Surprise, queer kids play sports!
Bonus quote for The HLE:
Vaillancourt has had similar experiences in hockey, a sport she discovered as a toddler watching her brother play.
She has always been strong-willed, with a hint of defiance in her French Canadian accent and the arch of her eyebrows. Her parents worried when she came out in college.
Posted by tentimesfast at 6:29 AM
NewNowNext has a rad (and only partially complete) A to Z list of girl bands.
Girl rawk for the what? For the win.
Posted by tentimesfast at 6:25 AM
Background: I actually really, really, really (rillyrillyrilly!) like The Gossip. I have all of their albums. I think Beth Ditto has an amazing voice and is an extraordinary advocate for Big Girls Everywhere and is courageous and smart and all sorts of other good things.
I'd also like for her to shut the fuck up sometimes.
I'm not sure when this started. If I had to guess, I think it started somewhere between the NME interview where she blamed gay dudes for the fact that women have fucked up body images, her recent whine about Angelina Jolie's bisexuality and the announcement of a Beth Ditto advice column ("What would Beth Ditto do?"). Add to the first three the fact that you can't throw a virtual stone anymore without hitting a gossip blog's post about Beth getting nekkid on stage, and damn, I am sick. of. it.
Also of annoyance: Beth Ditto is from Arkansas, y'all! Did you know that? I had no idea. Dude, the woman gets the teensiest bit of prompting before she launches into a four zillion word I'M FROM ARKANSAS, Y'ALL rant in this month's Interview (which: props to The HLE for liberating that shit from her mail room for me. Holla!) She can't even stop talking about it when she's interviewing other people. (There is an awesome comment on that YouTube vid: "The chubby drag queen is sweet but those two boys scare me and I really didn't understand what they were talking about.")
Beth Ditto: chubby drag queen who won't effing shut her trap once in a while. Please do, Beth. For the good of the people.
Posted by tentimesfast at 5:09 AM
A conversation after an intoxicated viewing of "Platinum Weddings" on WE:
tentimesfast: Dude ...
Housemate's Boyfriend: Ohmygod ...
tentimesfast: Dude, I can't afford that shit!
HB: They're gonna make that shit legal for you. TIFFANY'S RINGS AND SHIT!
tentimesfast: I could buy, like, 20 cars for what they're paying.
HB: DIAMONDS, BITCHES!
tentimesfast: Oh, god, they're paying that much for FLOWERS? Oh, FUCK ME.
HB: HETEROSEXUALITY!
tentimefast: What?!
HB: They will get you ... for fifty.
tentimesfast: Huh?
HB: For fifty percent of your net worth, SON! ENJOY!
tentimesfast: Oh, no ... no. You people make weddings look like the devil.
HG: FIFTY!
Maybe it's best that gay marriage isn't legal, huh?
Posted by tentimesfast at 5:38 AM
Confession: I've been a bastard. I mean, in the past. Still, it's relevant. Call it a post-quarter-life crisis.
In the last ten years, I've discounted the gender and sexual identity of more people than I can count. Newfound queer identity? Whatever, you're probably going to sleep with a dude sometime soon. Newfound trans identity? Um, trend whore much?
I've been a bastard. My friends have been bastards. They still are bastards. Nobody is good enough, nobody has struggled enough or lived through enough. Your parents haven't kicked you out, or stopped talking to you. You haven't lost your best friends, your siblings, been booted from school, been homeless, haven't lost enough jobs. Competition, competition. You weren't expelled from high school for starting a GSA. The cops didn't harass you outside of a gay bar at 17. You didn't lose someone (queer) to HIV or suicide or alcoholism. You didn't protest loud enough or long enough or hard enough.
You didn't. End of story. End of relevance.
So, if you were into adding things into the Are You Queer Enough? competition, you'd probably also toss in all of the rad cultural bullshit, too. Lesbian Until Graduation, Girls Gone Wild, every pop culture reference that has made people think that queer chick identity is transitional, experimental, and Not Real. When we see girls kissing, it's very much pushed into the realm of fantasy. It's titillation, and it's silly and it's "look at her nails, they're not short enough.".
After 10 years of this, you sort of form an opinion. All of your friends support it, and that opinion goes like this: Queer Identity Is Formed At Birth And That Is It. And you agree with it, and you discount & discount & mock & discount ...
