“Woodhull Freedom Foundation wants your personal essays about how you experience (or don’t experience) sexual freedom in America. Essays should be approximately 500-1000 words, and should be engaging and well-written. Selected essays will be published on our website or our blogsites, and you will always receive credit for your work. Please include the name you’d like it published under and a brief (one to two sentence) bio.”
Submissions should be sent to kbartlett @ woodhullfoundation . org.
Movement feels good. This is what I try to remind myself of all the time when my lazy habits try to convince me that exercise isn’t worth the effort. Or to take the elevator up that one floor to my classes instead of the stairs. Or to coo sexily at someone so they’ll get me that white russian over there.
Fine, so that last one is a different kind of exercise, worthy in its own right. But the point here is, movement may seem difficult or trying, but it’s also often rewarding in its own right. Process over product.
And how’s this for a movement? Not in Our Town is about using sophisticated social media to link up people who, you know, give a damn about their communities and reinforcing their identity as loving, accepting people, by targeting the sites of hate crimes and the demonstrations of hate groups, exposing them, and countering with nonviolent demonstrations of pretty much what they’ve always been doing: loving each other.
I just wanna make them all cupcakes or something. Even my flying monkeys can smell the "nurture" pheromones I must now reek of just seeing this.
No, this doesn’t mean public orgies. Perhaps that comes later. But don’t be disappointed; singing songs, holding hands, laughing and just “being there” is intimidating enough for hate groups. Earlier, we covered an example of non-violent responses to the Westboro Baptist Church’s hate, and it looks like this kind of thing is shaping into an actual, coherent, resistance movement.
Don’t believe this kind of thing is frightening to hate mongers? Think about every time someone says “that’s gay” or similar things. In my experience, it’s almost always directed at someone trying to connect to someone else on an authentic level, at something designed to foster personal growth or learning. They say it about homework assignments, attack some kind of fictional “thought police” of “political correctness” because civility is just too much a burden for them, they say it about men who admit to having a feeling once in a while that isn’t just rage, they say it to each other with that curious look in their eye, both shaming and also desperate for approval.
And they wouldn’t say it if they weren’t fucking afraid. So fearsome is this kind of thing, in fact, that even people who say they support things like gay rights, or getting an education, or having an honest conversation with people they say they love, these people too may resist it.
If you think about your high school or workplace or drinking buddies, then sit them along side this report from Towleroad about how the students of Gunn High resisted the fear and hate mongering of the WBC on their own campus, how do you think your “communities” measure up? Are they strong enough to resist when the kooks come knocking? Do you even know what kind of strength it takes?
There is nothing more frightening than a person who knows who they are and loves every part. Get moving!
Or, if you prefer, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Personally, I’d say this is a great example of making a decent, contributing member of society out of a total fucking douchebag.
I prefer being literal sometimes. See this miracle in action here.
Don't it just make ya wanna kiss 'em?
I fail at blogging or I’d know how to properly insert the video instead of just linking it above, so apologies for that. The point is, we can lose ourselves in semi-articulate rage provoked by hatemongers, we can try to outshout them, or we can be REAL perverts and make their message serve our own purposes!
See this brilliant young man’s efforts in the link above for inspiration <3
I found it! I found it! I found the elusive chimera, that rare creature thought to be mythological by so many for so long!
I found good news! Bless your heart, Andy Towle!
Take THAT, Pope Benedict Arnold
Some years ago I converted to Catholicism. I may have mentioned I’m a serious masochist before. But I’ll admit it; there are parts of the faith I suck at. Believing in hell for example. Never could pull that off. I’m more in line with what Company of Thieves says about such things. “We are all our own devil… and we make this world a hell.”
But one of the reasons I hopped on board and started participating as a lector in my church is the wonderful, loving, wise priest who listened to me and understood my need to confess. As a long time Vincentian monk, he was part of the really old school movement for social justice in the church, now being denied and shit on by the likes of Glenn Beck. When I say old school, I mean several centuries old, though he was also a huge proponent of Romero’s liberation theology.
True, I was politely asked to leave by the new priest after that wise man passed on. He was fine with me coming back to the church after transition, but not during. Couldn’t afford to alienate people. Make them uncomfortable. Services no longer required. I didn’t give up the faith though. Just the church.
And this is the church we’re probably used to hearing about nowadays. The church that kicks people out, decides who’s Christian and who isn’t, often while protecting pedophile priests. These things are both entirely real and, as my students might say, “some ol’ bulllllllshit”.
But by heaven, it is NOT all of us. When the Denver archdiocese removed a young girl from their school, not for being gay mind you, but for her PARENTS being a lesbian couple, Christians stood up. And they’re still standing up. They’re telling their own leadership that this is not Christlike. That this is not acceptable.
And I’ll be damned (likely for many reasons) if there isn’t more evidence of good people in community reaching out to do good things. As an update to previous posts on Mississippi and Utah respectively, we get examples of honesty and love being rewarded and hypocrisy being exposed.
Constance McMillen and ALL her peers will get their prom, due to a couple big donors, even as the facebook page created to support her and her girlfriend has garnered 250,000 followers.
