I identify as the earth
and as everything
that has ever happened to me.
I’d swear on my name
all of it is true
but I don’t have one. Not yet.
Steven Universe tells kids that they’re loved, that they’re special, and that there is nothing wrong with being themselves. This week it taught them that they don’t have to give up.
“Hillary famously eats one raw jalapeño a day, which is probably what gives her the internal fire necessary to endure 30 years of misogynistic bullshit and still want this job. ”
Of course, the “comeback” Trump is much the same as the Trump of the eighties; there is no “new” Trump, just as there was never a “new” Nixon. Rather, all along there have been several Trumps: the hyperbole addict who prevaricates for fun and profit; the knowledgeable builder whose associates profess awe at his attention to detail; the narcissist whose self-absorption doesn’t account for his dead-on ability to exploit other people’s weaknesses; the perpetual seventeen-year-old who lives in a zero-sum world of winners and “total losers,” loyal friends and “complete scumbags”; the insatiable publicity hound who courts the press on a daily basis and, when he doesn’t like what he reads, attacks the messengers as “human garbage”; the chairman and largest stockholder of a billion-dollar public corporation who seems unable to resist heralding overly optimistic earnings projections, which then fail to materialize, thereby eroding the value of his investment—in sum, a fellow both slippery and naïve, artfully calculating and recklessly heedless of consequences.
Six years ago I was a suicidal queer kid in a small town in the north of England, in the aftermath of a major personal trauma. I was alone, afraid, broken, and relentlessly sad.
In my isolation, as I attempted to simultaneously quell and articulate my ever-increasing gender-dysphoria, to be out and queer and visible in a homophobic environment, and to work out how to sit in a skin I had never learned to love, now scarred from sexual trauma and even more alien than it had always been, the Autostraddle website allowed me to connect with a vast network of people whose fears and struggles and passions echoed my own.
I read about hate crime and politics and endless legal battles, I read about break-ups and coming out and homophobic family Christmases. People wrote about homelessness, and depression, and falling in love with straight girls, and I saw my terrified baby-queer heart reflected in all these stories.
I was connected to something, and in seeing all the ways the pain I was experiencing had been known over and over so many times before by queer folks everywhere, I was also able to read about the love and joy those folks had also known, and let myself imagine how those things might one day feature in my life too. For the first time, I considered the possibility of authentic queer adulthood, and I began to genuinely believe that is was possible to be like me and to also be happy.
Just as I was learning what it meant to be a survivor, @autostraddle showed me that there were queer futures worth surviving for.
Autostraddle has literally saved my life on a number of occasions and so it was incredible this week for us to see that Resistance Roller Derby Glasgow was mentioned in an Autostraddle article with a wee note asking the community to take a look at what we’re doing and support us if they can. There is a poetry in the way these two things have come together that I’m finding hard to articulate, but I knew I needed to give it a shot.
When I think about this project and what I hope we’re building here, I think about the potentiality I met in myself for the first time in the Straddleverse and the formidable power of a community that is unapologetically itself: Queer, compassionate, and engaged - constantly learning and growing and being shaped by the people who make it everything it is.
I hope that RRDG can grow to be another example of this kind of community. As a movement and a culture roller derby has such an incredible potential to be this kind of positive space for inclusion and action, and I hope that six years from now someone will be able to look back and say that Resistance helped them find a way to be a part of that.
It’s a dark time right now. The political climate is terrifying for so many systemically marginalised and disadvantaged groups. It’s uncertain and scary, and in our fear and isolation it is more important than ever that we can find these small pockets of resistance, these ways to connect with the international intergenerational community of people who are with us in our struggle.
So thank you, Autostraddle, for being there for me in 2010, and thank you now for being there for Resistance, as we try to help this spark catch.
Love and glitter,
Killjoy
Resistance Roller Derby Glasgow
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/resistance-roller-derby-glasgow-lgbt–2/
CRYING AGAIN
In the coming months, the calls to normalize Trump’s presidency will continue to grow. They will come from the press, from celebrities, from our own friends and family — but there is nothing normal about him or about the administration that will surround him. The GOP’s strategy since the 1906s has been to dupe low information, rural, and religious voters into putting their party into power by appealing to the fear of “the other.” Trump’s presidency is a an all-out war on “the other.” We can’t let ourselves get lulled into complacency because he blurted out “I’m fine with marriage equality” in one interview.
Was fondly remembering this picture by Robin Roemer from a 2009 photoshoot and interview - Kate McKinnon: The Autostraddle Photoshoot
