The first time Lauren Zuniga ever performed in a poetry slam in 1999, she won $12, two cigarettes and a condom. Today, she makes her living selling poetry books, touring and leading workshops. In between she married a man, had two kids, divorced, and began dating women and identifying as queer.
After 200+ years of running the American government via several committees of boring old white guys, the Obama administration has finally figured out how to govern this country in a way that makes sense for everybody. On March 6, the White House celebrated Women’s History Month by hosting Aretha Franklin, Janelle Monáe, Patti LaBelle, Melissa Etheridge, Jill Scott, Ariana Grande and Tessanne Chin for a concert intended to celebrate the struggles, achievements and contributions made by women in music. Earlier in the day, First Lady Michelle Obama hosted “I’m Every Woman: The History of Women in Soul,” an interactive workshop for 124 middle school, high school and college students. Participants gathered in the State Dining Room to meet with Robert Santelli, Executive Director of The GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles and several of the performers to discuss the social and political climates of America that led to the advent of soul music, and its impact on the world. Michelle Obama described soul as “the kind of music that makes you move, no matter who you are or where you come from.”
Hello my little blue-bellied lizards! Remember last year, when we all met up with other like-minded music-loving queermos for International Record Store Day? If you happened to miss it (like I did), here’s your chance to fix all that. This year’s International Record Store Day takes place on April 19, and you can support your local shop while collecting super-rare and limited releases, re-releases, 7-inches, picture discs, brand new singles and other magical musical ephemera. Jack White is working to record, produce and distribute a new single in an attempt to break a world record, and some of the greatest rock bands in the world are putting out exclusive material just for the occasion.
Today in news that shattered everything we once knew about life, love and the world at large, Blondie frontwoman and professional cheekbones-haver Debbie Harry announced that she identifies as bisexual, and that she has enjoyed relationships with both men and women.
During an interview with a German magazine promoting their ten studio album Ghosts of Download (LOL what?), Ms. Harry confirmed that longstanding rumours of her alleged romantic dalliances with women were indeed true, and although she had enjoyed more longstanding relationships with men, “let’s just say women are more sensual.”
History buffs, get your Napoleon hats on, because this episode is for you and you can watch along right here!
Every time I hit “play” I feel like I’m hopping onto the Magic School Bus. I know that Captain Kirk aka Ms. Frizzle is about to school me on some aspect of tech, history, literature or philosophy.
Actual dinner can be such a production, I’m exhausted just THINKING ABOUT IT. And not only is it a production tonight, but it’ll be a production tomorrow night too. It happens practically every night! It’s redundant and takes forever and really, the dinner plates are just so big. I’d rather spend hours putting together a mess of food that I can eat with my hands, hot or cold, and from a tiny plate, than spend that time putting together a mess of food that has to be eaten immediately, piping hot, from full-size dinner plates using all the flatware.
Identity terms have really hard jobs. Seriously, think about all the things they have to do! There’s that private shine the right one is supposed to have when you call yourself it in your head. There’s the categorical meaning they’re supposed to take on when you use them to describe yourself to other people. And then there’s the baggage each drags along — the baggage of connotation and etymology, baggage that can be useful and positive (when it reminds us of shared community and shared history, for example) or negative (say, when it’s used to stereotype). At some point, privately or publicly, every well-examined word struggles under the pressure. And there’s no group better at thorough public examination than us QUILTBAGs.
For trans women, buying bras is often a new experience, even if we’re adults. If you transition later in life, you probably won’t have much experience picking out bras and the sizing might be confusing. Since most of us didn’t have the typical girl childhood, we’re kind of jumping in feet first and blind. When you add in other factors that are unique to trans women, picking out the right bra can be an arduous task.
Whether your goal is coming out to a new person or starting a queer-straight alliance at your high school, you’re gonna have to eventually speak up. And in doing so, you might feel a little bit insane, particularly if you’re the first of your kind. You may even question your own cause. While I was told to never talk about religion or politics, I later realized that this only applied to belief systems which deviated from those of the majority.
Scout’s Honor Clothing Company wants to send one lucky human to May A-Camp! YOU COULD BE THAT HUMAN!
