Orlando 06/12... this is not a miracle

Gust van Sant's My Own Private Idaho;
Chelsea Manning's, Rock Hudson's and Justin Trudeau's pictures (all taken from the Internet);
Paul Phung's & published by the magazine AnOther: What It Was Like Modelling in London’s Queerest Fashion Show);

Why hate is fuelling politics (Tom Standage/The Economist, Set 2022) [this video was age restricted and didn't show well on the page, so I took it out]; 

The Night of the Long Knives, Military History/Youtube);
53rd & 3rd (Ramones, 1976);
This is not America... Shalalalala!
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016);
Queen, Radio Gaga (1984);
Queen, Another One Bites the Dust (1980);
Queen, Under Pressure (1982);
Queen, I Want to Break Freee (1984);
Queen, A Kind of Magic (1986);
Queen, Living on My Own (1993/1985);
Nat King Cole, Nature Boy (1948);

Noel Rosa, Mulato Bamba (1932?);

Altered State (Osman Ozel/Dazed);
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"Le propre de la minorité, c'est de faire valoir la puissance du non-dénombrable, même quand elle est composée d'un seul membre. C'est la formule des multiplicités... Femme, nous avons tous à le devenir, que nous soyons masculins ou féminins. Non-blanc, nous avons tous à le devenir, que nous soyons blancs, jaunes ou noirs."

Deleuze & Gattari, Mille Plateaux

"... lines that would be straight in two dimensions might be curved when viewed from the stand point of a higher dimensionality... whichever way we choose to investigate the concept of straightness, we find that it eludes us more and more..."

A. D'Abro
"Je ne sache pas que cela ai empêché Sémiramis de régner en Syrie, et les Amazones de posséder jadis une grande partie de l'Asie."
Caïus Julius César (traduction Baudement)

"Deux personnes peuvent dire, 'la maîtresse de X..., je la connais', prononcer deux noms différents et ne se tromper ni l'une ni l'autre. Une femme qu'on aime suffit rarement à tous nos besoins et on la trompe avec une femme qu'on n'aime pas. Quant au genre d'amours que Saint-Loup avait hérités de M. de Charlus, un mari qui y est enclin fait habituellement le bonheur de sa femme."
"... chez des femmes comme la fille d'Odette ou les jeunes filles de la petite bande il y a une telle diversité, un tel cumul de goûts alternants si même ils ne sont pas simultanés, qu'elles passent aisément d'une liaison avec une femme à un grand amour pour un homme, si bien que définir le goût réel et dominant reste difficile."
"L'ideal de virilité des homosexuels à Saint-Loup n'est pas le même mais aussi conventionnel et aussi mensonger. Le mensonge gît pour eux dans le fait de ne pas vouloir se rendre compte que le désir physique est à la base des sentiments auxquels ils donnent une autre origine... le courage des jeunes hommes, l'ivresse des charges de cavalerie... pour Sant-Loup la guerre fut davantage l'idéal même qu'il s'imaginait poursuivre dans ses désirs beaucoup plus concrets mais ennuagés d'idéologie..."
Marcel Proust

"No fim da folia cósmica, os 'tenentes do diabo' são desbaratados pelo 'gay power' do partido dos anjos... São aqui os anjos que servem à causa divina 'agindo como diabos'... 'Bekriegen uns mit unsern eignen Waffen;/Es Sind auch Teufel, doch verkappt [Nos combatem com nossas próprias armas;/Não passam de demônios enrustidos]."

Haroldo de Campos (Deus & o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe)

"Conhece a Isadora?... Ela rodou a chave nas mãos e, por um instante, pensei numa baliza na frente de um desfile de Sete de Setembro, jogando para o algo  o  bastão cheio de fitas coloridas...  uma farda verde em cima da cadeira, ao lado das botas negras brilhantes."

