Pop Culture Fix: Your Guide to the 2024 Golden Globe Nominations (But Just the Gay Parts)
Your Guide to the 2024 Golden Globe Nominations (But Just the Gay Parts)
Jodie Foster and Anette Bening in Nyad, both are nominated for 2024 Golden Globes.
The 2024 Golden Globe nominations are upon us and, because I am who I am, I have the deep urge to tell you everything that is even remotely gay. Luckily, I share that same obsession with many Autostraddle editors!! (Y’all, there was a color coded google doc and everything!)
So with no further adieu, here are all the 2024 Golden Globe Nominations that are lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer, and/or trans related:
Gay Related 2024 Golden Globe Movie Nominations
- “Maestro” (Netflix) and “Anatomy of a Fall” (Neon) are both nominated for Best Motion Picture, Drama. “Anatomy of a Fall” (Neon) is also nominated for Best Picture in a Non-English Language.
- “Barbie” (Warner Bros.) is nominated for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy (for the purposes of this list, Barbie is a gay film. Argue with someone else). “May December” (Netflix), directed by gay filmmaker Todd Haynes, is also nominated in this category as well.
- Bradley Cooper and Greta Gerwig are nominated for Best Director of a Motion Picture for “Maestro” and “Barbie,” respectively.
- “Barbie” (Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach) and “Anatomy of a Fall” (Justine Triet, Arthur Harari) are both nominated for Best Screenplay.
- Colman Domingo (“Rustin”) and Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”) are gay actors both nominated for playing gay roles in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama category. Barry Keoghan is also nominated in this category for “Saltburn.”
- Lily Gladstone is a queer actor nominated in the Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama category for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Sandra Hüller and Anette Bening are also nominated in this category for “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Nyad,” respectively.
- Fantasia Barrino is nominated in Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy for “The Color Purple.”
- Lesbian icon Jodie Foster is nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category for “Nyad.”
- Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie” is nominated for Best Song.
Gay Related 2024 Golden Globe TV Nominations
- “The Last of Us” (HBO) and “The Morning Show” (Apple TV+) are both nominated for Best Television Series, Drama. (Netflix’s “The Diplomat” is also nominated and has a small, but notable, nonbinary role within it.)
- “Ted Lasso” (Apple TV+), “Abbott Elementary” (ABC), and “Only Murders in the Building” (Hulu) are all nominated for Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy.
- Nonbinary actor Bella Ramsey is nominated in the Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Drama category for “The Last of Us”
- Selena Gomez is nominated for Best Actress in a TV Series, Musical or Comedy for “Only Murders in the Building.”
- “Beef” (Netflix), “Daisy Jones & the Six” (Prime Video), and “Fellow Travelers” (Showtime) are all nominated for Best Limited Series, Anthology Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television.
- Matt Bomer is nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series for “Fellow Travelers.”
- Rachel Weisz is nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series for “Dead Ringers.”
- And finally, Black lesbian legend Wanda Sykes is nominated in the Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy category for “Wanda Sykes: I’m an Entertainer.”
Here’s some other related Golden Globe fun facts and thoughts to consider:
- Greta Gerwig Receives Her First Best Director Golden Globe Nomination for ‘Barbie.’ “In years past, she was notably snubbed for ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Little Women.'” And as a card-carrying member of the Greta Gerwig Hive (she don’t miss), let me just say this: She deserves!
- With her nomination for Best Supporting Actress for “Only Murders in the Building,” Meryl Streep Breaks Her Own Golden Globes Record
- Amy Schumer’s nomination for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy Special did remind me of this recent op-ed published in Newsweek: Amy Schumer Is Getting Canceled (the answer was then and remains now, “No.” It seems speaking out in favor of a ceasefire is the quickest way to lose work, but no signs speak to the opposite.)
- 7 of the Biggest LGBTQ+ Golden Globes Snubs of 2024. Justice for Trace Lysette, specifically!!
This is not gay related at all, but if you haven’t seen Past Lives, it was thus far one of my favorite movie watching experience last year, which is most certainly reflected back in these nominations and you should see it!
Other Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:
+ Brittney Griner Strikes Partnership to Tell Her Story Via ESPN, ABC News, Scripted Series. “The inspirational WNBA All-Star, who was arrested and held in Russia in 2022 and sentenced to nine years in prison, will give Disney the exclusive rights to share her story via a documentary feature from ESPN Films, the development of a scripted series through ABC Signature and an exclusive interview with ABC News anchor Robin Roberts.” It’s definitely of note to me that Robin Roberts was also the first reporter that Cherelle spoke to when BG was detained. As always, I only want for Cherelle and Brittney Griner’s happiness.
+ ‘Station 19’ To End With Season 7 at ABC. It’s been well documented at this point that Station 19 was having some behind-the-scenes workplace complications, including some that involved bringing in a DEI specialist for the writers room, so I suppose this shouldn’t feel like a shocker? And yet, here I am! SHOCKED! I’m pretty sure Station 19 was ABC’s number two rated show for adults last year? I did not expect it to end a shortened 10-episode season (it’s shortened, of course, because of the strikes, and we can add this to the list of things that were taken from us because studios didn’t know how to pay their laborers their fair worth!).
+ Cardi B Confirms Split From Husband Offset: ‘I’ve Been Single for a Minute Now.’ All I’m saying is Cardi is single, to the best of my knowledge Megan Thee Stallion is single, and if Santa’s listening, I’ve been a good girl this year…
+ The Black List Unveils Hollywood’s Favorite Unproduced Scripts of 2023
+ Over 150 players at the 2023 Women’s World Cup received targeted abuse on social media, according to a recent FIFA report the USWNT received the brunt of it.
+ This made me laugh! Meryl Streep’s ‘Devil Wears Prada’ Casting Got Pushback, Producer Was Told: ‘Are You Out of Your Mind? She’s Never Been Funny a Day in Her Life’
+ Watch Julia Stiles Recreate Her Save the Last Dance Routine With Chloe Fineman on SNL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jgHKLcBRmU
+ Eileen’s Subtle Book-to-Movie Differences Turn Its Queer Subtext Into Text (That said! Drew still wasn’t a fan though.)
+ Doctor Who Fans Have Not Seen the Last of Yasmin Finney’s Controversial Trans Character, EP Says (A note from me, I dislike the use of “controversial” here) — OK! This has led to a lot of confusion on the Autostraddle Editor Team, because we are all very hype for the new Dr. Who but also novices. I went around reading at least 3-4 different sources, but still can’t quite put together when the new Dr. Who comes out, so that we can cover it for y’all! Who wants to help me out in the comments? The best I can tell, a 60th anniversary special just aired, and that is what has introduced transphobes on the internet to Yasmin’s new character? But the new season and new Doctor (Sex Education’s Ncuti Gatwa) doesn’t officially kick off until the Christmas special later this month? Is that right?
+ Related to the above and also of my interest: I’d Like To Thank ‘Doctor Who’ for Recognizing One of the Spice Girls’ Best Songs
+ A ‘Renaissance of Gay Literature’ Marks a Turning Point for Publishing. “Exclusive data and industry experts — including publishers, booksellers and BookTok influencers — shed light on the yearslong surge in LGBTQ fiction sales.”
+ The Best Latine Movies of 2023
+ 2023’s Rookie Housewives, Ranked. I didn’t click through because I was scared to see where they placed Jena Lyons. Someone let me know.
Pop Culture Fix: TV Legend Norman Lear Has Died, May His Memory Be a Blessing
TV Legend Norman Lear Has Died, May His Memory Be a Blessing
At 101 years old, television writer and producer Norman Lear passed away yesterday in his home. I wouldn’t know how to parcel into words the impact of one singular man on the trajectory of television over the last more than 50 years, but put simply — no one did it like Norman Lear. From All in the Family, to The Jeffersons, to Maude, and of course One Day at a Time (along with its beloved by queer audiences reboot), Lear took his charge to bring the tough conversations happening in American homes and showcase them in their fully messy humanity across our TVs — somehow keeping their honesty without ever losing their humor. Sometimes their humor was in the honesty at all, if we’re being honest.
And of course, Lear who was Jewish and also a World War II veteran, lived a full long life (101 years is no joke!) — but it’s impossible not to feel a hole left by his presence today. If you have time this evening, All the Major Broadcast Networks Are Coming Together to Honor Norman Lear — CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, and the CW are all planning to join together to air a simulcast on-air memorial card in Norman Lear’s honor tonight at 8pm ET and PT.
For further reading on a great man, I cannot recommend enough Norman Lear’s Truth: He Depicted the American Experiment, One Family at a Time by Kathryn VanArendonk for Vulture. And this roundup, also from Vulture, is particularly great: The Industry Pays Tribute to Norman Lear
Other Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:
For my film nerds! Max Gets Access to the A24 Vault
And my lovers of camp! Drag Race Is Returning to 90-Minute Glory for Season 16
Anne Hathaway Remembers Meryl Streep’s Improvisation on the Devil Wears Prada
The View Star Alyssa Farah Griffin Says She’s on Spectrum of Sexuality, ‘Would Date a Woman’. And you know what? Good for her!
Anne Hathaway Worried She’d Gone “Too Far” in Eileen (I cannot wait to see this movie)
Trace Lysette on Independent Spirit Award Nomination: ‘You’ve Got to Dream’
Speaking of iconic awardees, I am still not over Queen Latifah’s looks for her Kennedy Center Honors (a reminder that she’s the first woman rapper to receive be a Kennedy Center honoree, we simply love making history!)
And finally, this one made me laugh: Santas, Ranked
Also.Also.Also: If You’re Afraid To Do Gay PDA in Public, You’re Not Alone
Happy pub day to Gabrielle Korn! An Autostraddle review of Yours for the Taking is in the works!
Queer as in F*ck You
Two-Thirds of LGBTQ+ Brits Avoid Holding Hands With Their Partners Over Safety Fears. In a survey of over 1,000 LGBTQ+ people in the UK, it was found that 67% of respondents intentionally avoided holding hands in the past year out of fears amid rising hate crimes. As someone who lives in a place where I too often have to avoid holding hands or public affection toward my partner, I understand how complex this can be. Additionally, 33% of respondents reported holding hands made them feel self-conscious, 30% reported feeling anxious, and 23% reported feeling unsafe. While this survey had a relatively small sample size, a similar study conducted on the LGBTQ communities of the UK in 2018 polled 100,000 people and found the same two-thirds result.
Trace Lysette on Independent Spirit Award Nomination: ‘You’ve Got to Dream’. For her work in Monica, Trace Lysette has received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination. As Lysette puts it: “Hopefully, the other award shows will become aware because we deserve to do more than just survive, we deserve to thrive.”
The Exquisite Mess of Being a 20-Something, in Photos. If you’ve been following along with this little link roundup column since I took over it earlier this year, then you know I love an LGBTQ photoessay. I love an intimate and artful glance into queer and trans life — especially when these photo series emphasize imperfection and mess in their aesthetics and subjects.
Queers Without Money. This is a republication of the late Amber Hollibaugh’s essay that was originally published in the Village Voice in 2001 about class, queerness, and economic justice. It includes a new introduction from Lisa Duggan.
Some global LGBTQ news from around the world:
- Nepal Just Registered Its First Queer Marriage.
- Russia Bans LGBTQ+ Activism, Declaring It an Extremist Movement.
- Australian Police Under Fire for Handling of 2020 Investigation Into Missing Trans Woman.
‘I Live in a Queer Fantasy’: Alex Jenny. Here’s a great interview with trans drag performer and therapist Alex Jenny, who you might know from Instagram and who I went to college with!
Saw This, Thought of You
“Let’s Wait Till Israel Says Something”: Why the Media Has Failed the Test of the War in Gaza. An excerpt from this “dispatch from the front lines of the information war”:
“We tell ourselves stories to understand the world better. In that moment, I recognized something about this story, and how it has dominated and shaped the lives of Palestinians: The very fact of their being the largest community in the world without a state makes an impact on how the media treats its perspective.”
Speaking Up for Palestine Can Be Hard, but It’s Never Been More Necessary. “It is unquestionably risky to show support for Palestinians. But the bigger risk is saying nothing at all.”
How American Librarians Helped Defeat the Nazis. Y’all KNOW I love stories about librarians doing the WORK.
This was a really interesting story about how restaurant closures can have a huge impact on communities:
May December May Cause Internet Brain.
Political Snacks
One More Thing
Pop Culture Fix: Everybody Start Manifesting Now for “Cruel Intentions” TV Show To Radiate Bisexual Energy
“Cruel Intentions” Announces Final Cast, Confirms Series Order on Prime Video
After two years in development and a lot of cast change-ups and a strike-delayed filming schedule, the final cast and full series order has been announced for the Cruel Intentions TV show, based on the iconic ’90s movie in which Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair kissed on the grass and I gasped in my seat at the shopping mall movie theater in Northern Michigan where I saw the film on opening weekend.
First Kill’s Sarah Catherine Hook will star as Caroline Merteuil, “the queen of everything – or at least the queen of Delta Phi,” and Sara Silva plays her right hand, CeCe. I think that Savannah Lee Smith (“Gossip Girl”) will be playing the role of “Annie, a model student, respectable young woman and daughter of the Vice President of the U.S.”
Sarah Catherine Hook practicing for the Cruel Intentions TV show
Other stars include Khobe Clarke (“Firefly Lane,” “Yellowjackets”), John Harlan Kim (“The Last Thing He Told Me,” “9-1-1”), Brooke Lena Johnson (“You”), and Sean Patrick Thomas (“Till”). Claire Forlani will be playing a recurring role, replacing the previously cast Laura Benanti.
