Originally published on Vice. Read the original here.
There have been unbelievable legislative triumphs that are essential and correct and humane, but there's been all kinds of losses along the way. Really, I think what it's about is capitalism has won, and there's not even a language for standing outside the market and being critical of the market and seeing it as something one can stand outside of and speak coherently about from the margins.
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So was Jason Holliday exploited into presenting a less-than-ideal version of himself, for sensationalistic effect? Or were he and Clarke engaged in a mutually beneficial (if adversarial) act of co-creation? Even a half century later, "it's impossible to know how upset he is or whether the tragic gay man on screen is just an act," Manohla Dargis said in her 2013 New York Times review celebrating Portrait of Jason's re-release.
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In 2013, at one of the lowest points in her life, 44-year-old software engineer Greta Martela placed a call to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. She had been hospitalized five times for being suicidal, starting at age 28, when she realized she was transgender. But she was still struggling with coming out to the wider world. When she disclosed to the counselor that she was transgender, he was confused about what that meant. Once she explained, “he got off the phone as quick as he could,” she said.
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“I’ve never really faced any kind of harassment,” Karma Dupchen, who at 23 is one of the most public LGBT figures in the country, told The Daily Beast. Yet “growing up gay in Bhutan was a very alienating experience for me,” Dupchen said, because in Bhutan, the idea of being gay or transgender is “pretty much unheard of.”
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“When was the last time you went to the theater and actually felt something authentic?” Mac asked me rhetorically as we discussed the show. By this, he meant something more than the reflected glow of the emotions of the actors. When was I made to feel something in my body? When was I moved? More than his song and dance on the stage – beautiful though those are – this is his true art: Breaking down the walls that keep us from feeling genuine emotion.
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For the first time in 40 years, celebrated photographer Roz Joseph’s images of the San Francisco drag scene in the 1970s will go on display this month at the San Francisco GLBT History Museum in "Reigning Queens: The Lost Photos of Roz Joseph."
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Like science fiction, puppetry is an art form where the better you are at it, the more people try to call it something else. Puppets, in America, are for children, and children are like small, gullible sociopaths—hardly the folks you'd look to for artistic recommendations. Which begs the question: Why give a "genius" fellowship to someone working in a discipline we barely even recognize as art?
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Husky follows the story of Davis, a pre-gay middle-school boy preparing to enter his freshman year. In an unusual twist for a YA novel these days, Davis's sexuality is less ambiguous and not fully formed. He knows he's different, but he doesn't quite know yet that it has to do with sexuality. Or as Kirkus Reviews put it, "This is not at its heart a book about sexuality but about humanity."
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