Happy Jubilee, Beautiful People
#171
Welcome to Third Cultured, a newsletter about Queer people in diplomacy, politics, culture and war from the perspective of Kyle Borland (he/they). My goal is to highlight all the ways today is different (and not so) from yesterday.
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This edition:
Opinion Essay
Queers in the News & Other Reads
Opinion Essay
I hope everyone is enjoying a well-earned and rejuvenating holiday. We’re at the tail end of one of my favorite times of year.
If you’ve subscribed for awhile, then you may be familiar with my idea of an annual American Jubilee, celebrating the freedom and the progress we’ve created together as a nation each and every year. The structure and weight of the spiritual, winter holidays has always felt unbalanced to me and for years I’ve thought it only made sense for there to be a civic, secular summer counterpart that centers our people, our history, and our future.
This year, I took the matter into my own hands and took off from work from June 26–July 7. It’s not the entire length of Jubilee – that would be Juneteenth (June 19 to Independence Day (July 4), but it’s been a fantastic time of needed rest and refocus on my personal life.
Long story short: the company I was working at merged with another company to create a brand new third company and we’ve all been busy building that since March 2023. I officially joined the company as a team member, email address and all in August 2023 and it’s been nonstop ever since.
This was all happening in parallel to the regression and violence our community has suffered over the past year. From Nex Benedict being murdered in a Oklahoma school bathroom to the library system in the town where I graduated high school taking its hood fully off to snuff out anything that doesn’t align with the Christian Fascist agenda. It’s been a rough year and with my additional stress at work, I’ve admittedly found it difficult to process it all in a way I found worth publishing.
However, with all of that comes a lot less time for other parts of life.
So my partner and I used this Jubilee as a staycation to catch up on life. That meant finally reorganizing the kitchen to store things in the kitchen island we bought months ago. It meant sorting through our closets (again) and donating/trashing what we no longer needed. We repeated this process with our books (okay…my books). I got myself to cut the chord with some of my oldest books that have crossed oceans and continents with me, but I knew I’d never reread. (I’ll have to write a future post about my sentimentality toward books, but this is not that post.)
Essentially, if there was an object that had been allowed to live in a space because we hadn’t gotten around to it – we dealt with it. Every square foot of space counts when we only have 1,000sqft and we’ve accumulated six years of life into it. I’ve found myself standing the newly available space like I’m Atsuko Okatsuka, enjoying every possible inch of the space I rent for so much. (Speaking of, our rent also went up ~$300 starting August 1. We still have a good deal considering the insanity of San Francisco housing, but it’s still an additional $3,250+/year that we weren’t paying before.)
Of course, it wasn’t all domestic upkeep. We celebrated Pride all month long, including dinner with friends at Nobu, the Pride game at Oracle Park, various community and neighborhood events, and marched down Market Street before bar hopping in the Castro. This week, we rested from all the festivities and rented a car for casual day trips around the Bay. Yesterday was Highway 1 toward Bodega Bay and a few days before that it was the opposite direction toward Santa Cruz and Carmel-By-the-Sea. I’m thinking of wrapping up the weekend with massages tomorrow or a couples nail appointment at the very least. A little pampering before a return to work on Monday. I’m already dreading the emails…but that’s what this 100mg edible is for.
Sunday Scaries can wait until tomorrow.
Happy Jubilee, beautiful people. May you feel renewed and ready for what lies ahead.
As always, thanks for reading. (And, don’t forget to “like” this post!)
Kyle (@kgborland)
Queers in the News & Other Reads
40-year ban on gay clergy struck down (United Methodist News)
A Relic of Los Angeles’s Anti-L.G.B.T.Q. Past Comes Down (NYTimes)
ACLU and Tennessee city settle lawsuit over controversial LGBTQ events ban (Reckon)
As Governments Demonize LGBTQ+ Rights, Children Lose the Most (Human Rights Watch)
Being an LGBTQ+ Student In The US Today (NPR)
Biden administration ties Obama’s record for number of confirmed LGBTQ judges in federal courts (News is Out)
Book Ban Fight in Nevada Would Create LGBTQ+ Section of Libraries (Teen Vogue)
Brittney Griner: The day I landed in Russia and wound up in prison (WashPost)
California DOJ: State of Pride Report (CA Office of the Attorney General)
Class Is Central to Gay Politics (Jacobin)
People tell a cruel joke that succinctly captures the logic of these relationships. “Father,” begins an earnest young man from a working-class barrio, “I have something to tell you . . . I’m gay.” The father expresses support, then asks a series of questions: “But do you live in a fashionable part of town? Do you shop at trendy stores? Can you even get into clubs that charge one hundred pesos at the door?” The boy’s answer to all three questions in succession is something like “Why, no, papá, you know I can’t afford such things.” Then comes the father’s flatfooted response, a harsh punchline: “Well, I love you very much, son, and I hate to tell you this, but you’re confused, you’re mistaken. No eres gay, eres solo un pinche puto [You’re not gay, you’re just a fucking fag].”
The joke tells us that in Mexico, gayness is understood to be a middle-class identity, associated with the accoutrements of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. As the father’s line of questioning suggests, this involves a certain style of life, a manner of dress, a fun night out at the clubs, followed perhaps by a leisurely Sunday brunch and savvy banter with friends. But in a country where the minimum wage is US$14.50 per day (and this much only after six consecutive hikes by the current center-left government), the price of admission to the fashionable clubs alone exceeds the reach of many.
For working-class men, then, being gay is not a given; it is a struggle, an aspirational identity. The joke encapsulates it all: how limited resources restrict working-class men’s options and steer their lives along certain tracks, leaving them in the role of frustrated aspirants to a free and unstigmatized identity, but also how class structures people’s aspirational and symbolic worlds. The cruelty of this jest is typically self-reflexive: the teller is invariably in the same position as the young protagonist, locked out of what both perceive to be the good life.