The show was set to begin filming in June in Toronto, but was delayed by the Actors’ Strike, and is now returning to Toronto in late January.
The new show is described to take place “at an elite Washington, D.C. college, where two ruthless step-siblings will do anything to stay on top of the cutthroat social hierarchy.” Furthermore: “After a brutal hazing incident threatens the entire Panhellenic system at their school, they’ll do whatever is necessary to preserve their power and reputation, even if that means seducing the daughter of the vice president of the United States.”
Sarah Goodman and Rachel Fisher, who signed on to the project in 2021, remain at the helm. Goodman also wrote and executive produced I Know What You Did Last Summer for Prime Video, which was very queer and although I personally enjoyed it, most people did not!
The original Cruel Intentions, inspired by Les Liaisons dangereuses, has a special place in the heart of the queer community — Demi Lovato said it made her realize she was queer, and many have argued it was queerer than it seemed while others have noted that the film punished people for homosexuality. I personally just happened to adore it, so!
An 2016 attempt at creating a television series based on the film, which did include Sarah Michelle Gellar in its cast, does have an unaired pilot that has made it into the public eye. Twitter was especially excited about a clip in which Sarah Michelle Gellar seduces Carmen (Nathalie Kelley).
Our hope is that the 2023 edition of this project will deliver similar bisexual energy or just queer stuff in general. It has to right??
(Also, SMG perhaps has cruel Queer Intentions Fan Art in her home.)
Other Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:
+ XYZ Films has acquired U.S. and Australia/NZ rights to distribute D.W. Waterson’s cheerleading drama Backspot, which Drew named as one of the Best Queer Sports Movies of all time. It’s a very queer production, starring Devery Jacobs and Evan Rachel Wood and produced by Elliot Page. “This is an excellent film about a young athlete his is an excellent film about a young athlete pushing her body, her mind and her personal life to the limits” writes Drew, “and should be in any future conversations of the best queer sports movies.”
+ Da Brat talks to Out Magazine about beating the odds by having a baby at the age of 49 after fibroids and polyps surgery and a miscarriage.
+ ‘If You Don’t Leave Blood On The Track, Why Even Do It?’ Tegan and Sara Quin Open Up
+ Marvel’s Most Iconic Queer Couple Just Made History (Changing X-Men Lore Forever)
+ Suranne Jones promises her fans: “My next few characters aren’t lesbians, but I’ll be back with more’”
+ Ariana DeBose is an astronaut at war in trailer for space-set thriller I.S.S.
+ Saltburn will debut on Prime Video before Christmas
Susan Sarandon, Melissa Barrera, and the Troubling Pattern of Punishment for Advocating for Palestine
feature image photo of Susan Sarandon by John Nacion / Contributor via Getty Images; photo of Melissa Barrera by Michael Buckner / Contributor via Getty Images
We’re continuing to see people punished for speaking out against Israel, genocide, and the mass killings of Palestinian civilians. Today,The Hollywood Reporter reported that bisexual actress Susan Sarandon was dropped by her talent agency, United Talent Agency (UTA), for speaking at a pro-Palestine protest.
At a rally in New York City’s Union Square on November 17, Sarandon gave a speech in which she empathized with Jewish Americans’ fears of the rise of antisemitism while also noting that this is how Muslims in America feel all the time. This is not the first time Sarandon has spoken up for social justice. She’s been critical of cops in the past, stands with trans people, and was critical of Hillary Clinton’s murky record on LGBTQ rights. She has been antiwar for over two decades.
It’s unclear where exactly UTA draws the line when it comes to its clients’ politics. The talent agency represents a wide swath of clients across the ideological spectrum, including people who have spoken out in support of Palestine in various capacities. They also rep vocal Zionists, including stars like Mayim Bialik as well as Sarah Silverman, who said on her podcast in 2021 that she supports Zionism and who made a now-deleted post on Instagram attempting to justify Israel’s decision to cut off electricity and water in Gaza.
just 3 weeks ago, sarah silverman called for israel to turn off water and electricity in gaza while it continued to be bombed and blamed her hateful post on weed. if you work at the daily show — take a stand. do not work with this woman. now is the time to make a moral choice https://t.co/Zr9pEdKU1V
— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) November 7, 2023
Sarandon has since offered an apology on Instagram, apologizing for the specific wording she used while reiterating what her real meaning was:
So far, there has been no update as to her representation.
In addition to Sarandon being dropped by UTA, news also broke that Spyglass had quietly fired Melissa Barrera from the next Scream movie for her pro-Palestine social media posts. Barrera has been vocal in her naming of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as a genocide and in her opposition to Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people. A Variety report on talent agency shakeups over employees taking pro-Palestine stands attempts to suggest Barrera played into an antisemitic trope about media control, but that really takes her post about media bias and social media algorithms completely out of context. Even if Variety is trying to say it’s what sources said about Barrera’s posts, there should at least be an addendum that includes the full text of Barrera’s post. The insinuation that Barrera is spreading an antisemitic trope is an absurd reach and one that conflates being critical of Israel with antisemitism.
the slashfilm article says melissa barrera was fired from scream 7 for leaning into "an antisemitic trope that jews control the media" and i have to assume it's referring to this instagram story. this is quite blatantly misconstruing what she said. pic.twitter.com/BHXNzqW64b
— jeremy (@jeremylovesyall) November 21, 2023
That same Variety report details the forced resignation of top Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Maha Dakhil, who came under fire for posting about witnessing genocide on her Instagram story. Dakhil was seemingly asked to issue a public apology and step out of her role on the agency’s internal board, but thanks in part to advocacy by her client Tom Cruise, was allowed to remain at CAA as an agent.
The report also notes some agents at UTA have apparently called for writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to be dropped for being a signatory on the open letter from participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature calling on “the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine.” Even though the agency decided to drop Sarandon, Coates is still represented there for now.
https://twitter.com/MariahRoseFaith/status/1727088213167337673
In anonymous accounts, a Middle Eastern actor told Vulture recently that what happened to Dakhil “scared the shit out of us.” The actor goes on to say: “I’m very careful not to use words like genocide, occupation, colonialism, open-air prisons — despite believing they do accurately describe what’s happening in Gaza.”
Journalists are being fired or forced to resign for speaking out against genocide. Sarandon was dropped for making statements that align with what her politics have been all along.
Meanwhile, the media bias Melissa Barrera was actually talking about in her post that apparently others have decided to erroneously label “antisemitic” is very much alive, and shadowbanning of pro-Palestine content has forced a lot of Instagram users to employ “algospeak.” Even Variety‘s biased reporting on Barrera’s posts is evidence of that exact media partiality she’s openly criticizing!
I’m curious to see if there will be ripple effects to Spyglass’ decision and if more actors will speak up or choose silence. Queer singer Kehlani has been bold in her demand for more celebrities to speak up. Sarandon, Barrera, and Barrera’s Scream co-star Jenna Ortega all signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire, which shouldn’t be considered controversial. Ortega has also posted on her own social media account in support of Palestine.
News of Ortega’s departure from Scream VII dropped one day after the Barrera news broke, but Variety is reporting it has nothing to do with the Barrera decision but rather her filming schedule for the upcoming season of Wednesday. The timing is…odd. And if Ortega’s participation was in question well before Barrera’s firing — the narrative the trades are going with — it seems like it would have been announced before now. I’m interested to see if Ortega speaks to the decision at any point.
In an official statement about Barrera’s firing, Spyglass said:
“Spyglass’ stance is unequivocally clear: We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”
There are no specific references in the statement to posts made by Barrera. Also, the statement reads as tacit genocide denial. Scream VII‘s director Christopher Landon also made a “statement” on Twitter that has since been deleted but read, vaguely: “Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make.”
To make matters even murkier, a new Hollywood Reporter story has come out citing sources who say the firing was not made in response to that specific social media post about shadowbanning but rather came a full month before the news broke, when Barrera began posting in solidarity with Palestine. “Before her firing, sources say her deal to return as Sam Carpenter, the lead character she introduced in 2022’s Scream, had been finalized,” THR notes. The same story claims Ortega’s deal had not been in place and that her departure had to do with salary negotiations rather than the original story of scheduling conflicts. The timing of the Ortega announcement, however, still seems odd.
Barrera has continued amplifying reports and images about the violence in Gaza since news of her firing broke and has yet to shift the focus to herself, which is definitely the right way to show solidarity, especially as a celebrity. In fact, 1,300 actors have now signed an open letter accusing various institutions of censoring and punishing artists who have spoken in support of Palestine, and while the letter lists Barrera’s firing as an example, I haven’t seen Barrera post about the letter herself, as she continues to center the genocide rather than Hollywood.
Over half a century after the Hollywood Blacklist torpedoed the careers of actors and other creatives for any association with the Community Party, we’re now seeing people in the film and television industry being punished for criticizing Israel and standing in solidarity with Palestine.
This story was originally published on November 21, 2023 and has been updated.
Julianna Margulies Sure As Hell Has No Business Speaking for LGBTQ People
Noted Good Wife and zealous Zionist Julianna Margulies recently appeared on “The Back Room with Andy Ostroy,” a podcast in which a man speaks to famous people about stuff, and oh boy did Julianna Marguiles have some stuff to say. Most curious to all of us here at this website, she at one point introduced her right to speak about her disdain for anti-Zionism in LGBTQ+ communities like so: “As someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show, I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew.” First of all, no she isn’t. Second of all — why is she speaking on behalf of lesbian Jewish journalists when the option existed and continues to exist for her to not speak at all?
As an actual lesbian Jewish journalist, listening to her share her bigoted ideas on this 50-minute podcast was excruciating. Julianna displays appalling racism and manages to endorse every single illogical and frustrating point made on behalf of these identities in recent months by alleged allies and community members, after opening the dialogue with: “I hate religion by the way, I think it’s fucked up the entire world, so I’m not a religious person.”
An initial attempt to discuss her character on The Morning Show quickly derails into something else altogether, as she recalls wishing she’d advocated for her character to wear a Star of David necklace rather than a cross. (This is a good point, we need more queer Jewish representation on television, but not on Julianna’s neck, thank you.) She then proposes the following storyline for Season Four:
“I would love in season four for Laura Peterson to go to Columbia and teach a class to the LGBTQ filmmakers there, or journalists, and teach a class and give them an earful about Hamas. That’s what I would love.”
It’s difficult to imagine anything worse than The Morning Show’s actual Season Three lesbian storylines, but Margulies dares to dream! She’s very upset at the LGBTQ+ community, who she so valiantly represented on television through her character Laura Peterson (a lady with a big house in Montana who dumps her hot girlfriend for, essentially, not calling the cops). Margulies continues:
“It’s those kids who are spewing this antisemitic hate, that have no idea if they stepped foot in an Islamic country — these people who want us to call them they/them, or whatever they want us to call them, which I have respectfully made a point of doing — it’s those people that will be the first people beheaded and their heads played with like a soccer ball. And that’s who they’re supporting? Terrorists who don’t want women to have their rights? LGBTQ people get executed.”
Kayla has written recently about what’s wrong with that way of thinking, and it’s safe to say any allegedly “respectful” utilization of they/them pronouns has been negated by this contextualization, and then she plows forward with an inaccurate anecdote about a “No Jews Allowed” sign at a screening hosted by a “Black lesbian group” at Columbia (it was actually a QPOC-lead group for queer women and non-binary people, and there were no “No Jews Allowed” signs), in which she shows her ass once again with repulsive, unabashed racism:
“Because I wanna say to them, ‘You f—ing idiots. You don’t exist. You’re even lower than the Jews. A. You’re Black, and B. You’re gay and you’re turning your back against the people who support you?’ Because Jews, they rally around everybody.”
The host and Juliana pontificate extensively about why it is that young people “endorse Hamas.” This is a consistent error throughout Juliana’s discourse — 1) Conflating Jews with Zionists and 2) conflating Palestinians with Hamas.
She expresses disdain for people who are tearing down signs for hostages kidnapped by Hamas, which is a valid action to feel disdain towards. But everything else she says on this podcast is completely bonkers. Her and Andy assert, with unearned confidence, that the U.S. would never stand for Black people to be treated how Jews are being treated right now (this is very very objectively false) and that people on a college campus would be persecuted for using the wrong pronouns but applauded for hating Jews.
This is a full hour of two grown adults with full access to the internet and the library asking each other “why do the kids support Hamas?” and answering it, over and over, with “because they hate Jews.”
Here’s a better question: Why do the kids support the people of Palestine?
Here’s a better answer: Because they hate genocide.
Look, Juliana saw a documentary. She thinks it’s okay for IDF to bomb hospitals because Hamas is operating out of hospitals. (Although, as someone who played a nurse on television, maybe she is qualified to speak on behalf of hospitals.) Here’s the thing: it’s never okay to bomb hospitals. Literally never! It is literally never okay to kill innocent civilians. Nothing that has ever happened to anyone, including everything that has ever happened to us the Jewish people, makes that okay. Despite centuries of oppression and expulsion and extermination, despite the Spanish Inquisition and the Russian Pogroms and the Holocaust and the October 7 attack — literally nothing, absolutely nothing at all, justifies indiscriminately killing of over 15,000 innocent Palestinians and continuing to create endless loops of intergenerational trauma and piling wrongs on wrongs and never getting to a right. It is far more coherent to condemn both Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 and Israel’s occupation and carpet-bombing of Palestine than it is to condemn the former but not the latter. Never again means never again for anyone.
