#the way people drove all of the black creators and trans women out of the fandom just. god. god god god.
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i need to know if the people who are following me who are currently in the process of reading homestuck for the first time are doing it through the Unofficial Homestuck Collection because if you aren't please say so because um. Veteran homestuck here who wants to give you the best possible experience . please. <- guy who's prepping for an upcoming homestuck reread and as such has a whole list of reccomendations
#reply here or send an anon ask and ill ramble and give you my mod reccomendations. and links#i know i dont talk abt homestuck much on main because i. purged . most of my homestuck follows back during the#massive fucking antiblackness transmisogyny moment of 2020. that has. like permanently set me on the fucking defensive about it#as in i love homestuck to bits. but i saw the true colours of a lot of fan creators back then and. hrrgghghh#the way people drove all of the black creators and trans women out of the fandom just. god. god god god.#even though the text itself esp later on. like. wants so badly to try and make reperations for those exact things. even if imperfectly#sighhhh. but yeah im around to chat homestuck and if you catch me post-november 1st ill be rereading again#ive been in the fanbase since 2012 so im not The Most Veteran but ive seen my fair share. i can provide historical context for some stuff#basically anything act 6 and beyond i was there for#anyway wow i talked a lot. almost like i really really like homestuck but had to GET REAL QUIET ABOUT IT for a bit while it was.#a bit of a sore spot#lucabytetalks#also i love the epilogues nuiances warts and all so.#that already makes me a black sheep in this godforsaken fanbase
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Both the Dave Chappelle and Margaret Atwood drama are taken wildly out of context. With their actual actions and words elsewhere they support the trans community (monetarily! where it matters). Chapelle particularly isnt steeped in the terf rabbit hole and outright says that trans women Are women but he's upset that people so hellbent on identity politics don't practice empathy when trying to correct people. Those very people drove his trans friend to suicide because she understood while he poked fun at trans people like he does @ every other demographic, he believes in her humanity. And of course people who talk about him 90% of the time haven't actually seen his shows and only quote articles about him.
Hi, first off, I'm not black, but still fuck you for this and I'm gonna tell you off based on of every single thing I'm hearing from the people who we all actually need to be listening to.
Literally every single black trans woman I know has said fuck this guy, every single black trans person/creator on TikTok, on social media in general, is saying that Dave Chappelle is perpetuating white supremacist views on gender and sexuality, perpetuating the idea that transness is a white construct that black people have fallen prey to. Perpetuating the idea that blackness and transness are conflicting identities. Perpetuating the very ingrained TERF ideology that intersectionality is wrong. Perpetuating First Wave white feminist movements. And you're saying that he's not in the wrong?
But It's Okay Because He Had A Trans Friend! Who can't defend herself. Who can't have an opinion on this because she's dead. She's fucking dead and honestly how dare you or anyone bring her up in this as some "gotcha".
I love stand-up. This Is Not Happening, comedy podcasts, Netflix and Comedy Central specials, anything and everything under the sun, including international stand-up. Seeing the recent smaller shows popping up on TikTok has really exciting to me. And before I say anything else, personally, I think Bert Kreisher's last special should have been a bigger deal in the media because half of it was him explaining all of the different ways he physically and emotionally scars his eldest daughter in like a 100% not funny way, this is relevant because if Bert Kreisher had said what Dave Chappelle did I don't think it would have even made news.
I've watched every single one of Dave Chappelle's comedy specials, I watched the Dave Chappelle show when I was a kid and once almost all the way through during the pandemic with a new critiquing eye thanks to life experience, I've even seen the clips that popped up in the very first years of YouTube as a platform. I've seen what he said on stage about trans people. At one point I was a part of a comedy scene enough that a cishet latino man who has real clout in some areas made some shit story about me as a trans person and my micro dick, as a transphobic attack against me after his dog tried to bite my cat and he theatened us both on a public platform. One of his biggest influences - Dave Chappelle. Transphobia in stand-up culture is well and alive and Dave Chappelle just gave TERF propoganda a seat at the table like it was no big deal. Like that doesn't actively put trans people in even more danger from people within their communities nonetheless. A household name stood on a stage and for 37 minutes railed on trans people. And when he did that, he railed on every single trans person. Not just the white ones.
So this take that you have is half-baked transphobic homophobic dimwitted propoganda nonsense. Congrats on falling for it. How the fuck do you have green on shinigamieyes when you're clearly steeped in rampant white supremacist transphobic rhetoric, get out of here I want nothing to do with you even if you are a mutual.