And then you meet someone who fucks your whole idea of everything you've learned so far. HLE, you've 180d me.
I don't know what it is. I think it's the you don't know x until you know y thing. In this case: you don't know what an fucking asshole you've been your whole life about queer identity until you hear how hurtful it is for your friend to run into those same ideas about queer identity. And then: fuck those ideas about queer identity.
And really: fuck them.
I can't abide by that shit anymore. I can't have my old ideas about gender and sexual ID fucking with the heads of my friends. I can't have someone hurting because I can't let go. I can't be the THAT GUY that I was. I just can't.
I've got your back, HLE. I swear.
Posted by tentimesfast at 5:37 AM
Apparently, the Mirah show at the Black Cat was so rad that someone decided to upload some videos to YouTube. I'm so glad that I decided to spend that night drinking post-show beers with the Hot Academic instead of, you know, actually going to the show.
I'm equally glad that Mirah busted out "Cold Cold Water", which is one of my favorite songs ever.
"Advisory Committee" made the set list, too. Woo, beers with a girl who barely even identifies as queer! So much better than live versions of the songs you love:
Insult to injury: Laura Veirs (with glasses this time) and "Magnetized". Wellity, wellity, well ... I'm an idiot.
My ongoing effort to miss every queer artist who plays within a 500-mile radius of Washington DC continues.
Team Gina (Gina Bling? Insanely motherfucking HOTT) will be playing the Phase Fest on August 16th. Working at night for the loss! I'll also be missing Katastrophe and Athens Boys Choir because I'm a bad, bad, bad 'mo.
Friday night though: Nicky Click (and hopefully some other rad stuff). Saturday night: God-des and She (and definitely some other rad stuff). I'm so there. For once.
Posted by tentimesfast at 4:59 AM
1.) There are 645,000 kinds of orgasm. Try to have them all, preferably at once.
2.) "Suck my tits, you animal!" is a completely rad and valid way of talking dirty to the person you're fucking. It's not cornball by any stretch of the imagination.
3.) "Clitty" is a great thing to say and won't get you punched in the face.
4.) Don't push your partner's boundaries.
4a.) If your partner is butch identified, push away. They're probably unsure of how to eroticize their own bodies and need some help from you. You should try telling them how boys like whatever it is that you want to do to them. That'll help.
4b.) If your partner is trans identified, see 4. Don't push boundaries!
4c.) Actually, 4b applies to butches, too. Sorry, dudes. Confused? No bigs. We didn't mean what we said in the other article.
5.) Do it for daddy. Like, a whole lot.
6.) You only have one partner? God, you FUCKING PROLE!
7.) 9 million years of publishing, and all we could find were these 20 random photos. Also, we're going to just sort of toss them around the book in weird spots.
8.) Fist, fist, fist your way to freedom.
9.) Bad porn = hott porn!
10.) Slice, dice, burn. Lather, rinse, repeat.
11.) BDSM is pretty much the way to go. Y'all aren't into that? Uh ... fuck.
12.) How-to: seamlessly transition from massage into foot worship in one easy chapter!
13.) One book, 309 pages, and like, 6 contributors. Make of that what you will.
14.) Michelle Tea is pretty much a modern era Beat writer and is the best thing to happen to this whole book.
15.) Alternate titles:
On Our Backs Guide to the Lesbian Sex That Happens at Polar Opposite Ends of the Experience Spectrum and Nothing In Between
On Our Backs Guide to Acting Out That Dream That You Had That You Won't Tell Anyone About, Not Even Your Girlfriend
On Our Backs Guide to Becoming a Sexual Revolutionary
On Our Backs Love Letter to How Awesome We Were Once Back in the Day
On Our Backs Guide to How Busted Some of Our Models Were. Seriously, Dude, You Wouldn't, Would You?
On Our Backs Guide to How to Sell Your Magazine to Some Corporation and Not Publish Anymore But Not Actually Tell Your Readers Anything About That
On Our Backs Guide to OW, THAT FUCKING HURTS, god, SAFE WORD! SAFE WORD!
On Our Backs Guide to Look, I'm Not Going to Do That. Yes, I Know I Said I Would For Your Birthday. Sorry.
On Our Backs Guide to Couples Therapy
