to have my sexuality be validated, if other people can sense I’m gay, if I’ll be safe, secure, and happy. And there definitely still are some shameful doubts, some questions which make me wonder if some people in my life who know I’m gay, resent me for it. I wonder if there are people in my family, who know, and are too afraid of me to express not only tolerance but support. I wonder if there are some who wouldn’t come to my wedding. 

In the end, I sometimes wonder if it’s all worth it. 

And then I hear powerful and inspiring stories from other members of the queer community, I see their faces shining for me and people like me to be represented. 

And then I remember seeing my uncles love each other so endlessly.

And then I hear her voice, and know without a fraction of a doubt that it’s worth it. 

[campchitaquamemories]

get to know me tag game - Magicians edition

tagged by @crossroadscastiel

name: Virginia/Ginny/Gigi

when you started watching the Magicians: I watched the first four-ish episodes as they aired, but I was feeling pretty burnt by media and it was obvious the show wasn’t going to explore my preferred pairing so when my real life blew up I didn’t bother picking it back up after. I remember seeing bits of a couple episodes of S2 and without context felt like my earlier concerns re: the het of it all (eliot got married to a woman? what?) were justified and put it down again. Then the news about 4x05 broke and the skies parted and angel choirs sang (like I’m not kidding I had a spiritual experience) because the show just - fucking went there! And so I shotgunned every episode that exists and here we are now, friends. Here we fucking are.

favorite season (so far): I mean, S3 if only for A Life in the Day but now that I’ve seen all of S1 + S2 and actually given them a fair shake I gotta say that I really enjoy it all. And S4 is shaping up to be the best season so far.

favorite female character(s): KADY - listen she snuck up on me, but jesus (also Fen, who I started out REALLY disliking as a plot device and grew to love as a character).

favorite male character(s): Eliot Waugh. Hands down. No questions. I love Quentin, that absolute dork. And Josh is super funny and relatable, and Penny is like, the definition of woke feminist + asshole and I love it. But Eliot has had my heart from the moment he appeared, all laid out like an ancient roman statue on the Brakebills sign, and gave Q his “I could absolutely eat you up” once-over. I was gone. That’s it for me, folks.

if you were a magician, what would be your discipline? (i.e. your specialty,options here): The Brakebills website says I’m a physical kid when I take the test, and I’m inclined to agree. Also I just went to look up the specific trees in the physical magic field and fuck if I would not end up in Minor Mending with Quentin fucking Coldwater. Telekinesis is something else I would love to have in my life.

which of the main characters would you best get along with? Honestly, probably Q because we are both major dorks who like the same kinds of things and so would always have an endless repertoire of things we could talk about.

which of the main characters do you relate to most? See above. ^^^ Q. (point of clarification: I want to be Eliot, but I am definitely actually Q.)

favorite unlikable character/villain: Tick! Sorry I just find his brand of annoying obsequiousness really amusing. I’m starting to develop feelings about Zelda, too, and I don’t like it.

favorite pairing(s): Queliot. Fargo + Margosh = Fargosh. Adiyoff(40) but also Wickodi(23). Alice/Happiness and Todd/A Plot please and thank you. (highkey blaming @sadlittlenerdking for that last one, btw)

favorite episode(s): Okay so I feel like this is cheating because you gotta understand at 13 episodes a season I feel like there is no filler, here. EVERY EPISODE got us to where we are and so of course “A Life in the Day” & “Escape from the Happy Place” are my top two, but I just pulled out a list of episodes in every season and, like, they’re all so great??? I can’t pick? I made a list and I was only leaving out maybe 2-3 episodes a season, so...

top 3 fandoms outside magicians: marvel cinematic universe, harry potter, and the graves of every piece of media that has killed or otherwise refuses to acknowledge the queer subtext I thirst for.

dream job: So, from the moment I realized what music was, my sole focus in life was performing. I sang in the shower, and in the car, and while doing homework, and under my breath in classes, and in choir. I did every stage thing I could get myself cast in, I went to university to study Vocal Music (with an emphasis in Opera Performance) and I almost did the thing. But life circumstances and choices made that something I’ve had to put down for a decade now. If I could pick up, today, and just go do anything in the world and still be able to provide reliably for my children? I would be performing again. On any stage, in any production, doing any type of music. 

what one thing do you wish people knew about you? one thing? I’m a very people person, but I also am battling a panic disorder and chronic depression, so sometimes it’s hard for me to engage with things. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you! I’ll be back eventually.

tagging @thepoisonroom, @coney-island-blitz, @wildfierr, @highkingqueliot, @iamjennifer64 and anyone else who wants to do the thing :3

[studylifeusa]

Meet Student Blogger, Komal!

Hi! I am Komal “Komz” Muthyalu. I am Indian but I grew up in Dubai. I grew up in an Indian community in Dubai so I never felt like I was away from India. I also went to an Indian school in Dubai for a while until middle school. I dropped out after that and was home-schooled all throughout high school. I realized I didn’t like being in school and learning things I was not interested in. I felt that there was a faster way of completing high school and going to college. So, my parents and I thought the best decision was to home-school me so I could focus on the subjects that I loved. This not only helped me have more time for my family and myself, but also participate in more community related and organizational work.

