Six Years By the Bay
#TC110
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
Quotes & Things
Opinion Essay
It was a momentous week in California.
We overwhelmingly voted to keep Gavin Newsom as our governor, rejecting the GOP’s desperate $300 million gambit. High on momentum, Newsom signed a flurry of bills that ended single-family zoning in the whole state. Even in combination, the new laws don’t amount to the change our moment calls for, but it’s a hard fought, yearslong victory nonetheless that deserves celebration.
Today, I let myself enjoy the small part I played in each of these victories.
Whether through my career or through my votes, I’ve been directly involved with this struggle – our housing crisis, our politics – for more than five years now. Perhaps not so coincidentally, on Wednesday of this week, September 15, I celebrated my six-year anniversary in San Francisco.
It’s surreal. That is, until I really think about it, and then it makes a lot of sense.
Rather than leaving as fast as I came, I watched people come and go. Instead of running from my mistakes and my pain, I lived with it. Like San Francisco, I grew. Maybe not into what I expected, or if I’m honest, exactly what I expected but with more bumps and bruises than I accounted for.
However, through all the struggle, I guess I did some things right after all because I’m starting year six in a good place. I am, dare I say – hopeful.
And, not just because I got a raise this week either.
Stay safe and get vaccinated, beautiful people.
Thanks for reading.
Roll Tide,
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Here are some stories worth your time.
1 in 500 Americans have died of COVID-19 (Washington Post)
500 Greatest Songs of All Time (Rolling Stone)
Aetna hit with lawsuit, accused of LGBTQ discrimination in fertility treatments (The Hill)
Afghan Women Confront the Taliban (New Lines)
Assessing the assessments of the Global War on Terrorism (Nonzero)
(Source: Nonzero) 
(Source: Nonzero) AUKUS: Australia signs deal with UK/US for nuclear subs to counter China (AP)
black at the met (Sweater Weather)
California now the only state that's advanced out of CDC's 'high' COVID transmission category (SF Chronicle)
Comment: It’s good to be a Californian.
CA recall: What exit polls tell us about the state’s LGBTQ voters (NBC News)
Correcting the record on sex work (Sex and the State)
Cuba could be about to legalise same-sex marriage/adoption (Gay Times)
False Election Claims in California Reveal a New Normal for G.O.P. (NYTimes)
Hungary equates LGBT promotion in films with horror in viewing age ratings (Reuters)
Las Vegas Raiders’ Carl Nassib makes LGBTQ history — and a game-saving play (NBC News)
Lil Nas X Gave Us the Queer MTV VMAs Spectacle We Deserve (W Magazine)
Majority LGBTQ+, women only Mills College merged with Northeastern (BAR)
Protesters rise against LGBT attacks in Spain (Reuters)
Queer South Koreans Hope for an Anti-Discrimination Law to End Decades of Discrimination (TIME)
Texas is pushing the most anti-trans bills in the country. Advocates fear deadly consequences. (19th News)
Texas wanted to be the tech haven of the U.S. Its new abortion bill and other measures are causing workers to rethink their move. (Washington Post)
Twitch Is Suing Users Who Allegedly Conducted "Hate Raids" On Black And LGBTQ Streamers (BuzzFeed News)
Ugandan government shamefully claims queer people fleeing its homophobia are fake ‘economic gays’ (Pink News)
Unusual Progressive-Centrist Alliance Wins Universal Child Care Subsidy (The Intercept)
Quotes & Things
Pure conjecture here, but for all the rhetoric around queerness being “unconventional,” I’ve always thought of it as being more fundamentally honest than the alternative of buying wholesale into the notion of fixed identity. To me, it asserts the truth: that identity is complicated, constantly shifting, and wholly impossible to completely understand, especially in the limited vocabulary that we are taught from a young age.
So perhaps you’re not as confused as you might think. Perhaps you’re engaging in something of a time-honored tradition here, one that can be as exciting as it is frightening. Perhaps we, each and every one of us, is at sea, and you are simply astute enough to have recognized this. With that realization comes the necessary process of adjusting. A lot of it isn’t fun. But some of it is!
