Sometimes you don't want to hear the answers
But you still have to ask the questions!
Happy Monday! World Pride is upon us this week, as are the first round of Democratic debates! Are you excited to hear a bunch of canned statements from a whole bunch of white guys you can’t even identify who definitely aren’t going to be president? Me either. Let’s not drag these eliminations out; sashay away, y’all.
Stonewall 50/World Pride will be amazing, I’m sure, but I still get a bit more excited by small-town Pride celebrations. I was so delighted to see Carlisle, Pennsylvania — a fairly rural town near where I grew up — just had its first ever pride week celebration with 300 people in attendance! Seeing rainbows and queer visibility in a place that never has such celebrations has a very different impact compared to being in a city where every business is decked out in queer bunting. (I like that too though!)
If you’re curious about all the excitement around World Pride, make sure you’re following my pal Cathy Renna on Twitter. She’s the brilliant media guru helping orchestrate all of the events from behind the scenes, and her feed is nothing but highlights about what’s going on!
Drag princesses for the win
The bad guys have been obsessed of late with drag queens and kids. They hate when drag queens read to kids, and they hate when kids want to be drag queens. I’m personally here for all of it, and the fact it pisses them off is just icing on the cake.
Last week, an ABC affiliate in Austin, Texas profiled a fabulous nine-year-old drag queen who goes by Kween KeeKee, prompting massive outrage from conservatives on social media. Whatever! The kid looks fierce and is having a great time sharing a positive message:
I want the world to know that you can be special, and you can be who you want to be. You can be a vegetarian, you can even be a veterinarian. You can be LGBTQ. You can be a drag queen, drag king.
Long live the Kween! Long live the Kween!
Working while trans
NBC News has a great piece profiling three transgender women and the different sacrifices they’ve made and discrimination they’ve faced in their careers. For some reason, though, the article insists on sharing all of their deadnames in complete and unnecessary violation of the standards for writing about trans people and their identities. *sigh*
I loved this quote from Dr. Christine McGinn about some of the misogyny she faced in med school:
It was my first month, so the rumors hadn’t gotten out yet that I was trans ... I didn’t know the answer to a question and I had kind of a nervous laugh. And this guy, the chief surgeon said: ‘Do you see that smile? That’s why women will never be taken seriously in surgery.’ But the funniest part was that he didn’t know that I had been in his boys club, and that I’d decided to quit.
A rose by any other name would be less respected
Speaking of the importance of respecting the present over the past, Lambda Legal won an important victory this week in a case against the state of Kansas, one of the few remaining states with major hurdles preventing transgender people from updating their birth certificates to reflect their gender identities.
It’s not something we think about much, but every state handles birth certificates a bit differently, and in some, they outright prohibit changing the name or gender marker later in life. Lambda Legal has been slowly knocking down these bans one by one, with recent victories in Idaho and Puerto Rico and now in Kansas. The last two states where trans people can’t update their birth certificates are Ohio and Tennessee, and Lambda already has already filed lawsuits in both of them.
More info in their thread:
And the survey says…
There were a couple of interesting surveys that came out today, and I have to say I’m a little disappointed by some of them!
In physics, we learned that “acceleration” is technically any change in speed, but in common parlance, we almost always mean speeding up. We might have to make an exception for GLAAD’s Accelerating Acceptance survey, which for the second straight year has found lower rates of LGBTQ acceptance — disturbingly among Generation Z and Millennials!
It’s worth noting that support for “equal rights” remained steady. What declined was how comfortable people felt in situations like learning a family member is queer, learning your doctor is queer, or learning your kid learned about LGBTQ history in school. The study authors suggest that we’ve taken for granted that younger people are more progressive, and in particular, young men’s support has deteriorated in the wake of “the sharp and quick rise in divisive rhetoric in politics and culture.” Certainly there’s some Trump effect there, but I’m guessing it’s more of a Jordan Peterson effect.
Speaking to The Daily Beast, GLADD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis explained that high-profile LGBTQ supporters have helped stem the bigotry coming from the White House. “Imagine how bad it would be if they didn’t step up, and we just had hate spewing out of the most powerful office in the country and world,” she said. GLAAD’s hoping more outreach in video games and country music will help reverse the downward trend.
