Alice Wu’s “The Half of It” has been for out less than a week, and it’s already become a classic. We brought together some of Autostraddle’s queer and trans Asian editors and writers — along with some of our writer friends and Generation Q’s Leo Sheng — to talk about the film, Alice Wu, and the current landscape of queer Asian media.
The very same free speech arguments that lawyers used to attempt to defend sex shops and strip clubs in the late 1990’s are being used to defend against SESTA/FOSTA now — and the fallout is largely the same: erasure of so-called “deviance” for the sake of respectability and supposed “safety.”
Visit five feminist bookstores across the south east that are creating community building and political organizing space as well as curating feminist literature written by authors from different backgrounds holding often marginalized identities.
When I got diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, I dropped everything and moved to the outskirts of the Everglades to die. Pushing my body to its limits brought a healing that I never could’ve found as a healthy person – to finally belong in my own skin.
“I think, ‘I will never be like them. Never.’ Though I can live here, I can work here, have a house here, but my mind is not like theirs. Because we all come here with a little war inside and it never stops.” Elvira Brodskaya and her wife fled persecution in Russia and settled in New York. But even in the U.S., they can’t escape all the fears of their past.
“If we are going to mourn our lost trans siblings, family and community members publicly, we need to do right by our community and contextualize their deaths with accuracy and intention.”
I stopped hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2017 because of toxic masculinity and bro culture in the hiking community. It exists, it’s shitty, and it fucked me up.
2017 somehow turned out to be the best year ever for lesbian and bisexual women on television — but we’ve still got a ways to go.
“I was guilty and heartbroken and I wasn’t ready to let go of her: my first kiss, my first time, my first girlfriend, my first love, my first everything and before that, my best friend.”
I changed. But it was a gradual process, in the way a forest becomes stone. Petrified forest of a body.
“Her first step into her first floor apartment was into a puddle of water. Everything was wet: furniture, photos, poems, journals, her shoes. The water lines on her walls marked the flood waters at a foot and a half.”
“I watched her zip up her white dress in the mirror; I watched her cross and uncross her legs; I watched her, and my friends watched her, and in the movie we were watching the other characters, men and women, watched her. I hated her so much, and so purely, with such satisfaction. I couldn’t look away.”
Taiwan’s ruling made me curious about how the news was being received by LGBTQ people across Asia. Did they too face cultural and institutional oppression against their gender and sexuality, or were their countries more accepting? Would the ruling have any impact on their livelihoods? Is Taiwan an inspiration for their leaders to consider marriage equality or LGBTQ rights overall, or will it not matter as much? I set out to find out by reaching out to LGBTQ activists in 42 Asian countries.
“This wholesale group exclusion of a person based on an accusation that they are somehow dangerous without any opportunity for that person to describe why they think this charge is happening or how they are experiencing it, or for anyone to look at the order of events that produced this accusation or the history of the person accusing — I mean, this is the definition of injustice.”
“I thought changing something on the outside would change the wrecked ruin of me on the inside. I thought somehow the inside would get a memo from my outside and get into shape. It didn’t, but my hair is the first way I was able to gain autonomy over my body.”
Candidates for U.S. President have been utilizing television ads since 1952 to sell themselves to the American people. And for sixty whole years, they’ve perpetuated these five sexist caricatures of women in campaign ads to do so.
This should keep your brain busy for quite some time.
“Being one of the cool kids is a privilege I never had growing up, especially in school. I was one of the outcasts because I was different. So on Transparent, it’s like the tables have turned.”
“Dating broken white women became a way to reprise a powerlessness that years of sexual abuse and generations of blackphobia had tricked me into believing in. I drowned this feeling of powerlessness in weed and seeking out relationships in which I could engage in yet remain completely hidden from view.”
I come bearing every ounce of truth I could muster about “false rape accusations” and the pitiful rape culture the myth of them exemplifies.