Caio Fernando Abreu

"Yeah, but I always ask them for the money first, Robert. You know, that's how I know. And that I tell them I can't see them again afterwards."
"I wouldn't fuck guys, unless they had poppers. If they had poppers I would fuck them. Fuck'em good, ha ha ha. I'd like it if they were fat, with a lot of money, ha ha ha."
Jim Carroll (Please Kill Me)
"When David said in Melody Maker that he was gay—then he changed it, and said he was bisexual, which was what he really meant—he never would have had the balls to do that unless he'd been hanging around with Iggy and Lou."
"David and Iggy chose Berlin to hang out in because there's more drag queens per square inch performing onstage than any other city in the world... they spent all their time fighting over who could get the best-looking drag queen."
Angela Bowie (Please Kill Me)
"But Dee Dee and those guys would ridicule me. I was still hanging out every day and Dee Dee would come by with his arm around this guy Michael, acting all fruity... He was stealing all my mother's jewelry, her clothes, her makeup, and her scarves, which created even more fights between them. She would flip out when she saw all her clothes were missing. That was another reason I didn't like glitter—it just created more fights at home."
Mickey Leigh (Please Kill Me)
"The great thing about Dee Dee is that he slept with everybody. Dee Dee slept with me, Dee Dee slept with Seymour, I think he slept with Danny—I mean Dee Dee slept with everybody and anybody. And he made you feel good."
Linda Stein (Please Kill Me)
"And I stuck my hand out, and Kennedy's standing right there. My  head was right by his dick, man, and I shook hands with him. Well, more like one of those finger-touching moments—he looked so fucking beautiful, man."
Ron Asheton (Please Kill Me)

"... for boys, remember that your older brothers cousins, uncles, and your fathers are not your role models..."

Kurdt Coebane, Journals

"... if the locals are, you know, of the mulleted persuasion..."

James St. James (Freak Show)
"'I had known Keith and Ricky since they were in high school. I vividly remember seeing them walking to school with lipstick on and their hair all done, holding hands. I was just like, oh these boys, they are not gonna make it. Because in Georgia back then, it was not at all cool to be gay...'" Maureen McGinley (as quoted in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up)

"... Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. Esses cowboys são todos cagalhões, no bom sentido, por isso estão sempre regulando a lenta, se param de beber perdem a coragem e não sabem nem segurar uma arma..."

Júpiter Maçã, A Odisséia

"lugar maravilhoso da CONTRACULTURA... país que tem o detetive de polícia como exemplo na TV, e contudo sente paixão e amor pelo gângster no closet!"

Gerald Thomas, Entre Duas Fileiras

"When the Stonewall riots happened in 1969 that signaled the beginning of gay liberation... people were coming out even if they weren't gay. By the early seventies people started going to the extremes of being gay."
Jack Walls (Please Kill Me)
"A pivotal moment was March 1984's Operation Pressure Point, a massive drug bust whose targets included smack-infested Avenue B, masterminded by a thrusting young U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York named Rudolph Giuliani. Then AIDS came into the picture, claiming the lives of many artists (including Keith Haring) and some musicians, too, notably Klaus Nomi, in 1983, and Ricky Wilson of the B-52's, in 1985."
Simon Reynolds (Rip It Up)

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I will say something risky, but intelligence is somersault (salto mortal, in Portuguese):

(1) There is no turning back, avoid self-victimization as much as stress over straitlaced/ghetto-like differences***—those two strategies only aggravate prejudice and stupidity. Even Donald Trump had to take a stand against the shooting attack. Hilary, Obama and the media all around the world were clear in their solidarity towards the victims and complete repudiation of homophobia. It is homophobic people who must feel trapped and they will feel trapped more and more, because this is an irreversible path: the basis of the bourgeois nuclear family (a nineteenth-century European bizarrie) has vanished.

