#kayla kumari upadhyaya

[thexfridax]

32 queer books vs their movie adaptations via @autostraddle

[fiercynn]

Everyone deserves safety, autonomy, and basic human rights. In the time since I started writing this, I’ve seen op-eds and social media posts pop up suggesting that “queers for Palestine” is akin to saying “chickens for KFC” or “minks for fur.” Aside from the dehumanization and condescension of those ridiculous comparisons, they also just aren’t accurate. They set up a hierarchy that true queer liberation seeks to dismantle. Global oppression of queer folks does not supersede any other form of violent, racist oppression. Fighting for Palestinian rights does not fundamentally take away from our own rights. Imperialism constantly constructs and maintains anti-queerness, and anti-imperialist work benefits all queer people. I’ve seen people online peddle the misguided idea that Palestinian freedom and queer freedom are at odds with each other because queer Palestinians seek asylum from persecution in Israel. Indeed, Israel has an official policy to grant temporary stay permits to LGTBQ+ folks from the West Bank and in some cases has issued work permits. Israel also has cultivated a reputation for being an ultra queer friendly destination, though as queer feminist Jewish activist Ashley Bohrer has written, the deliberate pinkwashing of Israel seriously obscures a lot of the lived realities of queer Palestinians living in Israel: “This so-called gay-friendly state of Israel preys on the vulnerability of queer Palestinians, a vulnerability that many of us who live in ‘progressive’ ‘human rights-friendly’ countries still face.” A longread feature in the independent nonprofit magazine run by Israeli and Palestinian journalists +972 Magazine similarly highlights stories from asylum-seeking queer Palestinians that contradict the dominant narrative of Israel as a LGBTQ+ safe haven, suggesting it’s only a safe haven for some. These queer Palestinians often face financial abuse, restrictions on access to healthcare, and other forms of discrimination and abuse. And while many of the sources interviewed indeed experienced violence in their homeland, it’s clear from reading these testimonies that things are not as simple as it being safe for all LGBTQ+ folks in Israel and unsafe in Palestine. In 2014, an op-ed published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz urged the IDF to stop its practice of blackmailing gay Palestinians. So even within Israel, there is pushback against the notion that Israel can function as a refuge for queer Palestinians.

fantastic piece by kayla kumari upadhyaya, published at autostraddle on october 31, 2023

[nothwell]

Sarah Wallace (they/them) interviews Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (she/her) about her work in the “relationship horror” subgenre, her career spanning nonfiction TV and film criticism to writing fiction, and adding to the growing canon of queer horror with her illustrated novelette, Helen House.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (she/her) is the managing editor of Autostraddle and TriQuarterly and the author of the queer horror novelette Helen House as well as many more articles and short stories. You can connect with her at her website: kaylakumariupadhyaya.com

Sarah Wallace (they/them) is the author of the queernormative cozy fantasy series Meddle & Mend, beginning with Letters to Half Moon Street, as well as coauthors of the Fae & Human Relations series beginning with Breeze Spells and Bridegrooms. You can connect with them on instagram: @ sarah.wallace.writer

[laciere]

"You don't get it at all."

She turned away from me and looked out the window. How could she say this? Any of this? I got it alright. I felt what she felt. Or maybe not exactly. Or maybe that's the thing i got. The certainty that no one konws what you're fucking talking about. Those contradictions. Here's what I know I knew then: I knew we were both unwhole. I knew we were the living ones but that we were also ghosts. I knew death was a sieve, full of holes that can't all be plugged at once. I knew no one else felt my exact pain. Because their someone wasn't my someone. Luci wasn't Helen and Helen wasn't Luci and I wasn't Amber and she wasn't me. But every time I put something into words, it sounds like something that has been said before, like something you could read in a book. There's nothing special about it at all. Yes, everyone's grief is valid. But no, you don't always want to hear about it. Yes, maybe I relate to widowers more than anyone else, but no, I don't want to fucking unpack that. Amber didn't tell me about her dead sister until she had to. I didn't tell her I fuck away the pain, and I never would. I would never tell her I almost ended things the second we started having less sex. I only didn't go through with it because I did care about her and did get more than sex out of our relationship and couldn't bear to lose her because of my own shit I hadn't even begun to untangle because oh god untangling this shit wouldn't be worrying a knot unloose, it would be another destruction. It would be a razed forest, an extinguished light, do you see what I mean about cliches? About the failures of language? I kept secrets of my own from Amber. I didn't let her see all of me. I don't even want you to see all of me. You want to see all of me? You sure about that? Here goes. What if i told you when I saw Pam for the first time and realized she looked so much like Amber, I didn't think it was sweet and cute. I thought it was hot. I was attracted to her, even wondered if her lips tasted citrusy like Amber's. I'd literally wanted to fuck my girlfriend's mom upon meeting her. Here's me, here's who I really am. A fucking grief monster. It was much easier to turn everything off and fuck and fantasize about fucking and fuck this shit sucks. Pam had it right. Fuck fuck fuckfuckfuckfuck.

