The Brown Daily Herald celebrated Perversion Pride month with a poll that produced spectacular results:
The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate. Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ identification has increased across the nation, with especially sharp growth at Brown. …
The Herald first surveyed sexual orientation in its Fall 2010 poll, in which around 14% of respondents answered that they were not straight. That number has more than doubled since. …
Brown’s queer community is much greater than the national average among adults. Gallup polls from 2022 found that only 7.2% of adults — and 19.7% of those aged 18 to 25 — identified as LGBTQ+.
“One in Four, Maybe More.
One in Three, Maybe Me.
One in Two, Must Be You.
One in One, No More Legacies”
What would America do without its top elite institutions?
SCOOP: I've obtained video from inside Disney's all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill, in which executive producer Latoya Raveneau says her team has implemented a "not-at-all-secret gay agenda" and is regularly "adding queerness" to children's programming. pic.twitter.com/eJnZMpKIXT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
Fabián Cháirez, La Revolución, 2014, currently under exhibition at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City.
Members of a Mexican Labor Union recently took violent exception to the artistic appropriation of Revolutionary Leader Emiliano Zapata by an LGBTQ+ painter.
Hyperallergenic could only clutch its pearls and collapse fainting.
“La Revolución†(2014), which depicts a nude Zapata donning a pink hat and high heels suggestively straddling a horse, was condemned by members of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores AgrÃcolas (UNTA) and other similar agricultural groups for its characterization of the revolutionary. The clashes around Cháirez’s painting come at a tumultuous time for the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL), the larger institution that oversees the museum, which was closed by unionized workers protesting alleged lack of payments on Wednesday morning. The museum remains closed to the public as of this afternoon.
According to El Universal, Ãlvaro López RÃos, a representative of UNTA, led a storming of the museum around noon on Tuesday to demand that the painting be removed from view and destroyed. Protesters blocked the entrance and chanted “Burn it, burn it!â€; they later hurled homophobic insults and other slurs at members of LGBTQ+ communities who had approached the scene in counter-protest. One of them was journalist and activist Antonio Bertran, whom López RÃos hit with a water bottle. A harrowing video shows another young man being violently kicked and beaten by protesters outside the museum.
Cháirez’s representation in particular has incensed those who prefer to remember only a conventionally masculine image of Zapata, widely known as a principal figure of the Mexican Revolution, an early and important advocate for peasant rights in Mexico, and the namesake of the Zapatista movement. To farmworkers and ordinary Mexicans alike, he remains a beloved symbol of empowerment for poor and historically marginalized communities. …
“What this polemic reveals is that Mexico is still filled with homophobic machos. Because what bothered people was not an image of a Zapata ‘mandilón,’ a barbaric Zapata, or even the cannibalistic Zapata that appears in revolutionary cartoons,†reflects Vargas, describing other works in the show. “What bothered people was an effeminate Zapata.â€
Vargas recounts that many of the members of agricultural unions who protested on Tuesday claimed ownersship of Zapata’s image. They were invited into the museum to view the entire exhibition, which also includes traditional images of the leader, but they refused.
Toby Young, at the Spectator, notes the latest example of Great Big Capitalist Wokedness.
[T]he rainbow-colored biscuit must go to Budweiser UK. The lager manufacturer has decided to produce a range of plastic beer cups with Pride’s nine official ‘flags’ on them, each representing a different section of the LGBT community. There’s ‘Genderfluid Pride’, for instance, a combination of pink, blue, white, purple and black, and ‘Asexual Pride’, where black is for ‘asexuals who don’t feel sexual attraction to anyone’ and white represents ‘non-asexual allies’.
As a marketing exercise, Budweiser’s ‘Fly the Flag’ campaign cannot be aimed at those people who happen to fall into these categories because there simply aren’t enough of them. In the US, the Williams Institute estimates that about 0.66 percent of the population is transgender, but that is a voluminous number compared with some of the more niche groups represented by the Budweiser cups. For instance, the black stripe on the yellow, white, purple and black cup symbolizing ‘Non-Binary Pride’ is intended to represent ‘those who feel they are without gender entirely’. Another flag labeled ‘Intersex Pride’ is aimed at people ‘whose biological sex can’t be classified as clearly male or female’. About one person in 2,000 fall into that particular medical category.