One of my childhood friends approached me about starting an environmental organization and I immediately jumped into the opportunity with her. I was able to work in the mornings when she was in school and attend events, meetings, etc. when most kids my age would have to dedicate their entire day to their education. I was the Head of Operations and the opportunity eventually felt like a full-time job. We were the most active youth group in the UAE and were eventually recognized by the United Nations. We had over 100 members internationally and presented in front of thousands of students in the UAE.

My family and I have visited the U.S. many times. The first time I came to the U.S. was in 2007 when I was 8-years-old, and I absolutely fell in love with California. According to my parents, I didn’t like New York because I thought it was extremely crowded. Ever since I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to come to the U.S. for my further education.

In 2015, it was finally time for me to start looking into universities and discovering programs that I loved. I have always been fascinated with technology and media. And so, I thought the right choice for me was engineering. I came across Columbia University’s Combined Plan Engineering Program with liberal arts colleges. I applied to eight liberal arts schools that offered that program and was rejected by one. My family could not afford to pay for my education so my ultimate decision was also dependent on the scholarships and financial aid that I was offered.

One school offered me a full tuition scholarship, however, the University of Redlands was able to meet my complete financial need in addition to tuition. And the best part? It’s in California. California was definitely my top choice; however, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to afford coming to school here. The University of Redlands made that more than possible for me. I was able to visit the school before I made my final decision and it felt like an easy decision once I came to this campus and met the people. I was very well taken care of during the entire weekend that I was here.

I loved my first semester at this university and I learnt a lot about myself too. I realized that I didn’t enjoy engineering. I wanted to work in the tech and media industry but from a more business standpoint. This seemed like a pretty specific interest and I didn’t know if I was able to do that here. That’s when I heard about the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, a program offered at the university. The program lets students create their own major, take classes in any department they want, and also contract the classes they take to tailor it to their educational desires. The name of my major is “Digital Transformation and Business Strategy.” The focus is mainly on marketing, digital media, and entertainment. I don’t think there is any other program in the entire country where I could study exactly what I want in the way that I want to.

Right now, I am half way through my junior year and there are so many things at this university I have been able to do since my time here.

Most of freshman year, I worked at the Pride Center where we did work related to LGBTQIA+ or queer issues on campus. Most of the work included setting up events catered to the community and creating learning spaces for everyone. I tutored economics for a semester and also worked as the Head of Web Development at the Johnston Radio station (completely run by students). I am currently a peer advisor for a class called Incredible India, where I get to hear what students have to say about my culture. I basically help incoming freshman understand the credit system and help them register for classes.

I volunteered to be an international student orientation leader my sophomore and junior years and was able to meet wonderful international students from all over the world. I was always interested in working with/for international students. When I came in as freshman, I didn't feel like there were many of us at all. And from then, I knew I wanted to change that. Our numbers have almost doubled since then. I actively reached out to the International Admissions Counselor to see if I could help him in any way. I volunteered at the center for Campus Diversity and Inclusion. During my sophomore year, I was offered a job as a Global Programs Assistant at the Office of International Students and Scholars. I was extremely excited because this was exactly what I wanted to do.

I am now a part of a lot of organizations and have a wonderful group of friends that I call family. I am studying what I want to study and I have the job that I always wanted. My entire experience at this university has been amazing and I am looking forward to going into my next semester soon.

Komal Muthyalu is an Indian student from Dubai studying Digital Transformation and Business Strategy at University of Redlands.

[auutintiug]

“In her own words, Hoda Katebi is “a Chicago-based angry daughter of Muslim-Iranian immigrants,” author of the book Tehran Streetstyle, community organizer, and the voice behind the radical, political online fashion publication JooJoo Azad. Here, she speaks with Palestinian-American human rights attorney, artist, educator, and writer Noura Erakat, who has time and again stunned and stupefied the media in bold, brazen, sensibly unapologetic interviews. Katebi and Erakat’s conversation is akin to two streams flowing parallel to one another, embarking upon the surfaces and diving into the depths of politics, art, activism, identity, and gender norms, ultimately joining forces in the same body of water, not in competition but in support of one another—level and determined, headstrong, open to the elements.

—

Hoda Katebi: Do you think that all art is political?

Noura Erakat: I mean, I’m trained as an attorney. I’m hesitant to make such an absolute statement. Politics is basically the negotiation over scarce resources, and it’s the work that’s being done to actually negotiate that distribution. Art is expression, some sort of expression, any kind of expression, right? It’s a visionary aide. It’s a manifestation. That could be political in two ways: What is it that the artist chose to represent as opposed to anything else, and then how does creation implicate a discussion around the distribution of scarce resources?