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (2022, Burrow Press)

[queerliblib]

"One of the most exciting instances of fighting bans I’ve read about recently was in a CNN feature on The Queer Liberation Library, an entirely online nonprofit collection of hundreds of ebooks and audiobooks centering LGBTQ narratives that’s free to access. It launched in October and represents a creative way of circumventing book bans given social, political, and financial barriers to accessing queer literature. Existing entirely online, it welcomes people who might not be able to physically access spaces selling or lending queer books."

-Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, LGBTQ Fiction Sales Are Up, but We Still Urgently Need Creative Ways To Fight Book Bans, @autostraddle, December, 27th, 2023.

[filipeanut]

“It is within the margins I am displaced to that I find home: Palestine is the epitome of placelessness and the beating heart of worldwide struggle. It is the most queer.” -Yazan Zahzah

"Pride has always been and will continue to be a mix of resistance, rage, release, and revelry. Pride is a rage party, as I like to think of it. But this year at Pride, we must continue to focus on the inextricable links between queer liberation and Palestinian liberation.” -Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

"No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us." From Micah Bazant's poster of Marsha P. Johnson (2013).

[cielsosinfel]

Favorite 2023 reads pt 2

Cus I said I'd come back and finish after making this post. I've been super busy + exhausted lately though so this will be less detailed lol (maybe, we'll see how much I ramble)

Once again, links to places I already discussed the book are added if they exist.

Fiction

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya: This is a VERY short book, barely I novella I feel, but it has so so so so much packed into it. I'm just gonna copy what I wrote on DW:

It's a story that opens with our unnamed narrator realizing she is a terrible girlfriend, as her girlfriend Amber shares that her sister died years ago. Our narrator also has dead sister trauma, and she is coping with her grief in fun and exciting ways aka sex addiction. A ghost story steadily unfolds, but what really got to me was how this book delved into sex addiction, codependence and objectifying not just your partner(s) but also yourself. Really plunges the depths of how far someone can fall in their grief and how it radiates outward to affect others.

Idol, Burning by Usami Rin, tl Asa Yoneda: A story about Akari, a high schooler deeply obsessed with a particular male idol, deeply involved in fandom for her oshi, has her world upended when rumors circulate that he hit a woman who may be his girlfriend. This was a beautiful, amazing novel (and wonderfully translated) about a teenage girl spiraling into depression, the failures of the education system to provide meaningful support, and the fractures in a family where everyone is coping so badly with the struggles life throws at them. I found this a very, very thoughtful book on depression, social isolation, eating disorders, and living with undiagnosed learning disabilities and dyslexia. It's also a beautiful exploration of all the ways fandom can offer a lifeline in one's darkest moments, and also contribute to spiraling further and further into a depressive and self-loathing rut.

I still have complicated feelings about the ending, but I think I also still appreciate the realism of it all, and how much more relatable it made it. Even as someone who has never been involved in oshi/idol fandom, let alone Japanese fandom, it resonated a lot as a man who was a disabled, undiagnosed teen girl desperately seeking connection and purpose with online fan communities.

I read some of the original Japanese novel too and I think the language is perfect for someone still intermediate with their Japanese literacy!

A Man of Lies by Ben Crane; A former enforcer for the local mob boss fucks up big-time when he and his boyfriend (that mob boss' accountant) are caught trying to steal money to run away together. Now his boyfriend's dead and the enforcer will be too, if he doesn't pay his boss back. But he's got a much better idea what to do with the money he gets from his last big heist.

I wasn't expecting to be as into this as I was, but the writing pulled me in and didn't let go- the prose is quick and easy and never loses its pace; this would really make a perfect action film. And the plot was a lot less predictable than I was expecting; the cast was genuinely fun and endearing barring a few characters, which helps cus there are SO MANY PoVs. It's just a very fun trope-y genre romp and a good break from much heavier stories lol. I'm excited for the sequel after the damn cliffhanger this ends on.

