Also.Also.Also: Chase Strangio and Kimberly Drew Are the Cutest Queer Love Story You’ll See Today!

Feature image of Chase Strangio and Kimberly Drew via Instagram

Well friends, I had a beer with my lunch and I just ate two (2!!) cupcakes before I wrote this round up! I’m living wild and free! How about you?

Queer as in F*ck You

Well, this Personal News/Vapid Fluff content left the Autostraddle slack just overcome with squeeees and well wishes!

First on Twitter….

Then on Instagram…

LET’S GO TEAM LOVE!!! Congratulations to civil rights attorney, trans rights activist Chase Strangio and best-selling author, artist, curator Kimberly Drew!! Both queer icons-in-the-making, now in love! We are overcome with so much joy and happiness and rooting for y’all in every way!

I’m a Queer Lesbian. Here’s Why I Refuse to Be Called a ‘Wife.’

Black queer winemaker Alert! Did you hear me!?!? BLACK QUEER WINEMAKER!!!!! Ahhhhhhh! This Land Is My Land: Krista Scruggs Is One of America’s Most Intriguing Winemakers: “As one of just 1.3% of American farm owners who are Black, the ZAFA Wines owner aims to cast a counterspell against the curse of colonialism.”

And finally, from R.O. Kwon, on the last week’s Atlanta shooting:

“I will carry for a long time, for instance, the moment I first saw the Korean victims’ names written in Korean. In hangul, which I associate with joy, with homecoming. With deep, good safety. It is the language written on the books in my parents’ house, on the menus of restaurants I turn to when I really miss my mother’s food, in the birthday cards my parents send, retelling me the story of my birth in Seoul. This time, the hangul marked the passing of women shot for what they looked like, killed by a racist gunman and by this country’s white supremacy.”

A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking (it’s your Must Read of the day)

Saw This, Thought of You

Next month will mark Selena’s 50th Birthday, and to honor her Texas Monthly has published an just an absolutely GORGEOUS special collection edited by Cat Cardenas, “Celebrating Selena”

I feel like this has been the major story of March Madness so far? Even in “mainstream” sports coverage? And honestly, it feels like a relief to finally get some light shining into the shadows? How the NCAA Has Been Screwing Over Women’s Sports for Years

Her House: Queen Latifah Recreated the Rom-Com in Her Image

Black and Asian-American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List. I loved this and learned so much.

As someone who’s number #1 fear is, “will I die alone?” (whoops sorry too deep for a link round up!) — I very much appreciated this straightforward and practical advice: How To Plan Your Future if You Don’t Plan on Having Kids

You Probably Don’t Remember the Internet: How Do We Memorialize Life Online When It’s Constantly Disappearing?

Political Snacks

One thing I hate about the spring is that… in the United States it’s often when mass shooting season hits full force? lol Why do we live in this hell? What We Know About the Boulder Supermarket Shooting

Speaking of which, Guns Are a Threat to the Body Politic. “America must regulate guns not only to protect life, but to protect its citizens’ equal freedoms to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear.”

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Carmen Phillips

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

Carmen has written 716 articles for us.

12 Comments

  1. Huh. I was kind of expecting to learn about the nefarious history of the word wife in that article that was so against it. But it felt like the arguments against it could be used against words like “women”, which the author used freely. It didn’t convince me to have an opinion or make any judgments one way or another on how people choose to define themselves and their relationships. It actually felt a little like old arguments about how certain choices women make (bring a stay at home parent for example) made them not feminists. I care more about women having the choice to marry or not and to choose their own terms than any policing of those options.

    • Yeah, I agree! It’s a weird piece. If we can never use words that are associated with misogyny and sexism, how many words will be left? 3? The author also doesn’t note that a relationship involving two “wives” doesn’t allow for one person to be left all the household labour based on their label, because they share the same label! And if a wife is someone that typically gives free labour to a husband, what does it mean for a woman to be choosing to do labour for another woman? That seems kinda cool to me! To me it feels like a conflation between: something I’m personally not interested in for political reasons, and people who do this don’t understand/haven’t thought through the political ramifications.

    • I agree, the arguments where kind of baseless. The author doesn’t want to be called a “wife” because of their associations and that’s perfectly fine. But the world has changed since 1970, and so have the words husband and wive for a lot of us.

      The point about second wave feminism ending marriage and monogamy also bugs me, because some of us actually like monogamy and marriage. (I totaly support poly people, it’s just not for me.) Forcing all people into their idea of what life and love should be like isn’t the right move, we should be free to choose.

    • Thank you for this and the other comments on this article. I agree, it’s fine if someone doesn’t want to use the word “wife” for themselves, but I proudly call my spouse wife all the time; in fact(!), it feels very subversive when I call her my wife to people in my workplace or those that don’t expect me to have a wife, as if I am reclaiming this word that they don’t expect me to be able to use.

  3. Yeah, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that article. I understand that the association of ‘wife’ is indeed very loaded, but these problems are also problems regardless of what anyone in a relationship is called. Also, as a trans woman, the idea that ‘second-wave’ feminism is the be all end all is…difficult to say the least.

  4. Damn, Carmen. I have yet to click on a link here that I didn’t read from start to finish. Is it too much to ask for a queer Queen Latifah romcom?

  5. I have mixed feelings about the R.O. Kwon essay. On one hand, there are things I definitely relate, too, but at the same time, I think a lot of East Asian cis women with class privilege and who are English-speakers have been centered a lot in how we’ve been talking about this, and that perspective is really apparent here.

Comments are closed.