Also.Also.Also: Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson Are Doing Quarantine Like Two Introverts in Love

Welcome to your Thursday evening!! Here’s some links for you to read while you drink that glass of wine (or 8oz of water — I love you!)


Queer as in F*ck You

Candid Photographs of the Transgender Women of 1950s and 1960s Paris. Easily, and without any doubt, the most beautiful images I saw today.

Cis Women Can’t Ignore Trump’s Anti-Trans Shelter Policy by Samantha Riedel for Bitch Media

Economic Justice Is Necessary to Stop Murders of Trans Women of Color

Lesbian Baker in Detroit Got Homophobic Cake Order: Why She Made It Anyway. I’m really sad about this story because… obviously. But also this is my local bakery, it’s one I got to like once or twice a month for special treats, and I love it there. I HAD NO IDEA THE OWNER WAS A LESBIAN!! So now I love it so much more!!

Holland Taylor Answers Every Question We Have About Legally Blonde by Rachel Handler for Vulture. This is SO MUCH FUN! Just absolutely delightful! Highlights include the two queer women having debate on whether The L Word’s Peggy Peabody is gay. (No one asked me, but… She obviously was.)

Other things that Holland talks about include: Legally Blonde, duh; quarantining with Sarah Paulson — I know you want to know that! — and giving a shout out to one of my favorite black queer women writers, Angela Robinson!

There’s also this very sweet gem:

“I live my life in public. I do everything that I would do if I were an unknown person married to a man. I just live my life. And so if I happen to be seen in public, I’m not trying to be something that I’m not. But on the same token, I don’t talk with any depth about my private life because it’s not my personal style. But tweeting about Sarah’s show that she’s in and how wonderful she is, or even our personal tweets that we do back and forth, is not deeply personal. Or let’s say — it’s not private. I don’t have private communications with her in public. I don’t talk about the private aspect of our relationship in public. But I exist … I live in the public. And so I’m on Twitter. I love Twitter. Sarah doesn’t do Twitter so much.” 😍 💖

Literally everyone at Autostraddle cannot stop watching this on a loop:

Marry me, please. And then make us a wedding gazebo made out of recycled wine crates that you paint yourself, because wow “you love a project.”


Saw This, Thought of You

Happy Black Women’s Equal Pay Day! August 13th is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day. But what is Equal Pay Day, and what does it mean for the state of the gender and racial pay gap? (I’ll give you a hint, if you are a non-Black woman reading this right now, it means that if we had the same job, you would still get paid more than me. Maybe we should… I dunno… Fix that?)

The Untold Story of the Black Women Fighting to Remove Racist Statues

The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. “Good thing nobody’s predicting a huge surge in mail any time soon.” HA!

And while we are on THAT subject! 83% of Etsy Shops Are Run by Women. Postal Service Disruptions Could Devastate Them.

Tampax Made an Ad Showing How to Insert a Tampon. It Got Pulled off the Air.

Powerpoint Activism Is Taking Over Your Friends’ Instagram Accounts (Vanessa recommends pairing that with The Revolution Will Be Aestheticized: Some Thoughts on Instagram Politics by Mary Retta)


Political Snacks

At Least 183 Democratic Women Are on U.S. House Ballots, Breaking the 2018 Election Cycle Record

The Suffrage Movement Is Still Unfinished, Particularly for Black and Latino Voters

AOC Has 60 Seconds to Speak at the Democratic Convention. That Decision Is ‘Radically Tone-Deaf,’ Some Women Say. I am one of those women! FYI: Only two of the 35 speakers are under the age of 50.

Karine Jean-Pierre, Kamala Harris' new lesbian chief of staff, stands behind a podium in a cream colored tweed jacket and the cutest tiny Afro. She's talking into the microphone like she means serious business.

I realize this isn’t the point at all, but I’m obsessed with how gorgeous her hair is.

Black Lesbian Political Powerhouse Karine Jean-Pierre Announced as Kamala Harris’s Chief of Staff

Kamala Harris Isn’t the First Black Woman to Run for VP. Meet Charlotta Bass. Charlotta Bass was a newspaper publisher and Black political activist, and she ran as the Progressive Party candidate for Vice President in 1952. She was presumed to be a Communist, and I believe that’s why I never learned about her before this morning. But damn, I am so glad to know about her now.


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Carmen Phillips

Carmen Phillips is Autostraddle's former editor in chief. She began at Autostraddle in 2017 as a freelance team writer and worked her way up through the company, eventually becoming the EIC from 2021-2024. A Black Puerto Rican feminist writer with a PhD in American Studies from New York University, Carmen specializes in writing about Blackness, race, queerness, politics, culture, and the many ways we find community and connection with each other.  During her time at Autostraddle, Carmen focused on pop culture, TV and film reviews, criticism, interviews, and news analysis. She claims many past homes, but left the largest parts of her heart in Detroit, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, NY. And there were several years in her early 20s when she earnestly slept with a copy of James Baldwin’s “Fire Next Time” under her pillow. To reach out, you can find Carmen on Twitter, Instagram, or her website.

Carmen has written 716 articles for us.

15 Comments

  1. wow wow wow my day is so much better because of that POV video. my very first thought was “marry me so we can live in a tiny house”

  2. Whew as a fellow project dyke who has already built a little free library I am swooning! Those dimples! That apiary!

    Speaking of swooning – those images of trans women in Paris gave me palpitations!

    Your roundups are always excellent but I spent time with every one of these links. Thank you so much Carmen!

  3. That tampon video is the LEAST GRAPHIC THING I HAVE EVER SEEN I am enraged and sharing everywhere.

  4. love all of this (and for the hard or shitty things, I love your care in communicating them to us)

  5. Living with a wife who loved projects that much would high key stress me out, I just cannot function on that level.

    Great link round up!

  6. also just here to say, all you babes who are *not* the all-the-projects wife, ilu you are valued and appreciated, while that wife has truly impressive skills and creativity and i support her in her endeavors, that energy would absolutely exhaust me

  7. I’m sure this info is a communication somewhere, but I missed it, can anyone tell me why I can no longer like comments? So many of y’all are so funny and I wish to communicate my appreciation

    • Hi Beth! Unfortunately the widget that allows people to “like” comments kept literally breaking our site, to the point that we couldn’t write posts!! So sadly we had to remove the widget for the greater good of still being able to… well… you know, make content lol.

      I miss them too! I encourage people to like write “lol” or even “+1” on comments that they’ve enjoyed.

  8. Cannot decide whether having such a handy fix-it wife would be too exhausting for me to be around, but I totally would build a little library with her.
    The trans women portraits are gorgeous!

Comments are closed.