A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll: an absolutely GORGEOUS comic (as all Carroll's comics are) about a woman struggling to fit herself into the life of her new husband and his daughter, with the ghost of his former wife ever present in the background... more literally than she wants to accept. Really good terrifying and beautiful F/F horror exploring sexuality and relationships and mental health and domestic abuse.

Poetry:

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on by Franny Choi

Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women by Rebecca Nie and Peter Levitt

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

[queerstuffonscreen]

Sidetrack (2015)

Episode length: 7-19 min.

Country: USA

Genre: Web Series, Comedy

Language: English

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya wrote a web series about her life and herself, told through the eyes of eight other characters. Sidetrack tells the stories of comedians, cooks, DJs, soccer players, and lesbians. All at the same time.

Season 1

Episode 1: SATO

Episode 2: JALLIE

Episode 3: RADHIKA

Episode 4: CAMILLE

Episode 5: JO

Episode 6: ADRIENNE

Episode 7: SLOANE

Episode 8: ASA

Episode 9: HOT PARTY: PART ONE

Episode 10: HOT PARTY: PART TWO

Watch on YouTube

[venomousviolets]

"You do not need to diminish your own pain."

[lesbianelsas]

"Just as the incredible “Thanksgiving” episode of Master Of None so deftly deals with the experience of coming out, Moments In Love’s depiction of a queer path to pregnancy is authentic, dynamic, difficult without being wholly tragic, and rooted strongly in character and emotion. [...] Alicia’s interiority is treated with the same attention to detail as her physical surroundings. Moments In Love makes the personal lives of its characters viscerally immersive." - Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya for The AV Club

[killingevedaily]

Outstanding Drama Series - Killing Eve

Crescendoing, relentless, all-consuming obsession fuels the narrative of Killing Eve, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sexy, smart, distinctly feminine action thriller starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer as the toxic spy-assassin duo who can’t stop thinking about each other. Watching Killing Eve feels exactly like that: seering obsession. This category was stacked with great, complex dramas, but there’s something just purely intoxicating about Killing Evethat sets it apart. Though it’s the phrase most often used to describe Eve and Villanelle’s dynamic, “cat-and-mouse” hardly covers what Oh and Comer bring to these characters or what’s even on the page. It’s never quite clear whether they want to murder each other or make out. Hunting each other, longing for each other, Eve and Villanelle might be one of the most complex queer relationships on television. But beyond that dripping subtext, it’s just a very good thriller with compelling twists and turns and sharp edges that refuse to be dulled. — Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Fan Favorite New Show - Killing Eve

Queer women were always going to be into Killing Eve because queer women are very into Sandra Oh, but it didn’t take long into the first season of BBC America’s breakout show for queer women to become as obsessed with Killing Eve as Eve and Villanelle are with each other. This is a story we’ve never seen before, not like this, and damn the tropes we just want more! — Heather Hogan

[fuckyeahjamieandclaire]

Sam Heughan is more than just a pretty face. He’s a skilled and talented actor whose portrayal of Jamie on “Outlander” should not be overlooked again by the Emmys, though he missed the cut in the first two seasons of Starz’s popular time-travel romance. Can he overcome the Emmys’ “Slap the Stud” curse?

The Emmys have had a long history of slapping handsome leading men — it took them eight years to finally give Best Drama Actor to Jon Hamm for “Mad Men” and six years to even nominate Kit Harington for “Game of Thrones.” But could the tide be turning? Sterling K. Brown (“This Is Us”) won Best Drama Actor just last year and his co-star Milo Ventimiglia was nominated alongside him. And relative youth didn’t stop actors like Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”), Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”) and Riz Ahmed (“The Night Of”) from collecting trophies. Heughan deserves similar consideration.

Jamie (Heughan) spent half of the third season centuries apart from the woman he loves, Claire (Caitriona Balfe). This may have been torture for the show’s fans, but it allowed both Balfe and Heughan the opportunity to shine individually. But Heughan was at his series best in their reunion episode, “A. Malcolm.”

As Claire shows Jamie pictures of their daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton), already grown, his steely glare slowly breaks as he becomes emotional over how much of her life he’s missed. His shock slowly wears off as he and Claire reacquaint themselves with each other until it’s as if no time has passed at all.

He was praised by critics for his performance. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (A.V. Club) declared, “Heughan is doing a lot of the heavy-lifting, bringing emotional layers and conviction.” Team TVLine was impressed by his performance in “A. Malcolm”: “He’s excellent throughout the episode — note how often Jamie looks at Claire as though he can’t quite believe she’s really there.” And Ed Power (Telegraph) said, “Heughan is fantastic – smoldering as required yet also communicating genuine human need and vulnerability.”