I don’t identify as an artist because it’s political. I identify as an artist because I think that it’s a way of being. An artist is someone who can transcend an immediate material reality to be able to define yourself on your own terms, and to want to see the world on terms that may not yet exist. So those are the things that I think define an artist, which is not being bound by what is, but instead being in the constant act of creating what could be. A lot of the time it does come from people who hold privilege who say that they don’t want their art to be political or simultaneously call out Palestinians or black folks and say, “Oh, why do you always create political art?” It’s almost like my entire life. It’s triggering to you.

HK: What role does art play for you, and especially as a Palestinian, why is it important?

NE: So, I just want to be clear: I identify as an artist because I think that that’s the best way, because a lot of people see me, and they’re, “Oh, Noura’s a lawyer. Oh, Noura’s a teacher. Oh, Noura …” You know what I mean?

HK: Yeah.

NE: And I feel like rather than be defined by the actual profession, I want to be defined by the way I relate to the world in it. Me being an artist is not me defining my career or my productivity. It’s my relationship to time. I’m also identifying as queer, right? it’s not who you’re attracted to; it’s how you’re manifesting yourself in the world outside of binaries. I want to live.

I’ve written two plays, and I’ve fallen out of that—it’s a practice, like anything, and I haven’t been keeping it up. But last fall, the Kennedy Center invited the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival, which I am a co-founder of, to curate a program for the Millennium Stage. I got to direct the program, which meant musical direction, light direction, you know, all the stage work, plus it’s a play that I wrote, and I directed the professional actress who performed it. It was actually such a miracle, because we only got to do one stage rehearsal an hour before the program started.

The DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival began because in 2011, I had been co-leading something called the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, and we had created a local chapter in D.C., and all of the work that we were doing as part of that network was, I thought, very reactionary. No to negotiations. No to these terms of the peace process. No to the split. I knew, I knew that that was not going to last because that’s not something that sustains. It creates a lot of toxicity.

On a trip to Toronto, I was speaking in Toronto and my good friend introduced me to her project, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, and I thought to myself, oh my God. That’s it. We have to create something that will outlast the politics of rejection. We have to create something that lives on its own terms. So when I got back, I and two other women co-founded this project, and now we’re in our eighth year. It is not a Palestine film festival; it is a showman arts festival. Our whole purpose is to showcase the artists, whoever they are. You could be talking about your favorite color or your favorite candy or the way your mom screwed you over and still left it in your head. The whole point is to showcase the artist and all of the different media that they use, visual, performing, cross stitching, cooking, music, dance, the whole thing.

This is where we’re dreaming of the future. This is where we’re creating. Who are Palestinians? Who are young Palestinians don’t know anything about it? From what they feel, from what their family passed onto them—how are they expressing that? And that is the future of Palestine. We’re trying to cultivate the space where they can dream. What the diaspora looks like and what the community looks like beyond just, what are the political terms upon which this will be resolved? Instead it becomes a social question, more like, what do people look like? What does trauma feel like? What is joy? What is internal conflict? What languages do we speak in this space? It also becomes one of the best tools for mainstreaming the question of Palestine. We’re bringing out audiences that probably feel like the whole thing is toxic.

HK: Yeah, it’s like a language that transcends border and culture. You create really accessible work. So, how are you able to transcend that really difficult box that lawyers are taught to be sitting in?

NE: I went into law school because I wanted to fight, and I thought, if only we had these tools we could just reason through this, then we can get out of the binds that politics had created for us, and we’ll just reason through it through some arbiter. We just listen to each side, and we can figure it out, and in fact, that was a really jarring lesson, and one of naivety, and it’s become the source of inspiration for my forthcoming book, Justice for Some: Law in the Question of Palestine, which will be out in March 2019. First of all, I barely survived the damned thing, because it is the single most white, heteronormative, classist, stifling space—

HK: Say it.

NE: —you can ever imagine. It is basically where you go to protect and revere the status quo. My issue with law school is that you take that for granted. Nobody admits that that’s what it is, and you start to act like everything that you’re studying is objective when everything is so not objective.

HK: Everything that you produce, whether it’s academic in the legal industry, you’re coming from your particular perspective of the world. Oppressed or oppressor.

NE: True, but there’s a different kind. Let me give you an example. When you’re studying property law in the United States, all property law is built upon a logic of dispossessing native nations, indigenous nations in the United States. And here you are studying concepts like liens, trusts or estates, possession, but you never ever talk about, well, what is the root of this whole model? The root of it is the dispossession of indigenous nations. Or when we talk about criminal law: We want to talk about the death penalty as a jurisprudential matter, which means we’re just going to look at the case law, but we’re not going to talk about, how is it that the law itself and the way that the death penalty becomes instrumentalized is specifically to punish black people?

I had a really hard time in law school. I ended up getting a big award at the end, which was like a vindication, but I almost didn’t even go to my graduation because I was just like, this was miserable. Afterwards, I didn’t even take a traditional law job. I went to Berkeley Law, and after law school, I got a fellowship for something like 30, 35k. That’s insane for a recent law graduate, and then there was no such thing as working as a Palestinian-rights lawyer, so I had to create my own job. It was a coup to even get the fellowship.

