Tuesday, January 31. 2006Remember Coretta Scott King Coretta Scott King died overnight. I don't know volumes about her work and her mission, but I know I liked what she gave us. I like what remains. She was an outspoken supporter of civil rights for gays and lesbians, as I’ve mentioned before. Her ideals were/are inclusive of all kinds of people. If you believe in the dream she continued to work towards after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, now’s a good time to take a personal assessment: how are you ensuring this dream becomes a reality? Are your actions inclusionary? Are your words? Are the people you vote for? Okay, sidebar: MS Word doesn't recognize "inclusionary" and insists that it should be replaced with "exclusionary." If you want to learn more about Coretta Scott King, search for articles about her in any major online newspaper and you’re sure to find material. Another good place to start is the King Center. Hatecrime.org has a page with plenty of inspirational remarks by Ms. Scott King. I’m unable to check them for accuracy, but assuming they ARE accurate, here’s the link. Finally, for the sake of beauty and hope, a haunting portrait of Coretta Scott King here. Friday, January 27. 2006Do You See What I See?
I'm not one to dress fancy - hell, I'm barely one to dress. If it's harder than a pair of pants and some kind of pullover, it's too hard to be worth my effort. I have always preferred boxers to briefs (no matter how sexy they make me look), was trained early on to buy all my clothes in the same one or two color families so I never have to color coordinate, and the only label I look for is the one with the sale price scribbled on it in red pen. These basic philosophies have served me well and pretty much guarantee that I don't have to know what I'm going to wear until twenty minutes before I'm out the door. But I work at a job that involves parties. This past Monday, in fact, there was a work function that required a suit, and so, I suited up. And apparently changing my usual mode of dress didn't only transform my outward appearance - it transformed my sexuality. I swear to god, people thought I was straight. Continue reading "Do You See What I See?" Thursday, January 26. 2006Trannyshack: Why mainstream media coverage of transgender issues is a real drag One of the biggest myths around is the myth of 'the liberal media.' Eric Alterman has persuasively debunked this hoary myth in his book, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic) ( excerpted in The Nation)The mainstream media are (note 'media' is the plural for 'medium') not really liberal; rather, mainstream media in the United States are corporate, which means that they often reflect the worst of market-based imperatives, above all, the need to generate a profit for owners and investors. Nowhere is this un-liberal profit motive more in evidence than in media coverage of transgender issues. Consider an article in the New York Daily News from January 25. In "Welcome to the drag race! Gender benders are crossing over, into your living room," Joe Neumaier writes,
Continue reading "Trannyshack: Why mainstream media coverage of transgender issues is a real drag" Wednesday, January 25. 2006L...is for Lame?
Well, the ladies are back! Season 3 of the L Word started up again a few weeks ago. Yes, the Los Angelino lesbian women are back to rock our Sunday nights. Or will they?
 It's true that it's hard to beat the sexiness of a scene between love interests Carmen & Shane, but should the only lesbian-centered television show survive based on viewers' voyeurism? Is the sex life of gorgeous women the best way we have to portray a lesbian lifestyle? This season the show offers a new character - Moira. I suppose that she came up as a response to all those fans who were complaining that this show was only about femme lesbians. So, of course, now we have the stereotypical butch from small town USA, walking around with her hands in her pockets, driving her pick-up truck, and unable to engage in superficial conversations at a fancy restaurant in LA because she feels "out of place." Will I keep watching? Of course! What better way to combat those Sunday night blues? Will I ever feel identified with what goes on in the show? Well, probably not until they bring in some characters that actually have to work for a living, don't have time to sip coffee all day, and maybe even sometimes, have a bad hair day. Monday, January 23. 2006I've Got a SecretFriday, January 20. 2006Queer Conservative? What the Fuck?!
If you're a queer conservative I don't get it. What have they done for you lately, those conservatives? Nada. Sure, there are fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives, bla bla bla. You wanna be conservative, great. Happy for you. Really. Enjoy the environmental degradation, the social injustice, the letting the meek rot because after all they shall inherit the earth, the anti-queer propaganda. Or just ignore those issues. Ignore them and accept conservatism on the basis of the issues you DON'T want to ignore. But really, when the day is over, YOU are able to publicly announce your queerness NOT because of conervatives' efforts, but because of the efforts of the open-minded liberals who've fought to make homophobia a stigma.
