Innehållsförteckning för April - May 2020 från The Advocate

THERE’S THIS GREAT scene in The Paper, a 1994 film about 24 hours in the life of of the hardworking reporters and editors at a financially strapped New York City tabloid newspaper. The newroom’s top boss, Robert Duvall, tells a story of running up a huge restaurant tab he couldn’t afford with friends as a young man and then being unexpectedly rescued by Pablo Picasso. When his number two in command, played by Glenn Close, asks him for his point, Duvall tells her, “Well, the people we cover, we move in their world, but it is their world. You can’t live like them, Alicia. You’ll never keep up. Now, if you try and make this job about the money, you’ll be nothing but miserable, ’cause we don’t get the money—never…

The town filled the theater. If it wasn’t the whole town, it certainly felt like it. It was winter, in Provincetown, 1993. Crusts of dirty snow lined the parking lot, and it was the time of year when people didn’t leave their houses unless they had to. We were here for the first showing of Philadelphia, which was no small thing for a town that functioned as a safe haven for people with HIV and AIDS. While neither my boyfriend and I believed we were HIV-positive, many people in the audience had struggled with chronic illness, or with the deaths of partners and friends. And yet, in the minutes before the curtain went up, there was a jovial mood in the room. People were excited to be together in one…

The beloved mayor of Wilton Manors, Justin Flippen, died in February after having a brain aneurysm on his way to a city commission meeting. The gay man and longtime activist of the heavily LGBTQ city was only 41. Flippen was first elected to the commission in 2010 but left to run for the Florida House. He did not win the House seat but returned to the commission and was elected mayor in 2018, when it became one of the few cities in the country to have all LGBTQ elected officials. A native of Broward County, he was a graduate of Florida Atlantic University, where he was the first openly gay student body president. In addition to his political career, he worked for the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau.…

Shrimp & Crab Gravy 1 cup of diced yellow onion½ cup of diced green pepper½ cup of diced red pepper1 stick of butter1 tablespoon of browning sauce (I use Kitchen Bouquet)1 pound of claw or lump crab meat1 pound of shrimp8 cups of seafood or crab stockflour and water for rouxgarlicseasoning saltOld Bay Seasoningpepper 1. Melt butter in a large stock pot 2. Saute onions and peppers in it 3. Add seafood stock and browning sauce, bring to a boil 4. Add crab meat 5. Mix flour and water into a roux 6. Stir in small amounts of roux until you have reached your desired thickness 7. Season with garlic, Old Bay Seasoning, salt, and & pepper to taste 8. Add shrimp. Cook for 5-7 minutes Serve over jasmine rice.…

Jason Segel recently confessed in a Rolling Stone interview that Simone, his character Peter’s love interest in the new deliciously surrealist AMC series Dispatches from Elsewhere, was not originally written as a transgender character. That is, until he met captivating Hollywood newcomer, Eve Lindley. “The only other time this has happened was when Russell Brand came in to read for [Forgetting Sarah] Marshall. I’d originally written his part to be a straight-laced British author, like a Hugh Grant type. Then Russell came in, and gave me something entirely better,” Segel told Rolling Stone. “I felt the same way about Eve when she auditioned—Simone was not written as a trans character. She made Simone so much richer, more complicated, gave her so much more depth. It changed the whole project. The…

KELLI DUNHAM didn’t take the typical trajectory to becoming a stand-up comedian. The queer author, registered nurse, and former nun (that’s not a joke) grew up in a small rural town in Wisconsin with a population of about 1,500—“if you count the cows,” she quips. “I do not think that I heard the word lesbian probably until I was almost a teenager, maybe 12 or 13,” recalls Dunham. “I don’t even know it was a thing you could be.” In retrospect, she realizes she occasionally experienced queer folks reaching out to her as a child without even realizing it. “I lived in a rural area of Wisconsin, and there was something called the Ice Age Trail,” says Dunham. “Our driveway was actually part of the Ice Age Trail—now, we were…

Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark is not your average autobiography. The book mirrors the fragmented and sometimes confusing nature of the author’s life. Wark freely admits she has no answers to the many questions she poses or to the situations confronting her. She fails at living as a queer person just as spectacularly as she does when she thinks she is straight. Wark never gives up, though, and her experiences are as interesting as they are varied. The story travels from Sydney amid the burgeoning 1980s gay and drag scene to present-day New York, and chronicles the author’s life in a series of short, inviting chapters, which range in length from a few paragraphs to several pages. (Semiotext(e)) Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera follows a young Puerto Rican…