Comparing LGBTQ Equality and Democracy Tally Scores Across the Country (Democracy Maps)
Creation of Woman: Evangelical and Transgender in the Bible Belt (Longreads)
Czech president signs expanded same-sex partnership rights into law — fight for marriage continues (Bay Area Reporter)
Gay man who fled Ghana to the U.S. finally granted asylum (Black Enterprise)
Greece becomes first Orthodox Christian country to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption (WashPost)
How an inclusive gym brand became a battlefield over LGBTQ+ rights (WashPost)
In the Ruins of Edward Gibbon’s Masterpiece (The New Republic)
Indonesia is trying to block LGBTQIA content from the internet (Rest of World)
Iraq criminalises same-sex relationships with maximum 15 years in prison (Al Jazeera)
Know Your Enemy: The Gay Men Who Built the Conservative Movement (Dissent)
LGBTQ migrants face 'triple vulnerability' as a group in Mexico aims to help them (NBC News)
LGBTQ Palestinians in Gaza are sharing their last words on an online mapping platform (Reckon)
LGBTQ Rights Under Pressure in Bukele’s El Salvador (Tico Times)
LGBTQ soldiers in Ukraine hope their service is changing attitudes as they rally for legal rights (AP)
Marlon Wayans on Standing Up to LGBTQ Hate: “The Worst People Now Have a Megaphone” (The Hollywood Reporter)
Meet the D.C. Area Church Welcoming LGBTQ+ Asylum Seekers to the United States (tagg magazine)
Michelle Henry, a “Light” in San Francisco’s Trans Community, Was Killed (them)
Moms for Liberty Completely Collapses in Former Strongholds (The New Republic)
Mpox Is Still Circulating Among U.S. Gay Men (HealthDay)
New Study Finds NYT Fails to Quote Trans People in 66% of Stories About Anti-Trans Bills (TPA)
People say they're leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse (NPR)
Pride Flags Are Being Burned, Stolen, Slashed, and Torn Down in Incidents Across the U.S. (them)
Queer people have shaped America. Why celebrating that fact protects kids (LA Times)
Queering the State: How should LGBT activism think about state power? (Boston Review)
Report: Positive Attitudes Toward LGBTQ People in China (Williams Institute)
Report: Trump on LGBTQ+ Rights (ACLU)
Rights and safety of LGBTQ people at risk if far right wins French parliamentary elections (France24)
San Francisco declares itself a transgender sanctuary city (Bay Area Reporter)
SCOTUS Is Taking Aim at Transgender Rights (The New Republic)
Senate resolution apologizes to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of LGBTQ federal employees (The Hill)
Seoul’s homophobic mayor’s government restricted Pride. 150,000 people showed up anyway. (LGBTQ Nation)
Shooter who killed 5 at LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs pleads guilty to 50 federal hate crimes (The Colorado Sun)
Thailand's marriage equality a rare win in Asia's fight for LGBTQ rights (Nikkei Asia)
The Cousin I Never Knew (Esquire)
‘The Gay Cookbook’ Was of and Ahead of Its Time (Eater)
The Last Gay Erotica Store (Esquire)
The Love Letter Generator That Foretold ChatGPT (JSTOR)
The Money Coup: What the fall of Chevron deference means for state capacity (Can We Still Govern?)
The number of hate groups in the U.S. has almost doubled in two years (LGBTQ Nation)
The Queer Imagination, Then and Now (Brooklyn Rail)
The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs (Ruxandra)
This is the full, shocking story of the decade-long destruction of LGBTQ+ rights in Putin’s Russia (PinkNews)
This Kinky Queer Rapper Became a Star Overnight. Clueless Republicans Helped (Rolling Stone)
This trans author toured red-state libraries. What she found might surprise you (LA Times)
Thousands of people march for trans and women’s rights in Pakistan (Pink News)
Tim Dunn, the Billionaire Bully Who Wants to Turn Texas Into a Christian Theocracy (Texas Monthly)
Dunn is up-front about his desire to use politics to pave the way for a “New Earth,” in which Jesus Christ and his believers will live together. (“When heaven comes to earth and God dwells with his people as the King,” Dunn has said.) Until then, he remains a key player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects the importance of pluralism to American identity. Instead it contends that only devout Christians are good Americans.
Two new regulations strengthen protections for LGBTQ people (Williams Institute)
In the past week, the Biden administration issued two final rules that strengthen protections from discrimination for LGBTQ people. On April 26, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a final rule that restores and expands LGBTQ protections from discrimination in health care under the Affordable Care Act, citing our transgender population estimates and research on the costs and benefits of providing transition-related health care in employee health benefit plans.
Days later, on April 29, the Administration for Children and Families, finalized a policy that bolsters protections for youth in foster care by requiring state child welfare agencies to ensure that LGBTQ children have access to specially designated foster care placements. The final rule cites our research assessing the disproportionality and disparities among LGBTQ youth in foster care in Los Angeles.
U.S. states where the highest and lowest shares of LGBT adults live (Axios)
U.S. support for LGBTQ+ rights is declining after decades of support. Here’s why (PBS Newshour)
‘We’re Going to Stand Up’: Queer Literature is Booming in Africa (NYTimes)
What does Labour’s election win mean for LGBTQ+ rights in the UK? (Pink News)
What you need to know about the Pride flag ban at US embassies and why it matters (Reckon)
What We Can Learn From the Boy Scouts of America’s Fight For LGBTQ+ Equality (LitHub)
Why Companies Must Recommit to the Fight for LGBTQ+ Rights (Harvard Business Review)
Glad to see Third Cultured is back. Sounds like you had a great holiday!