Miss Major on the Stonewall movie:
The best thing I can remember about that night is that when the girls decided, “no, we ain’t doing this,” some of the girls got out of the paddy wagon and came back, the police got so scared they backed into the club and locked the doors! I mean, if nothing else, that was the funniest thing to have in your mind watching it happen. And meanwhile across the street there are all these cute little white boys cheering us on, and saying “don’t hurt the girls!” and all this blah blah. They weren’t in the fight.
Rukmini Callimachi does a follow-up on the process of reporting her piece about the Yazidi women and girls used as sex slaves by ISIS (and also recommends Yazda as a good NGO and destination for donations):
Q: What special considerations do you have to take into account when talking to the victims, particularly those who are still children?
A: In the case of the 12-year-old, I interviewed her in the presence of her family. In the other cases, I interviewed them alone. I wanted them to be alone so they wouldn’t be ashamed, especially in front of male relatives.
But with the 12-year-old, it felt like that one was on the fence. She is a child. I wanted the family to be present at her side and to essentially vet my questions and make sure I wasn’t asking anything that went too far.
In every instance, we asked the women if they wanted to be identified or not. Most said they wanted to be identified by first initial or age. But there were also outliers. There were a couple of women — one older, one younger — who said, very clearly, that they wanted their names used and their faces shown. They said: “We are not ashamed and we are not afraid of them. By hiding in any way, by not identifying ourselves, we would be signaling shame.”
RIP, Julian Bond:
He strove to vanquish discrimination against anyone who knew oppression, his friends and family said, recently advocating for gay couples who wished to marry. He’d snap pictures with anyone on the street. He talked to the president.
“Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life – from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP,” President Obama said in a statement Sunday. “Michelle and I have benefited from his example, his counsel, and his friendship – and we offer our prayers and sympathies to his wife, Pamela, and his children.”
Here is a picture of my friend Carrie’s puppy, at a bar:
In other puppy news, Anne Helen Petersen has a new puppy as well:
This is how Emily St. John Mandel edited Station Eleven, and it worked out really well for her, so maybe try that?
Lisa Hix has an AWESOME interview with Anita Pointer of the Pointer Sisters on music, the civil rights movement, and her massive collection of black memorabilia:
I first discovered black memorabilia in 1980. We were headed to Prescott, Arkansas, where my momma’s from, and we saw an antiques store. I’ve always loved looking around antiques stores, so we stopped. That’s when I saw Dancing Sam, the first piece of black memorabilia that I bought. He was a painted black wooden doll, with a wire holder on his back and little hinges on his limbs. You hold him on top of a plywood platform, and you tap the plywood so he jumps and dances around. The packaging says, “Hours and hours of fun for your children.” [Laughs.] I was like, “Whoa, you mean kids would sit there and play with this for hours?” Dancing Sam was black with white lips, like blackface makeup, so he intrigued me. It all started there. I began going to antiques stores and picking up black memorabilia wherever I could.
This is a great idea! We should do this!
Friend of The Toast Hieu Truong is in a STRONGWOMAN competition for colon cancer! She’d love your help, or just some encouraging words!
I will never get tired of Joel and Tyler arguing about fictional dudes they would bang (today, Wolverine v Cyclops), and we don’t include a lot of stuff for or by gay dudes on this site, so honestly, I’m doing this for The Movement:
Joel: It’s not like there’s a wrong choice here, per se. I just prefer a tall man who can lead a group of disparate super-powered mutants. While it’s certainly in vogue in certain nerd circles right now to stan for Cyclops after years of being maligned by his lame characterization in both the source material and that god awful ’90s cartoon (I said it). But for me, the movies are where I really started to turn around on him. Sure, James Marsden’s chiseled features and blindingly white teeth didn’t hurt, but even while constantly being sidelined in the narrative, there is still something really charming about his devotion to Jean, the professor, and the school itself. How can you not like that guy?
Tyler: I dunno, he doesn’t have metal claws that shoot out from in between his knuckles, a hell of a lot of rage problems stemming from buried-away traumas, and a penchant for tank tops out of which his rippling biceps bulge. So, please, tell me more about how the blind guy who shoots lasers out of his face is the one to go with.