I’m now in a place where I have some stability, but from the time I graduated until now, I came onto the tenure track in the academy basically hustling. Nobody wants to … It’s just a difficult story. I mean, you have to be crazy to be doing this work. If I wasn’t crazy, I wouldn’t have lasted this long.

HK: What has got you through?

NE: I kept pushing. I kept being a lawyer. I went back to school, and I kept writing like a lawyer. I kept appearing on television like a lawyer until more recently. I think until last December, when I started to appear on TV and in public spaces, a little less as an attorney and more like as a human being and a Palestinian, that, I think, was a major turning point for me and for people receiving me, because when I’m talking as a lawyer, you know, I’m basically trying to be removed from it, just making the argument and letting it stand, but when I step into my skin as a Palestinian, as a human being, it’s me.

I’m still going to use logic as my primary communication tool, and everybody has a different way they like to communicate in public. Some people like to tell stories. Some people like to move you, just really deeply move you and rally you to fight and believe. I think logic is really compelling. I do it in the same way when I’m in my classroom. I don’t ever tell you what exactly to believe. I want to give you enough facts and information for you to make your own decision. That’s so much more powerful when you have to engage with me and do the work with me. You have to think about it.

For me, legal practice basically means that I’m an advocate. Because what is human rights advocacy? There’s no courtroom. What does it mean, then, to be a human rights attorney? It means that I am making a case in the world of public opinion. That’s my courtroom.

HK: What got you out of bed every day during this period? Were you also doing art at the same time, or did art come later?

NE: I was producing art while I was in law school as a writer. I dabbled in poetry, but I did the theater work. My first play is based on oral histories that I collected.

I’m in the West Bank in 2000, when the second intifada begins. I’m a student at Hebrew University [of Jerusalem], which was a whole story unto itself, but I’m the only student at Hebrew U that is a Palestinian and living in what’s known as the West Bank. And so basically, school gets shut down, because the intifada has started, and I had come eager to do an oral history project. I thought it was going to be about young girls and women. I started traveling to interview families of the slain, of the killed, and to get the stories of those killed, and so I collect all of these stories and come back. I transcribe them, and then I turn that oral history project into a revolving monologue, which is like a one-act play for about an hour where you get to hear almost all of the stories being told by the characters themselves as they’re describing their loved one who’d been killed.

So, I write that while I’m in law school. I produce that. I direct that. It takes its own life, and it’s performed in different places. I then come to do another monologue, but this time it’s a one-woman show, and I perform that one everywhere. And that was it. That space just killed my creative spirit.

HK: Do you see yourself within the legacy of any artist that you look up to? Whose tradition do you feel that you belong to, if any?

NE: The first person that comes to mind is Arundhati Roy.

HK: Bae!

NE: Right? Here is this woman completely committed to revolutionary justice and transformation but who is expressing herself also as a dreamer, as a novelist, and as an essayist, and so I really like that. It’s these visionary women who are immersed and accountable to a base and to a movement. They don’t see themselves as above or as being revered. They see themselves as being a part of something bigger than them. What you’re seeing in their work is homage to it, paying respect to it, and creating space for it.

HK: Situating yourself in the West as a site of knowledge production in academia, which is heavy orientalist, perpetuates a lot of racism, the same ways that you mention about the law. What are your experiences there, and what made you become an educator?

NE: I think in everything that I’ve done, I’ve always been an educator. Even as an activist or when I’m leading workshops at different universities from before I got into law school. The difference about entering the academy is now you’re producing knowledge in a way that’s refereed and becomes subject to academic and scholarly scrutiny. A lot of circumstances pushed me into that field, and also because I’m increasingly unfulfilled by the legal practice, which I find is so hampered by the question of politics and by political issues. I’m increasingly frustrated with the limitation of the law, but also more curious about it. Why is it working in this way? What is it about the law, what is it about politics? And so these became scholarly inquiries that push me out, like make me more disenchanted with being a lawyer.

Once I’m in the academy, now it’s like a whole different set of challenges. It becomes the most stark when people of color talk about justice issues that are difficult conversations. So, if I was talking about FGM and the Muslim community, I don’t think people would receive me harshly. It might even be kind of okay, because I’m not challenging the establishment. But being of color, producing knowledge that is counter-hegemonic is when you raise a lot of flags, and immediately people begin to question whether you’re an academic or an activist. It’s one thing if somebody was studying these things. It’s another if you’re invested in them and studying them. That’s been a really difficult challenge, how to toe that line.

It’s a lot of unknowns, like you’re saying. For me, I’m leaving the choice to myself. I write about what I find the most interesting, intriguing, because that’s what’s the most authentic, and that’s the work that I do best, when I enjoy what I’m doing. But there is great risk in doing the work in that way. I feel like that’s the risk that’s worth taking. I want to know that I spent all the time I had breathing, able-bodied and able-minded, to produce the work that I thought was critical and necessary, rather than produce the work that I thought was going to help me climb some sort of career ladder.