Susan Sarandon was dropped by UTA last week for saying a sentence in a Free Palestine rally that could’ve been interpreted in a variety of ways because someone decided there was in fact only one objective way to hear it, and that way was “anti-semitic rant.” (UTA represents a lot of great people, but they also represent Megan McCain, a handful of Fox News anchors, and didn’t dump Bill O’Reily until after his big sexual harassment settlement was revealed.)
But on this podcast, Julianna Marguiles says objectively bigoted things about Black people, queer people, Palestinian people and Islamic people. She So far, she’s still on the client list at CAA and was given a chance to issue an apology. If she’s feeling persecuted presently I suspect it’s not because she’s Jewish, but because she is saying hateful, bigoted things on a regular basis. USA Today gave her a whole-ass column last week to share her little ideas. Meanwhile, the United States stands firmly with Israel and in 2022, funnelled $3 billion dollars into Israel’s massively powerful military. Actors and journalists are losing their jobs, and artists are losing their funding and jobs and artistic freedom, for supporting Palestine.
Like Amy Schumer, Margulies takes time to present a very mercenary vision of activism:
“The fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says that they’re just ig-ig [word fumbles] -—they just don’t know, or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews. But when you’ve been marginalized so much as a community, the way I feel we have, isn’t that when you step up?”
There’s so much to unpack here. Her repeated insistence that various groups are only advocating for Palestine because they are brainwashed idiots is offensive as fuck, and in this specific case, dangerously racist. She also doesn’t seem to know that Black Jewish people exist? Finally, as perhaps most clearly articulated by the levels of Tzedakah (the Hebrew term for charitable giving that is integral to the Jewish faith), it is best to give without expecting anything in return, not even a “thank you,” not even anybody even knowing you helped at all. If you’re only giving in hopes of getting something in return, you’re better off not doing giving in the first place.
Which brings me to Margulies’ next bit, in which she wants us all to know that she herself did activism and in fact she was right on top of that instagram black square thing! Also, she threw the first brick at Black Lives Matter:
“I’m the first person to march in Black Lives Matter. When that happened to George Floyd I put a black screen on my instagram, like I ran to support my Black brothers and sisters. When lgbtq+ people are being attacked, I run, I made a commercial for same-sex marriages with my husband in 2012.”
She is right that the Jewish people have a long, storied history in social justice communities — in fact, a great deal of anti-semitism in this country is because of Jewish ties to various civil rights movements. In line with that tradition, Jewish Voice For Peace is one of the primary activist organizations supporting the movement for a free Palestine, a movement that has welcomed Jewish supporters. Jewish queer people are turning out to call for a ceasefire and support a free Palestine, not out of ignorance or a lack of education, but its opposite.
We also don’t have to deny that antisemitism is on the rise or stop advocating for Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza in order to put energy towards Palestinian liberation and fight for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Zionism also benefits anti-semites, including historically the American and European leaders who supported anti-semitic policy, refused Jewish immigrants and either participated in or looked away from the Holocaust. Now they can support Israel instead of actually supporting Jewish people, and conveniently enough this approach also provides them with a political ally in the Middle East.
What’s actually shocking is that anyone who can do basic math or understand the tragedy of death, displacement, torture and starvation can look at what’s been happening in Gaza and rather than use their platform to advocate for a ceasefire and an end to apartheid and occupation, to instead use it, as Jullianna does, to complain about the WGA’s failure to immediately issue a statement condemning Hamas, because statements fix everything I guess. Zionism is not reflective of core Jewish values or traditions, and the virulent, unchecked racism we’ve seen from Zionist Jewish celebrities like Julianna makes that even clearer.
Aligning with Zionism doesn’t make Julianna Margulies more closely aligned with Jewish values, and Margulies using her experience playing a lesbian on television as an entry point to saying the most racist batshit stuff ever is disgraceful.
So. In between all of the social media posts about Margulies Big Podcast Adventure, I saw a reel from nonbinary model/activist Rain Dove that I wanted to share here because I think this story is better than anything else I could say about Julianna Margulies.
After being inundated with DMs from followers telling Rain Dove, who’d been working to funnel money towards various humanitarian causes in the region, that they’d be killed if they set foot in Palestine, Dove assembled a team of locals and others and went to Palestine to distribute cash and physical aid to Gazan Palestinians in need. Dove survived, they felt welcome, they met and worked with loads of other LGBTQ+ people, they were shocked by the horrifying conditions in the region. “This propaganda that LGBTQ+ people must not call for humanitarian aid or rights for Palestinian people simply because of conservative values is unethical and wrong,” wrote Dove upon their return. “Every human — EVERY HUMAN deserves the right to food shelter water physical safety and freedom of movement. And I mean EVERY. So don’t get it twisted.”
Also.Also.Also: Why Florida High School Students Walking Out Over Trans Sport Bans Matters
feature image by Miami Herald / Contributor via Getty Images
Whewwww, last night was a wild night on Twitter given the death of a certain notorious war criminal. My group chats were ALIVE.
Queer as in F*ck You
Hundreds of Florida Students Staged a Walkout to Support the Rights of Trans Athletes. Making good on my own rule that if you’re going to cover the bad shit happening in places like Florida that you should also cover the resistance to that bad shit, I want to highlight the bravery of the hundreds of high school kids who walked out during the school day at Monarch High School in Broward County, FL to protest the recent reassignment and removal of school staff members who had allowed a trans girl to compete on the girls volleyball team, including the principal James Cecil. Assistant principal Kenneth May, athletic director Dione Hester, information management technician Jessica Norton, and temporary athletic coach Alex Burgess were among the reassigned staff being “investigated” for going against the state’s trans sports ban, signed into law by Governor DeSantis in 2021.
I know a high school walk out sounds like a small thing, but this is huge. It shows a two-fold approach to resistance happening in the state: First, the administrators and staff members who flouted the ban in the first place showed it’s totally an option to just…not enforce transphobic regulations. If more Florida school staff were willing to do this, it would make the ban difficult and maybe even impossible to reinforce. Second, the students showed their solidarity and support not just for this one trans athlete but all trans athletes, holding signs and chanting affirmations of support for trans lives everywhere and questioning the ban. It’s further evidence that the Florida legislation does not adequately represent the Florida people. These students are boldly taking a stance against decisions that directly impact them and yet that most of them don’t get a say in since they’re too young to vote. Anyway, I dove a little deeper on Florida’s anti-LGBTQ policies and historical resistance to them earlier this week.
Related: The Christian Right Wants to Force Teachers to Out Trans Kids. Dissent from educators is increasingly urgent, and for us non-educators, we have to find ways to support that dissent from the sidelines.
Our Queer and Jewish Grief Must Fuel Our Fight to Let Gaza Live. Rabbi Elliot Kukla calls for a permanent ceasefire.
Ted Cruz Introduces Bill Limiting Pronouns and Names Despite Going by His Own Chosen Name. Okay, while it’s always a pretty easy target to point out hypocrisy from politicians, this headline GOT ME GOOD.
Mexican LGBTQ+ Advocates Question Officials’ Account of Nonbinary Magistrate’s Death.
I love a specific queer history moment: Inside the Historic Lesbian Cafes That Fed the Feminist Movement.
Saw This, Thought of You
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies. DING DONG, America’s favorite war criminal is dead. And Spencer Ackerman at Rolling Stone went all the way off with this headline but also this dek: “The infamy of Nixon’s foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history’s worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him.”
Speaking of war crimes, mass murders, and the military industrial complex: Israel Arms the World’s Autocrats—With Weapons Tested on Palestinians.
In media news, Jezebel Is Coming Back.
Political Snacks
Election 2024 and What the Fight for LGBTQ+ Rights Looks Like Now.
One More Thing
Pop Culture Fix: Kate McKinnon Returning to SNL To Make the Yuletide Gay With Billie Eilish
Kate McKinnon and Billie Eilish Will Have a Very Gay Saturday Night Live Christmas On December 16th
Billie Eilish Episode 1813 — Pictured: (l-r) Host Billie Eilish as Leslie D., Kate McKinnon, Ego Nwodim, and Kenan Thompson during the Santa Song sketch on Saturday, December 11, 2021 (Photo by: Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
Kate McKinnon is returning to Saturday Night Live to host its December 16th episode with musical guest Billie Eilish, which will be the second time Billie is the musical guest for a Christmas episode of SNL and therefore the second time the twosome will be appearing together in the same Christmas episode! But a lot has changed since the 2021 Christmas episode — now Billie has revealed that she is gay and tired and also both Kate and Billie were involved in the Barbie movie. This feels like an opportunity for some kind of Gay Christmas Barbie skit, just an idea!
The December 16th episode will be Kate McKinnon’s hosting debut after leaving the show in 2022 — during her time on the program she delighted the fuck out of us on a regular basis and also was nominated for ten Emmys and won two. She’s also had very memorable turns on holiday episodes of Saturday Night Live, including Do It On My Twin Bed, HomeGoods, The Christmas Candle and, of course, Back Home Ballers.
Feature image by Rosalind OConnor/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
More Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:
+ Netflix has dropped the trailer for “Under Pressure,” a documentary about the United States’ Women’s Soccer team’s quest for a third World Cup title. This documentary was constructed very quickly?!
+ + Bella Ramsey spoke to Pink News about their excitement for a lesbian romance between Ellie and newcomer Dina in Season Two of “Last of Us.” Furthermore, on this very day they were named as one of the BAFTA Breakthrough Award recipients for their performance as Ellie in the first season of HBO’s Last of Us, based on the bestselling video game.
+ Why are trailers for musicals hiding the fact that they are musicals?
+ Every LGBTQ+ contestant in The Squid Game: The Challenge
+ Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus Lead Spotify Wrapped 2023
+ “An Unexpected Christmas” tops Variety’s list of the best Hallmark Christmas movies, suggesting that viewers “come for the sweet pretend-we’re-still-together-for-my-parents storyline; stay for the most natural chemistry yet.” Variety doesn’t mention this, but there is an unexpected lesbian in an Unexpected Christmas.
+ ‘Mean Girls’ Pop-Up Dining Experience to Debut in Los Angeles and New York
+ OUTtv will debut “Looking For a Third” with reality TV star Tiffany ‘New York’ Pollard: Tiffany Pollard is hosting a show that will begin with one gay couple and one lesbian couple looking for a third.
Cynthia Nixon Joins Hunger Strike for Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza
On Monday morning, a coalition of more than one dozen local elected officials and activists from Jewish Voice for Peace, the Campaign for Palestinian Rights, If Not Now, Dream Defenders, the Adalah Justice Project, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) gathered in front of the White House. The representative group — which included activists, state law makers, and Tony and Emmy award winning actress Cynthia Nixon, an active member of DSA, former New York gubernatorial candidate — gathered together to announce a five-day hunger strike for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The strikers will continue to gather outside the White House daily between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. until Friday. They include Delaware State Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton, New York Rep. Zohran Mamdani, Oklahoma Rep. Mauree Turner (who is queer), Virginia Rep. Sam Rasoul, and Michigan Rep. Abraham Aiyash. Reps. Zohran Mamdani and Madinah Wilson-Anton are among the half dozen participants who have committed to avoiding food for the entire five days. The rest will fast for less than five days, though each taking daily shifts.
According to reporting from Time, when Delaware lawmaker Winston-Anton was invited by Mamdani to take part in the hunger strike, she started to cry. Though vocal on social media and various protests, she said that she still felt helpless, “I wanted to do something else but I just didn’t know what.” (A sentiment that I believe is shared by so many right now.)
Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
When interviewed by The Cut, Nixon shared that “one of the things we’re doing with our hunger strike is calling out to President Biden, who has experienced such devastating personal loss in his own life — though he has been strangely and disturbingly insensitive through the tremendous suffering and killing in Gaza right now. He is known for his empathy. It’s one of his strengths as a leader, so we’re imploring that he listen to the will of the American people, 70 percent of whom want there to be a cease-fire.”
This was echoed by New York Rep. Zohran Mamdani, who noted that in a recent poll conducted by Data for Progress, roughly two-thirds of U.S. voters say they either “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with a permanent ceasefire. A similar Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 68% of respondents agreed with the statement “Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate.”
Nixon described the public attitude and crossroads succinctly, “we’re at a watershed moment where politicians have not caught up yet. I’m very encouraged by the number of Congress members who have now signed on for a ceasefire, but the number is certainly not yet reflective of what the American people want.”
Mamdani, who invited Nixon to participate in the demonstration, told The Guardian, “We are taking this action of hunger striking to showcase the actions of President Biden, It’s President Biden’s actions that are leading to the bombing of Palestinians, the starving of Palestinians. So we are starving ourselves to make visible what is so often erased, which is the Palestinian experience.”
While Israel and Hamas have declared a four-day temporary ceasefire that began November 28th and has since been extended for an additional two days, to allow for the release of more hostages and prisoners. There is significant worry that once the the “temporary” pause closes, violence that is already untenable will only increase (According to reporting from Aljazeera, Israeli officials have already suggested that the bombing in Gaza will resume with an even greater intensity once the temporary truce expires). This is on top of an already existing blockade by Israel making it near impossible for Palestinians to find food and clean water, a situation the UN World Food Programme has said leaves Gaza’s civilians facing the “immediate possibility of starvation.” Oxfam has described the starvation as a “weapon of war.”
