The Struggle to Move Forward
#TC104
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
Opinion Essay
This past week brought my COVID anxiety back into high-gear. My partner and I both canceled trips we had planned for this upcoming weekend (August 6–8) because it seemed unwise to travel during another spike in cases. We’re both vaccinated and we wear masks everywhere, but so many folks around me have become breakthrough cases that my hermit instincts are creeping back into my decision-making.
I desperately want to go to the beach, but I don’t feel anywhere close to secure enough to go near an aiport and rental car prices are through the roof. I’m so angry that we’re in this place again because the American people are overly-empowered idiots who compare mask and vaccine mandates to forced internment camps. The mental leaps these imbeciles make to craft their delusions will never cease to shock me.
I have always been an anxious person, but COVID pushed my mental health off a cliff that I had only just started to climb out of the past couple of weeks. With my partner unemployed (and struggling with his own mental health issues), re-adding the stress of a spiking pandemic is bringing my brain to a halt. I can’t fathom planning trips, even while my social feeds are flooded with countless trips to Hawaii (despite a local water shortage). I can’t focus on anything long enough to create anything of worth.
I’m terrified of what’s coming, and I’m actually in a better spot than I was the first time around. This could’ve been over. We could’ve beat this virus as the American people rather than prioritizing twisted individualism over public health.
It’s enraging.
Worse yet, the Lavender Scare went global and the forces that wish to erase Queer people’s existence are winning all over the globe. Ghana is about to pass one of the strictest anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the world, China continues to censor Queer content and label it “divisive” within its digital authoritarian framework, Hungary is taking its anti-LGBTQ+ law to the ballot, a mob attacked a feminist and queer training seminar in Kazakhstan, here in the States a Substack publication used location data from Grindr to out a priest without their consent, and even in Western Europe – a gay man was beaten to death outside a nightclub in Spain and two gay men were beaten and robbed in a Edinburgh city center street. The frequency of attacks is only increasing.
Everything is going to get worse before it gets better. That much is clear.
Maybe that’s why I have no idea what to say to my boss when he aks what I want to do with my future. This probably isn’t the answer he’s looking for, but only one word comes to mind and I can’t see past it:
Survive.
Stay safe and get vaccinated, beautiful people. Thanks for reading.
Roll Tide,
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Here are some stories worth your time.
8 Books About the Messiness and Beauty of Queer Life (LitHub)
2021 Study: Marijuana legalization leads to higher property values and millions of dollars in new tax revenue (Real Estate Witch)
‘About time’: LGBTQ Olympic athletes unleash a rainbow wave (AP)
Afghanistan: The Twilight of the Global Empire (Resilience)
"American Exceptionalism" for the 21st Century (Foreign Exchanges)
Before Black, queer artists were mainstream, there was Qaadir Howard (Fast Company)
Catholics must set up a fund for Gay priests (Out Leadership)
Centuries of U.S. imperialism made surfing an Olympic sport (Washington Post)
Debacle in Afghanistan: Likely Taliban victory signals the collapse of American empire (Salon)
Ed Buck convicted in meth overdose deaths of Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean (LA Times)
In a gruesome case of an older white man using his power and money to exploit the poverty and drug addiction of younger Black men, the jury found Buck guilty of every charge in a nine-count indictment. Among them were maintaining a drug den, distribution of methamphetamine and enticement to cross state lines to engage in prostitution.
Buck’s obsessive pursuit of his dangerous fetish led to the overdose deaths of two Black men in his apartment: Gemmel Moore, 26, in July 2017, and Timothy Dean, 55, in January 2019.
It was only in September 2019, after a third Black man nearly died of an overdose, that Buck was arrested — a delay that fueled angry protests by activists who accused law enforcement officials of failing to aggressively investigate a politically influential white man. Buck, a onetime candidate for West Hollywood’s City Council, made more than $500,000 in campaign donations over the last couple of decades, nearly all of it to Democrats.
“Ed Buck will never harm anyone else, and I thank God for that,” said Joyce Jackson, who with her sister Joann Campbell flew to L.A. from Tampa, Fla., to join their brother Timothy Dean’s tight circle of friends at the trial.
Comment: Rot in hell, you putrid piece of shit.
Every Book Lover Should Fear This Graph (Bookshop.org)
(Source: Bookshop) Excerpt from The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi (Sinocism)
For Xi, the origin of these shifts is China’s growing power and what it saw as the West’s apparent self-destruction. On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Then, a little more than three months later, a populist surge catapulted Donald Trump into office as president of the United States. From China’s perspective—which is highly sensitive to changes in its perceptions of American power and threat—these two events were shocking. Beijing believed that the world’s most powerful democracies were withdrawing from the international order they had helped erect abroad and were struggling to govern themselves at home. The West’s subsequent response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and then the storming of the US Capitol by extremists in 2021, reinforced a sense that “time and momentum are on our side,” as Xi Jinping put it shortly after those events. China’s leadership and foreign policy elite declared that a “period of historical opportunity” [历史机遇期] had emerged to expand the country’s strategic focus from Asia to the wider globe and its governance systems. The “great change unseen in a century” associated with this transition are at the center of China’s grand strategy. “I often say that leading cadres must keep two overall situations in mind,” Xi noted in a recent speech, “one is the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the other is the great changes unseen in a century. This is the basic starting point of our planning work.”