HK: Because at the end, you always get exposed anyway.

NE: Maybe it’s about getting exposed, but I feel like it’s between you and yourself. What is it that you want at the end of the day? What is going to make you happy? So, yeah, I’m taking a risk, but everything else that I’ve done has been a risk. Right?

HK: Yeah. And with all of these risks, what are the joys of being an educator?

NE: Oh my God, the students. There’s so much tremendous joy. There’s so much tremendous joy in their capacity and their imagination and their passion, and the community that they create with one another. In finding folks who want to create an alternative world based on a place of love and a place of vision and a place of hope and a place of faith. All of that is joyful. I believe that the revolution will be full of joy. I know the revolution to be full of joy. It’s also full of tremendous heartache, but we already know that, right? But when we fight, we don’t just fight because we’re sad and because we’re angry. We fight because we believe we can. We believe we can. We believe we should.

HK: And we have no choice.

NE: We believe we are better. And that’s so joyful.

HK: And that also takes me to the very last question that I’ll ask: What is the world that you’d like to see?

NE: Well, there’s the really nerdy answer, which is to see a world where if we are to have governments, the governments are to be run by people for the sake of people, where profit is not a determinative logic, where the distribution of wealth is not concomitant with some neo-liberal equation of productivity and earnings and market formulations, but rather based on need. That’s a world that I would love to live in.

I would like to live in a world where we’re actually honoring the earth. We are depleting this earth at such a fast rate, at such a disrespectful rate, that we’re not going to have an earth to even divide by the time we figure out how to get along with one another and get over our human conflict. That’s why billionaires are trying to figure out their exit route to Mars and life elsewhere. Environmentalism isn’t this side thing. It’s central to everything that we do, and it’s entwined with indigenous justice as well, people who have already told us how to treat this earth and how to make it sustainable.

HK: That’s beautiful. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything that you wanted to say that we didn’t get to touch on?

NE: One of the things that made me most excited about the invitation by Suited, the first thing I thought of, was that I wanted Rami Kashou to dress me, because I saw him on Project Runway and he didn’t identify as a Palestinian. I knew he was Palestinian, but he was just out there being a designer, and in watching him, I found freedom. I thought, that is what freedom will mean for Palestinians, when they can just be in the world and not have to be defined by our fight. We can just be defined by whoever we want to be. “I’ve been fangirling you for 12 years. You want to dress me?” So we meet, and he dresses me, and if you notice … I don’t know if you’ve seen the photos.

HK: I haven’t.

NE: It’s like artwork. Literally the only other person who’d worn what I wore for this photo shoot was a mannequin at a museum. It is exactly what I envision the future of Palestine to be, which is taking our tradition and our history and our past, but not going back to it or being stuck in it. It’s taking it and creating something absolutely new and visionary. It’s Palestinian futurism, and it was … that is such a central piece of the photo shoot, of this story, of what art is doing, of my own vision of: What does it take for us to create these new futures? And at the heart of it, it means not being afraid to dream.

[tusouthafrica]

Female Student Activism: Speaking Out Despite Facing Gender Discrimination

Article, Photos and Audio by: Emma Padner

A Seasoned Activist

At just 12 years old, Brenda Leonard attended her first political meeting. By age 15, she became the president of the Student Representative Council at her high school in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. 

Leonard was an active student protestor in 1985 when South Africa was ruled by the Apartheid Government. Leonard, who currently works at Bush Community Radio in Woodstock, Cape Town, was working to fight and ultimately overturn this government.

But she and the other women participants had to battle for equality within the majority male protest organizations. Leonard recalled a time when the women protested in order to gain the respect of their male counterparts.

“[The men] thought we were distracting away from the real issues and we were called anti-revolutionaries and lots of other things,” she added. “But for us it was important that our voices are heard because we make a contribution, a very important contribution towards liberating the country.”

“Our liberation is not different to your liberation and because of that our issues need to be recognized within this.”

-Leonard, on how women during the Apartheid Era needed to ‘prove’ that gender liberation should be valued in society

Hear From Leonard

A Rich Past of Student Activism

Student protests have played a pivotal role in South Africa’s history. In 1974, the Apartheid Government made it compulsory that the Afrikkans language be taught in all South African schools.  

On June 16, 1976, students in Soweto, Johannesburg marched in protest of this significant curricular change. What began as a peaceful protest turned violent when police arrived, resulting in an original report of twenty three deaths. Estimates rose to 176 casualties. 

Leonard added that in the 1980s when she was actively protesting, students were more violent; burning tires, disrupting schools, and making petrol bombs. 

In 2015, students began protesting the rising fees for higher education. This sparked the #FeesMustFall movement. Meanwhile, the Western Cape province held protests for the removal of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes statue, which was at the University of Cape Town (UCT)’s main campus. There were also protests to prevent the outsourcing of university workers. 