This hunger strike in front of the White House is not meant to be poetic politics or symbolism; no one engages in hunger to be pretty. The very real starvation faced by civilians in Gaza can be hard to grapple with or face from within the various privileges of the United States. The activists of behind this work hope that whatever “shock value” of their demonstration will help put personal faces on a movement for freedom. As Nixon explained to The Cut, “it’s happening the week after Thanksgiving, a time when people get very distracted and caught up in the holidays.”
Nixon, who was one of more than 260 artists who previously signed an open letter calling on President Biden and Congress to commit to a ceasefire, went on to say “None of this is normal. None of this is routine and none of this can be allowed to continue.”
For Nixon, who has been involved in grassroots activism for decades, the call for a ceasefire is personal. A family friend, Thane Aboushi (previous candidate for Manhattan district attorney) is a Palestinian New Yorker who by chance found herself in Israel the night before the attack on October 7, causing fear for her safety and that of her family. But also, Nixon’s eldest son, who is Jewish and lives in Chicago, encouraged her to leverage her celebrity and privilege to do something:
“Two of my three children are Jewish. My oldest son in particular is extremely involved in the movement for justice for Palestinians and has been very active in Chicago, where he lives and was arrested for his protest about a week and a half ago.
When this was starting, we spent a lot of time on the phone with him. He was doing everything he could in terms of protests, speeches, speaking in articles. He said to my wife and me point-blank, ‘You have a much bigger megaphone than I do. And I just implore you at this moment to do everything you can to bring attention to this.’ His Jewish identity is very central to him. He’s the grandson of two Holocaust survivors. He said, for him, ‘never again’ means never again for everyone.”
Of course, Cynthia Nixon’s decision to join the hunger strike comes at a time when other actors in Hollywood have recently been made to face public punishment for advocating for Palestine. Most notably, Susan Sarandon was recently dropped by her talent agency, United Talent Agency (UTA), for speaking at a pro-Palestine protest. Scream star Melissa Barrera was fired from the franchise’s upcoming movie for her pro-Palestine social media posts. While Cynthia Nixon noted a need to be cautious in selecting her words, her belief remained steadfast: “This is a terrible time for Palestinians and Israelis. It’s a particularly terrifying moment for Muslims and Jews in America and across the world, where we’re seeing so much Islamophobia and antisemitism and attacks. That said, I feel we can’t be living in a world where saying the mass slaughter of civilians is wrong. That can’t be a thing we’re not allowed to say.”
While Nixon will only be participating in the strike in front of the White House on Monday and Tuesday (today), her understanding of her role in the protest is what’s stayed with me the most. One of the things that we most think about when reporting on celebrity involvement in the fight for Palestinian human rights and freedoms is, how do we keep the story about what’s the actual story? I wavered on covering Cynthia Nixon’s involvement at all, worried that it would overshadow the work of countless activists who have come together to make this hunger strike even possible. For that, Nixon said it simply and to the point, “We’re a group of people who have a megaphone, a large platform.”
There have been so many headlines today on variations of “Cynthia Nixon joins hunger strike for ceasefire in Gaza” — and its shined a brighter light on these protests than maybe would have otherwise been able to be achieved. And now she’s happy to step aside and put the bright light and loud noise of her microphone on the activists who need it most. I hope we all remember to do the same.
Also.Also.Also: Queer Palestinian Professor on Resurgence of Global Queer Solidarity With Palestine
feature image photo by NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images
It is 50 degrees today or as we call it in central Florida…SWEATER WEATHER.
Queer as in F*ck You
Why Queer Solidarity With Palestine Is Not “Chickens for KFC.” There are truly so many great pull-quotes from this Them interview with queer Palestinian professor Dr. Sa’ed Atshan — who is a professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College — that it’s impossible to pick just one. But I actually wanted to highlight this lovely opening from Dr. Atshan:
I spent [my] childhood years in the West Bank, in Ramallah, and growing up under Israeli military occupation. On one hand, there’s a tremendous amount of beauty and joy in living in Palestine: the people, the landscape, the generosity of spirit, the food, the love, the community, the sense of solidarity, the traditions being really held in a collectivist society and space. There was just a lot of beauty. Picking olives during the olive harvest season. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of picking a fresh fig off the tree; it’s just amazing.
“I want to be clear, I’m not arguing that we want to focus less on anti-imperialism,” Atshan goes on to say in the interview, which I recommend reading in full. “I agree completely that it is paramount as a priority. But what I’m arguing is that the queer liberation struggle cannot be disentangled from the anti-imperialist struggle. They are fundamentally connected, and the existence of the queer Palestinian body is a testament to that. Because I’m simultaneously queer and Palestinian, I can’t sever parts of my body and self. I am both of these things at once… So I argue that the attempt to actually try to privilege one over the other is a fallacy because they are inextricably linked to begin with. They cannot be separated.”
Gretchen Felker-Martin and Carmen Maria Machado on the Healing Power of Queer Horror. As part of Them‘s Trans Futures package, authors Carmen Maria Machado and Gretchen Felker-Martin had a video conversation about finding healing in horror.
Nearly Two Years After “Don’t Say Gay,” Classroom Censorship Is Still on the Rise. I also wrote today about how the Florida legislature is trying to expand Don’t Say Gay to the workplace.
TDOR was over a week ago, but this was an important read: On Trans Day of Remembrance, Some Advocates Are Honoring Lives Lost to More Than Homicide. “TDOR was formed to honor lives lost to murder. But everyday discrimination leads to transgender deaths that should be honored too, some advocates say.”
Saw This, Thought of You
The Shootings in Vermont Cannot Be Separated From Dehumanization of Palestinians Globally. “The attack on Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmed comes as Palestinians are silenced and oppressed across the Global North.” The three Palestinian college students — Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmed — were shot while speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs. The shooting took place in Burlington, Vermont, “near the Friends Meeting house, where Vermonters for Justice in Palestine regularly gather to plan how to stop the carnage in Gaza.” These attacks are horrifying and, as the piece reflects, impossible to disentangle from the ways Palestinians are dehumanized in the media and at a massive global scale.
The Right to Speak for Ourselves: “For far too long, Palestinians have been denied the freedom to tell our own story.”
Why So Many Powerful Men Were Just Sued for Sexual Assault.
Political Snacks
What the Fight To Expand Access to the Ballot for Native Americans Looks Like Now.
One More Thing
I tried to link to an Instagram post of this great Chen Chen poem, but it wasn’t embedding properly, so I’ll link to it in poets.org: i love you to the moon & by Chen Chen.
Don’t Say Gay Was Never About Children — But We Already Knew That
feature image photo by Anadolu / Contributor via Getty Images
Last week, Florida House of Representatives Republican Ryan Chamberlin introduced House Bill 599, a modern-day attempt to stymie LGBTQ presence in government work. The bill would make it official state policy “that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” It specifically targets local and state government employees, contractors, and nonprofits that receive funding from the state. Essentially extending Ron DeSantis’ now much-derided “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of gender identity and sexuality in public school settings, the bill forbids tax-exempt nonprofits or employers that receive state funds from requiring any sensitivity training or presentations on gender identity and expression and sexuality. It also would forbid trans employees from sharing their pronouns and prohibits other employees from having to use anyone’s pronouns if those pronouns “do not correspond to his or her sex” as outlined by the bill. Employers would also be forbidden from asking employees their pronouns.
“Don’t Say Gay,” according to its supporters, was allegedly about “protecting children.” But anyone paying attention knows that isn’t the case. Children are just easy targets. Children are just an easy way to test fascistic policies. We see this with transphobic sports bans for school-aged children that have now ripple effected into the broader sports world and society at large. We even see this in the way Israeli soldiers target Palestinian children as a means of reinforcing occupation and control. When spun insidiously as the “Parental Rights in Education bill” and by preying on parents’ fears, it was actually quite easy for DeSantis to push through his agenda to eliminate conversations about sexuality and gender identity in schools, confusing teachers along the way and eventually pushing out many LGBTQ+ instructors. That’s the real goal: a purge of LGBTQ people — and trans folks in particular — from public society. Schools were the first target, and the policy then paved the way for Chamberlin to introduce “Don’t Say Gay”: Workplace Redux.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law Executive Order 10450, which formalized a policy already informally well underway in the federal government. Known as the Lavender Scare, a moral panic about lesbians and gay men working as federal government employees took over the nation in the 1950s, and Executive Order 10450 made it so people working for the government who were gay or suspected of being gay could be interrogated, removed from their positions, and banned from applying to other government jobs. This was all under the shoddy logic that gay people were particularly vulnerable to blackmail and therefore could pose a potential security risk. They were also seen as a cultural risk in that queerness was seen as an entry point to more radical politics and more radical constructions of society.
Shortly after, in 1956, the Florida Legislature established the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (known more commonly as the Johns Committee after its chairman, state Senator Charley Johns), which sought to “investigate” civil rights movement groups for suspected communist connections. The Johns Committee essentially harnessed the combined powers of racism, anti-leftism, and homophobia to dismantle civil liberties in the public sphere in Florida. Initially, the committee set its sights on the NAACP, trying to paint the organization as communist and therefore anti-American. Then, the committee found a new target: gays.
Stacy Braukman, who wrote Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965, said in an interview with Spectrum South that this shift from targeting political and racial groups to homosexuals remains a little ambiguous, but “it was just an easy thing to do, since gays and lesbians were so vulnerable.” The federal government was already expelling people accused of sexual “perversion” (read: being gay) under the guise of “security” and, also, “protecting children.” The Johns Committee made exposing and expelling queer people from the public sphere its new mission, focusing in particular on public education institutions. Collaborating with cops, the committee surveilled and interrogated activists and university students, professors, faculty, and administrators. Students and faculty alike were targets, often pushed out of institutions like the University of Florida. This was already common practice in 1958, but in 1961, the committee was officially charged with the task of determining “the extent of infiltration into agencies supported by state funds by practicing homosexuals.”
In 1964, the Johns Committee published a homophobic pamphlet called “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida” that eventually became known as “the purple pamphlet.” It asserted: “The homosexuals are organized…The homosexuals will win every battle that is fought unless we band together…If we don’t act soon, we will wake up some morning and find they are too big to fight. They may be already.” The pamphlet, however, had the opposite of its intended effect, spurring backlash that eventually led to the committee’s defending and disbandment.
It’s not a perfect comparison, but the Florida legislature, under DeSantis’ gubernatorial leadership, is basically introducing a new Lavender Scare to the public sphere. Essentially outlawing LGBTQ nonprofits in the state caters to the fears outlined in that 1964 pamphlet: that we are organized and ready to fight.
I hear all the time from people — usually well meaning allies but also sometimes gay liberals — some version of at least it’s not as bad as it was back then. Yeah, sure, maybe for financially comfortable cis white gays. As for everyone else, especially trans people, these attempts at legislative overreach are just as alarming than what was happening in the 1950s, if not more so. The Johns Committee leaned on anti-communist rhetoric to push its agenda and convince the public that any deviation from heteronormativity was inherently un-American. It was never really about security. Neither was the larger Lavender Scare happening around the country. Accusations of communism made it easier for people to sell the idea of removing homosexuals from the government. But it was always just about pushing queer people to the margins. Just like “Don’t Say Gay” isn’t really about protecting children but rather pushing out queer and trans educators, public servants, and organizers and making it harder for queer and trans kids to access community and understanding about their identities.
And now, Chamberlin’s new bill attempting to codify a cis gender binary as the norm doesn’t even make any pretense at being about anything other than punishing and subjugating trans and gender-nonconforming people while also making it potentially impossible for LGBTQ+ nonprofits to operate in the state. There is no political movement queer folks are being pinned to as a way to prove the “danger” they pose. The state no longer needs to cry communism to convince people queerness and transness don’t belong in the public sphere; they can just call us wrong and call it a day. All these legislative attempts to push LGBTQ folks even further to the margins build on each other.
Don’t, especially if you live outside Florida, write this off as a lost cause. Even if there’s a strong likelihood this will pass in the current legislature, that defeatist mentality doesn’t tangibly help the Floridians who will need it most if it does. The legislative session starts on January 9, and representatives like Anna Eskamani of my district are already rallying for people to push back on proposed bills like this one. The implications for LGBTQ+ nonprofits in the state — like the beloved Zebra Youth where I live and where my fiancée and I are raising money for at our wedding in a few months — are nothing short of devastating. If you’re outside Florida and you subscribe to a narrow definition of this place, perhaps you define this state by its oppressive politicians and hate groups, but I for one cannot imagine this place without these LGBTQ organizations or without the people who support and benefit from them. We have to become as organized as that pamphlet warned we were. And just like the Johns Committee was a microcosm of a larger national movement to place queerness at odds with citizenship, this battle is not happening in a vacuum. When things happen here, they have a tendency to ripple effect outward and connect back to things happening at the national level. Florida could once again become the test site for similar legislation in other states to follow.
None of this came out of the ether. Restricting queer and trans public life has long been a method of societal control wielded by governments. It’s not enough to say history is repeating itself; we have to look back and understand exactly how and why it is. People didn’t just accept the Johns Committee; there has always been resistance in the face of oppression. Early on in the committee’s terror, librarian and activist Ruth Perry, working as the secretary for Miami’s NAACP, refused to cooperate with the committee during legal proceedings despite threats to her life. While many other organizations avoided direct confrontation with the committee, the Tampa branch of the American Association of University Women condemned and worked against the committee consistently, an important chapter of women-led activism in the South left out of history books all too frequently.
