That Gal Gadot has never ‘supported the Palestinian genocide’.
Does not have a rifle with the notch marks of all those she’s killed.
And has stated outright that she believes in coexistence.
She worked as a fitness instructor, never seeing combat during her mandatory stint in the Israeli army (IDF), and the only thing she said was that she wished luck to her former colleagues in the army (you know, the equivalent of ‘Support Our Troops’) and specifically wished them luck against (and condemned) Hamas, which is a terrorist organization. Her tags then went on to note #stopterror and #coexistance.
You don’t have to like her, or Wonder Woman, or DC, but if you could keep the antisemitism out of it, that’d be great.
I’m gonna need some sources cause I’ve been very conflicted about wanting to go see the movie.
The text is a little small but here’s a transcript:
“I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens. Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children. We shall overcome! Shabbat Shalom! #weareright #freegazafromHamas #stopterror #coexistence #iloveidf”
So one more time:
In Israel, EVERY citizen is REQUIRED to serve in the IDF. It is a mandatory conscription army. So her involvement in the army wasn’t really a ‘choice’. And she’s sending love out to other people, young people, who also didn’t really have a choice.
The only thing she ever condemns or supports their fight against is Hamas, which has been condemned as a terrorist organization by multiple countries with verified human rights violations and who has been known to obstruct efforts towards a peaceful resolution.
She objects to terrorist action and the killing of civilians. She tags it ‘coexistence’ and ‘stopterror’.
Nowhere does she support Israeli dominance, or the horrific treatment of Palestinians. Nowhere does she carte blanche support Israel’s actions; she just expresses her concern and is praying for the ‘boys and girls’ who are part of her country’s military in the face of horrific terrorist behavior. Nowhere does she wholesale blame Palestinians for the conflict and in fact seems to be horrified that civilians are caught in the middle of this. Nowhere does she wants to free Gaza from Palestinians; just a known terrorist organization.
She’s not being anti-black or anti-brown, she’s not being anti-Palestinian, and she’s definitely not giving a thumbs up to war crimes or exulting in the death of ANYONE. She’s praying and supporting her country’s young people in a really awful, complex situation and she’s very clearly condemning a SPECIFIC organization instead of painting all Palestinians in any way.
The politics of the region are complex and obviously, there’s a lot of layers and conflicting information and feelings but like… someone saying ‘I love and am praying for people in a terrible conflict and want us to overcome it’ isn’t what a lot of people are making it out to be. Is she directing her concern in one direction? Somewhat, yeah. Can you object to the fact that she doesn’t outright say ‘I pray for Palestine’? Definitely. But there’s being more concerned for your own people and then there’s what people are making out she is and has said.
Like I said: dislike her or dislike Wonder Woman or have no interest in the DCEU, but the blatant exacerbation of this post and the additions people have made (about her being a sniper, etc) is just outright antisemitism, plain and simple.
Julie Andrews has a new children’s television series on Netflix called Julie’s Greenroom where she teaches a group of puppet children known as “greenies” about the performing arts. If that wasn’t already good enough news for you, one of the show’s characters is gender-neutral.
The students are racially diverse and include Hank, a piano-playing prodigy who uses a wheelchair and Riley, who is gender-neutral.
“If pressed we’d say she’s a girl, but maybe not forever,” said Andrews’ daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, who created the show with her mother. “We wanted to be diverse as possible.”
Aside from the greenies the series will feature celebrity guest stars such as Tituss Burgess, Chris Colfer, Idina Menzel and Carol Burnett.
“This project represents the fulfillment of a long held dream to educate children about the wonder of the arts,” Andrews said in a statement announcing the show.
I am here for this.
It has an episode where Spike, the black boy, is encouraged to write even though he insists that “no one” like him is a writer (the phrasing makes it very clear that it is a racial issue). And then the next episode is about the boys learning that ballet isn’t just for girls, and Hank learns that he can still dance, even in the chair.
Plus there’s music every episode and theater/exercise warm ups for kids! And all the puppets are by the Henson Company! My favorite so far is Fizz! She’s a precious girl who is never mocked for asking questions, is in fact encouraged to explore things. Plus, their overarching plot is putting on a musical about an Ogre that takes away “all the arts”. It’s a simply WONDERFUL series.