Media organization Daily Vox reported that the movement did not get immediate attention because it originated at historically black, rural universities like The University of Limpopo. Once protests spread to historically white universities such as Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and UCT, it grew into a national movement. 

Unfortunately, the historically black universities continued to be ignored by most major media outlets throughout the movement. 

#FeesMustFall from a Journalist’s Viewpoint

Asisha Dadi Patel was attending Johannesburg’s Wits and covered the #FeesMustFall protests firsthand for Daily Vox in 2015 and 2016.

During her honors (postgraduate year), she worked to uncover the truth about #FeesMustFall. Patel said she represented the protests from the students’ point of view. 

“As a journalist, covering [#FeesMustFall] was amazing for me because it was literally stuff that had never happened before...and here I was being able to be a part of documenting it,” she said.

Despite appreciating the opportunity to cover the protests, Patel recalled multiple times where she was harassed while doing her job because of her gender. She said it was common to see that sort of practice within the movement.

“A lot of issues of sexism came to the foreground, a lot of issues of patriarchy; people, including women themselves, were not willing to take women leaders seriously,” she added. “I know there were multiple accounts of sexual assault and those sorts of thing by the security with female students. They were just brutalized, they were just manhandled really badly. One girl had her shirt ripped open and her breasts were hanging out just because of police brutality.” 

Patel said when class registration was shut down in 2016, a group of students gathered to occupy the concourse on campus. She took a photo for her article. 

“[The group] got extremely angry and within a matter of 30 seconds there was a massive mob surrounding me,” she said. “They were trying to grab my phone and trying to force me to delete the picture and it turned into a very big thing. They were getting physical.” 

The violent situation caused her to feel exhausted by the movement and traumatized. She added that violence increased in 2016, due to the police presence on campus.

“A whole group of women banded together to protest that exact issue and say, ‘If this movement isn’t going to be inclusive of women and elevate the voices of the women who are elected as our leaders rightfully, then we don’t want to be part of it.’”

-Patel, on the unequal treatment of the rightfully elected female leaders of the Wits Student Representative Council in 2015 

Hear From Patel

2016 Protests at Wits University

For journalism honors student Tumell Modiba, #FeesMustFall was new to her when she started at Wits in 2016. Modiba was born in South Africa but grew up in the United Arab Emirates.

“I was kind of culture shocked in a way because I’ve seen protests happen on TV but not really happening at school,” she said. “I remember attending class this one time and students came in and disrupted and said that it’s very unfair that students are continuing to study whilst we are fighting for free education.”

Modiba was in a difficult situation during the protests, she added, as she did not participate because her parents asked her not to. They were visiting while campus was shut down because of protests and had her travel to Cape Town with them so she would not be involved or put in danger.

“I would tell my parents every day what's happening, how there were police vans on campus, how some people were being tear gassed, shot at with tear gas by the police, and my parents were very scared of that.”

-Modiba, on why her parents would not allow her to participate in the #FeesMustFall protests

Hear From Modiba

Modiba said women seemed to fall victim to violence by police forces more than their male counterparts, despite not actively participating in the protests on campus. 

“The policemen themselves were very intimidating. They would even catcall us, try to flirt with us and it was very unsafe because you wouldn't know if you denied any of their advances, what they would do to you,” Modiba said. “They could easily arrest you.” 

She added she heard there were many women who were assaulted on campus by private securities. 

Jabulile Mbatha, a journalism honors student at Wits, said she needed to participate in the protests because she and her friends were directly affected by the fees.

As a commuter, Mbatha had to go out of her way to travel to campus each day to protest. She said doing this she put herself in danger as she did not have an immediate safe space to run to, like a dormitory. 

She said she spoke with her parents about participating in the protests. Mbatha added her family had always been open and encouraging, and her parents simply warned her to avoid violence and “try and remain as you are.”

Mbatha added the protests were unlike anything she had experienced in the past, as the university was highly militarized and it was her first encounter with police at such close contact.

“For [police officers] to also be fighting back as much as they did was just unbearable because you saw the things they did to other students or the people you were protesting with, and it’s hard for you to not want to fight for your own life,” she added.

Though Mbatha did not experience additional struggle due to her gender, she noticed her male counterparts seemed to lead more discussions and have more decision-making power.

“There’s a hierarchical structure where gender takes an important role and the male student activists seem to shine or seem to want to lead the protest or give direction,” she said. “...which is very frustrating because we’re all facing the same struggle.”

“Some of my friends that stayed back home thought that it was very unnecessary putting my life in danger...by coming all the way here, knowing that [I] wouldn't have an immediate safe space to run to if ever it just got really bad.”

-Mbatha, on commuting to campus in order to participate in protests

Protests in the Western Cape

At UCT, students were not only protesting high fees, but also the presence of a Cecil John Rhodes statue on campus. The #RhodesMustFall movement sparked a call to ‘decolonize’ education across South Africa. 