And of course, there was always student dissent to the committee, even though it can be hard to find documentation of it as dominant history has a tendency to obscure or downplay the significance of student activism. But in reading through the archives of The Tampa Tribune (a former daily newspaper in Tampa that was bought by the Tampa Bay Times in 2016), I found lots of evidence pointing toward organized efforts by University of South Florida students to fight the committee. In a 1962 letter to the Tribune, students of one of the residence halls at USF (one of the universities consistently targeted by the committee’s hearings) lament the lack of community pushback outside of campus against the committee’s investigation tactics. “We wonder if most of the people in the community realize how many students are protesting the methods used in this investigation?” the letter reads. Specific books and curriculum were being investigated by the committee (sound familiar?!), and students called to question what exactly was being challenged, writing that they do not feel persecuted of their religious or political beliefs by these teachings but rather that “required readings have challenged us to evaluate our present beliefs and ideas,” which is what education should be all about. To understand the power and influence of student dissent and campus movements, look no further than the Florida legislature’s attempts to curtail them today.
So while a new Lavender Scare is well underway and bills like this latest proposed one coming out of Florida date back to the mid 20th century, a pattern of resistance to those efforts goes way back in history, too. We must hold onto that.
Pop Culture Fix: Maybe This Time We’ll Be Lucky, Maybe This Time “The Color Purple” Will Be Gay
“The Color Purple” Screenwriter Says He Wanted to Spotlight Celie and Shug’s Gay Storyline
The 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s bestselling lesbian novel The Color Purple was, like so many films, suspiciously void of any overtly gay content. The Broadway musical includes a love song between Celie and Shug, “What About Love?”, but many productions found a way to downplay the romantic aspect of that love.
So we are all, as a community, very hopeful that the new Color Purple musical film, debuting this holiday season in a theater near you, will in fact address the romantic love between Shug and Celie. At a special screening, screenwriter Marcus Gardley was asked about how he planned to address their relationship in the film, and according to Queerty, he had a pretty promising response:
“The romantic aspect between Celie and button pushing blues singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) “was very important,” added Gardley. “That’s part of the reason I got the job. My pitch led off with, ‘This is a love story between two women’. It was the most important thing to Alice Walker. In the original film, there was not enough of the romantic love between Celie and Shug. I wanted the love story to be prominent and didn’t want to brush over that these two women are in love.”
Here’s hoping!
Other Queer Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:
+ 20 of 2023’s LGBTQ-Inclusive Early Readers, Chapter Books, and Early Middle Grade Titles
+ Queer Stars Dazzle at Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” Film World Premiere
+ Margot Robbie doesn’t see the need for a Barbie sequel: ‘We put everything into this one’ — weird because I personally do see the need!
+ Doctor Who fans applaud ‘progressive’ trans storyline for Yasmin Finney’s Rose: ‘We love to see it’
+ It’s a Wonderful Knife is queer as hell Christmas horror packed with cleavers and clever twists
+ The Soul Train Awards Renamed a Gendered Award to Honor Janelle Monáe
Indigenous Resistance Movements From the 20th and 21st Centuries We Can Learn From
feature image by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Over the last month, I’ve noticed a pretty disturbing trend in the way people are talking about what is happening in Palestine and the global response to the occupation. From what I’ve seen on social media, both liberals and conservatives who are in favor of Israel’s response to the events of October 7 have attempted to “call out” people in the U.S. over and over again for also being settlers on occupied land. Many of the criticisms of the ongoing resistance movement for Palestinian liberation here in the U.S. seem to hinge on this fact and appear to be making the claim that there hasn’t been a robust resistance movement against the U.S. government’s occupation of this land and its treatment of the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island.
I’m not here to argue with them, because I don’t think we should be expending our energy arguing with genocide deniers under any circumstances, but the teacher in me is always instantly activated when people try to make claims about a past they don’t fully understand. It was yet another reminder about the lack of education many people have in regards to decolonial movements and actions here and abroad. I could point to a lot of different reasons why this happens, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me every day that people seem to have this idea that struggles against occupation and colonization are fixed in a very distant past that no longer has much bearing on the present. Not only is thinking of history’s impact on the present as minimal one of the most ignorant understandings of how the world works, but it also assumes there have not been more contemporary examples of resistance for us to learn from.
Unlike what some of these people might have us believe, there is a lengthy and robust history of resistance against occupation and colonialism led by Indigenous people here in the U.S. And I can’t think of a better time than Thanksgiving to reflect on it. The Thanksgiving story, like a lot of the narratives we learn about our history as Americans, is more often than not completely misconstrued, and that misconstruction is often wielded around as a weapon to try to convince us that the early colonists’ and the U.S. government’s treatment of Indigenous people here was “not that bad.” The many distorted narratives of the Thanksgiving story make the claim that the colonists were welcome with open arms and no questions asked, but the truth of the Thanksgiving story is actually much more complicated than that, as is every other narrative about this country we’ve ever been told.
Many Indigenous people have worked hard to try to correct this image that most Americans have of Thanksgiving and the relationships between their ancestors and the early colonists, and I’ve noticed throughout my career as an educator that more and more teachers have also answered the call to present a truer, more nuanced depiction of not only the Thanksgiving story but of the history of the genocide and displacement of Indigenous people in the U.S., as well. There’s no doubt in my mind that this has been an imperative step in the right direction for helping young people develop a better understanding of this country, themselves, and their place in it, but I can see that some people are missing an important aspect of the story of settler colonialism here. Although it’s absolutely necessary to discuss it, it’s not enough to depict the tragedies that were inflicted on Indigenous people and not show them as groups of people with their own agency and their own abilities to not only defend themselves from the colonist’s advancements on their land but also fight back against occupation.
Growing up in Florida in the 1990s, we learned early in our education about the great Seminole Wars of the 1800s. These were presented to us and taught to us as wars in the usual sense where two sides who have grievances against one another take up arms to solve those grievances, but the truth is much more complex than that. All three of the “wars” began as a result of Seminole resistance to the colonists’ and, eventually, the U.S. government’s attempt to occupy more and more Seminole land in various ways. First, as a response to the amount of unauthorized slave raids being conducted in Northern Florida Seminole territory. Second, as a response to President Andrew Jackson’s forceful insistence that the Seminoles leave Florida under the rules of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. And finally, as a response to the growth of colonial towns on the west coast of Florida. In the elementary, middle, and secondary school classrooms I was in as a kid, we were never given a full understanding of this story. Even if we felt it, there was no one to confirm our suspicions that the colonists and the resulting occupation of these lands were wrong, and there was certainly no one trying to make us understand that these weren’t just wars — they were struggles against that ongoing occupation.
The truth is that while many Nations were coerced into signing treaties or willfully did so and that while some Nations worked with the early colonists to ensure their own survival or just because they felt it was the most beneficial thing to do, Indigenous people in the U.S. never stopped resisting settler colonialism, white supremacy, and occupation. You can see they’ve done this in a variety of ways — through the preservation of the cultures and languages, through their art, through their fight for representation and visibility — but the stories of active resistance through direct action and violence in the 20th century, in particular, are much more obscured. But to fully understand the response to colonialism in the U.S. and to understand our potential for eventually dismantling this system, we have to become familiar with the people who have already done and are doing that work. We have to study up.
This is an examination and a celebration of the contemporary resistance history people want to claim doesn’t exist. Although the success rates of these movements vary, I think looking back on them can help us understand what we’re up against when we’re fighting against settler colonial and imperial powers and can help give us some ideas for new tactics and strategies we can utilize in the fight.
Occupation of Alcatraz Island, November 1969
Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Although this particular action seems very well-known to me, it still feels as if it should be on this list. By the mid-1960s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) began to take more organized shape under the leadership of Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, and George Mitchell, and their organization began to inspire a new generation of Indigenous organizers willing to put themselves on the line to fight for Indigenous civil rights and restoration of land to Indigenous communities.
The occupation of Alcatraz Island that occurred in 1969 was actually preceded by a much shorter occupation of the island that happened in 1964. At that time, a group of Sioux activists had discovered Alcatraz was going to be vacated by the U.S. government, which according to the Treaty of Fort Laramie meant that the land should be returned to the original Nations who occupied the land prior to the U.S. government’s occupation of it. A group of Sioux activists staged a short takeover of Alcatraz in 1964 with the intention of turning the island into a cultural center for Indigenous people, but their plans quickly got more complicated as developers in the surrounding Bay Area got involved in appealing to the U.S. government for the land. As a result, a group of Indigenous organizers from all over the country came together under the group name Indians of All Tribes to plan and execute a larger takeover of Alcatraz in November 1969.
The takeover was led by Richard Oakes and LaNada Means but included over 89 other Indigenous organizers and activists who managed to set up camp on the island. Eventually, the takeover grew to include over 400 Indigenous people from different Nations all over the U.S. and, together, they created ways to sustain themselves and the community of people living there for the majority of the 19 months they were there. Pressure from the U.S. government, including the cutting off of fresh water, electricity, and telecommunications on the island prompted an end to the takeover, along with other interpersonal conflicts between the organizers, but the legacy was long-lasting and material in many ways.
Aside from inspiring an ongoing movement to reclaim Indigenous land, the Occupation of Alcatraz also inspired the writing and passing of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. The passage of this law forced the legal ending of the enforcement of a series of “Indian termination” policies passed between 1940 and 1970 that aimed to force assimilation on Indigenous people and helped give Nations more sovereignty over the financial decisions of what happens on land that belongs to Indigenous people. Of course, this did not change the fact of the U.S. government’s occupation or totally stop them from further persecuting Indigenous people, but it set legal precedent for land sovereignty disputes.
Puget Sound “Fish Wars,” September 1970
Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. The Fish Wars were the result of a decades-long battle between the Indigenous Nations who populate the area around the Puget Sound, particularly the Nisqually and the Puyallup, and the state of Washington over the state’s laws against certain kinds of fishing in the waters of the Puget Sound. According to the Treaty of Medicine Creek that was signed by the tribes that lived in the Puget Sound and the U.S., the Indigenous Nations of that area were entitled to enact their traditional tribal fishing and hunting rights. But by the early 20th century, the state of Washington was doing everything it could to try to limit their ability to fish where and when they wanted to. The passing of various state laws as it pertains to what kind of fishing could be done in the Puget Sound, including the necessity for getting fishing licenses and permits, led to a series of arrests throughout the 1940s and 1950s of Indigenous men who were violating these laws.
Since the Nisqually and Puyallup viewed the passing of these laws as a violation of the Treaty, they first resisted by continuing to fish the waters as they always had. By the early 1960s, though, the response from state authorities continued to get more and more threatening and violent. In response, members of the Puyallup Nation decided to stage a series of “fish-ins” in part of the Sound called Frank’s Landing beginning in 1963. The “fish-ins” captured national attention for a while, even resulting in the arrest of Marlon Brando in 1964 for participating in one of the “fish-ins,” but they failed to help bring about a change in authoritative action by the state or materialize any legal precedent for some years. The “Fish Wars” really came to a tipping point in September 1970 when a group of Puyallup men decided to arm themselves in defense against state law enforcement. No one was killed in the struggle, but it did lead the U.S. government to finally step in and sue the state of Washington into making sure their laws were no longer in violation of the Treaty through what became known as the Boldt Decision of 1974.
Wounded Knee Occupation, February 1973
Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
This event was precipitated by a number of very complicated reasons that relate not only to the U.S. government’s attempt to control what happens on sovereign reservation land but also to the differences in the way people on that reservation responded to the U.S.’s interference on the reservation. Despite the complexity of the situation, though, the Wounded Knee Occupation remains an important example of resistance against the colonial and occupying forces of the U.S. government.
Led by members of the American Indian Movement and members of the Oglala Sioux Nation, over 200 Indigenous people seized and occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota in order to protest the U.S. government’s lack of adherence to the various treaties they’d signed with the tribes living around the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and tribes all around the country. The organizers of the occupation attempted to use the action as a way to force the U.S. government into reopening treaty negotiations and hopefully bring an end to the inequitable treatment of Indigenous people in the U.S. Led by Russell Means and Carter Camp, the occupation went on for 71 days as the state and local law enforcement, along with the FBI, did their best to intimidate and weaken the activists involved in the occupation. As the weeks went on, the U.S. government tightened their grip on the region — by trying to starve out the organizers, by intimidating them with violence, and by trying to prevent any aid from making it to the people who were occupying the town — and the conflict grew more violent as a result. Organizers working with AIM were killed and injured as a result, as were members of the state and local authorities and the FBI.
The aftermath of the Wounded Knee Occupation produced less material results but did lead to a recognition by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 that the U.S. government’s interference in tribal and reservation affairs was illegal according to the treaties they signed with the Sioux Nation.
The Longest Walk, July 1978
Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images
By the end of the 1970s, the American Indian Movement had gained a lot of traction throughout many Indigenous Nations, and the U.S. government seemed hellbent on doing everything it could to worsen the treatment of Indigenous people as it possibly could. On top of the fact that Indigenous people were already struggling to find jobs, permanent housing, and healthcare due to discrimination and lack of opportunity, Congress was set to vote on a series of legislation that would effectively void many treaty obligations that the U.S. still had to Indigenous people. If these bills were to become laws, they would have drastically altered the lives of every Indigenous person and Nation in the U.S. by forcing them to cede sovereignty and reservation land rights to the U.S. government, among other things.
