Lesbian Pop Culture Reviews

The Whole 9 Yards: Year in Review

We associate the number nine with extremes: highs (cloud nine), lows (the ninth Psalm, predicting the coming of the Antichrist), good luck and bad. Considering the spectrum of events we lived through in 2010-2011—from the greatest victories to the worst tragedies—the number nine seems a particularly apt symbol for the past twelve months’ happenings. On the plus side, DADT was repealed; on the minus side, a near-apocalyptic disaster devastated Japan. Last year, we opened our Annual Year in Review with the crisis in Haiti, which proves again that life is fragile.

31. PUBLIC SERVICE OR PUBLIC MENACE?

Wikileaks—the cloak-and-dagger, semi-anonymous hacker organization—illegally published thousands of secret government documents over the past year. Founder Julian Assange, a self-described “internet activist,” is alternately revered as a free press champion and decried as a criminal and traitor, while Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army private who supplied Wikileaks with data on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is currently in a military prison where he faces charges of treason. Meanwhile, Assange is out on bail after being arrested by Interpol for the alleged sexual assault of two Swedish women. Sounds nefarious to us.

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