(2) Actually, here lies the real problem, and someone too badly affected by a disease such as homophobia might indeed eventually prefer to see humanity itself vanishing just next (thus shame on play-with-fire demagogical politicians such as Donald Trump).  A single kiss is enough to expose in a flash their own world as a house of cards. A routine of beating their wives up is developed long before they depart to massively shoot strangers—everything out of confusion and frustration. Homophobia kills because it is sad and resentful. Nowadays it is desperate. This man was dead long before he killed. He was waiting to be buried. Authorities were (are still) blind.

(3) Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch (Hölderlin).

***There is no contradiction in being gay and disliking ghettos. Bars changed a lot since then, but here is what William Burrough's narrator in Junky says: “A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago... Occasionally, you find intact personalities in a queer bar, but fags set the tone of these joints, and it always brings me down to go into a queer bar.” The narrator doesn't go around shooting people. On the contrary, he denounces a spurious strategy of locking up and doing away with gay people even before one comes out to shoot them. This is a deadly strategy of a fearful and hypocrite society.

***See also:
- Kur-d-t My Ghost;
- faire ce qu'il faut, parler au spectre;
- souvenirs de soleils (1);
- souvenirs de soleils (2);
- Genug!
- Série, presque à genoux with thread;
- Pier Paolo Pasolini;
- Dogen with Hagakure;
- Boswell, Dover & others;
- Most interesting LGBTQUIA+ movies;

- Lost Splendor: Felix Yussupov's autobiography (Bob Atchison's site); 

- Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenburg Affair (a paper by James D. Steakley, Studies in Visual Communication, Spring 1983);

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"Dee do de de dee do de de
I don't have no time for no monkey business
Dee do de de dee do de de
I get so lonely lonely lonely lonely yeah
Got to be some good times ahead"

"I’ve been struggling with censorship throughout my career first as a poet and journalist in Russia, then as a multimedia artist in the West. My work is still being routinely censored as “pornographic,” “obscene” or “unsafe.” The online censorship of queer imagery is more rampant than ever and the corporate leash seems to be getting tighter and tighter, threatening our fundamental rights and freedoms. These policies inflict pain on our community by destroying any authentic, unfiltered documents of queer sensuality and sexuality. Instead we’re being served with a castrated and homogenised substitute promoted as the “gay norm,”" (Slava Mogutin, "Cruising on Hampstead Heath"/Dazed);
"“I like to change things,” she says. “My thing isn’t only to make music for people to have fun and dance to. I like to make people discuss things and think different. I have a huge LGBT audience, and I’m bisexual – but when you see me, if I don’t tell you I’m bisexual, I don’t have the physical representation of the LGBT (community). It’s different when you’re a drag queen. They’re not treated seriously, or like they’re talented people. So when I invited Pabllo, the idea was to educate people without them feeling like they were being educated. It was super indirect. I invited her to show people: she sings well as fuck – better than me, actually – she dances, she’s super-cool, she’s beautiful, and she’s a drag queen, and she deserves respect,”" (Anitta, "How Anitta became Brazil's biggest pop star"/Dazed);   

- Big tech firms need to stop reducing LGBT+ people to their sex lives (The Guardian); 
- Justin Trudeau: the rise and fall of a political brand  (The Guardian);
- "Chelsea Manning: Spring 2019" (Dazed);

- The 1970s genderqueer performance artist that turned trash into treasure (Dazed);
- How to be a good online ally to trans and non-binary people in 2019 (Dazed);
- "Mike Pence Booed, Confronted at Hamilton Performance" (Advocate);
- "One in Five Straight Men Watches Gay Sex" (Advocate);

*****Excerpts from a Michèle Lamy & GAIKA interview (Dazed, March 2018): 

"I always want to explore ‘radical luxury’ – I mean, I like radical more than I like luxury, and it’s very nice to be able to combine art and the commercial, but it’s one thing to say something, but you need to demonstrate it with the theme. And so we have the collection upstairs and this here (the boxing studio)." 