To help fight against this, Phillip Deer and a group of organizers from other Nations came together to plan a walk from Alcatraz Island to Washington, D.C., where they would then camp out on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Along the way, the 24 marchers who ended up walking the entirety of the 2,700 mile journey were joined by other Indigenous activists and their supporters as they made their way across the U.S. Once they arrived in Washington D.C., organizers and supporters camped out in Maryland for 12 days and led protests around the White House almost every day.
In the end, the action didn’t solve the issues that already existed. However, Congress voted “no” on each piece of legislation that threatened to take sovereignty away from Indigenous people.
Orme Dam Protests, November 1981
I wish there was more information available online about what exactly happened during the decade-long battle between the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and the U.S. government, but there isn’t. I’m still including it on this list, because I do think it deserves a spot just based on the perseverance of the Yavapai people and their ability to keep fighting off the U.S. government and the state of Arizona for 10 whole years.
In 1968, Congress approved the Central Arizona Project, which was a development project designed to essentially make the land more hospitable for (white) American people to move to Phoenix and other parts of Central Arizona. Part of the plan was to build the Orme Dam in order to build a small reservoir off the Salt and Verde rivers. The Secretary of the Interior claimed the reservoir was for the Indigenous Nations around the area, but the truth is that the construction of the dam would flood more than half of the Yavapai reservation and would diminish the tribe’s ability to keep farming on their land. In response, the Yavapai Nation staged a series of protests over the course of 10 years to fight to keep the dam from being built.
They were finally able to stop organizing when the U.S. government decided to cancel the building of the dam in November 1981. Today, they celebrate this huge win for land rights at the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Orme Dam Victory Days Pow Wow in early November every year. So, not only did they win, but they also haven’t let anyone forget it.
Keystone XL Pipeline Protests, August 2011 – June 2021
Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images
When I thought about including this on the list, I was a little hesitant at first. The organization in opposition of the Keystone XL Pipeline was a group of environmentalists that included and was led by Indigenous people of South Dakota and Montana, but wasn’t exactly initiated by them. Regardless, though, the actions against the Keystone XL Pipeline were still largely planned and fronted by members of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and the Fort Belknap Indian Community of Montana, among many others.
The Keystone XL Pipeline was a proposed pipeline that would transport crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada through Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, eventually ending in south Texas. From the very beginning, climate activists and organizers were opposed to the construction of the pipeline, but the pipeline’s proposed pathway through many tribal lands and waterways eventually brought more people to fight against it. Starting in August 2011, there were a series of actions held at the White House that resulted in over 1,000 arrests and more significant growth for the movement against the pipeline. In November 2011, thousands of protesters managed to form a human chain around the White House in order to get then President Barack Obama to halt construction on the pipeline. From there, the movement expanded to other areas of the country as protests were held throughout the years in Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas. In 2015, Obama canceled proposed construction of the pipeline only to have the construction proposal renewed by President Trump when he took office.
The culmination of this decade-long battle came when members of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and the Fort Belknap Indian Community of Montana held their own public hearings about the Keystone XL Pipeline and then eventually filed suit against the Trump Administration for their continued support of the construction of the pipeline. Because of the lengthy fight against the pipeline and the continued battles in court, the developer of the Keystone XL Pipeline decided not to move forward with the construction and abandoned their plan altogether in 2021.
Dakota Access Pipeline Protests/Standing Rock Protests, April 2016 – February 2017
Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Maybe you’re unconvinced how the fight against the construction of a couple of pipelines could really count as a decolonial struggle, but the fact is that both the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline are just the newest installments in the attempted expansion of the colonial powers of the U.S. And the struggles against them overlapping just serves to illustrate this further.
Similar to the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline was built to transport crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, only the distance was much shorter and cut through not only tribal lands but specifically sacred tribal lands and also threatened to pollute the water of Lake Oahe, a large reservoir that serves both the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. In response to the proposed construction of the pipeline, a group of young Indigenous activists from Standing Rock and other reservations in the area came together in the spring of 2016 and then created a Water Protectors’ camp that interfered with the path of the proposed pipeline. The protest first began as a simple occupation of space until state, local, and Federal authorities continued to exert pressure on the Water Protectors and their allies to abandon the occupation and get out of the way. By September, organizers and activists who stuck with the occupation began to experience several threatening attempts by private security forces hired by the developer of the pipeline and the local authorities. Violence escalated as the private security forces attempted to evict the protesters. Even though many people were hurt in the struggle, the escalation of the violence drew more attention from the media, politicians, celebrities, and other Americans who could see the attacks play out in the media and on social media.
For the next few months, the organizers and activists who stayed at the camp would experience more violent attacks from the authorities and private security forces. As the harshest parts of winter set in on the camp made the situation even worse for the activists who were still there, many decided to leave the camp in January 2017 but it still took a forceful removal of the final activists left in February 2017 by the U.S. National Guard for the occupation to end officially.
While the Standing Rock protests were not successful in getting the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down, it still serves as one of the most important actions led by Indigenous people against the U.S. government in recent years. Since 2017, pipeline protests and protests against illegal development of Indigenous pop up all across the country utilizing some of the strategies used in the Standing Rock protests.
While the majority of these were huge actions that had long-lasting impacts on both the lives of Indigenous people in the U.S. and the way the U.S. government interacts with them, it’s important to remember that these are just a few of the resistance actions taken up by Indigenous people in the U.S. in recent years. As the national and international conversations on colonialism, imperialism, and decolonization progress and spread, I think it’s important for us to continue reflecting on the big and small ways Indigenous groups in the U.S. and abroad have challenged and fought against the occupying, colonialist, imperialist forces that have attempted to wipe those groups off the map entirely. And it’s important for us to stand with them, as well. The fight for the liberation of all oppressed people is not going to stop being violent, difficult, and dangerous. At the very least, we owe it to our predecessors to take the lessons they’ve behind seriously.
Pop Culture Fix: Prime Video Really Went For It By Cancelling Three Queer Shows In One Day
Prime Video Cancels Three More Queer Shows
“With Love” (Kevin Estrada / Prime Video)
Prime Video is continuing its cancellation spree with a few shows we’re familiar with around here because a lot of the shows they cancel are gay! The service has chosen to axe The Horror of Dolores Roach, With Love, and Harlan Coben’s Shelter.
Justina Machado (One Day at a Time) starred as a “chaotic bisexual cannibal” in The Horror of Dolores Roach. It was produced by Blumhouse Television, Spotify, Amazon Studios and also Gloria Calderón Kellett (One Day at a Time) ‘s production studio Glonation.
Glonation was also behind With Love, a series for which Calderón Kellett served as showrunner. With Love followed the Diaz family across various holidays throughout the year as they looked for love. Trans actress Isis King starred as Sol Perez, the Diaz siblings’ cousin and a trans non-binary oncologist. Her boyfriend Miles had a nonbinary child, Charlie, played by Birdie Silverstein. Charlie’s mother was played by SIlverstein’s real-life actual mother, Busy Phillips. There was also a gay male couple in the Diaz family. It was a vey gay show!
Harlan Coben’s Shelter, which was a very compelling watch while also being sort of objectively bad, was also cancelled. Shelter was notable to me personally for having queer rep in two separate storylines — both Mickey Bolitar (Jaden Michael)’s aunt (Constance Zimmer) and one of his new best friends (played by queer actor Abby Corrigan ) were queer.
It is once again a sad day for gay people who like television. (me)
Other Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:
+ Who Is Stormé DeLarverie In Fellow Travelers? Real-Life Performer & Stonewall Activist Explained
+ Watch Sarah Paulson Gush About Her Wise and Witty Girlfriend, Holland Taylor: “I am thrilled, and I feel very lucky to be with a person who is smarter, wiser, wittier than I, and that just makes my life better in every possible way and helps me want to be a better person and a fully realized person. She just also makes me feel seen, which I think is the most important gift you can give to any person.”
+ Reneé Rapp Talks About Her Crush On Justin Bieber—and His “Lesbian” Look, “Which Is Hot”
+ From bottoming royals to lesbian dime novels: 15 queer book-to-film adaptations
+ A parody musical of ‘Saw’ brings to life a long overdue queer love story
+ Kristen Stewart and Catherine Hardwicke crashed Robert Pattinson’s 37th birthday party this year
Also.Also.Also: Ceasefire Now
feature image photo by NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images
Did you know you can fax your representatives to demand an immediate ceasefire? It is free and easy to do.
Queer as in F*ck You
Witnessing Gaza Through Instagram. Zaina Arafat, the queer Palestinian American author who wrote my favorite novel of 2020, has penned an essay about following various Palestinian journalists and writers on Instagram who are on the ground in Gaza, bearing witness to Israel’s genocidal violence and making sure the world sees and hears. Arafat writes on the complexities of being a Palestinian American living in the States:
Since the assault began, I’ve spent my days yelling, crying, sharing, fundraising, and continuing on as normal. Bouts of activism interspersed with the daily life of a working mother in Brooklyn. I’ve taught my writing classes as usual without once mentioning Palestine. I’ve walked by the doxing vans and tried to shake off my disgust before entering the classroom. I’ve read at fundraisers and found my voice shaking, eyes burning, even though I’d chosen to read something with levity. Pain in writing can be hilarious, the author Geoff Dyer once told me. As a Palestinian, I’ve held on to that. I’ve gone to action-oriented meetings to organize. I’ve also gone to a dog Halloween-costume contest with my wife and our 1-year-old daughter. I’ve taken her to Tunes for Tykes. That I can grieve and protest, attend vigils and fundraisers, and still plan a birthday party for my daughter is a duality that is impossible to sit with. “Everything normal right now is obscene,” I heard Israeli journalist Amira Hass say early on in the war, and it’s true. Even sitting down to articulate this moment feels obscene.
And here is a piece written by a journalist on the ground for Al Jazeera in Gaza: “The Only Thing Keeping Me Standing Is the Suffering I’m Seeing”: Being a Journalist in Gaza.
When You Face a Backlash For Speaking Out About Palestine.
Why Queer and Trans People Need To Resist Pinkwashing. Queer and trans author Kai Cheng Thom wrote this piece for Xtra:
The deceptive logic of pinkwashing argues that queer and trans people, and all of our allies, ought to support Israel’s actions as a matter of our own self-preservation, an argument entrenched in Islamophobic and anti-Arab propaganda that claims Arabs and Muslims are inherently homophobic and violent. This style of propaganda that has been intensely present in the cultural sphere of the Global North since the so-called “War On Terrorism” began in 2001. Notably, this argument seems increasingly popular even among individuals who themselves are no great supporters of LGBTQ+ rights.
LGBTQ authors K-Ming Chang, Torrey Peters, and Fatimah Asghar are among the signatories of this statement of solidarity from One World authors calling on President Biden to demand the release of arrested activist Ahed Tamimi:
Saw This, Thought of You
Also about Mosab’s abduction: Celebrated Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha Reportedly Seized in Gaza. “One may wonder why Israel would kidnap a poet. The answer, though painful, is simple. In its genocidal war against Palestinians, Israel seeks to erase not only Palestinian lives but also their culture and heritage.”
TikTok Says It’s Not the Algorithm, Teens Are Just Pro-Palestine.
This Palestinian Group Has an Urgent Request for Theater Companies Around the World. The group is asking people to perform The Gaza Monologues on November 29, 2023.
Another journalist has been killed by Israeli forces. Belal Jadallah, the “Godfather of Palestinian Journalism,” Has Been Killed in Gaza. At least 53 journalists and media workers have been killed.
Political Snacks
One More Thing
a poem:
And as a bonus, another poem:
Pop Culture Fix: “The Marvels” Allegedly Cut a Scene Confirming Valkyrie and Captain Marvel’s Lesbian Relationship, As The MCU Is Wont To Do
“The Marvels” Maybe Cut a Lesbian Scene… Again
Allegedly, a scene confirming what felt to many queer viewers like an implied lesbian relationship between Captain Marvel and Valkyrie was cut from The Marvels. In this scene, it was apparently expressed that “Captain Marvel and Valkyrie had a past relationship because one of them says to the other, “we work better as friends.”
For what it’s worth, our in-house Marvel expert, Dr. Carmen Phillips says she actually prefers the final cut of The Marvels to the possibility of seeing this scene that got cut.
“I’d prefer to think of them as continued friends with benefits,” she told me directly and exclusively. “If they told me Valkyrie and Carol dated and broke up OFF SCREEN, after Valkyrie’s first girlfriend also died OFF SCREEN — I would’ve had an aneurysm. I do want confirmation, but that would’ve been a painful choice to do it.”
This is a fairly routine set of circumstances for a Marvel movie release at this point. BothThor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder failed to acknowledge Valkyrie’s bisexuality sufficiently (it was cut altogether from Ragnarok, and poorly handled in Love and Thunder). Wakanda Forever also cut a kiss on the lips between Ayo and Aneka — instead the film just showed a forehead kiss. A queer scene was also rumored to have been cut from the first Black Panther film. The arc of the marvel universe is long, but maybe eventually one day it’ll bend towards queerness.
Other Queer Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:
+ Josie Totah talks to Vulture about playing an 1800s lesbian in The Buccaneers: “I’m obviously a queer person, so I’m glad they chose someone who’s in the community and to do it right, and hopefully we did.”
Did you get any ideas into this show?