In interesting contrast, my colleague Casey Quinlan also writes today about a new CBS poll that found that 84% of American believe there’s been progress for LGBTQ rights. I’m inclined to believe the sentiment is fair thanks to visibility and awareness, though it’s still hard to square with all of the setbacks the Trump administration has imposed. Only 56% believe there is a lot of discrimination against transgender people (do the other 44% not even know about the military ban??), but the number did climb to 66% for people who personally know a trans person. As Casey notes, however, many people don’t even realize we don’t have federal LGBTQ protections to guarantee accountability for discrimination when it takes place. #EqualityAct
BuzzFeed also did a survey of LGBTQ people to assess how they feel about Pride. I was bummed to see so many were just fine with police (79%) and corporations (76%) participating in Pride. I suspect it’s no coincidence 56% also opposed including the brown and black stripes on the Pride flag to represent queer people of color.
These are tough conversations to have, but I really respect the efforts of groups like “No Justice, No Pride” who challenge the status quo, because it’s all too easy to ignore the persecution many queer people experience because of their race, gender identity, or any other combination of intersecting factors. We’ll no doubt continue to have these debates about how activist-y and inclusive Pride should be for years to come.
I was encouraged, though, to see a lot of support (72%) for displays of kink at Pride. If we were suddenly afraid to promote sexual freedom, I’d start to wonder if Pride had irredeemably jumped the shark.
Where maybe you don’t want them to know your name
I don’t want to air all the queer community’s dirty laundry here, but while we’re on the topic, there’s a pretty ugly situation playing out at a Minneapolis gay bar called Cheers. Cheers hasn’t even opened yet, but now that its owner Emad Abed’s rampant anti-Semitism has seen the light of day, it’s unclear that it ever will, especially given it’s now facing eviction. A Facebook group called Queers Against Cheers is on watch just in case it does so they can protest. “He will not earn a penny from the queer community nor anyone else,” they promise.
This story came to light after Abed’s comments were first shared on Facebook by Andy Birkey, a reporter whose LGBTQ coverage in Minnesota I’ve long respected. Abed unleashed some pretty ugly attacks on Birkey for revealing his comments, but I’m really glad he stood his ground and held this bigot accountable.
If you want to see how nasty Abed’s comments were, click through to see Daniel Villareal’s round-up.
Short-lived Catholic praise
One last bit of bad news… I was just praising that Jesuit school in Indianapolis that refused to fire a gay teacher, and here comes a different Catholic school in Indiana that does fire one of its gay teachers. Cathedral High School called the decision “agonizing,” but didn’t want to miss out on being able to receive communion at the school.
Every coming out matters
I never watched American Crime or Falling Skies, so I’m not really familiar with actor Connor Jessup, but I was very moved by what he said in an Instagram post coming out publicly as gay. Not only did he have to to treat playing gay characters like an out-of-body experience, he’s had to police every move and mannerism. An excerpt:
I don’t want to censor — consciously or not — the ways I talk, sit, laugh, or dress, the stories I tell, the jokes I make, my points of reference and connection. I don’t want to be complicit, even peripherally, in the idea that being gay is a problem to be solved or hushed. I’m grateful to be gay. Queerness is a solution. It’s a promise against cliche and solipsism and blandness; it’s a tilted head and an open window.
Welcome to the “family,” Connor! We’re glad to have you!
Lifestyles of the trans and nonbinary
A new webseries called Trans Monogamist is hoping to compensate for the invisibility of trans, non-binary, and polyamorous couples in romantic comedies. Check out the first episode and then look for new episodes on future Mondays:
Thank goodness Tig Notaro lives under a rock
This isn’t really queer news, but Tig Notaro is queer, I adore her, and this is my newsletter. She has a new series in which she interviews celebrities she can’t identify and it’s amazing. Last week she was on Colbert, and her “hearing difficulty” story was my biggest laugh of the day, so hopefully you enjoy it too:
If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please tell your friends about it so they know to sign up for it too! If nothing else, it’d be great if you could RT my little introductory thread from this afternoon:
Until next time, stay platinum!
(Photo Credit: Instagram/@minikweenkeekee)