So is the target audience beer drinkers whom Budweiser thinks will approve of the support it’s showing to these groups? I doubt the company has done any research to establish how large that demographic is. Rather, it’s a mandatory exercise in virtue signaling, something every large company now feels it has to do to demonstrate its alignment with progressive orthodoxy. But why? To attract woke applicants from good universities? Because someone in the corporate and social responsibility department has suggested it and no one dares contradict them for fear of being labeled homophobic, transphobic or bi-phobic? Because the fiftysomething CEO wants to be able to tell his blue-haired 16-year-old daughter that he’s doing his bit to fight bigotry and oppression? Or is he planning to give a set of the rainbow cups to his wife so she can show them off to her friends at the local country club?
Probably all of the above, but there’s also a strong hint of religious observance in it, with all members of the Brahmin class, and those aspiring to join, feeling obliged to express the same progressive pieties.
“The movement towards androgyny occurs in late phases of culture, as a civilization is starting to unravel. You can find it again and again and again through history. In the Greek art you could see it happening. All of a sudden the sculptures of handsome nude young men, athletes, that used to be very robust in the archaic period, suddenly begin to seem like wet noodles toward the end. And the people who live in such periods (late phases of culture) — whether it’s the Hellenistic era, whether it’s the Roman Empire, whether it’s the Mauve decade of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, whether it’s Weimar Germany — people who live in such times feel that they are very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan: “homosexuality, heterosexuality, so what, anything goes, and so on…†But from the perspective of historical distance, you can see that it’s a culture that no longer believes in itself. And then what you invariably get are people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity on the edges. Whether they be the Vandals and the Huns, or whether they’re the barbarians of ISIS, you see them starting to mass on the outsides of the culture. And that’s what we have right now. There’s a tremendous disconnect between the infatuation with the transgender movement in our own culture and what’s going on out there.”
A lot of people on Facebook yesterday were marveling at, and laughing about, this leftie idiot‘s ideological derangement and her absolutely appalling Mount-Everest-sized shrill sense of self-entitlement. Her much-enduring and despite-all-her-bullshit loving family has evidently, for years and years, through what must have been a truly dreadful adolescence well into what-ought-to-be adulthood tolerated her vicious politics and humored her sexually perverse nonsense, but those terrible people failed to climb on board the radical LGBTQ&c.&c. train with her and she, they, zir, or ze is finally fed up.
Every Sunday for the last 12 years, I have called my conservative Republican mom and talked to her for upwards of an hour. I tell her about my work, and try to keep her entertained with cheery, funny anecdotes. I share good news and paper over bad. I keep the conversation flowing and effervescent. In each call, I work hard to come across as someone happy, with lots of friends and lots to do, and nothing to complain or cry about.
I have upheld this ritual through breakups, bereavements, depressive episodes, periods of trauma, and years of acute political turmoil. I’ve only wavered and broken kayfabe a few times — when my dad died, for example, or when Trump was elected. That time, I curled up on a bench and sobbed, begging my conservative mom to understand what her vote had done to me. I shook and sputtered borderline incomprehensible things about how much it hurt for her to vote the way she did, how betrayed I felt as a sexual assault survivor, a trans person, a scientist, or a person who needs birth control.
She believed we could agree to disagree, so long as we never discussed or even thought about our disagreements.
She reacted with the same equanimity she always projects when unwanted emotions rear their needy heads. She wasn’t concerned that her actions had hurt or betrayed me, no, she was worried I was stressing myself out by thinking about it too much. She believed we could agree to disagree, so long as we never discussed or even thought about our disagreements. By refusing to stop glaring at our differences, I was the one hurting myself.
That’s how it’s always been in my family. I am the renegade, the unstable queer one, with big emotions and strange desires that alienate me from my family’s politics. I am responsible for minimizing the conflict that my existence creates. I’m not supposed to express emotion, start fights, or remind anyone of the chasm that separates my life from their traditional, “family-oriented†values.
I’m done carrying that responsibility. It’s been slowly poisoning me for years. …
My mom wouldn’t say she’s socially conservative. Neither would most of my Republican relatives. They like to think of themselves as family-oriented, patriotic, no-nonsense lovers of fiscal restraint, and it doesn’t matter if the reality of the political choices lines up with those ideals. They don’t like to talk about the basis for their ideology, or evidence in support of their views — and they absolutely will not acknowledge the social consequences of their actions. They have always voted Republican, and it seems they always will, no matter the candidate they are given or the abhorrent policies that candidate advances. And for the most part, they don’t want to talk about their beliefs or the reasons for their choices — aside, perhaps, from a few idle rants about the evils of the Clintons. In such a vacuum of reflection and vulnerability, it’s paralyzingly difficult for me to even start a conversation about the harm they’ve done.