I did. There was one point where … I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s the penultimate scene for my character that I got to write, based off …we’d gone back and forth because this character is obviously queer and they really wanted it to be a story of a girl who was not traumatized. I thought that was cool because a lot of period pieces and representation in general of queer people has to do with trauma, but I also wanted it to feel authentic and that we weren’t ignoring the sociopolitical climate of being gay. You’re not just like “I like girls!” and someone’s like “Yeah, you do!”
+ How Chrishell Stause Queered Selling Sunset
+ Bilal Baig Says Goodbye to CBC’s Sort Of
+ “Rustin” Creates Flat Simplicity out of Complex Black Gay History
+ Hunter Schafer tells Jimmy Fallon that she’s been preparing for her Hunger Games role all her life!
Also.Also.Also: Supreme Court Blocks Florida Drag Ban
feature image photo by Matt Hunt via Getty Images
It’s later in the day than I usually publish this roundup, but I’ve been focused for the past 72ish hours on a piece I wrote about the history of “objectivity” in newsrooms and the recent resignations of queer writers and editors from the New York Times. It made me want to write more historical deep dives, so stay tuned for where that goes.
Queer as in F*ck You
Florida Drag Shows Win Temporary Victory in Supreme Court. In May, the clown known as Ron DeSantis signed the “Protection of Children Act” — Florida’s version of a drag ban — into law. The Hamburger Mary’s in downtown Orlando (just a few miles away from where I reside) challenged the ban in court, and a federal judge blocked it. The state of Florida under DeSantis’ “leadership” sought to reinstate it over the summer, but the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled to maintain the pause in a 6-to-3 vote (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented). For now, the ban remains unenforceable. I am tempted to go to that Hamburger Mary’s location this weekend to celebrate.
Speaking of Florida drag: This New Queer Horror Film Is a Fun Middle Finger to Florida’s Anti-Drag Laws.
In unfortunate news in this state though: A Florida Teacher Was Fired for Using “Mx.” Instead of Gendered Honorific.
Gaza’s Queer Palestinians Fight to Be Remembered. “Through the online platform Queering the Map, stories of queer Palestinians can live on forever, asserting to the world that they do, in fact, exist.” I also wrote about Queering the Map and Palestine. The Queering the Map project is so much more than just a map.
Justin Torres Wins National Book Award for Queer Novel ‘Blackouts.’ YESSSS!!!!!!! Lfg gays! Also, I recently had the pleasure of meeting Justin, and he is a delight.
The finalists of the National Book Awards also took time during the ceremony to call for a ceasefire: Justin Torres Wins at National Book Awards as Authors Call for Cease-Fire in Gaza.
Saw This, Thought of You
Why These Teachers Unions Are Demanding a Cease-Fire.
This is a tough but urgent long read by Saree Makdisi: Physical Destruction in Whole or in Part.
Libraries, Summer School, Police and Composting Face Cuts Amid NYC Budget Crisis. Eric Adams’ budget cuts have come for libraries. PROTECT LIBRARIES!!!!!
Political Snacks
Congress Punished Rep. Rashida Tlaib. It Sent a Chilling Message to Palestinian Americans.
The City That Just Might Decide the 2024 Election.
One More Thing
Once Again, Journalistic “Objectivity” Is Failing Us — Especially Queer and Other Marginalized Writers
Jazmine Hughes was recently forced to resign from the New York Times Magazine after signing an open letter by the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza. The letter, which I am also a solidarity signatory of, calls for Palestinian liberation and critiques racist and revisionist news and media coverage of Israel’s ongoing genocidal obliteration of Gaza. Magazine contributor Jamie Lauren Keiles also signed the letter and announced he’d no longer be writing for the publication. In a live broadcast with Democracy Now!, the two writers discussed their reasoning for signing the letter as well as something I’ve thought about a lot in my decade of working in journalism and media: the hollow promise of journalistic objectivity.
“I think that objectivity is a wonderful, beautiful project for a world that does not exist,” Hughes says.
Objectivity assumes a lack of power differentials. Objectivity flattens and erases identity.
In recent years, newsrooms have made pushes to diversify, but hiring marginalized voices and then expecting them to remain silent or perform “objectivity” often means asking them to go against the cores of their identities and ignore the movements that are working toward their own liberation. Hughes and Keiles are queer writers, and Keiles is trans. In the time since I started writing this piece, Anne Boyer has also resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine as a direct result of the war on Gaza, and she is also queer. I don’t think these details are insignificant. There’s a history of queer and trans dissent in newsrooms, and LGBTQ groups and individuals have experienced intense censorship for decades. In 1990, lesbian beat reporter Sandy Nelson was removed from the newsdesk at The News Tribune for participating in a campaign to protect gay rights in Tacoma.
Mainstream historians often flagrantly ignore the connections between antiwar movements and queer liberation, but it’s actually quite easy to connect the dots between these struggles. And right now, we’re seeing journalists punished for standing up for trans rights and for standing against war. And it always comes back to this age-old debate about “neutrality” and who or what it’s really meant to protect in newsrooms.
“I signed the letter…as a Black person, as a queer person, as a woman,” Hughes says. “And, you know, all these identities have — all of those identities, or all of the communities thereof — have been awarded their rights by agitation, right? By protest. And I, as a person at the core of all these identities, wanted to amplify that effort.”
Writers are asked to bring their identities to their work but then are told to sit down and be quiet when those identities are under attack. We saw this over and over again in 2020 when it came to Black journalists (I realize the unfortunate irony of linking to the NYT, but Wesley Lowery’s words on the topic connect so many dots).
The lofty goal of perfect journalistic objectivity is often wielded in ways that amount not to fairness but to censorship and punishment. Hughes goes on in the interview to point out that she was not part of the newsroom. She worked for the magazine, and the work she did was political, sure, but it was also rooted in her identities and was not a mere presentation of facts in the way news reporters are expected to write. She wrote from a particular point of view. A point of view reflected in the Writers Against the War on Gaza letter.
As for Keiles, this was the second time he signed a letter while working as an independent contractor for the New York Times Magazine — a labor distinction Keiles points out is relevant to the larger conversation. On signing the letter, Keiles says:
“So, first and foremost, I signed the letter as a person. I feel like growing up as a Jew in America, you’re asked all the time, ‘What would people do if there was another Holocaust?’ And, for me, it was just really important to say this is the time when you’re supposed to speak up. This is the moment that you’ve been hypothetically asked about your entire life. So, journalism aside, I signed it as a person, and I think it’s the right thing to do. And I wouldn’t support an ethnostate anywhere else in the world for any other group, and I don’t support it for my own people. So, that was, first and foremost, why I signed the letter.”
Keiles also signed the open letter by nearly 1,000 New York Times contributors calling attention to the publication’s long history of transphobic bias and demanding change to the ways the paper covers trans issues, especially when it comes to trans youth. In this interview, Keiles says he was reprimanded for that despite being an independent contractor who does not receive benefits from the New York Times. He was told he couldn’t sign the letter because it singled out the work of other writers at the paper, and he responded that he doesn’t actually work there. That the paper could claim an ownership over Keiles’ speech when he is not a full-time employee is, indeed, especially ludicrous. He told Democracy Now! he resigned shortly after signing the Gaza letter because he could feel another reprimand coming.
Similarly to Hughes, Keiles covers arts and culture and not a ton of what is considered “hard news.” And though my personal experience is just a small microcosm of all of this, I’m no stranger to the frustration of being stymied by newsroom rules in ways that ultimately seem arbitrary and more in service of maintaining a dangerous status quo than in service of objectivity. While working at my college newspaper as an editor in 2013, I was informally reprimanded for participating in a pro-Palestine protest to demand my university divest from Israeli apartheid (a movement that, 10 years later, is still very much alive).
I was an editor in the Arts section of the paper. I was pretty sure my views on Palestine weren’t affecting my ability to edit reviews of Pretty Little Liars.
Jokes aside, arts and culture criticism is — or at least, should be — political. Art isn’t created in an apolitical void. We all bring specific points of view, cultural histories, and contexts to the page when we write. And writers and editors who are willing to take stands against things like genocide, police violence, etc. are not the true root of media bias; more often than not, forms of oppression like racism, sexism, and transphobia are. Not only was I an Arts editor, but I was also in the process of co-founding a section of the newspaper specifically dedicated to students of color. In the early days of the section, we were often criticized for being “too political.” The fact of our existence was political. Our identities were politicized no matter what we chose to write about or platform. We published stories that felt extremely pressing to students of color on campus, including policies regarding undocumented students, racist treatment of Black students, and the fight for Palestinian liberation. And it wasn’t enough to just write about these things; the actions and protests were vital, too. It was all connected. And some would have liked to use newsroom policies to stifle that. Journalism aside, like Keiles, it felt like the right thing to do, just like calling for a ceasefire is now.
Journalistic objectivity and intellectual honesty are not always the same thing. Keiles touches on that in the interview: “There are all these ideas about journalistic objectivity, but then when it actually comes down to the level of news being produced, things we would expect of news coverage on any other topic are totally being forgotten here.”
Last week, Writers Against the War on Gaza staged an action in the New York Times office lobby calling for a ceasefire and also criticizing the paper’s bias toward Israel in recent coverage. These biases run so much deeper and have far more harmful impacts than Hughes and Keiles signing the open letter ever could. Just look at this infographic compiled by Mona Chalabi — who has been a contributor to the NYT — as one small example:
In recent history, journalists have quit their jobs or been forced to resign for being antiwar, especially from the 1990s to now. Hell, even news giants like Phil Donahue lost platforms for being antiwar. Let’s think critically for a moment about what that really means: that being against militarism and war and oppressive systems is somehow at odds with being an ethical journalist.
Last month, six BBC reporters were taken off air for posting — or liking — pro-Palestine tweets. LA Times employees were recently taken off of Israel and Palestine coverage for three months after signing an open letter, a move LA Times reporter Suhauna Hussain points out effectively removes many Muslim journalists and “most if not all Palestinians” from coverage. Censorship, the criminalization of protest, and a wildly misguided crackdown on language are nothing new, especially in the post-9/11 U.S. But the extreme politicization and criminalization of the pro-Palestine movement and of Palestinian life in general, coupled with the silencing of journalists, feels more disorienting than ever. Reporters on the ground in Gaza are risking their lives to show the world what’s happening, and reporters in the U.S. are being punished just for bearing witness and standing in solidarity.
In 2021, NPR amended its policy against journalists participating in protests to be less limiting. The organization’s public editor Kelly McBride correctly pointed out at the time that aspects of the policy are still vague. Stifling political speech can mean stifling a person’s humanity. And we’re seeing a lot of news organizations actually double down on their rules about how journalists use social media to express views. In a Vanity Fair story about Hughes’ resignation and the larger culture of punishing journalists who speak out against Israel, Charlotte Klein writes that Vanity Fair’s parent company Condé Nast recently sent an email reminding staffers of social media policies. Hearst Magazines implemented a new social media policy that states staffers can be terminated for even liking content deemed controversial and channels the surveillance state by encouraging employees to tell on each other for violating the rules. (Read the Vanity Fair piece in full for a behind-the-scenes look at just how messy Hughes’ forced resignation was.)
It’s easy to see how the stalwart and dated rules on objectivity specifically target journalists of marginalized identities, especially because our identities are so politicized. We’re deemed controversial just for existing. Last year, an opinion piece in the Washington Post indeed asserted that journalism conflates “objective” perspectives with white ones, citing historical examples of white journalists participating in pro-segregation movements with no consequences. What is deemed objective and therefore acceptable by society and what is not often aligns with power.
In his book The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, Lewis Raven Wallace attempts to trace the origins of objectivity in news, which he writes “is sort of like trying to track down the origins of some of the water in a river.” Wallace eventually concludes the exact terminology of “objectivity” in journalism is really less than a hundred years old, though we begin to see its emergence in the very late 19th century and early 20th century. Wallace — who is queer and trans — makes direct connections between the emergence of “objectivity” as a code of conduct for journalists in early mainstream (and entirely white) newsrooms and the emergence of prominent Black-run publications. In fact, if we want to dig back into the history of the New York Times specifically, as Wallace notes in the book, Ida B. Wells was labeled “radical” for extensively covering the facts of lynchings, while the New York Times, under the guise of “balance,” reported on lynchings from a distinctly white perspective without gathering actual facts. (Wallace was fired by Marketplace for publishing a Medium essay about newsroom objectivity, by the way.)
We continue to see an alignment between “objectivity” and dominant narratives today, with anything that challenges those dominant narratives deemed “biased” or “radical.” As Keiles puts it, attempts to silence journalists’ pushback against Israel’s actions and the way they’re covered in the media indeed seems like a tacit endorsement of Israel’s actions. And is that journalistic objectivity? We are not seeing widespread firings or resignations of people in arts institutions, colleges, or newspapers for expressing Zionist views. But people across all of those sectors are being fired or facing calls to be fired for expressing pro-Palestinian views — even passively. There’s a disproportionality here that’s glaringly obvious.
Even slightly more progressive policies like NPR’s require that writers seek permission to participate in certain forms of civic engagement and dissent. But seeking permission to essentially advocate for your own humanity is beyond demoralizing. And so is stifling dissent against the oppression of any group of marginalized people. Newsroom policies emphasize facts, but what about moral truths? Can anyone look at what’s happening in Gaza and say oBjEcTiVeLy that it is right or justified? Who benefits from reporters remaining silent in the face of not only injustice but also media bias that attempts to flatten and minimize power and oppression?
