Today is #40toNoneDay, The True Colors Fund’s effort to spread the word on LGBTQ homelessness. They have special events and live streams all day, so check their website for details.
The New York Times remembers and praises social worker Jane Addams, but leaves out the fact she was in long-term relationships with women for most of her life. This is exactly why I included Jane in our series Queer Women History Forgot…because they “forgot” to include she was a lesbian.
“Do I see any butch women being taken seriously in mainstream media? No!” This came up during an LGBTQ Online panel at VidCon in Europe, where out YouTubers took on topics of visibility and why YT’s new restricted mode censoring queer content is so harmful. Panelists were Joey Graceffa, Dodie Clark, Jake Akita, Rowan Ellis, Roly West and moderator Jazza John.
Batwoman will finally be a lesbian on screen—in a “Justice League” porn parody. Yay?
The director of last year’s well-received “Elle” is moving on to tell the story of a lesbian nun in his new Frenc-language film, “Blessed Virgin.” Paul Verhoeven has cast Virginie Efira as the protagonist based on Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century Italian nun whose life was detailed in “Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy” by Judith C. Brown. Suggest it at your next book club meeting!
As if we didn’t have enough problems with our SOs, now we have to worry about them stealing our skin. That’s the premise of this new horror film, “Replace,” that has a major lesbian relationship at its center.
Samira Wiley and Lauren Morelli walked their first red carpet together as wife and wife. “The Handmaid’s Tale” premiered last night in L.A., and it’s now available on Hulu. I highly recommend the feminist, queer-inclusive series.
Out lesbian Chelsea Savage is running for a delegate seat in Virginia’s 73rd District race. Her story is an interesting one: She grew up in a religious cult, married a man 20 years her senior and had a child before hearing that people of the same sex could ever consider being together. “That sounded pretty awesome, you know, but I couldn’t say that out loud,” she said. “Being a lesbian was a club I wanted to be part of, but I couldn’t figure it out. Kind of like growing up in the old Little House on the Prairie dresses, I would have loved to wear fashionable clothes, but that would never happen.” She left the church, then her husband, and came out as a lesbian, and now works as an activist and at VCU Health as a Professional Liability Investigator. On April 29, she will participate in a caucus that she hopes will sway voters in her direction.
The Beefcake swimwear line is perfect for queers and anyone who doesn’t like traditional bikinis, one-pieces or board shorts with rashguards. It’s like a chic wrestling singlet that holds all your bits in place and flatters any body, with sizes XS through 5X.
Pulse Nightclub owner Barbara Poma is planning a memorial to commemorate the tragic event, with details to come next week. Poma reportedly turned down an offer from The City of Orlando to buy the club ($2.25 million!) to turn into a memorial of their own.
There’s a whole site dedicated to coming out now, with inspirational stories and videos and a chance to share your own. Like Nicole, who says Girl Scouts was her root. (Sadly, I didn’t have any hot butch babes in my Brownie troop.)
Donald Trump could revoke the status of the Stonewall Inn as a national monument because he’s a jerk like that. For some reason, he has plans to sign an executive order that will ask authorities to revisit sites deemed national landmarks in the past two years to “discern whether their size and scope” are within the original “intent” of the Antiquities Act of 1906,” which is what was established to protect, preserve and recognize “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects … of historic or scientific interest.” So it basically depends on what these “authorities” define as relevant enough, and if they are homophobes who don’t understand the well-documented history and importance of Stonewall, then we could be in for another battle against queer erasure.
No one is using dental dams or practicing safe oral sex, even queer sex educators. It seems that most women see things like surgical gloves as “unsexy” and without much risk. A quote: “Latex gloves are a total and complete turnoff for me. They’re very ‘surgical,’ and I’m not sure actually what I’d be using them for outside of having sex with a HIV-positive person and being afraid of hangnails or something. I would love to live in a world where using dental dams was commonplace, but honestly, it really does impede intimacy in a way a condom doesn’t. I would only use a dam if I was, like, desperate, and the other person was really unsure about their STI status.” TBH, I have never used a dental dam or gloves, but I’m also a serial monogamist. (FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, GUYS.)
Arisa White is a queer black writer who recently performed at Bay Area Writers Resist, and her chat with the Los Angeles Book Review is so relevant in these times of Trump. I am now going to include this story she told them because it’s that good:
“I have an aunt who’s a lesbian — but she doesn’t call herself that. She calls herself an aggressive. She’s in her early 60s and she came out in the late ’70s, when everyone was coming out. In 1979, when she came out, that’s when I was born. That’s when there was this gay march on Washington — 1979 was such a gay year! But my family had a difficult time accepting her: How are you gay when you had kids, and were married?
For her, it was like: No, the previous performance wasn’t true. But she maintained her relationship with my family, and we got to witness this queer, black female in relationship to us. We had to re-see everything. We had to break through our discomforts of what it means to be a woman, to be black, to be a mother. What we thought was the script was broken.
My aunt broke a silence. Silence is different from quiet. She was like: I’m going to be the kind of woman that I want to be. I’m going to break through and find a language for myself. When she did that, she pushed us all out of our expectations. Then we had to reside in a place of quiet. Quiet is a creative space; silence is death. In quiet, we get to incubate and bring into creation a new form.”
I’ll leave you with that. BREAK THROUGH. GET LOUD.
What Do You Think?