From Belfast to Beirut, A Tale of Elusive Peace (New Lines)
Gay Nigerian priest makes religion serve LGBTQ people (Washington Blade)
Ghana poised to vote on ‘worst anti-LGBTQ bill ever’ (NBC News)
Draft legislation in Ghana would make identifying as gay or even an ally to the LGBTQ community a second-degree felony punishable by five years in prison — with advocating for LGBTQ rights punishable by up to 10 years.
I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was a Hoax. (Vice)
‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’: Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients (AL.com)
In Official DC, Chasten Buttigieg is a stranger in a (very) strange land (WaPo)
Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river (AP)
Introduced Resolution Apologizes for Treatment of LGBT Members of Civil Service and Armed Forces (House.gov)
Is Gilbert Baker's rainbow Pride Flag no longer enough to represent the diversity of the LGBTQ community? (SF Chronicle)
Karen Jaime on Documenting the Queer Lives of the Lower East Side (LitHub)
Kleptocracy, not socialism, is at the root of Venezuela’s crisis (Inkstick)
Lessons Learned: US-Global LGBTQ+ Foreign Policy (Out Leadership)
Leyna Bloom Makes History as Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue’s First Trans Cover Star (them.)
LGBT Turks Take Stock After Disrupted Pride Celebrations (Voice of America)
LGBTQ community’s varied flags and whom they represent (SF Chronicle)
LGBTQIA+ Architecture: 10 Professionals From the Global South (ArchDaily)
Louisiana’s Anti-Trans Sports Bill Is Finally Dead for the Year (them.)
Matt Damon Says Daughter Taught Him Not To Use ‘F-Slur For A Homosexual’ Months Ago (HuffPo)
Comment: I’m sorry, but…“months”?! Always knew he was trash.
'Maximum Pressure' Is Malicious and So Are Its Supporters (Eunomia)
Mississippi is only state with no openly LGBTQ elected officials (NY Daily News)
New US LGBTQ museum seeks executive director (Bay Area Reporter)
New Zealand moves to outlaw LGBTQ conversion therapy (Washington Post)
Once an evangelical pastor, a transgender woman is on a mission to empower women (Washington Post)
Over 100 Veterans Say A Doctor Butchered Their Feet. He’s Still Working And Says He Was A Scapegoat. (BuzzFeed News)
Pegasus: The New Global Weapon for Silencing Journalists (Forbidden Stories)
Comment: Read this. WaPo’s and The Wire’s coverage is great, too.
Puerto Rico activists condemn police raid on LGBTQ-friendly bar (LA Blade)
RuPaul: Queer people’s trauma is not your Drag Race reality TV storyline (The Tab)
San Francisco’s Psychedelic Zeitgeist: The Rise of the Rock Ballroom (The San Franciscan)
Sexual assault is endemic among gay men – it took years to realise it happened to me (Metro)
Single gay dads give tips for first-time parents: ‘I created the village around myself’ (Yahoo!)
The German Experiment That Placed Foster Kids with Pedophiles (New Yorker)
The incalculable cost of cheap chicken—and the hidden industry that shoulders it (Scalawag)
The Rich History of China’s Islam (New Lines)
The Rise of Must-Read TV (The Atlantic)
The psychedelics + sex in the woods party (Sex and the State)
The Trouble With ‘the LGBT Community’ (The Nation)
They saved Chi’s last lesbian bar, infused it with Black queer culture (NBC News)
Thousands march for LGBTQ rights in Budapest’s biggest Pride (Al Jazeera)
Top U.S. Catholic Church official resigns after cellphone data used to track him on Grindr and to gay bars (Washington Post)
Trans and Queer People in India Should Demand Better Health Care (Scientific American)
US Senate unanimously confirms two LGBTQ women to top military positions (Stars and Stripes)
Quotes
“Soon America will become just another tribe here. You will be cowards if you leave. And, you will be our enemies if you stay.”
– Wesley Morgan in The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley
“Once abnormal situations such as extreme weather happen, [officials] must take resolute steps to suspend schools, stop production and businesses, halt transport and close tunnels and flood-prone black spots.”
“[We] must abandon any thoughts of luck, overcome inertia and avoid missing critical opportunities so [we can] do our best to save people’s lives and property.”
– The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top planning agency, issued a directive on Monday telling local officials to step up during emergencies, following the catatrophic Henan floods.