"For me it’s about equality, it’s about honesty. It’s about all these things where I can’t accept the alternative. Like some of the things we just seem to accept in the world as normal. Misogyny, racism, intolerance, you know, we have conversations surrounding these things in the media all the time, but nothing’s changing. And when you think about it, it’s pretty abhorrent. You know, you have to tell men not to rape people, like, including people who supposedly run the world, they have to be told not to rape…"

"I think boxing is a good metaphor for the fight we face and how we should be fighting it. You know, boxing is one-on-one. You look your opponent in the eyes and there are a lot of rules and and there is a lot of respect, traditionally. You know, it brings in a lot of different people; you take people off the street, and kids, and people from all different walks of life, and you see people realise themselves and their potential in the boxing ring. Instead of taking a gun and shooting 20 people in anger, you can be measured and see how to be strong and how to stand for yourself as an individual here."

"The world’s changing and I think the power in the world is shifting and changing. It’s shifting away from the West, it’s shifting away from men, and you’ve got one of two reactions: accept the world is changing and be part of it, or build walls, physically or metaphorically to stop it and to block it out... Yeah, to be like Trump and his wall, you know, in the White House cowering thinking ‘we are the last supreme white beings’, sitting there with his finger on the nuclear button... So extreme. You know, I think that it (Trump’s appointment) made a lot of people wake up..."

"You know, it never really made sense to me – the massive amount of inequality in the world just seems unnecessary. It just doesn’t seem like an efficient way to keep the world turning if you think of it as a machine or a structure. It’s purely about ego as far as I can tell, it’s not even just about the material side of things or money, it’s about dominance."

"... since the dawn of the internet, and people being constantly connected to these violent images every minute, every second, it’s important that the press change too. The media should be analysing themselves and changing the way they do things. I want to see unbiased opinions, I don’t want to see left-wing newspapers or right-wing newspapers. I want to see a tribune that covers it all in a fair way..." Michèle Lamy and GAIKA go head to head on the fight for the future (Dazed, 2018);

L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ issues in Eastern Europe:

'Shally and his friends had been heading to LGBTQ club night KiKi at Khidi, a cavernous techno club on the banks of the Mtkvari river, and decided to stop at Gallery for a drink on the way. “When we got there, police in riot gear with machine guns were blocking the entrance,” explains Shally. “We asked why we couldn’t go in, and what was happening to the people in there, but they kept shouting at us to leave. Eventually one grabbed me by the hair and started beating me, before my friends managed to drag me away...

'“The government is afraid of this new wave of people who are striving to be free and express themselves,” says Rivs, a Khidi mainstay who is at the heart of the city’s pulsing techno scene. “Georgia was always a conservative country, but what some people don’t realise is that if they continue to try and repress us, we will push back harder. The raids didn’t stop people going to the clubs. If anything, there are more parties in Tbilisi than there ever were,”' Tbilisi: altered state (Dazed);

'Some of the most exciting creative movements are forged in the face of great adversity. All around the world, a new generation of talented designers, musicians, and artists are coming together to fight against social repression, political turmoil, and violence with strength, creativity, and passion, as they seek to change not just the world around them, but the world at large...

Across Eastern Europe and stretching out into Russia, this wave of creativity is perhaps at its strongest. Rising from the ashes of the Eastern Bloc and propelled forwards by the likes of Gosha Rubchinskiy and Demna Gvasalia, designers including Anton Belinskiy, Situationist, Akà Prodiàshvili, and Berhasm are asserting themselves as ones to watch in Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia respectively, as part of the final generation to be born under Soviet rule,' Podmost is the wild fashion label rising out of Ukraine (Dazed);

'Kydeeva also redefines the idea of masculinity, as Russia has always been and remains the land of hyper-masculinity and strong heroic men: she liberates her boys from gender conventions, allowing them to be young and sensual, free and open to everything,' Coming of age in 21st century Russia (Dazed);

- Armed police storm Georgian nightclubs leading to a rave outside Parliament (Dazed);

- Hundreds protest in Georgia after police raid night clubs (Reuters);
- The gay ‘Gypsy’ who became Bulgaria’s biggest star (Dazed);