Barbara Smith via “This Shit Has Got to Change”: The Autostraddle Interview with Black Lesbian Feminist Legend Barbara Smith
We call upon the legacy of the Stonewall uprising. We call upon the legacy in the fight for our freedoms from the racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ableist, violent system. Tonight we will call out the names of some, not all — the ones that we know have been killed at the hands of the police, or from their neglect in upholding our safety. We cannot name all the names because often we are disappeared and not remembered.
Cara Page, Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project, via Audre Lorde Project Hosts Vigil and Flashmob To “Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves”
It’s here, it’s queer, and now it’s grey! Grab our Scissoring Sweatshirt in its latest shade at the Autostraddle Store.
While it is definitely tragic we still have to march, there is something beautiful and hopeful about the fact that I am fighting for [my mom’s] freedom as much as mine, and we’re both out here so that my nephew, who just turned one, hopefully won’t have to march when he grows up. This moment transgresses time and in that sense this movement is beyond the individual; it’s truly for the whole collective.
Elisa Peebles via Dispatches From The Millions Marches
We told some really incredible stories this year, and you won’t want to miss a thing.
This flask will hold all of your holiday spirits. Get it in time for Christmas when you order by 12/14!
Don’t know what to wear to Christmas dinner? Get a Scissoring Sweatshirt in time for the big moment when you order by 12/14 in the Autostraddle Store!
I had lived the privilege of a blackness that was reaffirmed in society, and found myself reflected in every echelon of power, and tale of despair. My experiences had been normalized, rather than nominal. I had walked streets and avenues, surrounded by nothing but brown shiny faces and had never experienced the color of my skin as a coat to be put on outside my home. It is because of this that I spend the first two years in America looking for faces like mine in every public space, finding them, counting them, willing them to multiply so that my skin can feel at ease again. It never happens.
You can still get a pair of “STRADDLE THIS” underthings from the Autostraddle Store in time for Christmas! Order by 12/14 to be all set.
Yeah, sometimes sex really is weird or gross or embarrassing or everything at once — and that is part of why it is awesome.
Fuck normal; who wants to be normal? I choose this abnormal, absurd world filled with unashamed characters that have multiplied in me the gift of love, of eyes wide open, of a curious soul and an accepting mind. Who have given unto each other something the world can’t: a sense that this is the norm, that what we are doing isn’t exceptional, or strange, but merely the way things have always been. That’s what home feels like. There is no consciousness of your otherness, you simply are. It is a place that does not seek to define you by the things you are “not,” but rather by an affirmation of your presence and being.
When the ceramic snow village came down from the attic and the tree went up in my living room, everything was going to be okay. Christmas would make it okay. My mom threw dishes, smashed them against the floor and the wall, but she never even chipped her Southern Living Christmas china. My dad wasn’t home very much; he had to travel all the time for work, but he never missed a holiday moment. He chopped down the tree. He untangled the lights. My dad made a “Santa Stops Here” sign for my birthday one time, and he was right: During the regular year, we had to choose between crutches for my broken ankle or cigarettes for my mom, but Santa always gave everyone in my family something so good. My mom bought elves and she bought angels. She displayed them in every nook of our house. Nobody got slapped at Christmas.
Heather Hogan via Hate Actually: Can the Holigays Heal a Gay Grinch’s Heart?
Things are gonna get gay this Christmas on The Fosters and Pretty Little Liars.Or at least we hope so.
I am now 100 percent convinced Archie Panjabi‘s time on The Good Wife is going to end with either Kalinda riding off into the sunset with Lana, in some kind of Olivia Pope island situation, or with Kalinda getting axe-murdered.