[...]  Will the actors branch open its arms to “Outlander” the way the craft branches have? Either way Heughan will always have his golden pineapple from Gold Derby.

[fiercynn]

steven w. thrasher writing for mondoweiss on november 6, 2023:

As I recently heard Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique author Sa’ed Atshan say in a talk, pinkwashing falsely presumes not only that LGBTQ life doesn’t exist in Palestine but that LGBTQ Palestinians aren’t ever affirmed by their families or each other. And much as feminism is necessary, Atshan argues, queerness is fundamental to imagining a free Palestine into being. Perhaps most relevant to the ceasefire the Queer Bloc marched for this weekend, pinkwashing obscures how LGBTQ people are being tortured, starved, and killed daily by the Israeli Occupation Forces. If just five percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are LGBTQ, that means at least 115,000 of queer Palestinians are being directly terrorized right now and about 500 have been killed (to say nothing of their families). This has been most heartbreakingly documented by people in Gaza using Queering the Map,  a community-generated platform that “provides an interface to collaboratively record the cartography of queer life—from park benches to the middle of the ocean—in order to preserve our histories and unfolding realities, which continue to be invalidated, contested, and erased.” In Gaza, queer people have been using it to honor their dead, post what they imagine to be their final messages before their own deaths, and make promises to find each other in the afterlife. Queer theory and contemporary gay life were formed in the shadow of death caused by AIDS in 1980s; now, queer people in Gaza are living in a far more urgent shadow of death—one in which the grim reaper won’t come in the form of HIV killing them over years, but in an instant, when a bomb is dropped from one of the American made jets or drones constantly flying over Gaza. However, because they are Palestinians, pinkwashing tries to erase the need for their safety from the global LGBTQ community. 

more resources on israel's pinkwashing and queer palestinian liberation

pinkwashing at decolonize palestine

a liberatory demand from queers in palestine at mizna

beyond propaganda: pinkwashing as colonial violence at alQaws

"i'd rather die in the west bank": lgbtq palestinians find no safety in israel by tamar ben david and lilach ben david at +972 magazine

a palestinian trans woman's story peels away israel's pinkwashing veil by sharona weiss at +972 magazine

palestinian liberation is queer liberation by kayla kumari upadhyaya at autostraddle

say no to pinkwashing at bds movement

palestine as a queer struggle at the u.s. campaign for palestinian rights

pinkwashing settler colonialsm: how settler-colonial states co-opt gay rights to legitimize occupation by emily zak at briar patch magazine

pinkwashing exposed: seattle fights back! an hour-long documentary directed by dean spade and edited by amy mahardy

filmmaker pledge at queer cinema for palestine

[laciere]

Her hair brushed my cheek, and I kissed her head again. And again. I squeezed her, and one of my hands grazed her nipple. That's all it took. My mind switched gears again. Back to sex, the flash of fantasy, placing my hand on her mouth before she could utter anything horrible. My skin was still post-jog slick. I thought of her mouth on the sweatiest, most pungent parts of me. Even in the growing darkness, I saw the faint scar on her shoulder and wanted to trace it with my tongue.

Was it my fault she hadn't told me about her dead sister? Did I ask her enough about herself when we first started dating? Was it bad that I remembered what she wore to dates better than what we talked about? Of course it was bad. It belonged on the Bad Girlfriend list for sure.

I wondered, not for the first time, if I was a love grifter. Sometimes I felt like I loved Amber, but love was like a shiny lure at the end of a fishhook. Something soft sutured to something sharp. A trap. Here she was, opening up to me, and I couldn't stop thinking of her open legs.

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (2022, Burrow Press)

[gaywrites]

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just come out all at once? I hate that I feel pressured to come out to men whose names I don’t even know just so they won’t ask for my number or offer me a drink. Why should they get to know something that took me so long to say to the people closest to me, so long to say to myself?

Mastering the Art of Coming Out (and Making Lobster Bisque) | Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya for Autostraddle

[ilovenarcisse]

“Her mostly false testimony and casting of Wes as a troubled killer is intercut with flashbacks to the actual murder of Wes Gibbins in all its gory details. Just when I thought this show was finally done brutalizing Wes, we have to watch as he’s attacked and then slowly dragging himself along the floor gasping for breath and calling out for help. It’s horrifying and makes Annalise’s decision to distort the truth all the more nauseating.” by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya from AV Club