#like cringe what are you even doing in my inbox exposing yourself like this#get better soon I guess#normalize saying fuck you to people who defend transphobia#i'm always gonna ally myself with the black trans people I love and care about over some bullshit like this
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Black, Queer, and Here
In a post-‘Moonlight’ world, writers like Michael R. Jackson and Jeremy O. Harris are making the case for LGBTQ stories that go beyond the gay white experience.
BY MARCUS SCOTT
Last month, when Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop earned unanimous praise upon opening at Playwrights Horizons, it was a pivotal moment for me as a spectator. As someone who is also a Black, gay, musical theatre writer, I saw myself and my story onstage for the first time. I guffawed, clapped my hands, snapped along, celebrated the pageantry of Black excellence, and even teared up a bit during the play’s climax.
For the first time I didn’t have to undertake the mental gymnastics all marginalized people are basically required to do once they enter the theatre; to empathize with the white, often male protagonist as default. Not to mention, there was additional apprehension. Any time I saw a story centered on LGBTQ characters, I could usually predict what I was getting myself into: either comedic NutraSweet schmaltz with heart, or a maudlin tragedy where happy endings are laughable and everyone dies in the end.
But this was different. Led by a colossal, virtuoso performance from Larry Owens—not to mention anchored by an all-Black, all-queer ensemble of multitalented, triple-threat featured players—A Strange Loop (now extended through July 28) is a singular, seminal Bildungsroman that casts a subversive, critical third eye on both mainstream and nether regions of the Black gay American experience that had not been shown before.
The show follows Usher (Owens), a young, NYU-educated, overweight Black gay man working as an usher at a long-running Broadway musical and struggling to write a musical about a young, NYU-educated, overweight Black gay man working as an usher at a long-running Broadway musical and struggling to write a musical (hence the loop in the title). A Strange Loop is a visceral, soulful, psychosexual panoramic pièce de résistance that may just be the most radical Off-Broadway musical of its kind. Contextualizing everything from #MeToo, Moonlight, Tyler Perry, Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and second wave feminism, Jackson’s show is a potpourri of popular culture, existentialism, and metafiction—a dazzling coming-of-age artistic journey of self-discovery.
My sentiments for the show have been shared. In a post-show talkback on June 19, “Pose” star Billy Porter joined Jackson, choreographer Raja Feather Kelly, and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins onstage to discuss the musical. The event, which was attended by top names in the theatre community (such as Lin-Manuel Miranda), was presented by Ucross, a prestigious residency program in northeast Wyoming. Porter choked back tears as he began the panel: “To sit up there and see my life onstage, when everybody said that my story wasn’t valid—to see that up there, to see it so brave, and to see it so bold. To see it so truthful, so complicated, so honest, and so unapologetic, has been one of the most wonderful nights for me in the theatre.”
Over the course of the 2018-19 season, I saw 100 shows, and few of them affected me like Jackson’s musical. None of those other shows centered on queer bodies of color. In all fairness, it’s not like a lot of theatres are producing plays by or about queer people of color. And when they do, it’s sanitized, ambiguous, and not complex—for example, Celie and Shug’s neutered romance in The Color Purple.
Earlier this year, in a lively panel about the state of the American play (copresented by American Theatre and Signature Theatre), playwright and director Robert O’Hara wryly offered some insight into the queer POC experience in American theatre. Speaking about the 2017-18 season, O’Hara pondered the state of Broadway, which was littered with prestige London transfers or star-driven assembly line revivals of treasured classics. But he also noticed a third trend: “the amount of gay white men we have on Broadway this year.” Naming Angels in America, The Boys in the Band, and Torch Song, all of which were written by white gay men, O’Hara remarked, “There’s too many white gay people, particularly white gay men and their struggle being white and gay and male. Do we really need that many conversations? To some people, that’s diversity. But to me, that’s just more white folks onstage.”
Though theatre prides itself on being a space for outcasts, and most of its preeminent artists are gay men, their visibility often comes at the expense of other members of the LGBTQ community. In the theatre, LGBTQ plays have often centered solely on the experience of gay white cis-men and (only recently) cis-women, while people of color war in the margins for mainstream acclaim.
