It’s almost summer solstice!! Celebrate one more week of increasingly long days with a zesty Afternoon Snack.
As we start approaching the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, we enjoying learning about the way young queer artists are memorializing Stonewall and participating in dialogue with LGBT elders.
Among the triumphs of the Stonewall legacy is the expansion of our understanding of gender, so we are excited to celebrate Jonathan Van Ness coming out as nonbinary! Can you believe!?
In an excellent essay for Bright Wall Dark Room, Isabel Cole unpacks the joyful marvel that is Magic Mike XXL:
But the categorization of “for women” does the movie and its audience a disservice. It carries some aggressively straight assumptions, excluding both women who have no interest in the beefcake buffet and men who do (not to mention those who are neither) in a way that feels inimical to the spirit of the movie, in which the guys hit up a drag bar as a convention weekend tradition, Zoe’s guy phase shows no signs of reappearing, and heterosexual men straightforwardly admire each other’s beauty, athleticism, and erotic skill. It obscures the fact that it’s a movie about men, interested in undoing the ways men are warped by the expectations of gender. And it’s condescending to the women who do love this movie, like we’re a bunch of hormonal creatures too dumb to tell the difference between hot and good. Depressing, too, because if we accept it at face value, then our wildest, most forbidden fantasy is, what, that men could be nice to us?
Speaking of Good Boys, we’re sure you’ve already all seen the Final Fantasy VII Remake trailer, for good or ill. But have you seen our darling idiot son and all his friends, scheduled to return to our Playstations this very year of our lord 2019????
This is VERY exciting news for the romance-loving trash among us: Harlequin is launching a TV arm! We have only one request, of course, which is — Make it Gay, You Cowards!!!!
If you would like to have the galaxy brain experience to end all galaxy brain experiences, please read this absolutely INCREDIBLE essay summarizing a thesis which reveals that the proliferation of MFA programs and, therefore, essentially all contemporary literary superstars, was funded by the got dang CIA!!!!
At the beginning of the month I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly. At the end I had a list of unlikely names, a file of ideological quotations, and the smoking gun of the CIA connection. Later, after gathering secondary sources and digesting the primary ones, I would have my thesis: The Cold War not only underwrote the discipline but also gave it its intellectual shape. This was the linchpin of the story, and it would take a long time to develop.
Shot, chaser. Sometimes the truth hurts, folks.
