Be Gay Do Crime T-Shirt

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Rachel: On “Be Gay Do Crimes” though, and I guess while we’re on cops, makes me think of “More Lana than Lana,” which is the title of a poem in Porn Carnival, if we’re going to indulge more in “self-talking of our own consciousness,” and the trope of the bad-bad girl. I saw some younger fans talking about the film, calling it a “Be trans, do crimes” rallying cry.’ – writer Kelley Dong interviewing By Hook or By Crook directors Silas Howard and Harry Dodge It took me a while to read since some of the comics were very in-depth, and I felt like I needed time to digest them while I was reading, so I'd read a few and then put it down for a day or two. It was definitely cool to see so many different perspectives on what it's like to be a queer person, and also to have them united in the general message that, no matter the struggles and hardships that might be faced along the way, it's actually still pretty great! Some of the comics were short and funny, and I think the mix of more serious pieces with the shorter, lighter ones also helped make the whole thing more readable. Honestly, this was 50% a salt read, and 50% it looked pretty cool, and so I actually wanted to read it. They beat out Dates! (and a few others) for the Ignatz Award, and so I was mildly salty about it since I was a Dates! contributor 😒 Rachel: Personally, I feel so done talking about the “party discourse.” I will say my favorite response to the “controversy” surrounding the launch party and The Cut article came from organizer and sex worker Lorilee Lee. She pointed out that it was great that the party had a mutual aid aspect but as she basically said, so what if it didn’t? What if it weren’t. Why can’t sex workers lives be about fun and community and partying, like basically anyone else’s.

Is It Safe to be Gay in the UK? - Evening Standard

Just as every other new film with queer female representation, I Care A Lot was discussed intensely on the Internet following its release. Division was particularly strong over its ending. In the last two minutes of an otherwise enjoyable film, it seemed as though its two protagonists would receive a happy ending. As almost every queer person knows, happy endings to stories about us are incredibly rare, so much so that the “Bury Your Gays” theory has emerged in recent years to analyse the prevalence of this alarming trend. For me, Elaine’s book goes into something more metaphysical than gender roles and compulsive heterosexuality, beyond bio-essentialism while still rooted in, as she puts it “Romeo & Juliet & Elaine.”If anything, I do think the Gurlesque questions romance, or has a sense of anger toward the problem of romance, toward the male object of desire. I think of Ariana Reines’s coeur de lion. After I read it, he immediately opened YouTube and found Krystle Cole, the infamous Krystle Cole! It was almost sacrilegious to me seeing her, but then she was as magical, as perfect as I could’ve imagined. There’s something about loving something so much that you want to leave it unconsumed. It’s that fear of exhausting your satiety. Fear of the edible. Of losing what you have. While the oversaturated, bubblegum tones of Doug Emmet’s cinematography reflect the plastic superficiality of this sleek, anonymous, urbane world, the plot is in fact grounded in the horrifying reality of legal guardianship in the US. Blakeson’s aim is not a Ken Loach-style sweeping statement, however. Legal guardianship simply serves as the roots from which Marla’s evil flowers flourish. It is more a vaguely scathing commentary on American hypercapitalism than anything else, but Blakeson ensures that it’s nevertheless an entertaining one. The plot is exhilaratingly unpredictable, until the more generic second act takes a turn for the banal. Of course I am talking more than about Krystle Cole, I am talking about romance, which I am now trying to write poems about, my personal relationship to romance. And when it comes to that, I finally decided: I’d like to learn to be enraptured by my fear. PHOENIX (AP) — The first study of its kind found that people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer or gender non-confirming are nearly four times as likely to be victims of violent crime than those outside such communities.

Be Gay, Do Crimes: On the Gurlesque, Lana Del… | Poetry Be Gay, Do Crimes: On the Gurlesque, Lana Del… | Poetry

This disconnect between queer cinema and crime film might be surprising, given that, until fifty years ago, to be gay was more or less synonymous with doing crime. The famed origin story for the US gay rights movements is a police raid on a West Village dive bar in the summer of 1969. Two years prior, sexual activity between men was finally decriminalized in the UK. Sex between women wasn’t regulated with the same degree of verve, but it was the frequent subject of obscenity trials—in 1918, for instance, Maud Allan was charged with inciting a “Cult of the Clitoris” by dancing as Salome before largely female audiences in London’s music halls. Perhaps prohibitions against homosexuality meant that queer crime couldn’t be the subject of mainstream film, but a deeper dive into film history shows that this wasn’t a hard and fast rule. Case in point: Basil Deardon’s 1961 noir Victim. Marla’s demise was not inconceivable, given her utter disregard for the people whose lives her greed destroyed, but it begs the question: why do so many (cis-het, white) male villains not only survive, but also often thrive after their misdeeds? What message does this send out to the thousands of queer women watching this film, hoping for a glimmer of representation and the happy endings that are by no means such a rarity in real life? For example, researchers found that such a population is much more likely to be victimized by someone they know well than a person who is a non-sexual and gender minority.

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The gag strips are mostly unfunny. Some of the historical comics and the ones abt other countries are decent but some of them are quite dry.

I Care A Lot takes “be gay, do crime” literally | Varsity

For a poem to be a Gurlesque poem, they have to traffic in the detritus of actual girlhood. Maybe there’s unicorns and glitter but there’s also snot and vomit. Because that’s a category that is always so marginalized but there’s nothing more meaningless in this culture than a girl… in terms of age and gender.They’re femme, maybe high-femme. It has to be girly but it has to be aggressive, assertive, to take you by the throat and throw you down the stairs. It has to be a little fearless and bad ass for sure. Be gay, do crime.” These four short words have become the new rallying cry at Pride demonstrations, but a glance at the canon of queer film suggests you might not hear this sentiment at the cinema. Classic films like The Children’s Hour and Suddenly, Last Summer often take up Gothic elements to convey the paranoia and sense of entrapment felt by queer characters, but their plots are focused on individual psychology rather than the detection of a crime, as are more overt crime films, such Harold Prince’s gay murder mystery Something for Everyone from 1970. It was a bit sad that with all the excellent personal narratives, there was only one intersex story and it was a purely educational one with interviews (generally if you pay attention to intersex activism - and you do, right?! right?! -, you probably heard all that from the original people who made those arguments). I felt this could have been commissioned better: reach out to those activists and pair them with artists to let them tell their own stories. That could also be a whole anthology :) This also relates to the sense I have about the “flippancy” of the way politics have been discussed around your book. We’re living in times where everything we do is archived, if not immediately reported online, so it makes sense that someone would adopt a strategy of slant, ironized or even coded meanings. I’m mostly thinking about The Cut article and how people responded to the playful and almost blasphemous pull-quotes about a few political issues.

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