In my family, control and invalidation are wielded subtly, and perhaps without conscious intent. Norms are enforced through a gentle blend of selective praise, light mockery, quiet dismissal, and mild admonition. If I take a step toward prescribed, traditional roles, I am celebrated and recognized. If I take a different path, or express a competing desire, I am ignored or ridiculed in a way I can’t quite point to. If I complain about that ridicule, I am dismissed as overly sensitive or told I’m making things up, misremembering them.
I have dozens of memories of family members chiding a teenage me for expressing disinterest in giving birth or having a family. Whenever I expressed a passion for the sciences or a desire to go to grad school, I was treated as though my interests were cute, but fleeting. When I began throwing my adolescent, closeted self into politics — mostly activism for LGBT rights — my mother would tell me, in hushed tones, that it was “okay†that I was doing so, but that we wouldn’t be letting my grandparents know about what I’d been up to.
I wasn’t beaten for being who I was. Usually, I wasn’t even directly berated. The problem wasn’t a specific act of mistreatment or abuse, but rather the emotional and political climate that surrounded me. My family consistently listened to conservative voices that branded me, and people like me, as perverse, immature, deluded, and mockable. My family voted, without relent, for politicians who wanted to curtail abortion rights, LGBT rights, educational access, and intellectual freedom. They unilaterally advanced and rewarded a life path that was traditional, deeply gendered, and rooted in devotion to the family unit, often to the detriment of connections with the outside world. They couldn’t see how these actions wore me down and slowly, quietly, left me feeling broken, incapable of appropriate adulthood, and totally alone.
Michael Hobbes, in HuffPo, wonders why, after our courts have decided that homosexuals can marry and the rest of us had better bake them a cake or else, members of that subculture are still so lonely and unhappy.
In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history. As recently as my own adolescence, gay marriage was a distant aspiration, something newspapers still put in scare quotes. Now, it’s been enshrined in law by the Supreme Court. Public support for gay marriage has climbed from 27 percent in 1996 to 61 percent in 2016. In pop culture, we’ve gone from “Cruising†to “Queer Eye†to “Moonlight.†Gay characters these days are so commonplace they’re even allowed to have flaws.
Still, even as we celebrate the scale and speed of this change, the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades. Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives. We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode. And just like the last epidemic we lived through, the trauma appears to be concentrated among men. In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three. Despite all the talk of our “chosen families,†gay men have fewer close friends than straight people or gay women. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: “It’s not a question of them not knowing how to save their lives. It’s a question of them knowing if their lives are worth saving.†…
“Marriage equality and the changes in legal status were an improvement for some gay men,†says Christopher Stults, a researcher at New York University who studies the differences in mental health between gay and straight men. “But for a lot of other people, it was a letdown. Like, we have this legal status, and yet there’s still something unfulfilled.â€
This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon. In the Netherlands, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, gay men remain three times more likely to suffer from a mood disorder than straight men, and 10 times more likely to engage in “suicidal self-harm.†In Sweden, which has had civil unions since 1995 and full marriage since 2009, men married to men have triple the suicide rate of men married to women.
All of these unbearable statistics lead to the same conclusion: It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men.
[A]s the first look walked out, a man to my right said out loud in pure exhilaration: “Gender! So last season!â€
What would result lived up to and, in fact, beyond the hype—and it was a privilege to witness. Not a moment too soon, and somehow fitting for the final day of the menswear loop, Palomo sent out a lavish and over-the-top collection that, at its core, gave a bejeweled and feather-trimmed middle finger to the unaccepting and the regressive. How fabulously timely.
The 24 year-old, who told Vogue in an interview last month that he works with “materials that are usually used for womenswear”, founded the label less than a year ago and has since been doing the most to shatter the traditional gender binary that has long ruled men’s fashion.
Alejandro’s Spring ’17 collection is so goddamn regal it hurts. Think Elizabethan ruffles meets Studio 54 with thigh-high boots (held up by garters no less!), pleated schoolgirl skirts and of course, a lot of skin.
Adios forever heteronormativity, one corset at a time.
[T]he Palomo Spain fall 2017 collection looked like what would happen if a young Spanish prince got into his mother, the queen’s, wardrobe. Or if a matador was feeling a bit kinky. (It also owed a major debt to the in-your-face hauteur of the the bad boys of the so-called Movida Madrileña of post-Franco Spain, like Pedro Almodovar.) The show opened with a feminine take on suiting, with ruffles, bell sleeves, and exposed shoulders. And closed with virginal boys in all white gowns and garters, plus one latex suit that resembled a bridegroom’s condom.