Since July 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has encouraged the daily use of Truvada in the HIV prevention strategy known as preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. Earlier this year, it added the drug Descovy as another daily PrEP option. But newer strategies are emerging for people who struggle with adherence to daily PrEP. Experts still recommend that some high-risk populations take the medication daily to ensure protection. For example, some studies suggest that for trans women, feminizing hormones may quicken the filtering of Truvada and Descovy out of their bodies, so they may need to maintain daily adherence to keep an effective dose in their systems. But some lower-risk communities may soon have new options in practicing PrEP. Some San Francisco health experts are embracing a new dosing regimen…

I AM NOT a religious person. On a good day, I lean toward being an atheist, and on a bad day, I consider myself agnostic. (You just need to ask God what her deal is every now and again, right?) Still, I have always believed in some kind of intelligent design that is far too complex for humans to understand. I guess it’s the human in me to try and figure it out. When I was coming to terms with my sexuality, I often pondered the question of why some people—those like me—are created to partner with the same sex. The shorter, less inspirational answer that I could come up with was that it was nature’s version of birth control, or a sort of cap on population growth. The romantic…

Former Illinois congressman Aaron Schock penned a lengthy coming-out letter to the public, which was posted to Instagram as well as his own website in March. In the letter, Shock expressed “regret” for not coming out sooner and detailed “a difficult and ultimately, now optimistic, journey familiar to many LGBTQ people.” This included being raised in a conservative religious household and, once arriving in Washington, D.C., at age 27, putting “my ambition over the truth, which not only hurt me, but others as well.” Schock also expressed no love for the media. He saw the frequent references of his Downton Abbey fandom, which he debunked as false, and “a dog whistle” about his being a closeted gay man. He added that any “opportunity [to come out] quickly vanished” after a…

The Gay Agenda by queer power couple Ashley Molesso and Chessie Needham is more than just the latest effort to provide the definitive user’s guide to all things LGBTQ. It is also a Lisa Frank-esque rainbow celebration of the community itself. A beautifully designed compendium that seeks to honor our stories while sharing them with a wider audience, The Gay Agenda is an homage to those who fought before us, and a reminder of the important people and events in our history. It includes a helpful acronyms translation guide for the uninitiated, and those of us who are a little behind the times. Molesso and Needham are also the founders of Ash+Chess, the hip Brooklyn art and stationery retailer, and the book reflects their artistic talents with over 100 full-color…

SINCE COOLHAUS ICE cream premiered in 2009 with its fun flavors—like Milkshake & Fries, Midnight Munchies, Mo Matcha Mocha, and Thai Town Crunch, to name a few—it reflected the millennial mindset of founders and lesbian couple Natasha Case and Freya Estreller, and continues to push the boundaries of ice cream as a socially conscious brand. Now the country’s leading women-founded ice cream company, Coolhaus offers out-of-this-world Sammies, dairy-free options, ingredients that promote animal welfare (like cage-free eggs), and a mission to empower other female business owners. That commitment to social change, admits Coolhaus’s cofounder and CEO, Case, was not always baked into the company’s ingredients but evolved to reflect the tastes of customers. “What the public is looking for today is: What’s the mission beyond me buying this?” Case observes.…

THE MODELS FLOATED down the staircase of the Tokyo studio. Visions of water, fire, stars, and other fantastical projections—brought to life in a fusion of fashion and technology—danced behind them as they descended in staggered pairs toward the hushed audience waiting below. The judges of this particular Making the Cut challenge—luminaries Heidi Klum, Joseph Altuzarra, Chiara Ferragni, and Naomi Campbell—were lined in an illuminated row next to the runway. They outlined observations in notebooks and traded feedback amongst themselves. Was a given ensemble pretty, practical, wearable, and sellable? Campbell alone was quiet in the lineup: “What does Naomi think?” wondered Klum aloud at one point. The other judges turned. Campbell, unhearing or laser-focused, remained silent. She continued to write intently on the pad. For an audience member, the sound of…

In the pilot episode of What We Do in the Shadows—an FX comedy that centers on a vampire clan living in 21st-century Staten Island—the characters discuss the arrival of a vampiric royal named Baron Afanas (Doug Jones) to their shared home. “A few hundred years ago, we enjoyed a very intense, very long sexual affair. It was very wild, lots of acrobatic stuff,” Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) confides to a (faux) documentary crew chronicling the lives of the immortal nightcrawlers. “A while back, the baron and I enjoyed a very intense sex affair. Very animalistic. Acrobatic stuff, you might say,” echoes her husband, Laszlo (Matt Berry), in his own confessional. With that one joke, the team behind What We Do in the Shadows committed to taking a viewpoint of the world…

With the global panic over the spread of the COVID-19, the travel bans, and quarantines, it’s easy to worry that you’ll never be able to travel again. There’s certainly cause for concern, but there are also steps you can take to protect yourself without succumbing to fear. We’re not saying the steps that health departments are taking are not warranted, and canceling or postponing large events is a smart way to help slow down a contagion and avoid overwhelming our health care system with a huge spike in the number of people needing care at once. But, even though COVID-19 appears to have a higher mortality rate than the flu, you are still more likely to die from one of the nation’s three leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer,…

