The Trevor Project had bisexual training.
Today, The Bisexual Resource Center and BiNet USA trained the staff of the Trevor Project in bisexual cultural competency and the needs of bi, pan, fluid, queer (bi+) youth.
As far as we know, this is one of the first times The Trevor Project has had a bi training for their entire staff! It’s great to see more and more LGBT organizations recognizing the need for training on different LGBTQIA communities, by the communities themselves!
This is why I’m a cat person.
Not much new in this episode. Kate Kristopher and Huckleberry are confirmed lovers, and Kate’s family is a big problem.
What if the Bond girl and Bond villain were the same person?
Jiz Lee discusses gender neutral pronouns.
DEAR ANNIE: I met my husband in college. He was outgoing, handsome and a star athlete. We now have two beautiful babies and, I thought, a perfect marriage.
A month ago, we had dinner with a couple we’ve known for years. One of them said something about “bisexuals,” to which I replied, “There is no such thing. You are either gay or straight.” Everyone looked uncomfortable.
The next day, my husband told me that he is bisexual. He said he’d had a relationship with another man in college before he met me. But he reassured me that I had nothing to worry about because he loves me and has no desire to be with anyone else of either sex.
Annie, I wish he’d never told me. I’ve been upset ever since. I believe my husband when he says he is not interested in anyone else, but I have to ask, is there really such a thing as “bisexual?” My sister says that is just what people claim before they come out as gay. And second, how can I trust my husband when he kept this secret from me for so long?
Please don’t suggest counseling. My husband says there is nothing to “change” about him, although he says he will go if I insist. I just want to turn back the clock so I can think of my husband the way I did before. — Confused Wife
Ideally, I think people should come out to partners early in the relationship in order to figure this out well in advance. But, prejudice against bisexual people exists. And that means some people are going to be reluctant to come out, and some people might not figure it out until well into the relationship.
On the plus side, Oriasha Edwards finally won UK asylum after a ridiculous legal struggle. However Aderonke Apata still faces deportation because lesbians never have children according to the court.
My second time to Rocky Horror I wore a polka-dot dress, borrowed from a friend in my dorm. I painted my nails, but didn’t feel confidant to do much else. It was the only place on campus where I felt comfortable to do so, in spite of the fact that the mixed-gender unit in my “hippy” dorm was home to an entire spectrum of genders.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been in and out of the closet for most of the last decade, but mass media has struck me to be both running forward in some ways and running backwards in others. We have more representation but the writers trip over themselves to specify which boxes the characters go into, make it clear that the character isn’t one of those bad queers who swish or are stone butch. It’s why Sense8 was such a drink of water to see bears kissing in the title sequence, and to see Dykes on Bikes and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the opening episodes.
For people who have not been initiated into RHPS culture, (aka, “virgins”) the movie just isn’t that good. Spoken lines come out phrased weirdly and broken with awkward silences. Pacing between musical numbers drags. Apparently, much of this is unintentional, but the spaces became an opportunity for audience participation. We heckle the characters on-screen in a style later developed for Mystery Science Theater 3000. We throw rice for the wedding, and use water pistols for the rain scene. The iconic songs are transformed into call/response sequences. We show up in costumes. We do the time warp, again and again.
Beyond that, shows involve amateur performers in costume pantomiming the action on screen. We can not only watch the characters, we can become the characters as a form of roleplay. The live cast serve as MCs, opening the show with the traditional heckling of “virgins” (first-time participants) and costume contests.
The movie and musical itself is a parody of 1950s and 1960s science fiction and gay/lesbian menace b-movies. Wikipedia can give you all the details, so I’m not going to give a synopsis. Alternately character arcs are recapped in two of final scenes:
Rose Tints My World
Don’t Dream It, Be It
The plot plays on the older-than-Dracula idea of two “pure” souls seduced into different forms of sexual and gender “deviance” in the traditional family values sense of the word. Frank seduces nearly the entire cast in one way or another. As the movie makes clear, the moralistic frame demanded by censors around the sexual and gender subtexts of b-movies and pulp fiction often feels pretty thin. The monster ends up a tragic anti-hero, the priggish narrator with no neck is mocked.
I found Rocky Horror through friends, campus fliers, and a still-tiny internet in 1990, 15 years after the movie’s release. The fandom at the time encouraged participation and individualized interpretation rather than engaged in wars over whether a character was team gay, team bi, or team trans. It was a story about experimentation and discovery. It still remains one of the few films with an openly nonbinary and bisexual character, but Frank can be interpreted other ways as well.
Should it be remade? The original musical has been revived many times. The Producers and Young Frankenstein were revised and reworked. West Side Story was translated into a bilingual production. I don’t have serious objections to a new version, but the original was very much a protest against the celluloid closet of the era. The movie version of RHPS (1975) falls right in the middle of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and the death and coming out of Rock Hudson (1985). Other points of reference that come to the top of my head are Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd of Diamonds are Forever (1971) and the lesbian Queen Gedren of Red Sonja (1985).
In a few decades, we’ve moved beyond LGBTQ person as freak through LGBTQ person as punchline, LGBTQ person as tragedy and slowly, character who just happens to be LGBTQ. The celluloid closet has arguably been replaced with a pink ceiling in entertainment, unless you happen to be Magneto. Shows like Elementary and Orphan Black just casually drop in same-sex relationship and transgender characters without much in the way of comment.