Objectivity often just means preserving an imperialist, white supremecist, heterosexist status quo, preserving a viewpoint that allows for the continued marginalization of the people who are already at the margins. Anything that questions it is labeled “controversial” — and therefore dismissed, silenced, or punished.
The Complicated History of Reed Erickson, A Different Kind of Trans Resistance
Feature image of Reed Erickson courtesy of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.
Reed Erickson (center) with girlfriend Daisy Harriman (left) and Michele, 1963.
When we look at resistance history, we have a tendency to focus on the most public-facing activities. We envision demonstrations numbering in the hundreds or thousands taking over entire buildings, blocking highways and train stations, and preventing boats from leaving their ports. We think of organizers vandalizing the homes or corporate offices of people and corporations responsible for some of the most terrible atrocities we’ve ever witnessed. Or we remember moments where organizers took over radio and television stations or the stages where politicians were speaking.
I see why we do that — they’re flashy, they’re impressive, they make us feel less lonely, and their coverage in the media has the power to get other people thinking about the issues at hand. But this leaves out a lot of other resistance strategies and a lot of people who work to improve our society.
I’m always thinking about resistance that happens behind the scenes, the things people do to create material change without putting themselves or their work in the spotlight. When I’m digging through archives and researching online, I’m on the look-out for people who challenged the norms of our society and created pathways for other people to do the same — even in ways we wouldn’t normally classify as resistance.
I don’t know if Reed Erickson would think of himself as being among an assemblage of people who did this kind of work. After all, his legacy is quite complicated and he was an extremely private person who evaded most attempts at public attention for his contributions. But when I think about people who had the power (and money) to do something and then did, I think of Erickson and all he accomplished.
Reed Erickson grew up in a middle class suburb in north Philadelphia where his engineer father owned a lucrative lead smelting business. When Erickson graduated from college in 1940, his father moved the business to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Erickson followed to attend Louisiana State University’s school of mechanical engineering. While going to school and working in the family business in Baton Rouge, Erickson met a female partner (her name has been withheld from all archival documentation at the family’s request) who he was with prior to his medical transition in the early 1960s. From there, he and his partner moved back to Philadelphia.
Erickson didn’t start working towards trans liberation until he was middle-aged, but his early adult life was peppered with involvement with progressive politics and left-leaning political inclinations. In 1948, he and his partner campaigned for Henry Wallce of the Progressive Party, they hosted Paul Robeson — yes, Paul Robeson — at their home in Philadelphia, and Erickson was even fired from his engineering job for refusing to fire his secretary on the grounds that she was a suspected member of the Communist Party. Erickson’s father died in 1962 and left the family business to Erickson, which he managed to expand and run successfully for a number of years.
I can’t be certain that his father’s death is what gave him the freedom to seek medical transition but it certainly seems that way from the sequence of events. In 1963, Erickson sought the help of Dr. Harry Benjamin who had a track record of treating people with hormonal replacement therapy for what would later become known as gender dysphoria. According to sociologist Aaron H. Devor, Erickson had his name legally changed in Louisiana in 1963 (Devor says it was a legal first for the state to change a name due to a “sex change”) and then underwent gender affirming surgeries in 1965. Although he originally sought treatment from Benjamin for himself, it was their relationship that precipitated a different dream for Erickson.
I want to be clear: this is a very abbreviated account. The truth is, Reed Erickson lived an incredibly rich life that was also marked by drug problems, divorces, protracted legal battles, and a very public falling out with ONE, Inc., the legendary gay rights organization that Erickson helped fund for much of its early existence. In addition to that, some of Erickson’s early work was done in conjunction with not just Benjamin, but also Dr. John Money, whose work many people (especially trans people) regard as terribly misguided at best and violent and dangerous at worst.
I don’t think the less flattering parts of Erickson’s life should be ignored just because he was able to accomplish so much in a time period when there was so little care and support for trans people. In the 1960s, the field of gender identity research was extremely limited, particularly in the U.S. There weren’t a lot of doctors, like Benjamin and Money, who were willing to take the risk of addressing “transsexualism.” In fact, it was this absence of available treatment and ongoing research in the field of gender identity that pushed Erickson to use his money — and the power bequeathed to him as a result of having said money — to do something about it.
Once Erickson’s treatment was “complete,” he didn’t just turn around and continue living his life. He used his newfound sense of whatever he was feeling — I imagine something close to freedom — to make sure other trans people could feel the same way. In 1964, Erickson founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), a philanthropic organization that was established to fund projects, institutions, and research to help trans people get the gender affirming care and treatment they needed. Through the EEF, Erickson funded the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) — now called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) — and helped subsidize the opening of the Johns Hopkins University Gender Identity Clinic.
The EEF also funded years of the annual International Symposium on Gender Identity, an event that helped gather together doctors from all over the world to discuss their medical research and advancements in the treatments of “transsexual” patients. Through their work at the symposium, the HBIGDA became the first medical organization in the U.S. to develop standards of care for transgender people: the Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders. The Standards of Care became a living document that has been amended year after year as new research and new clinical practices in the treatment of trans people evolve.
Beyond the contributions to the medical care that trans people received then and now, the EEF also provided mental health support and aid to trans people seeking help in understanding themselves. The EEF published and distributed newsletters and publications to trans people who needed information on gender affirming care and support in discovering the possibility of trans life. They also kept an in-person office with a phone line, both of which were open to anyone who needed support and wanted to call-in or stop by to get it.
Of course, Reed Erickson was in a unique position to do this work that most trans people are not. Through the inheritance of his father’s business, his growth of that business, and his sale of it, Erickson was able to amass a small fortune that is wholly inaccessible to most of us. And any good organizer knows that philanthropy technically doesn’t change the material conditions of the people it’s intended to help. In most cases, I think that’s absolutely true.
However, when I examine Erickson’s contributions, it feels much more complicated than that. Erickson wasn’t technically an organizer and the EEF wasn’t necessarily started as a political organization working towards the liberation of trans people. In fact, the mission of the EEF was “to provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support.” From this vantage point, it seems like Erickson’s work with Benjamin (and Money and many others at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic) wasn’t just about providing critical care to trans people but also to push the boundaries of what people understood as “normal.”
This reality is most closely reflected in who was able to take advantage of the foundation’s support and Benjamin’s and the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic’s treatment. Although it’s estimated that Benjamin treated more than 1,500 trans patients over the course of his career, the majority of the people who could both afford to make the trip to Benjamin’s clinic and take advantage of treatment options were middle to upper class white trans people who exhibited Benjamin’s very narrow and specific set of symptoms for “gender identity disorder.” The EEF’s funding didn’t help alleviate this lack of access for other trans people, and Erickson stayed incredibly rich until his death in 1992.
But even with those limitations Reed Erickson’s contributions were significant to the material conditions of trans people’s lives. It’s important to recognize the fact that gender affirming care almost always guarantees happier and more fulfilling lives for trans people. While it’s true that any real liberation movement would address and attempt to solve the problems I’ve noted, it’s also true that the creation and existence of the institutions he funded made it possible for many other people to receive treatment. The advancements in these treatments and care for trans people that came out of the institutions he personally bankrolled have been improved upon as the years have gone by, and that wouldn’t have been possible if they never existed in the first place. And even though trans healthcare is still not as accessible as it absolutely should be, Erickson’s funding of this essential research helped the field grow and move forward toward a more substantial level of accessibility. It took a lot of courage and a lot of tact — and, sure, the privilege granted to him through his class position — to not only live publicly as a trans man in the 1960s and 1970s, but to provide medical institutions with the funding necessary to give others the same opportunity.
When we think of resistance, we don’t often think of it this way. But even as a person who thinks immense wealth is a crime against humanity, I can’t deny that Reed Erickson used his class position and the power that came with it to actually affect vital and lasting change.
This doesn’t absolve Erickson’s wealth hoarding, but I do wonder if it can serve as an example for what’s possible in our current moment of legalized anti-trans violence. Challenging the legal discrimination and exclusion of trans people in public and in the courts is, no doubt, an essential part of the fight for our lives and our ability to live them. But I wonder if sometimes we forget the fact that many of us have to live our lives — and figure out how to afford therapy, gender affirming care, etc. — regardless of what happens with the law. There are many organizations working to provide critical mental health support to trans people around the country who desperately need it, yet the anti-trans violence keeps coming. And the more extreme the violence gets, the more I find myself wishing we had a network of care and relief that could not only provide mental health support to trans people experiencing the effects of these laws but could also help us make the material changes needed to improve the conditions of our lives overall. A lot of people might roll their eyes at the idea of the redistribution of wealth and a lot of people probably feel overwhelmed at the thought of movement building, but if one guy could change the trajectory of trans history simply by throwing a bunch of money at the lack of trans healthcare in this country, I think we could pull together — especially those of us from privileged and powerful class positions — to work towards the same.
At a time when gender affirming care wasn’t just unusual but was also illegal in some places, Erickson and the EEF were able to pull the resources together to create a pathway to both help create the very first standards of trans healthcare and help provide that treatment to many people who needed it. Right now, we’re standing at the crux of a historic moment where many people are faced with the same decision as Erickson. Do you make the choice to resist and figure out how to create the conditions necessary to get people the care they need? Or do you use your privilege and power to shield yourself from the more damning effects of the anti-trans violence we’re all experiencing?
I’m not saying we need another Reed Erickson, but I do think we can use the lessons we’ve learned from him and the Erickson Educational Foundation to conceive of a more liberatory path forward, a path even he couldn’t imagine.
This piece is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).
Pop Culture Fix: Lesbian Road Trip Movie “Drive-Away Dolls” Trailer Is Finally Here After 15 Years In Development
Lesbian Road Trip Comedy “Drive-Away Dolls” Drops First Trailer
Drive-Away Dolls follows Jamie (Margaret Qualley), an “uninhibited free spirit” distraught over a recent breakup, and her best friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who’s just uptight in general and could use a little adventure, as they set off together on an impulsive road trip to Tallahassee, delivering a car for a “car drop service.” But then! Things go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals who have stored criminal objects in said car. Queer actor Beanie Feldstein is also in the film and local favorite Pedro Pascal will apparently make an appearance of some kind.
What’s interesting is that this project has been in development for a really long time! Coen originally pitched this film idea to Allison Anders while enjoying a Christmas together in San Francisco in the early 2000s. The movie was announced in 2007 — then titled Drive-Away Dykes — and Anders was on board to direct. Anders is a bit of a legend — she directed Gas Food Lodging and Mi Vida Loca as well as eps of Sex and the City and The L Word. Coen was going for a tone akin to early 1970s exploitation romance films he saw as a kid. The tagline was “Women on the road. All kinds of action.” Stars attached to the project over the years include Selma Blair, Holly Hunter, Christina Applegate, and Chloë Sevigny. This was the original plot:
When Marion, a skirt-chasing party girl, gets kicked out after her cop girlfriend finds her in bed with another woman, she convinces her buttoned-down friend Jamie to let her come along on a get-away-for-a-few-days drive-away car assignment from Philadelphia to Miami. Packed along for the ride are Jamie’s crush on Marion, Marion’s unrelenting desire to cruise every lesbian bar on the eastern seaboard, and — since this is Coen territory — a severed head in a hatbox, a mystery briefcase full of plaster phalluses, a melange of angry pursuers, an evil senator, a bitter ex-girlfriend and loads of hot boyless sex.
Anders told The Los Angeles Times in 2007 that she was “particularly eager to film sequences like the girls’ encounter with a women’s soccer team at a basement party.” She promised the film would be bold, smart, brave and funny. The Coen brothers wrote the script together — their first — as a “spare time kind of thing” around other projects. It’s unclear what happened between the 2007 false start and the film’s more genuine launch in 2022.
The new script has been co-written by Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke, and the film being set in 1999 is “the final remnant of the project’s original intent.” In 2022, it was reported that the film was indeed somehow still happening, but now Coen was directing, instead of Anders. Coen said of his inability to get the project moving in the 2000s: “I think 20 years ago, we could’ve gotten an important lesbian movie made. But this is an unimportant lesbian movie. That just didn’t compute then.”
It was originally slated to debut in September 2023, which has now been postponed to February 2024.
Other Pop Culture Stories for your day:
+ Sue Bird welcomes Megan Rapinoe to retirement: ‘I’ve been waiting for you’
+ Taylor Swift’s Queer Fans Want to Liberate Her: Danny Lavery looks at “Gaylors” in a new episode of Slate’s Outward podcast
+ JoJo Siwa Breaks Down in Tears Over Insecurities and Hair Loss Comments: “Everything gets judged. You know, people told me I have a receding hairline, they don’t know that I have a stress rash and that’s why I’m balding right here. A 12-year-old shouldn’t have a stress rash on their head that makes them bald, but I did.”
+ USWNT Picks Emma Hayes as New Head Coach, Making Her World’s Highest-Paid Female Coach but Sam Kerr and Matildas are caught in fallout as Emma Hayes confirmed as US women’s coach
+ Big Brother final will consist solely of queer men and women for first time!
+ ‘Shadow And Bone’, ‘Glamorous’ & ‘Agent Elvis’ Among 5 Series Canceled By Netflix Amid Strike Impact: Glamorous was very gay but it was also kind of bad, so I have mixed feelings
+ How ‘Gen V’ Showrunners Keep Outrageous Stories Grounded in Reality
+ How the animated ‘Nimona’ broke LGBTQ+ barriers and survived to tell the tale