UCT masters student Alexandria Hotz, studying philosophy and human rights law, said though there were students who seemed to step up more than others, the UCT protesters did their best to eliminate hierarchy within the protest space. 

She said history tends to seek out someone to illuminate as a leader even if there is not one, creating divisions within the space. 

“It [is] important that some women and queer, nonbinary people were emphasized as leaders and it gave confidence to young women, young queer people, young non binary people,” Hotz said. “But it also had an impact on who was valued, who was seen, who was not and that's really one of the biggest things that I think was really unfortunate.” 

Hotz’s involvement in politics began when she was young, as her parents were politically active and took her to marches and protests. She added that sometimes she wanted to live a “carefree, blasé, apathetic life,” but politics always called to her.

“You begin to realize that your body is racialized and your body is gendered and that shapes the experiences that you have in the world and on campus,” she said. “It makes it also very difficult to ignore or remain silent or not want to be part of what was happening and unfolding at the university.” 

“We’re not going to sit quietly and take this type of oppression and violence. We are going to speak about what's happening in our political spaces, and if we are wanting to see a different world than that different world needs to start within the organizing spaces that we’re in.”

-Hotz, on the reaction of how women, queer, and nonbianry people were treated in protests

Hear From Hotz

Pushing Past Gender Barriers

Wits journalism and media studies student Imaan Moosa also identifies as a student activist. However, she was not at Wits during the #FeesMustFall protests. She is active with the Palestine Solidarity Community. She serves as the group’s secretary. 

Moosa said in her experience, it is more difficult and unsafe for women in protests. She added she has personally been manhandled by police while protesting. 

“When you’re in an environment like that and then you’re being targeted by police and they are trying to harm you, it makes you very angry,” she said.  

Moosa said she believes there is a ‘stigma’ around women in leadership positions, and that women have to “work 10 times harder than a man whose in this position because [men] don't see [females] as valuable as men.”

Moosa found herself and other women having to prove themselves not just to the men in the activism community, but to men in general who want to get involved. 

“There’s that added challenge of being a woman in activist circles where you’re not just being targeted by police or people in power but you have to explain your existence in that space,” Moosa added.

“[Men] don’t see [women] as valuable as men and you have to prove yourself not just to the men in the activism community but just to men in general who want to get involved because they don’t see you as worthy of that [leadership] position.” 

-Moosa, on how women leaders are portrayed in politics and protests

Hear From Moosa

Looking to the Future 

Activist Brenda Leonard said she was proud when the #FeesMustFall protests broke out because of the large number of young women who were unafraid to step up and be active in the protests.

“I smile because it made me feel, ‘Yes we’ve done something right!’” she said. “We fought for years, [and] here’s what we fought for, because they stood up there, they were young, they were articulate, confident and they could fight for the issues.”

Moosa emphasized the importance that students, especially women, continue to vocalize what they believe in and fight for those beliefs, because young people always seem to push for change worldwide.

She added that the struggle and danger for young women is a universal idea, and that because of the universality, they will continue to stand up for other women across the country and globe.  

“As South Africans, we have a duty to help others...any small change matters,” Moosa said. “We are the future of our generation and we are going to be the ones who are sitting in Parliament, who are making laws and changing policy and we do have a voice and we should be able to use our voice to make a difference.”

Hear From Leonard about the Future 

[adventures-in-transmania]

Story time #1, the beginning

So, unlike media tends to represent trans people, I didn't know as a kid. I had no problem being called a tomboy in middle school, from what little I can remember. I do remember getting along far easier with boys than girls, but I also had almost every girl I tried being friends with at that age pull some backstabbing, gossipy, clique-y bullshit and who has time for that?

That being said, I don't think I ever had that phase in which I tried to be overly feminine to fit in, which some trans people go through. I wore dresses and skirts in elementary school without any feeling that it wasn't right. I also grew up in a house with a mentally ill biological mother (BPD) who was also a lesbian. I grew up with my bio father out of the house (saw him occasionally, not all that important tbh) and my mother having girlfriends. It's just how life was. I didn't need it explained, I didn't even realize it was different. It wasn't a big deal.

Fast forward to what I CAN remember, my coming out story. Somewhere around 10th grade I stumbled upon the term transgender. I'd been supportive of LGBT+ for quite a few years by then. I thought about my sexuality occasionally. For the most part, I was into men, but I remember not caring if I ended up with a woman. I remember the whispers of my classmates, calling me a dyke when they thought I couldn't hear them, the rumors about my mother being gay, therefore I had to be gay. They really didn't bother me. The people I considered friends didn't mention it or even care from what I gathered. I didn't really discuss lgbt issues with people from school. My friends were teenaged boys and would squirm if you even mentioned anything queer.

Luckily for me, I had friends online. One was a very mature for her age girl who provided a very positive light in an otherwise dark time. I loved her as a best friend and wouldn't trade my time with her for anything. The other was a boy from the deep South living with a religious family. They both met me as a guy character on a website of which I spent a lot of time on during high school. At some point I told them I wasn't born a guy. They didn't care. Online I was a guy.