Whether it’s about the gay civil rights movement (Mart Crowley’s seminal The Boys In The Band, Dustin Lance Black’s 8), the HIV/AIDS epidemic (Larry Kramer’s definitive The Normal Heart, Tony Kushner’s iconic Angels in America, William Finn’s neurotic Falsettos) or communal inherited trauma (Moisés Kaufman’s triumphant docudrama The Laramie Project, Matthew Lopez’s Broadway-bound The Inheritance), gay white men have dominated queer stories, creating nuanced characters and becoming the epicenter of the narratives of LGBTQ culture.
Openly gay Black artists like O’Hara and George C. Wolfe have created work about Black queer life over three decades, but their numbers were fewer and far between. The difference now is the sheer volume of diverse queer voices. Some are even calling it a renaissance.
I trace it to the film Moonlight. Released in 2016 to universal acclaim under the helm of director Barry Jenkins, and based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Moonlight became the first film with an all-Black cast and the first LGBTQ film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The victory was a watershed moment in popular culture, sparking public interest in Black art and queer stories.
Ever since, queer Black theatre artists have begun to storm the proverbial tower in droves: McCraney recently returned to Steppenwolf in Chicago with Ms. Blakk For President, and his Choir Boy had an acclaimed run on Broadway after making the rounds of the nation’s regional theatres. Donja R. Love, an HIV-positive gay Black playwright, saw the world premieres of his queer period dramas Sugar in Our Wounds and Fireflies. Jordan Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo earned an extended and lauded run Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Hailed as “The Queer Black Savior the Theater World Needs” by Out magazine, Jeremy O. Harris became a literary sensation and enfant terrible of the theatre world after Slave Play and Daddy had their world premieres this past season (Slave Play will transfer to Broadway in September).
What makes these plays radical is their candor, addressing the audience with frank depictions of queer Black life. Most importantly, these are plays that are creating discourse on what artist Lora Mathis calls radical softness, or “the idea that unapologetically sharing your emotions is a political move and a way to combat the societal idea that feelings are a sign of weakness.” In one of the most pivotal scenes in Choir Boy, one of the boys chooses an a cappella rendition of “Love Ballad” (originally by Jeffrey Osborne of L.T.D.) to express his love for another boy, but imagination ends up being the closest he’ll ever get to confessing his feelings. In Sugar in Our Wounds, an enslaved man offers another reading lessons, but the subtext is that of romantic yearning. In Slave Play, an interracial gay couple undergo therapy, in an effort to reconnect. These writers subvert and comment on the oppressive systems that affect disenfranchised and marginalized people without attacking or distancing mainstream audiences.
Not to mention the playwrights who identify as queer but whose plays aren’t chiefly about LGBTQ life: Colman Domingo (Dot), Marcus Gardley (The House That Will Not Stand), Jonathan Norton (My Tidy List of Terrors), Timothy DuWhite (Neptune), Keelay Gipson (#NewSlaves), Korde Arrington Tuttle (clarity), Jirèh Breon Holder (Too Heavy for Your Pocket) and Derek Lee McPhatter (Bring the Beat Back). Chief among these is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who was listed among the Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights of 2018-2019 and has been honored as a two-time finalist for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively.
As writer-activist Darnell L. Moore noted on Twitter: “In the past few months, I’ve witnessed displays of brilliance—Black queer men who have created theatrical works that dig into the complex interior lives of Black characters. Their works disrupt & reimagine all we believe to be true about the limits of Blackness, of gender. They poke at the grounds of Black radical politics by illuminating how the freedom dreams conjured by some of the Blacks often function as nightmares for some others—trans folk, queers, drag queens, the not-respectable. They remind us about the futility of white liberalism. They refuse the white gaze.” He characterized these plays as “Black folks-loving art works” which “preach and sing and lament and celebrate and bear witness and take up arms and push and pull us.”
At the same time, Moore does wonder “how these works might be received if the creators and/or main actors weren’t Black gay men.” He has a point: Queer women, trans, or gender non-binary writers still struggle to be seen, with only a few receiving recognition such as Aziza Barnes (BLKS), Tanya Barfield (Bright Half Life), Tracey Scott Wilson (Buzzer), Nissy Aya (righteous kill, a requiem), and Ianne Fields Stewart (A Complicated Woman).
While many Black artists are generating work that are nuanced and empowering, and even dissecting of the white gaze, there are still just as many works that default towards “enterpainment.” Coined by playwright Aurin Squire in his play Zoohouse, “enterpainment” is a trope that calls for historically oppressed people to be forced into situations where they must put their suffering and victimhood on display for the education and edification of the masses. This exercise in emotional masochism has been at the forefront of many Black plays, with this trope being weaponized and commodified. Many Black characters in general are defined by their pain, and in plays that center on LGBTQ people of color, too often that pain is doubled because of their race and sexual orientation.
