Greetings, Toast! If you read just one thing we posted this week it ought to be Mallory’s chat with Mey Rude, Gabby Bellot, Brook Shelley, and Frances Lee about transmisogyny within the queer community, disc golfing, dating, and a host of other things. Seriously: read every word.
I thoroughly enjoyed Teresa Mathew’s profile of the San Jose Raging Grannies, as someone who hopes to have a long life and whose typical breakfast consists of two cups of coffee + rage:
Age is a serious factor in the Grannies’ form of protest. They can show up for an hour or so, sing, and leave. Revolution isn’t necessarily a young person’s game, but prolonged protest marches might be.
Singing can’t solve everything, and it can’t completely dissolve Julia’s frustration. Even as she admits the toll her anger takes on her, it is something she cannot easily ignore. If anything, her ire has only grown more potent with age, stacking up alongside the years she has lived. “I’m more angry than when I was younger,” Julia says. “Everything is money, money, money.”
shut up
everybody shut up
I SAID SHUT UP I GOTTA HARP SOMETHING
“Does anyone else find it odd that we use the word ‘supertaster’ as if you are somehow better at tasting than the rest of us, when what it really means is that you cannot enjoy flavorful lettuces?”
Ren Jender talked with director Deniz Gamze Ergüven about Mustang, her feminist fairy tale film:
RJ: I see a lot of parallels in the uncle’s treatment of the girls to how fundamentalist Christians treat girls in the families here in the US, based on our own traditions. Were you thinking of the girls’ position in the family in a larger context of women elsewhere?
DGE: Women from very different cultures with no intersection culturally or geographically with Turkey could completely relate to the story of the girls. And it’s very strongly anchored in all the big religions. I showed the film in a women’s prison in France and there were women from the four corners of the world, from Africa to Eastern Europe who said they had the exact same treatment.
Mindy Hung wrote so beautifully about her father, her religious upbringing, and her present atheism:
I was desperate to be a good, Christian kid. I never thought that I had the luxury of misbehaving. There weren’t a lot of East Asian people in our neighborhood and at my school at the time. I was visible. I knew I would never get away with anything and my wish to be accepted went hand in hand with my desire to be invisible.
At church summer camp—I may have been ten?—we watched a short movie. The dialogue was in English, but all of the actors were of Asian descent. A man befriended a woman and a boy and tried to introduce them to Christianity. There was some sexual tension—or maybe I just want to imagine charged-yet-somehow-pure banter about salvation. After much walking and talking, the kid triggered a rock slide and the man leaped to shelter the child with his body. In a long sequence, they both went tumbling down a hill, white boulders and rocks crashing over them. At the hospital, the man was pronounced dead, having sacrificed himself for the boy. The kid and woman hugged and the woman decided to convert to Christianity so that the man’s death would not be in vain.
The. Fucking. End.
The teacher handed out blank paper and told us to write down what we thought of the movie.
I wrote nothing.
“You think blackmail is such an ugly word” and other Signs You’re About To Be in a Sinister Homoerotic Subplot in a Midcentury Drama
A week later, responses to this piece continue to show up in my inbox and in pending comments. I have resolved not to share any more after this week, but it should be noted that a lot of the notes are truly kind and empathetic and wonderful to read! Then there’s this one. The key word here is “begins” — also “analysis,” and probably also “nothing”:
(…He goes on.)
tfw you’re reading along and nodding, like, okay, and then hmm:
I love you, Toasties. Have the greatest weekend.
