Bodily Autonomy is Under Attack
(Again) | #TC99
Welcome to Third Cultured – a foreign policy and LGBTQIA+ politics newsletter – published by yours truly, Kyle Borland. My goal is to highlight the unique role Queer people play in the politics of the United States and the world-at-large.
Third Cultured is available to all but, as Austin Kleon says, "This newsletter is free, but not cheap.” If you’re able, support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber!
This edition:
Opinion Essay
Notable Quotes
Stories to Watch
Opinion Essay
The Christian Fascists will never rest until they control everyone’s bodies, again.
They’ve singularly fought to gut Roe for decades, and this summer they might get their wish. “Progress” in this country is next to meaningless when the obstructionists are always in the wings, ready to take our rights away, our bodily autonomy away.
The women of America deserve so much better from this nation than the puritanical oversight of their uterus. I would not blame them for picking up their guns and marching on SCOTUS — a la the March on Versailles — if those robed sacks of shit follow through on their threats.
To be anti-abortion is to be against individualism, liberty, and bodily autonomy. It is to be so authoritarian in your beliefs that you use the law to control other human beings, their bodies, and their decisions. And, it’s not just abortion, it extends to all people.
Look at Pennsylvania, this week it voted to keep homosexuality in its obscenity laws.
The powerful anti-Queer forces worldwide see the growing Trans Panic / Lavender Scare in the US and are capitalizing on the moment:
Ghana continues to imprison 21 LGBTQ+ activists, despite US pressure;
Russia demanded that Facebook block the Russian LGBT Network page, with the authorities alleging that it harms the development and health of minors; (how original…)
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party described LGBTQ+ people as “morally unacceptable” at a meeting about an LGBTQ+ rights bill, and said “from a biological perspective, human beings must preserve the species, LGBTQ+ people go against this.” Tokyo is now accused of violating the Olympic charter after it failed to approve the bill to protect the rights of the LGBTQ+ community;
In Korea, the Christian church is such a strong force that gay Koreans live two entirely separate lives – family and queer – that don’t mix at all;
In Poland, LGBTQ+ people are called ‘a plague’ and compared to Hitler as “LGBT+ Free Zones” spring up all over the nation;
In Lithuania, more than 10,000 people protested against a same-sex civil partnerships bill in a “family defense march,” claiming same-sex unions are “a threat to traditional family values.”
If the Christian Fascists succeed at nullifying Roe v. Wade, then they’ll be invigorated to go after any court case that doesn’t sit right with them (ex: Obergefell v. Hodges). They already gutted the Voting Rights Act with Shelby v. Holder, and they constructed this conservative SCOTUS majority for this explicit purpose. “Conservatives” empowered an autocrat that mocked their very beliefs, even laughed in their faces, but he packed the Courts sufficiently for a generation, ensuring the terrifying wave of “progress” was reversed.
For that, they’ll revere him forever because it means those of us who’s very lives depend on flimsy court cases will always live with one eye over our shoulder.
Stay safe and get vaccinated, beautiful people. Thanks for reading.
Roll Tide,
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Here are some great reads worth your time.
An American Sports Icon’s Legacy of LGBTQ Rights (The Nation)
Businesses championing LGBT-friendly policies perform better financially (Gay Times)
Do I Need to Be Visibly Queer? (Teen Vogue)
Everyone Is Awesome: Lego to launch first LGBTQ+ set (The Guardian)
GLAAD finds major social media sites 'unsafe' for LGBTQ users (Bay Area Reporter)
How LGBTQ+ Activists Got “Homosexuality” out of the DSM (JSTOR)
How Many Times Is Disney Going To Introduce Its ‘First’ Gay Character? (Forbes)
How this queer Vietnamese athlete went from homelessness to international advocate (Outsports)
I regret to inform you that the Evangelicals are at it again (Sex and the State)
Judy Grahn on Erotic Power, Queerness, and the Goddess Inanna (LitHub)
To me, this journey into ancient mythology addresses the stickiest problems of all, the limitations of religions. While many individual sects and priests, pastors, and rabbis have moved beyond outdated Medieval ideas, the fact that the texts remain limited and excluding, even blaming, of groups of people—women, the whole LGBT alphabet, and so on—means permanent social change is impossible. I don’t think I am the only Gay or nonbinary or female person to experience the particular pain of social cruelty, and exclusion from the greater definitions of, shall we say, cosmic Love.
The texts themselves must be addressed, and now that the ancient mythology that directly impacted the Abrahamic texts is available, it is clear that initially women had sacred place/office, with numerous goddesses who were powerful creation deities. Inanna has a female goddess companion who is as close to her as the male lover of King Gilgamesh was to him. The research of Will Roscoe and others has made clear that homosexual and transgender people held sacred office and participated in her rituals. And Inanna is both immanent within, and protective of, nature. Her radiant powers are erotic and interactive, accessible and creative. Her stories are richly psychological.