The “bury your gays” stereotype is still very much the norm for these plays, including some of the ones mentioned above. For example, in Donja R. Love’s Fireflies, the protagonist is a woman who clings to the memory of the woman she loved who was horribly murdered in the streets. The main character in Chisa Hutchinson’s She Like Girls is a 16-year-old lesbian who is shot and killed at the climax of the play.
Most stories featuring queer characters of color forefront the atrocities that inherently arise from the stigmatization of one’s sexual agency and one’s race. Rather than showcasing the beauty within the full expression of queerness—such as falling in love or (in A Strange Loop) standing up to your parents—too often writers are defaulting to trauma.
But this is part of a larger issue: that of Black artists working within a primarily white system who feel they must commodify their pain for white consumption. And of white producers not feeling like they’re able to challenge artists of color to look deeper, of them thinking of these artists as a single diversity slot or purveyor of issue plays, instead of artists whose careers and ideas need to be invested in. At the live event, Robert O’Hara had some advice for white producers: “You have to be able to live inside the power and the privilege that you have, and also continue to demand the rigor, intellect, and dexterity that the work requires so that it does not just become a play but a [major stepping stone for a] career.”
Recently I ran into Jackson at Musical Theatre Factory’s High Five, a gala hosted at Town Stages; he was being honored that night. Before I could congratulate him, he kindly rebuffed. “There’s still work to be done,” he said as he was greeted by eager patrons and admirers. He’s not wrong. In 2017, Pew found that younger, non-white, and low-income people (lower middle-class people of color) were more likely to self-identify as LGBTQ than whites, debunking the myth that Blacks and Latinos are overwhelmingly homophobic.
Reality is more complex than we give it credit for. And considering that Broadway is in need of new musicals in it’s 2019-20 season, there really is nothing more topical than, to quote A Strange Loop, a “big, Black, and queer-ass Broadway show.”
Marcus Scott is a New York-based playwright, musical writer and journalist. He’s written for Elle, Essence, Out and Playbill, among other publications.
#A Strange Loop#Slave Play#black playwrights#black gay men#black gay playwrights#black queer playwrights#gay playwrights#queer playwrights#Michael R Jackson#Robert O'Hara#Donja R. Love#Aurin Squire#Darnell L. Moore#Terrell Alvin McCraney#Branden Jacobs-Jenkins#Sugar In Our Wounds
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I think I hate everything.
This is a conscious decision, on some level. Everything is fucked up, and I’m running out of ways to cope with it. I can’t turn my music up any louder to drown things out or my ears might start bleeding. I’ve even throw myself back into a MMO to help disassociate from things when I’m home. I can’t turn it all off.
No matter who I talk to, politics or some such gets brought up that makes me say “I don’t want to talk to you”. Shit, some lady stopped in the parking lot at work tonight and was bitching about the president to me. Lady, I whole heartedly agree, but I’m at work. Leave me alone please. I just want to drive my car, blast some music, sing something that makes me feel alive, and forget about everything for a few minutes.
I keep having to remind myself that this is reality. Yes, Donald Trump is President. Yes, this election made it more apparent than ever that bigots, racists and misogynists are still here in droves. Like they all came out to the elections, frantically waving their arms about, screaming “REMEMBER US?!?!”.
Here I thought things were getting better. That we were making progress as a people, a country. We were taking steps to lessen racism with a black president. We had taken steps to help in accepting and normalizing gay people, and non binary sexualities. Shit, we had even started to tackle trans people’s issues.
Nope, fuck all that. Let’s smash everything with rocks we found from the 1950′s and undo all progress we’ve made.
I can’t even... I’m angry typing this all out. And on oh so many beers. (I’m out of whiskey) so you can imagine it’s a bit hard to concentrate.
I’m gonna be 40 in 4 years (yes... I have a tumblr... I’ve been here a while). The older I get and the more I learn about the world and how people treat each other, the angrier I get. I use to be a optimist, and I’ve always been empathetic towards people. Especially those I know I can never fully understand what they go through on a day to day basis. This has slowly been whittled away into cynicism and sarcasm, because people just want to prove me wrong. A great man once said “Inside every cynical person, is a disappointed idealist”.
My sarcasm can barely hide my disdain and contempt anymore.
