The World Was Too Much This Week
#122
Welcome to Third Cultured, a newsletter covering all things queer and techno-politics from the perspective of Kyle Borland. My goal is to highlight all the ways today is different (and not so) from yesterday.
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This edition:
Links, Quotes & Things
I promise to share my perspective next week, but between the war on Queer people here at home to the war in Europe – this week was too much for me to get a thought out post written. Take care of yourselves as our world gets more chaotic. I’ll do my best to do the same.
As always, thanks for reading, beautiful people.
Kyle (@kgborland)
Links, Quotes & Things
15 other 'Don't Say Gay'-style bills are cropping up nationwide (The Hill)
Florida could give teachers 6 weeks to out gay students to their parents, even if they’ll get abused (LGBTQ Nation)
Florida politicians behind "Don't Say Gay" bill backed by corporations that claim to support LGBTQ rights (Popular Information)
Gay lawmaker tears up in house floor speech against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill (LGBTQ Nation)
Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex (LitHub)
Legislation Threatens To Erase the LGBTQ Community—It’s Time To Explain and Claim the ‘A’ in LGBTQIA+ (Ms. Magazine)
“Our Love Doesn’t Count”: LGBTQ Students At BYU Opened Up About The School’s Same-Sex Dating Ban (BuzzFeed News)
Republicans can't stop obsessing over kids' genitals (Progressives Everywhere)
School board member votes to ban GSA saying kids should just go to church instead (LGBTQ Nation, TIME, Washington Post)
Texas Is Terrorizing Trans Youth (The Nation)
The Bills Targeting LGBTQ Students (NPR)
Transgender athlete bans are on the rise. These trans lawyers are gearing up to fight. (The Washington Post)
We, the Abuser State – With Texas declaring trans childhood to be de facto child abuse, what will it take for us to break the cycle? (Sad Brown Girl)
A Gang Used Grindr to Lure Gay Men For Robbery, Assault (Out)
A record 7.1% of US adults now identify as LGBTQ, new poll shows (NBC News, USA Today)
Bored Apes, BuzzFeed and the Battle for the Future of the Internet (Motherboard)
The infighting and heterogeneity of the web3/crypto/NFT community can make it appear like anything but a united front. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a Bitcoin devotee, hates web3; Marc Andreessen, of the web3-loving a16z investment firm, subsequently seems not to want anything to do with Dorsey. Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the encrypted messaging service Signal, helped create the cryptocurrency MobileCoin, but suggested “technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1” in a blog calling out centralization in the space. Selkis, the crypto enthusiast who wants to give BuzzFeed “the Gawker treatment,” has described Ron Paul as the “patron political saint of crypto,” while others argue in good faith that they hope to create a more diverse and equitable world in line with leftist tendencies. And technologically, web3 is not one thing that anybody can agree on, except for that it involves crypto.
Broadway Is Getting Even Gayer With Queering the Canon (them.)
BUTT Magazine Is Coming Back After 10 Years (PAPER)
First LGBTQ-focused pilot project in US for UBI launches in West Hollywood (LA Blade)
‘FRIENDS’ Can’t Be Gay in China, and People are Pissed (Mic)
From her LGBT play We Are Gay to self-censoring for the first time, Hong Kong dramatist Candice Chong on keeping calm amid the chaos (South China Morning Post)
Gay bears struggling with internalised fatphobia and beard envy, groundbreaking research finds (Pink News)
Gay man beaten to death by men who thought he was hitting on them (LGBTQ Nation)
Gay Police Officer Wins $225,000 Settlement in Discrimination Suit (Advocate)
How queer-friendly is Valentine’s Day in India? Vogue investigates (Vogue)
How a gay man from Singapore found acceptance in Australia (Al Jazeera)
How the new banned books panic fits into America’s history of school censorship (Vox)
In defence of ageing twinks (Dazed)
As much as people like to joke about “30 being 50 in gay years”, the truth is that if you’re masculine, muscular and, ideally, rich, then your sexual capital remains high well into middle age. More feminine or sexually passive gay men aren’t so lucky; to be a 35-year-old faggy bottom is often seen as a more pitiful condition than being a masculine top of the same age. This dynamic mirrors the straight world, where older women are subject to far more ageism than men of an equivalent age. You can see this expressed in the phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, and its implication that clinging onto a certain mode of femininity is, past a point, desperate and sad. The disdain which people have towards ageing twinks is an expression of this same misogyny, albeit in a roundabout way. It plays into some uniquely gay anxieties as well: some queer academics have suggested that the valorisation of the twink archetype in the 90s and 00s was partly a response to the AIDS crisis, with ageing being linked with death, the deterioration of the body and the HIV epidemic itself. Whether or not this association lingers, it’s clear that a fear of ageing is common among gay men, just as it’s an animating force in society at large.