That's not to say I knew for certain. I was still figuring things out. I didn't have dysphoria at the time. I had no qualms with people using she/her pronouns.

Sometime in 10th grade, I came out to my parent (my bio mother), thinking someone who identified as a lesbian would at the very least understand, talk, maybe even support their child coming out as trans.

Here's a plot twist, they didn't. Here's an even bigger plot twist. They also came out as trans. So, you'd think a trans parent (haha, jokes to be made here) would support their trans child. You'd be wrong. This has caused me much pain, much grief, just 'much' over the years.

There was six years of silence on the issue. We just didn't talk about it.

It wasn't really an issue that bugged me until a couple years into college. Well, other than the issue with my cousin's wedding. I think It was during either my junior or senior year, my cousin got married. I was in the wedding as a reader of some poem. I grew up with her in my life, she lived with us for some time. My parent made me wear a dress. Maybe that was my phase of trying to be overtly feminine, because I went all out. I wore the dress, 6 inch 'coral' heels, painted my nails, and probably wore make-up (which I never really bothered with, even as a girl). I wasn't happy about wearing the dress at this point in my life, I would have much rather been in a suit. My parent, who at this point had come out to me as trans, was able to wear a suit. No one in our family questioned it. It was a sore spot for me for a while. Maybe that was my first experience with blatantly dysphoria, but I can't say for certain. What I saw at the time was my parent, a trans man to me, a cis lesbian to everyone else, was able to wear a suit, but I was made to be uncomfortable in a dress.

I've talked about this since then (8 years after the fact) with both my parent and my cousin and the reasons make sense, according to our society. I'm now willing to accept it was necessary and I'm pretty much over it.

The other instance that I'm not over and will probably always regret is prom. My senior year, I got into this thing with someone who had been a very, very good friend. It was hard, probably based on senior class nostalgia. I liked him, his intelligence. I don't know what he saw in me. He was traditional, conservative, as most people were where I grew up, with it being a small town with 3 churches in 2 square miles.

We spent a lot of time in the library after school. I stayed to spend time with him, mostly. Over Christmas break during our senior year, I confessed that I liked him, which turned out to be reciprocated for whatever reason, or at least he said. A few months after, we discussed prom. I don't recall either of us being entirely enthused about it, but seeing it as something one should experience in high school, as well as the idea that most of our friends were going.

I believe I mentioned once about my thought to wear a suit to prom. A friend of mine who identified as a cis woman at the time, a lesbian, had worn a suit. I wanted to, also. He said he wouldn't go with me, then. I gave in, as I did at that time. I didn't have many people who actually wanted to be with me in any capacity (there's a bit more to this story, but I'm trying to be concise), so to experience something so paramount to the high school experience, I wanted to be included.

At the time I still identified as a woman to anyone who knew me offline. I wasn't dysphoric, I was just a tomboy. I had started to go by Riley online but couldn't really do so in school or anywhere else. I didn't really discuss anything with anyone offline so the two friends I mentioned earlier online really helped. They may not have completely understood but they let me talk about it and accepted me no matter what.

Another major thing I remember from high school was this one instance with my friend and guidance counselor. I had been 'turned in,' for a lack of a better word for attempting to cut at school (yeah, fucked up thing to do, surprise surprise. I wasn't good at coping with emotions, so sue me). I tried talking to my guidance counselor about potentially being trans and having a bit of a rough time with it, which took a lot of courage to do. The only other person I even thought I could go to had been my parent, as misguided as that was. The guidance counselor hadn't even heard of the term and even after explaining it, didn't have any sort of advice (to be expected after first hearing about it). There was no follow up, no conversation, nothing. Any sort of research would have revealed that trans people (teenagers especially) are at a higher risk of committing suicide and higher risk of being bullied. But it's easy to fall through the cracks when you're not a face or name people remember.

Here's one of my favorite memories from high school. Sometime during my senior year I took a psychology class. It was offered as an elective and I had free time. I would have rather been in a class than having a study hall. The class was taught by someone who had only taken a psychology course in college about 15-20 years ago, which explains a lot. She was certainly not qualified in any capacity to be teaching this class. I had several run ins with this particular teacher, but I kept my head down and did my work for the most part. One of her classes led to a discussion on gun laws and ownership. I was naive at the time, but she made a comment about how she should be able to own a gun so if someone came onto her front lawn, she could defend her property. That was the mentality of a lot of people in this small, conservative town. Great stuff.

So, another class we were talking about biased and unbiased studies. I don't remember the specific topic, but it had to pertain to something hormonal. I brought up the idea that to have a completely unbiased study, you would need test subjects that were AFAB on testosterone and AMAB on estrogen. She couldn't even imagine the concept. That night, I wrote an entire paper on why AMAB people would take estrogen and vice versa. I didn't mention being trans as a reason until the very last line. My biggest regret in life, just before that prom fiasco, is never giving her the paper.