I can only try to explain to you why what you just said is racist so many times, before I just knock your fucking teeth down your throat. You should be drawn and quartered, person who thinks the term “niglette” is an adorable way to describe black children, and keep saying it at work, and hasn’t gotten it through your thick fucking skull that I’m serious when I tell you not to say shit like that.
Yes person who has a Trump/Pence sticker, I’m gonna key your car to get that sticker off.
Inversely, person who still has 5 Bernie signs in your lawn like they’re magical wards to keep assholes at bay, I want to hug you and tell you that you’ll survive.
This world is fucked up. All of it. I want to leave, even if it’s just for a bit. Not in, like, a kill myself way. Just a “I’m tired of watching the world self destruct” way. I don’t want to die. So badly I still hope there are vampires. I know there aren’t, but a guy can hope. Aliens would probably just kill us all or use us as lab rats.
I think it was in Hitchhicker’s Guide for the Galaxy they said “And God created man, and it was generally perceived as a bad idea”. I couldn’t agree more. We can’t even take care of each other. Shit we can’t even take care of our own kids.
What sucks, on a personal level, is any career I’ve ever wanted was all about making people happy. Comedian, video game creator, musician. And all I do now is deliver pizza. I literally deliver happiness to people.
Also, fuck people who don’t like pizza. Who the fuck doesn’t love pizza. Even frozen pizza or day old pizza. Btw, that old adage “Sex is like pizza. Even if it’s bad, it’s still good”. FUCK THAT. Pizza is good 95% of the time. I eat a lot of pizza (if you’ve ever seen me, you can tell), and I’ve gotten a few bad ones. What guy said this by the way? You know it was a guy, because 100% of women that have had sex with a man, has had at least one round of bad sex.
I’d be better off if I gave up on people.
Maybe I can try to tell jokes. I dunno. I gotta do something so I don’t lose my mind. Sorry if none of this didn’t make any sense.
fuck
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'Awards Chatter' Podcast — Laverne Cox ('Orange Is the New Black')
http://styleveryday.com/2017/07/30/awards-chatter-podcast-laverne-cox-orange-is-the-new-black/
'Awards Chatter' Podcast — Laverne Cox ('Orange Is the New Black')
“The past four years I have been working like a dog,” says Orange Is the New Black actress and activist Laverne Cox as we sit down at the offices of The Hollywood Reporter to record an episode of the ‘Awards Chatter’ podcast in mid-July. Cox, the first openly transgender person ever to receive an acting Emmy nomination — she was nominated three years ago and again last month for her work on Orange — and the first openly trans person ever to appear on the cover of Time also starred this season in the Fox TV movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again and on the short-lived CBS drama series Doubt. What makes all the effort worth it, says the actress, is feedback that suggests she’s not only excelling onscreen, but also making a difference off it, as well. “When I meet young transgender people who say that their lives have changed because of my work,” she says, “that they decided not to commit suicide because of my visibility, that they decided to pursue their dreams of being actors, or to transition or to come out to friends or family, that means the most to me.”
(Click above to listen to this episode or here to access all of our 161 episodes via iTunes. Past guests include Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Eddie Murphy, Lady Gaga, Robert De Niro, Amy Schumer, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Louis C.K., Emma Stone, Harvey Weinstein, Natalie Portman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jane Fonda, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nicole Kidman, Aziz Ansari, Taraji P. Henson, J.J. Abrams, Helen Mirren, Justin Timberlake, Brie Larson, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Vikander, Warren Beatty, Jessica Chastain, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Winslet, Sting, Isabelle Huppert, Tyler Perry, Sally Field, Michael Moore, Lily Collins, Denzel Washington, Mandy Moore, Ricky Gervais, Kristen Stewart, James Corden, Sarah Silverman, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Beckinsale, Bill Maher, Lily Tomlin, Rami Malek, Allison Janney, Trevor Noah, Olivia Wilde, Eddie Redmayne and Claire Foy.)
Cox’s journey to this point has been anything but likely. Born and raised near Mobile, Ala., in a religious home and conservative community, she grew up looking like a boy but feeling like a girl, and was subjected to constant shaming by classmates, teachers and even relatives. “How feminine I was was a problem that had to be solved,” she recalls. By the age of 11, her inner turmoil drove her to attempt suicide, but she survived and found motivation to go on in dance, through which she could express herself. A desire to pursue that passion and live more freely led her to an arts high school and then, after a brief stint at Indiana University, to Marymount Manhattan College in the Big Apple, where acting first entered the picture.