Hey everyone! Scout’s Honor is doing a thing! You probably already know and love Autostraddle, and maybe you’ve heard of A-Camp. Maybe you so wish you could go to A-Camp but you just can’t afford it. That’s where we come in! Apply for the Scout’s Honor Campership and we’ll send you camp for free, and in a spiffy new shirt to boot.
I wanted to answer the question When did this happen?.
This is a post we wrote five years ago. We were super-ignorant about all things trans then. Pathetically enough, we came up with that list during a rare moment when almost every team member was present, including like 12 interns, and not one of us thought it was weird to include “Boys Don’t Cry” (although we did acknowledge that it wasn’t a lesbian film in the post? specifically we oddly declared: “Boys Don’t Cry definitely isn’t a “lesbian film” — there aren’t any lesbians in it! But it has a lesbian director and a queer sensibility and is important for other reasons so we wanted to talk about it anyhow.”). And honestly that post was far from our last mistake w/r/t trans issues!!
Part of why we’re so committed to trans female inclusion now is because we’re retroactively appalled at how minuscule our collective knowledge was back then despite the fact that we were actively making queer media. If we could be that ignorant, then anybody could! I didn’t know a single g-damn thing about trans women, honestly, besides the very few representations I’d seen in the media growing up, all of which were really awful. I bought it, though. I didn’t know anything else. All the trans misogyny and all the transphobia, I bought it. I pretty much ate what I was served and never questioned it. It’s kind of terrifying. When I read “Whipping Girl” for the first time, almost every behavior she spoke out against was a way I myself had behaved, every media lie she deconstructed was one I’d once believed.
When I first started hearing from people who already knew this stuff, it was from kids just coming out of college who were active in campus LGBTQ groups, took women’s studies & queer theory, etc. I was an English major who dated frat boys, I graduated in 2003. I mention this because people tend to assume I have some kind of “background” in LGBTQ issues, and I don’t, and neither does Laneia, except that I’m constantly self-educating and have been since around 2005. Lately that’s involved a lot of educating about trans issues. But before starting Autostraddle and when I was first coming out in the mid-‘00s, I didn’t have any friends, female or male, who were out as trans or who I knew were trans. i eventually had some friends who had trans male friends so I knew a teeny tiny bit about trans men, but that was it. I don’t know, it just was what it was.
Anyhow, if you want to dislike Autostraddle because we once wrote posts like that, that’s okay, I get it, I’m sorry, and like I said, that’s hardly our worst mistake. this very week a thing went up we (laneia & i) hadn’t seen ahead of time that when we did see, were like, we need to take that down. I’m not trying to convince you to like us or consider us trans-female-inclusive, either. You don’t have to. I do feel like the proof is in the pudding (or in the level of ire we receive from TERFs?) and in the incredible community of trans women who read and write for autostraddle, but you can disagree. i’ve just come to a place in my life where I have to accept that not everyone is going to like what our site is about or what we write about or how all the various cis and trans and otherwise-identified humans of Autostraddle conduct ourselves, and that’s okay. I also have to accept that when I say things like this, it will be interpreted in vastly different ways by vastly different people and I can’t control that either.
but i just wanted to address this question because I don’t want any trans women to think that we live in a world where a website as large/popular as autostraddle, a website which declares itself inclusive of trans women, was still publishing shit like that in 2014, because I don’t think the world needs more depressing news about trans inclusion in queer women’s spaces today.
"I’m faster than the speed of the light when it comes to getting those gum drops out of their packaging. I remove your bra so quickly, I put the “yonic” in tachyonic particle. It doesn’t bother me in the least that tachyonic particles are hypothetical, or that most physicists don’t think they exist because they’re not consistent with the known law of physics. I’ll tell you what, most physicists have not yet experienced the thrill of me taking off their bras. I feel sorry for them. Their big bangers need to breathe."
Reader, I am a broke-ass college student, but I also would like to own more sex toys than I currently do. So naturally, I was overjoyed when I saw this post about how to procure (safe, quality) sex toys on a budget. Look within for advice on buying used sex toys (the answer is almost always to not), and the best vibrators, dildos, and other sexy accoutrements you can get for less-outrageous amounts of money. Thanks, Autostraddle!