Karine Jean-Pierre: 1st Gay Person to Lead White House Press Briefing (Advocate)
LGBTQ+ Employees Are Less Satisfied Than Colleagues at Work (Glassdoor)
LGBTQ rights pioneer Kay Lahusen, photographer who documented early queer liberation history, dies at 91 (NYDailyNews)
LGBTQ youth suffered during the pandemic. They need ‘all hands on deck’ right now. (Washington Post)
No, New York Times, Pride Organizers Didn’t “Misstep” by Banning Uniformed Cops (them.)
Queer imposter syndrome? (Varsity)
Queer Shoulders at the Wheel (Boston Review)
Corresponding with other poets for lists of potential contributors, Wieners outlined his plans for the magazine with infectious enthusiasm. Riffing off Allen Ginsberg’s own poem “America,” Wieners wrote to him: “There are other queer shoulders at the wheel. . . . I hope Tangiers is good for the line and that you can choke me with a load of your stuff/ and direct those you yourself are hot on to my stoop.” To leading New York School poet James Schuyler, he jokingly remarks of this new queer poetry: “It cd take us over the precipice. . . . Cd fuck up the sentence as we know it, as W. S. Merwin will never know it.” Such letters are exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure. Thinking up ideas on the fly, there are hits and misses, missed connections and stabs in the dark, suggesting something too capacious to be contained in print.
Roxane Gay, Gigi Gorgeous, Wilson Cruz and Others Discuss Mental Health in the LGBTQ Community (People)
San Francisco Democrats elect Mahogany as first Black and first transgender local party chair (Bay Area Reporter)
Seeking a Connection to My Grandmother in Alice Munro’s Queer Characters (LitHub)
Homosexuality, she remembers, was understood in very narrow ways in her small Ontario town in the 1940s; it was associated less with same-sex desire than with gender nonconformity. “There were homosexuals in town,” she recalls, “and we knew who they were: an elegant, light-voiced, wavy-haired paper-hanger who called himself an interior decorator; the minister’s widow’s fat, spoiled only son, who went so far as to enter baking contests and had crocheted a tablecloth; a hypochondriacal church organist and music teacher who kept the choir and his pupils in line with screaming tantrums.”
The first time I read it, this sentence made me cringe. The narrator’s catalogue of gays is a parade of stereotypes, and there’s something more than a little cruel in her depiction of them as pretentious, spoiled, and screeching. And yet—and this was what really hurt—it also seemed as though I belonged with them. After all, hadn’t I grown up sewing pillows and playing with my grandmother’s jewelry? The narrator’s stereotypes seemed at once misogynist, homophobic, and uncomfortably close to the bone.
SF's Rohrer to become 1st openly trans bishop in US (Bay Area Reporter)
‘SNL’ tells the hilarious truth about Pride—and its own LGBTQ evolution (Fast Company)
Still Here and Still Queer: The Gay Restaurant Endures (NYTimes)
'The Eternals' Trailer Gives Glimpse of Marvel's First Gay Superhero (Out)
The Forgotten History of the First Openly Gay Man to Play Major League Baseball (them.)
The Forgotten Queer Legacy of Billy West and Zuni Café (NYTimes)
The Only Living Black Man in New York: On an Overlooked, Subversive Sci-Fi Story by W.E.B. Du Bois (LitHub)
What a queer Taiwanese 1995 sci-fi novel got right about the future (LATimes)
Yelp Adds New Features To Highlight LGBTQ-Owned Businesses (Forbes)
Young, Male and Anti-Feminist – The Gen Z Boys Who Hate Women (Vice)
Stories to Watch
€1.1 billion: Germany agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn for the Herero-Nama genocide.
100 Years of Communist China: It’s been quite a century for the CCP.
Africa’s Sahel: France, British, and the UN haven’t been able to slow the destabilization brought by spreading Islamist Terrorism.
In the Sahel, a war-scarred belt of semi-desert that cuts across the broad chest of the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, extremist Islamist fighters have killed thousands of civilians and uprooted more than 4 million people over the past four years, says the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of several NGOs that are assisting the displaced.
Biden-Putin Summit: Preparations are underway to meet in Geneva next month.
George Floyd: It’s been one year since his death. Which states have attempted progress? Unfortunately, as a whole, US spending on policing is going up.
Palestine: The US announced it’s reopening its consulate in East Jerusalem, which serves as an autonomous office in charge of diplomatic relations with the Palestinians.
Samoa: There’s a coup going down on the island nation as the decades-long leader Tuimalealiifano Vaaletoa Sualauvi II won’t step down after losing a recent election to Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, who will be the nation’s first female prime minister. Sualauvi went so far as to lock the opposition party out of the parliament so they can’t be sworn in. They inaugurated themselves in tents outside the locked doors.