Israel's Health Ministry Bans LGBTQ 'Conversion Therapy' (Haaretz)
More Lesbians on Broadcast TV than Gay Men for First Time (Advocate, BBC, GLAAD)
Pediatricians Who Serve Trans Youth Face Increasing Harassment. Lifesaving Care Could Be on the Line (TIME)
Percentage of LGBTQ adults in U.S. has doubled over past decade (NBC News)
Peter Thiel: The Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker (The New York Times)
POEM: Hey, Robyn—It’s Me, Whitney (Werk-in-Progress)
Protesters Demand Longer Prison Sentences for LGBTQ in Senegal (Voice of America)
Comment: The rampant homophobia and transphobia in the Global South is one of the most disheartening global trends. Evangelicals are funding all of it.
Queer Communities Often Left Out of Disaster Planning, Research Shows (KQED)
‘Queering Black history’: Here are 5 LGTBQ pioneers to know (The Washington Post)
SCOTUS and LGBTQ+ Rights
SCOTUS Will Decide Whether Anti-LGBTQ+ Discrimination Is Free Speech (them.)
Supreme Court will hear another clash pitting religious rights against laws protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination (The Washington Post)
The Supreme Court will hear a big case about whether religion is a license to discriminate (Vox)
SF Mayor London Breed should pick queer parent for San Francisco school board (Bay Area Reporter)
Taiwan LGBTQ activists hold Valentine's Day marriage law protest (France24)
Teen Accused of Breaking Into Gay Man's Home & Beating Him With Wrench (Advocate)
The Digital Offertory and the Militant Right (Forever Wars)
Many far-right organizations claim, often and loudly, to be acting on their Christian faith. The shift of the dregs of the far right over to an explicitly Christian organization ought to worry Christians who disagree with that interpretation of Jesus’ teachings. But it doesn’t appear to be meeting much resistance, and, as these breaches and leaks continue, there will be more scrutiny on the extent of the overlap in funding between the kind of fascist street violence that is endangering Ottawa and para-church organizations that claim to help the underprivileged.
The Power of a Good Cry (The New York Times)
The Queer Indigenous Artists Reclaiming a Fluid Sense of Gender (The New York Times)
This Map of Informed Consent Clinics Is Helping Trans People Find HRT (them.)
To All the Gay Men I've Loved Before (Advocate)
Transition, Freedom of Choice, and The Roman Empire (Genderf*cked)
Two remanded for assaulting three women over lesbianism (GhanaWeb)
Ukraine and Putin’s War
How Putin’s Designs on Ukraine Reflect the “Dangerous Nostalgia” of a Lost Empire (The Intercept)
‘It Is Impossible to Leave’: Ukrainians Scramble as They Wake Up to Russia’s War (Rolling Stone)
LGBTQ+ Ukrainians Brace for Human Rights Abuses as Russia Invades (CBS News, LGBTQ Nation, Pink News, them.)
Ordinary Russians Don’t Want This War (Jacobin)
Putin’s rationality, war causes, and Xi’s inaction (China-Russia Report)
Russia tested the West by attacking Ukrainian LGBTQ people first. Europe & America looked away. (LGBTQ Nation)
Understanding the Ukraine Crisis: A Comprehensive Reading List (LitHub)
Which Russia-Ukraine Take Is Right for You? (New York Magazine)
Why a New Era of War is Dawning — And What Putin Really Wants (Eudaimonia)