Medication is often stigmatized and that really bothers me. I’ve taken meds on and off for years to supplement my focus and combat my anxiety. I’ve adapted because of prescriptions. None of us are weak for this, we’re simply helping our brains get the chemicals they need to function better.
Honestly I am still a lil ??? at the viscerally negative reaction to Vashti because like, there is nothing, in the Megillah, at all,
Vashti is…. the white dudes in the background that everyone ships with each other even though they were only briefly on screen in one scene and never showed up again
Except she’s a woman so people either hate her or have to be all ~PROGRESSIVE!~ about their headcanon and it’s like whoa there what is happening here. She ain’t that deep
That’s my Vashti opinion
ok logically i can kinda see this opinion
but then emotionally/ideologically i feel like we can/should analyse everything, that the texts are like this for a reason
but then on the THIRD hand, i do really hate how it’s either “I’m a feminist and Vashti is the best!!!” or “I’m Orthodox and Vashti was awful” and there’s never an in between or any other option! (and, as a sorta-Orthodox feminist, I’ve never come across a satisfying Orthodox feminist response to this)
I’m Orthodox and feminist, and Vashti gets a super raw deal from her life and is demonized by the Talmud in ways that look unjust to me, but that doesn’t make her a feminist hero.
I just don’t see how Vashti is not a feminist story. This is a woman who is faced with a no-win situation—she can disgrace herself (and also Achashvarosh, although he’s too drunk to notice) by acquiescing to his request, in a culture in which women’s public presence and sexuality is tightly controlled.Or she can say ‘eff off’, and stand the consequences. And she is replaced with Esther, another woman with intensely limited control over her body and her options, and even higher stakes.
I don’t know if Vashti is a feminist hero, but this is a situation with feminist resonance. And I certainly can’t see her as a villain.
The midrash I like is that Haman was out to get her, because she humiliated him, and would slap him in the face with her shoes. First, it creates a series of beautiful symmetries in the story, but I also just love imagining a tiny, gorgeous Indian princess (in my imagination, Vashti is always Indian) whapping her husband’s schmuck vizier across the face with a jeweled flip-flop.
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing – every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemicby Randy Shiltsis a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaustcollects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
Read or watchThe Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Streetor watchMilk. Dallas Buyers Clubhas its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played Onbut JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y’all. Please, take care of one another.
Adding that in the US, And The Band Played On is on the monthly discounted Kindle ebooks list for June 2017.
Legit, THIS is why I sometimes get short with the younger generations of LGBTQ folks who don’t understand what it was like growing up queer decades ago. Even in the late 90′s/early 00′s, the despair we felt around this issue. It hit very close to home.
One of the most terrifying parts of this new administration is knowing that knowing that a second wave of this is coming. When Mike Pence took office as governor in Indiana, they saw a surge in HIV outbreaks in that state. We actually were starting to see AIDS become manageable, and I’m so angry that this progress will very likely go backwards.
I’m not even that old, and I’m a cis woman, but I remember. I had friends. We can’t go back to this. I think any queer person who was alive in those times knows someone who was affected. The despair we felt when this death sentence was put on someone. The grieving. It’s unbearable. I grew up with sparse role models because of how many we lost. It was a cloud hanging over the heads of every queer person.
Please, LGBTQ community, find a way to solidify and fight together. Arguing about who is “gay enough,” or whether we can use the word “queer” or not, or excluding trans people is detrimental to our cause. If we keep dividing ourselves we will be conquered.
I love my community. I can’t stand the thought of a second wave of AIDS crisis hitting us.
It’s about this dude Henry who’s an artist living in New York,
and he has to go back to his hometown in Montana to take care of his grandfather who just recently had a stroke and is wheelchair-bound.
Things are all fine and dandy until Henry finds out that his old best friend from high school, as well as object of his unrequited affections that he’s never really been able to let go of is also back in town. His name is Dean. He’s there with his two sons to recoup from a recent divorce from his wife.
Henry is extremely frazzled by seeing his long-time crush after so many years, but they spend a lot of time together over the passing weeks and seem to fall into their old friendship very easily. Perhaps a little too easily….??? hmmm???