Also a factor is that political discussion has shifted from a gay liberation to a civil rights perspective. This likely blunts Frank’s manifesto that sexuality and gender are human liberties to be explored.
Still though, I think it’s becoming a rule in our culture that if it doesn’t get remade once a generation it’s forgotten. So there’s that. Maybe it can be revisioned around the current wave of bathroom bills and trans panic.
(divisors z) → (Listof Natural)
z : Integer
Returns a list of all positive divisors of the integer z. The divisors appear in ascending order.
Another reason why Racket rocks, because optimizing trial-division for large numbers.
It makes solving the Fermat Exponent problem easy:
http://pastebin.com/embed_js.php?i=4MR6D39a
Apparently, there was a period of time in Beethoven’s transition from classical formalist to bombastic romanticist (possibly accompanied by severe hearing loss and disillusionment with Napoleon) when musicians said, (translated from 19th-century German), “What the heck, Beethoven! This isn’t music! My kids could write this!”
Elsewhere:
Butler’s Dawn has been optioned for television. Producer Allen Bain:
I definitely want to stay true to the material and honor the legacy of Octavia Butler, because I think that’s important and I do think that’s possible in 2015. I think my predecessors have broken a lot of ground in television and the distribution channels have changed, so you can actually make TV now that you couldn’t 15 years ago. Back then a show had to be episodic in the sense that you could tune in any day, it didn’t matter if you knew the backstory, and you could watch it from beginning to end and be satisfied. That’s changed tremendously in the last 15 years or so.
A comic by Justin Hubbell about taking baby steps with genderqueer transitions. Just read the whole thing.
Is it really progress that in 25 years, stereotypes about my sexuality have gone from “anything that moves” to “binary only?”
150 years ago when scientists were describing human sexuality, they were trying to distill complex cultures down to a handful of words. There were men loving men and women loving women. There were men and women who loved both. There was butch and femme. There were “normal” guys and feminine fairies. There were gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who “crossdressed” full-time and part-time. Anne Lister put on a suit and a masculine name to cruise the red light district. There were trans people who fully transitioned (to the extent that was possible) and married. Their spouses may or may not have been co-conspirators.
And all this was further complicated by colonialism and contact with cultures that don’t do gender and sexuality the same way, which scientists still don’t understand.
So scientists did what scientists do, they created a theory. Then they created words to describe that theory, out of loanwords from another language which made their theory seem less like making shit up. Then they overgeneralized without really questioning about what the people they described really wanted.
Naming sexuality was based on the 19th century conceit that naming something is equivalent to understanding it. That those names didn’t accurately describe the people or things involved is pretty typical for the 19th century. At least half of our post Victorian language to describe sexuality involves misnomers and euphemisms. Colonial place names range from the wildly optimistic to the wildly inaccurate. This practice taken up by 20th century city planners who named neighborhoods and streets after plants that didn’t exist on site.
English has been described as a language that mugs other languages for nouns in dark alleys. I think modern English is even more macabre. English assaults other languages, takes their coats and hats, and goes dancing. Usually we don’t notice this. Democrats favor a proportional system and Republicans claim to be populist. Mass hysteria doesn’t involve a giant uterus. We use the word depression to describe a clinical mental illness, an economic phenomenon, a geologic feature, and a weather system. Language is conventional, it is almost never logical.
But, let’s turn back to the 19th and early 20th century. “Homosexuality” included Lister’s cross-dressed cruising and drag, a concept that Mae West went to jail for putting on the stage. (The New York state legislature would ban explicit homosexuality from the stage until the 1970s.) “Heterosexuality,” included elements of gender-deviance as a kink. “Bisexuality” included elements of both heterosexuality and homosexuality, often treated as a transitory or deceptive homosexuality.
The point is that those words were coined to describe cultures and lifestyles that included a wide range of genders and gender expressions. The denotation of those words may be “attraction to the same sex” “attraction to both sexes.” But the connotation of those words always implied that we were swishy or butchy people who wore the wrong clothes, spoke in the wrong registers, and made “normal” people nervous.
Fun Home: Some incoming Duke University freshmen object to Fun Home as an entirely optional reading. Eliel Cruz responds:
This bubble of ignorance that conservatives live in when they treat LGBT stories as “other” isn’t just bad for academics, however—it’s also dangerous to our country’s ongoing struggle for equality. Excluding LGBT people from one’s worldview means it’s easier to see them as less than deserving of empathy—or less than human.
Ted Cruz gets it wrong. Sgt. Phillip Monk wasn’t fired:
One military training instructor who worked for me and counseled young airmen told them: “Homosexuals were the downfall of Rome, and now they’ll be the downfall of the military, and the military will fall because of their lust and greed.” About 13 trainees filed a complaint against him. Those complaints went straight to my boss, who told me we had to do something about it.
I went to legal, and legal said, “You have to do something about this.” We had a zero tolerance policy on discrimination. I went back to my staff and told them. Monk said, “He’s got freedom of speech!” But we had to discipline the instructor. It wasn’t even a huge punishment. It was a warning.
Monk was up in arms. He came to me and said, “You know, ma’am, I can tell we’re not gonna agree on this. My replacement is already coming in. Do you mind if I take leave while this happens?” I said, “Sure, it’s your prerogative.” He walked out of my office, filled out the paperwork, gave it to me, and I approved.
George R. R. Martin tells his side of the Hugo Losers Party:
cbrachyrhynchos 