Life in Manhattan was a mixed-bag for Cox, who by that point was publicly presenting herself in gender non-conforming ways. By day, her appearance provoked cruelty and abuse (“I never felt safe on the streets of New York,” she says), but by night it led to an unprecedented sense of freedom and acceptance (in the downtown club scene, she discovered other trans people and became a “mini-celebrity”). Her rollercoaster of an existence ultimately brought about “a full-on nervous breakdown,” after which she resolved to fully transition. “When I claimed trans, it was just empowering,” she explains. “It was, ‘This is what I am.'” Not that her problems went away: “For many years, I wanted to blend in and wanted to sort of be stealth and to quote-unquote ‘pass,’ but there was invariably always someone who knew I was trans, and that was very difficult for me,” she explains. “It was really shaming, and I felt like a failure.”
A major moment in Cox’s life came in 2007, when Candice Cayne became the first trans person to play a recurring trans part on a primetime show, ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money, proving to Cox that her dreams actually could become reality. “I just started submitting myself for everything,” she says, and soon she began landing work in off-Broadway productions and indie films; as a bit player on TV series including Law & Order; and as a reality TV contestant, on VH1’s I Want to Work for Diddy in 2008 (“I was never really interested in being P. Diddy‘s assistant, but what I was interested in was advancing my career”) and then, on the basis of her popularity with that show’s audience, a producer and co-host of the same network’s TRANSform Me in 2010. With greater exposure came greater fame, but not much greater security, financial or otherwise. Throughout those years, Cox continued to work at the drag restaurant Lucky Cheng. She also faced eviction notices, and seriously contemplated quitting the business and applying to graduate school. An LBGTQ-focused acting class, however, convinced her to persevere.
Then, in 2012, Cox’s big break arrived — even if it took her a while to realize it — when, following several auditions, she landed the recurring role of Sophia Burset, a trans hairdresser incarcerated for credit card fraud in a women’s prison, on Weeds creator Jenji Kohan‘s Netflix dramedy series Orange Is the New Black, which was inspired by Piper Kerman‘s 2010 memoir of the same name. The show was unveiled in 2013 and quickly became a cultural phenomenon, the most watched original content on the then-burgeoning streaming service, with fans ranging from teenage girls to President Barack Obama. For Cox, the opportunity to depict, for a large audience, the challenges of being a trans person in prison was all the more significant because she had spent years trying but failing to make a documentary about a real trans person, CeCe McDonald, who ostensibly was imprisoned unjustly.
Life for Cox hasn’t been quite the same since the explosion of Orange Is the New Black. For the first season’s third episode, “Lesbian Request Denied,” which was directed by Jodie Foster and explored Sophia’s backstory, Cox earned her first historic Emmy nom; for the fourth season’s fourth episode, “Doctor Psycho,” which depicts what life is like for a trans person in solitary confinement, she earned her second. In-between, she also landed her Time cover and became only the second trans performer ever to be a regular on a broadcast network show with Doubt (though the series was canceled after the airing of just two episodes, additional episodes continue to air on CBS on Saturdays at 8 p.m.). Cox also was the first trans person to appear on the radar of many Americans, and by her very existence — as well as the excellence of her work — she has helped to pave the way for greater awareness and and greater acceptance as well — at least in circles outside of Donald Trump‘s White House.
Cox paved the way not only for other characters in pop culture, like Jeffrey Tambor‘s portrayal of Jill Soloway‘s “mapa” on Amazon’s Transparent, which premiered in 2014, and for which Tambor has won the last two best actor in a comedy series Emmys; but also for real people like Chelsea Manning, the controversial U.S. Army soldier who went to jail, for leaking classified material, as Bradley, but began identifying herself as a woman in 2013; Caitlyn Jenner, who transitioned in 2015; and the list goes on. Trans people clearly still have a long way to go in achieving real equality, as demonstrated by Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the U.S. military, which he announced Wednesday on Twitter. (Cox immediately issued a statement condemning Trump’s decision, thanking members of the trans community for their service and saying, “I’m sorry your ‘commander in chief’ doesn’t value it.”) But as Cox continues to fight for further progress, she also celebrates the progress that has been made. “At one point, for the two weeks that Doubt was on the air, there were two black transgender women series regulars on primetime broadcast television,” she marvels, the other being Amiyah Scott on Fox’s Star. “That’s exciting.”
Orange is the New Black Primetime Emmy Awards Doubt
#Awards #Black #Chatter #Cox #Laverne #Orange #Podcast
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