And with everything with Dean happening, Henry can’t be blamed that he’s entirely oblivious to Pike, the man who runs the local general goods store.
It’s obvious to us (and the whole damn town) that Pike’s been head over heels for Henry since high school, but is painfully shy. He can barely talk to Henry at all and it’s the cuTEST GODDAMN THING oh lord help me from this movie.
Throughout the movie, Pike can’t seem to help himself from wanting nothing more than to make Henry happy from afar. He’s supposed to be delivering food cooked by one of the older ladies in town to Henry and his grandfather’s house to eat every night, but Pike cooks his own, exceptionally better meals, and delivers those instead and tells no one.
Now, Henry does notice Pike, and something about him catches his attention. Even if he doesn’t understand why yet. He tries to invite him to stay for dinner almost every night in an attempt to get him to open up, but Pike only becomes more closed off when he notices what’s going on between Henry and Dean.
I’ll stop there, as I don’t want to give the whole thing away, but I can’t leave this without talking about the town’s residents in this movie. This place is 100% one of those little towns where everyone knows each other as well as their business, you have nosy little old ladies, dudes who do nothing all day but sit on the porch of the corner store and smoke a pipe, and they all go to church on Sundays.
AND YET, not only is this movie void of any homophobia from any character, basically the whole freaking town is all up in this whole love triangle. They support Pike so much that there’s even scenes where they all play matchmaker with him and Henry. They root for them in the goofiest, most loveable way.
SO BASICALLY, this is a silly romantic comedy, except gay. It’s all super lighthearted comedy with tiny bits of drama thrown in. No one dies!!!! No one is killed or commits suicide and has a 100% happy ending!!! The three main guys are just normal guys!!! There’s not a stereotype to be found here!! anD ONE OF THEM IS NATIVE AMERICAN. No seriously guys it hurts me that not everybody knows about this movie. I discovered it when I was in middle school in our video store’s tiny little LGBTQ section, and must have rented it 20 times throughout the years before I finally bought it. I know this movie almost frame by frame I’ve watched it so many times because it’s just so disgustingly cute and always makes me happy. NOW, this movie isn’t perfect. It’s got some clunky acting, weird.. I guess artsy moments that don’t make sense, and crosses into the line of cheesy quite a few times, BUT, that’s really not important. This is treated exactly as if it were a het romantic comedy. Their being gay has nothing to do with the overall story, and is never brought up save for a small plotline where Henry is guilty with himself for never coming out to his grandfather. But overall, more LGBTQ movies need to be like this, it’s just way too rare.
GO WATCH IT YOU’LL BE GLAD YOU DID. Sadly, the only way I know to get ahold of it is to just buy the DVD. But it’s fairly cheap on Amazon! And even cheaper if you buy it used on there, but either way I promise it’s worth it to own. Like I said, I think I kept our video store in business from my renting it so many times.
Oh, and I hope you enjoy country music to some extent because this has the countriest soundtrack of all time.
Her Twitter mentions is full of people saying stuff like “You have always been able to cosplay a Captain!”. They just Don’t Get It. Please, Tumblr Star Trek fandom – go to her tweet and give her some love.
Miss Judi and I are going to see Wonder Woman Saturday, and I know it had a few bad reviews in advance, but that’s because men are garbage and write garbage reviews whenever they feel left out. I’m excited to see a female super hero movie directed by a woman, and she is catching all kinds of pressure because the movie cost a lot to make, as if men aren’t handed enormous budgets all the time with no track record in that kind of scale. Basically even if I didn’t want to see it, I probably still would since I don’t want it to flop, because even if it’s bad (and it’s probably great!) women should have the same opportunity to flop as men and not have it be a reflection on their entire gender.
Erik Davis is the managing editor of Fandango and he is also doing the Lord’s Work out here in these Internet Streets pointing out this ridiculous double standard. Team Erik Davis on today.
As Pride Month begins, let’s not forget who paved the way for us. We have a lot to thank Marsha P. Johnson & Sylvia Rivera for.
No offense but why do many folks leave out Miss Major? Maybe that’s why she’s struggling to get money to settle down and retire because folks are praising the dead rather than trying to keep the living live good… but maybe I’m just ranting.
Steel Phoenix Studios 