And those fine upstanding gents in Utah who spend their days thinking up new and creative ways of strangling civil liberties? The pharisees out west are “shocked” and “stunned” by one of their own confessing to a skinny-dipping excursion some years ago with a minor.
I need to add a couple things here for balance. I know as a blogger I don’t really have a responsibility to be fair in the way journalists might. It’s just my own ethics that beg for at least lip service.
Truth is, if we believe people can change, that they can learn from mistakes, then I think any ethical adult would have to admit that there’s going to be more to this Utah story than the scandal. We need to listen to the grown woman’s story and his. We need to extend what we’re so often not given ourselves: the chance for forgiveness and healing. It seems like the world could use a lot more of that in general.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean we need to extend them legislative authority while a legitimate question about their ethics remains unanswered. I have no illusions of being voted in as Texas governor as a sex worker. Maybe Illinois governor, but not the Lone Star.
For now though, I’m just gonna bask in the fact that there’s still a great big chunk of hope out there, growing in the hearts of loving people, that we can all take a bite of. I’ve even given the flying monkeys the day off.
No no, not as in that cloying, dissonant, Disney ode with vaguely suggestive lyrics from Aladdin, but rather an actual, outer space, celestial body. With aliens. Blue aliens, of course, that being de rigueur at the moment.
You WISH this post was about hot cat fuckin'
No hot space cat sex though, sorry.
Rather, this from the ever excellent (and best LGBT blog of 2008) Towleroad, a “site with homosexual tendencies”
I will admit, to the annoyance of many of my friends, that I am not a true gay marriage supporter. I’m one of those who’s suspicious of any special, legal rights/privileges/responsibilities attendant on who one chooses to fuck. I figure we should let the whole kit and caboodle be left to anyone’s cult of preference and put government back to work buying failed missile defense systems.
But the video raises a good point in a very creative way. So long as we stay in the business of giving straight people all these benefits because they badger a spouse into the grave before they fell prey themselves, then nelly nags and golddiggin’ dykes should have an equal space at the trough.
Cynicism aside, I’m all in favor of Social Security and hey, we earned that stuff anyway. It’s our money. We were told we’d get it back. Doesn’t Big Bro ever get tired of picking on folks?
If not, YOU BETTER, or SiP will hunt you down and take away your sexy license.
Let’s start the New Year off in a proactive way, by adding your voice to the Sexual Freedom Report!
This questionnaire will be the foundation for the first report on the State of Sexual Freedom in America today. If you already responded to the questionnaire, and many of you have, thank you! If not, we would really value your opinions!
As I shared with you in the first email, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation plans to publish regular reports on the sexual freedom movement, designed to help identify the social changes taking place, or that must take place for progress to be made, on the diverse issues on which we work. We are particularly interested in recognizing opportunities for already-established sexual freedom issue groups to work together.
We would like to know what you think are the most pressing sexual freedom issues this country is facing and so we are asking for a bit of your time and a lot of your knowledge and expertise.
We will treat your responses as confidential, unless you specifically give us permission to share your comments. To protect the confidentiality of our participants, we will download the responses each day and they will be taken completely offline. With that assurance, we are also asking that you provide your contact information on the survey.
I do hope that you’ll take some time right now to respond to the questionnaire. What you think really does matter to us and to this project.
Please click here or at the link below to begin the survey.
Thanks for your time and your participation!
Ricci Levy, Executive Director
PS: Please make sure to give us an email address in the questionnaire so that we can email you a copy of the completed report immediately prior to its public release.
A 14 year old boy is accused of raping a twelve year old girl on school grounds, during school hours.
Here’s what site supervisor Mustapha Cannon has to say about it: “They’re calling it a rape when it wasn’t really a rape. When this is all over with I want to see if I can get a public apology for my principal, which is my friend, and my vice-principal, which is my friend who aren’t at work right now. Some kids are not as popular as other kids. You have a girl that’s not as popular as some of the girls. You have a guy who is not as popular with some of the guys and the girls. It was hormones gone wild. There’s been plenty of incidents that happened that haven’t been reported as possible rapes or attempted rapes. I think this is something that’s been worded the wrong way.” Read more
Here’s the video with his interview:Mustapha Cannon Rape Interview #2
“Amanda Simpson–formerly a test pilot, and formerly a man–started her new job today as senior technical advisor with the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which plays a key role in national security and cybersecurity. Unfortunately, most of the talk so far has been about Simpson’s sex change, not her career change.” Read more
Now repeal DADT, muthafucka!
“American Evangelicals are apparently shocked that their anti-gay activism in Uganda — which mostly involves telling Ugandans that gay men sodomize boys and that homosexuals have a nefarious plot to destroy society as we know it — has actually been taken seriously by Ugandans, who, in order to stop purported child rape and total social annihilation, have bandied about the idea of executing gay people.” Read the rest of the story at Femeniste
If you didn’t already watch it, check out our earlier posts, including this one with Rachel Maddow.
Tessa Savicki wanted to take control of her reproductive life. On December 19th, 2006, Savicki instructed doctors to insert an IUD after she delivered her ninth child. Instead, the doctors elected to forcibly sterilize her on the operating table. Read the whole story here.
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