Homophobia is not gone yet and probably never will be entirely. Racism, misogyny, and transphobia sadly remain with us too, and LGBTQ people remain under attack by Donald Trump’s administration. However, an encouraging takeaway from the primary election season is that appealing to anti-LGBTQ sentiment is no longer a winning political strategy in many parts of the country. The major case in point is that Pete Buttigieg managed to run a viable campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination as an openly gay man. Yes, he’s out of the race now, but the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., made his mark on history. Still, he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He was criticized for his centrist ideology, for his troubled relationship with African-Americans, and for lacking national experience. But he…

Mala Forever is an all female-led film and digital studio based in Los Angeles and NYC. The award-winning studio develops and produces films, new media, and commissioned work that “centers unheard voices,” as stated on its website. “We are redefining the future of filmmaking through equitable production practices, and our growing community-based platform is a cultural hub for the radical femme revolution.” Mala Forever cofounder, Nina Reyes Rosenberg, a mixed-race first-generation Mexican-American and Jewish woman, says there was a “very different media environment when we were younger, [in] the ’90s and 2000s.” “I think we’ve always known that there was a power in being able to share our stories and our experiences and our strengths and our hopes and our lives through imagery, through story,” Rosenberg says. “For us, that…

1 She Sings Too Based on Chelsea Clinton’s (and illustrator Alexandra Boiger’s) bestselling children’s book, She Persisted: The Musical follows fourth-grader Naomi on a field trip to a women’s history museum that turns into an adventurous and inspiring voyage through time. “With so many kids’ shows based on fairy tales,” said Carey Purcell of TDF Stages, “it’s a treat to have one inspired by feminist tales.” 2 Queering the Classics New mobile-based media innovators Quibi has given the greenlight on a modern-day queer romantic comedy inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, written by rising Asian-American comedy star Joel Kim Booster (above, of NBC’s Sunnyside). Trip follows two besties embarking on a wine-filled week on Fire Island during the summer. 3 We Like Pike Austin-based duo Patrice Pike and Wayne…

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a woman of the year every year. She has a long history of fighting for the rights of women, LGBTQ people, people of color, and other marginalized groups. As a lawyer, she was arguing against sex discrimination back in the 1970s, when what was then called Women’s Liberation had far from universal support. One of her most significant early cases was Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue Service, which showed that gender equality benefited men as well as women. In the case, dramatized in the 2018 film On the Basis of Sex, Ginsburg successfully argued that a man shouldn’t be denied a tax deduction for what he paid his mother’s caregiver, when a woman in the same situation would receive…

On a soundstage in California’s San Fernando Valley, drag kings clad as hypermasculine characters including Danny Trejo’s Machete and Antonio Banderas’s El Mariachi sing and dance to a song about machismo expressly written for the scene they’re shooting for the history-making Starz series Vida. Creator and showrunner Tanya Saracho, who’s directing the episode, buoyantly runs back and forth between the set and the monitor. Mishel Prada, who plays Emma, one of the sisters at the center of Vida’s queer Latinx story that takes on notions of chosen family and gentrification in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, watches the drag king scene unfold on the monitor. Beside her are two of the show’s executive producers—Stephanie Langhoff and Robin Schwartz. Melissa Barrera, who’s about to break out as one of the stars…

In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak and concerns over large gatherings being the ideal contagion ground, many of the season’s top LGBTQ events are being canceled or postponed. Here’s what we know so far: SAGE, the organization dedicated to LGBTQ elders postponed the SAGE National Day of Advocacy (previously scheduled March 31) and has announced it will transform their HIV and Aging Conference and SAGENet affiliate conferences into virtual experiences. Miami’s Ultra Music Festival, a circuit party mainstay, also cancelled. Organizers tweeted, “It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that the City of Miami has issued an official directive requiring that the 22nd edition of Ultra Music Festival, originally in March, will be postponed to March 26-28, 2021.” Dinah Shore Weekend (originally scheduled April 1-6) will…

“People who have autism are more likely to be queer or trans,” argues Josh Thomas, sharing the impression he was left with after reading personal essays and hearing anecdotal stories while creating Freeform’s series Everything’s Gonna Be Okay. By introducing a queer storyline for leading character Matilda, the show is at the forefront in providing visibility for teens on the autism spectrum who also identify as LGBTQ or “dual-spectrum.” In the series, from Please Like Me creator and star, Thomas plays Nicholas, a young man who grew up with his mom in Australia but later chooses to raise his high school-age half-sisters Matilda (Kayla Cromer) and Genevieve (Maeve Press) in their home in Southern California when their father suddenly dies. The series was already a game-changer in having cast Cromer,…