“It’s all the boys in the club,” said Palomo of his collection the following day. “You’ve got the dandies, the very serious, masculine guys, and then you’ve got the slutty boys in high boots.”
For his first two collections, Palomo had a much more romantic, poetic approach, but for this season he wanted to be less “beautiful” and more naughty. “It’s not this naive thing anymore,” he added of his relationship to fashion. “I wanted to go a little further to a more sexual place. It’s about trying to find your sexual self inside and exploring it. What’s the role of sex in our lives?”
Before he could answer, the tall and slender model named Pol Roig waltzed over wearing a bedazzled sequin houndstooth blazer, knee-high sliver go-go boots, and nothing else. He reached his hand into the pocket of Polomo’s pants and pulled out his iPhone. “See! This is what I’m talking about,†said Polomo, with a laugh. “We thought about putting trousers on him, but he looks better without.” And it’s true, he did. He just lacked pockets of his own.
“When you feel attracted to something, you can’t control your body,” said Polomo, who nervously stroked a rose flower while he spoke, eventually breaking its stem.
———————————-
It seems odd that at least one major industry is dominated by the mentally disordered and psychologically defective. That sexual perversity is able to strut openly as an identity is symptomatic of Liberal Egalitarianism’s inability to resist any grievance-bearing constituency.
This sort of thing went on, as well, in Ancient Rome, and, then as now, was recognized as gravely symptomatic of that Empire and Society’s imminent downfall.
Apart from celebrating our culture’s impending Apocalyptic collapse into supine decadence, I personally find it impossible to understand the point of all of this. How do you make money by producing a clothing line of grotesque statements of perversity that not even a West Village Queer could possibly wear anywhere outside a Gay Pride Parade?
Macy’s will not be purchasing this stuff for its Men’s Department. There must be some unfathomable-to-straight-guys connection between these kinds of costume statements and clothing for women that women actually buy. There is a profound mystery there.
Heather MacDonald reports on the latest academic breaktrough in gender equity. Naturally, it occurred in California.
Another day in academia, another twist in the bizarre world of identity studies. The Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, is presenting a talk next week on “Queering Agriculture,†dedicated to the proposition that “it is absolutely crucial queer and transgender studies begin to deal more seriously with the subject of agriculture.â€
Queer theory has taken over student life on many campuses. Now that gay identity has been thoroughly institutionalized, declaring oneself “trans*,†“genderqueer,†“pangender,†or any of the other rapidly multiplying alternative sexes has become the last frontier of self-engrossed agitation available to students. But apart from the odoriferous leavings of female ginko trees, the “problem†of gender and plants did not seem to be a pressing one, making the application of queer theory to agriculture an innovation that even the most dogged observers of identity studies might not have seen coming. The talk’s presenter, a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at the University of Maryland, will allegedly show that “the growing popularity of sustainable food is laden with anthroheterocentric assumptions of the ‘good life’ coupled with idealized images and ideas of the American farm, and gender, radicalized and normative standards of health, family, and nation.â€
Only slightly modified from HuffPo quotation of Reuters’ story:
In a dramatic shift in tone, a Vatican document said on Monday that fallen angels had “gifts and qualities to offer” and asked if Catholicism could accept demons and recognize positive aspects of spirits damned to Hell throughout Eternity.
The document, prepared after a week of discussions at an assembly of 200 bishops, said the Church should challenge itself to find “a fraternal space” for fallen angels without compromising Catholic doctrine on theology and the afterlife.
While the text did not signal any change in the Church’s condemnation of rebellion in Heaven or its opposition to the overthrow of God, it used language that was less judgmental and more compassionate than past Vatican statements under previous popes.
The document will be the basis for discussion for the second and final week of the assembly, known as a synod, which was called by Pope Francis and focuses on the theme of the angelic.
It will also serve for further reflection among Catholics around the world ahead of another, definitive synod next year.
“Fallen angels have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these spirits, guaranteeing to them a further space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home,” said the document, known by its Latin name “relatio”.
“Are our communities capable of proving that, accepting and valuing their political orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on theology and the afterlife?” it asked.
John Thavis, Vatican expert and author of the bestselling 2013 book “The Vatican Diaries”, called the document “an earthquake” in the Church’s attitude towards damned spirits.
“The document clearly reflects Pope Francis’ desire to adopt a more merciful pastoral approach on theology and the afterlife,” he said.
A number of participants at the closed-door synod have said the Church should tone down its condemnatory language when referring to fallen angels and avoid phrases such as “devils” and “tempters” when speaking of former angels.