I get that being queer and conservative challenges norms, and that my attitude towards conservatives (and moderates, for that matter) is intollerant and partakes of the same kinds of "us/them" discourses that I think are fucked up for a democracy to have. To what do I owe this rant, then? Domestic spying's on a roll at the federal level, and here's how it manifests locally:  A University of California Los Angeles alumni group has been offering students up to $100 to "supply tape recordings and notes from classes to expose professors suspected of pushing liberal political views on their students." Several prominent members of the group, including US Congressman James Rogan (R), have resigned their membership. So wait, what's a liberal again? And what's a dangerous liberal? Are they two different things? Ah...the trickle down effect. I've always had LOTS of faith in it. See, Bush authorizes domestic spying, and this makes it okay for smaller entities to spy also. "If Big B does it, we should too." Rest assured, the trickle goes back up, too. Who is analyzing the information gathered by the aforementioned alumni group? Probably conservative politicians higher up the chain of command. It's a web of spying. Lucky for us, the web strings are coming into clear view. Bear in mind, a spy-prone group may be watching a queer group why? Because they'll reason that most queers are liberal and therefore a threat to our nation. Check out the brief version of the UCLA spy story at guardian.co.uk. Or the more thorough (yes, longer) version of the story by the LA Times. Wednesday, January 18. 2006The Golden Globes: When I say "Brokeback," you say...
Generally, speaking. To preface, I actually liked Brokeback Mountain a whole lot, a lot more than I thought I would (as you can read here). But when all the awards hype was starting - Golden Globe this! Oscar that! - I had some misgivings about the "favor" straight Hollywood was doing for queers (as you can read here). So while I am, on the one hand, happy as a pig in shit scoping out all the farmyard cocks at the four Globes Brokeback took home, I'm also a little peeved by the conspiracy of silence that seemed to envelope the Beverly Hilton. Was it completely and utterly impossible for a single person in that room to talk directly about Brokeback Mountain and use the word "gay?" The film was called everything from universal to controversial to a Western - all of which it of course is. But it is also gay. Not exclusively gay, not even primarily gay necessarily, but gay nonetheless. And considering the amount of straight animal husbandry shown in the montage clips and the amount of queer shenanigans that were well...not, the word, the subject, the very issues the movie was supposed to be bringing down were being held up onstage by Ang Lee, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry, Gustavo Santaolalla, Bernie Taupin, and Steve Carrell's wife Nancy (just kidding). Continue reading "The Golden Globes: When I say "Brokeback," you say..." Tuesday, January 17. 2006We Have Not Been Plantation Slaves But we deserve basic rights. No, we are not Black, though some of us are. We are not Women, though some of us are. Queer includes many kinds of PEOPLE, who all deserve Civil Rights not BECAUSE of their queerness, but despite it, regardless of it. We deserve not to be erased but EMbraced, because we are part of the national body, as wonderful and crude, as polite and confused as any fully realized biologically male heterosexual. In the face of doubt about the similarities between Matthew Shepard and Frederick Douglass, remember that intolerance and hate and discrimination are hurtful to individuals and to society, regardless of the degree of their manifestation. And so with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday marked on yesterday's calendar, let's wonder: Continue reading "We Have Not Been Plantation Slaves" Thursday, January 12. 2006BI PLUS WHAT? Are Bisexual people capable of wholly loving a person who is wholly homosexual? No really, it’s a serious question for folks of all sexualities (yes, queeries, you too). People all the time accuse bisexuals of not knowing who they want, of being wishy-washy. Sounds like paranoia. Like, if I really love a guy and he’s bi and he really loves me, what else matters? So maybe this guy wants a girlfriend, too? Well that’s something we negotiate. Maybe I really want two boyfriends. There’s no reason that can’t work—relationships are contracts, so figure out the terms you wanna agree to and sign up. After all, if you can really get EVERYTHING you need/want in a relationship from ONE INDIVIDUAL, why have friends? There are plenty of polyamorous couples out there being happy and we don’t find out about them because most of us are so hung up on a) Monogamy and b) Homogeneity that we prefer not to inquire. So we make society: 1 fag with 1 fag, 1dyke with 1 dyke, 1 breeder with 1 breeder and 1 bi with…That’s where people get stumped isn’t it. Because they don’t know what a bisexual person wants and they assume that since Bi means “two”, a bisexual wants at minimum two people, one of each gender, in order to be fulfilled. Red Alert, Red Alert! There’s nothing in the Manual of Perfect Bliss about this! HELP! Continue reading "BI PLUS WHAT?" Wednesday, January 11. 2006Brokeback Women We tend to talk mostly about MEN on Big Queer, so here’s an effort to break that…Not a lot of attention has been given to the WOMEN of Brokeback Mountain. Granted, the movie’s about the relationship between Jack and Ennis, but what strikes me about the lack of attention on the women is that so much of the talk about the men has to do with masculinity. You know, people (myself included) talk about how Ennis (Heath Ledger) represses his emotions to the point of living this double life, and they throw around words like manhood, masculinity, etc. But they don’t consider the other, crucial component to this—womanhood. Continue reading "Brokeback Women" |
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About Big Queer |
I clean up good...and apparently, I straighten up, too.
What do you say? Apparently, nothing specific. Just a lot of highly general things about generalness being generally heart-warming and universal for the general population in a kind of general way.
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