Happy Thursday!
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If you're not - welcome back!
We’re two queer journalists curating and writing about all things LGBTQIA+, from India and beyond.
This is the second of two special Franken-editions of Queering About. It has some of the loveliest stuff we watched, read and listened to in the time we took off.
Before we get started, we thought we’d clarify why we’re calling them Franken-letters! It’s not because we think that they’re abominations we created in a laboratory but because they’re monster letters, that is, really effing long letters consisting of different parts that should’ve been there in other editions! (Yes, big literature student energy here from both of us, we know.)
Let’s get started.
What We’re Into:
♫ Today we’re blasting Lady Gaga’s 911 and Sam Smith’s Diamonds, both of which premiered yesterday. Glorious stuff.
♫ We told you about the wonderful Kae Tempest, the poet who changed their name and pronouns. One of us heard them perform at Jaipur Literature Festival and it was electrifying. You can binge on their best work on this Spotify playlist.
🎨 @felixdeon is a brilliant artist whose art places queer people through out history. This particular one is inspired by the famous queer Iranian poet Abu Nuwas from the 8th century.
🎨 Amra Odbhuth, a queer cafe and art space in Kolkata have started an art series that tries to navigate queer ‘ancestory’ - who were our queer ancestors, and how will we be remembered by the future queers? Check out the project on instagram, it’s quite a nostalgic trip.
🎨 Check out this adorbs graphic story by Gaysi Family on love in the Delhi Metro.
✒ University of California Santa Cruz is offering a free massive open online course (MOOC) on Feminism and Social Justice! Thanks to Asmita Ghosh for the heads up.
🎥 This video about Beoncy Laishram, a doctor who is a part of Manipur’s nupi maanbi community of transgender women, and is now a Covid front-liner.
🎥 How would you like to raise your children, if you choose to have or adopt any? Do you think you could bring them up in a completely non-gendered way, including letting them choose their own gender at an age they can express it? This non-binary couple wants to give their child this chance. They call it gender-creative parenting, and we think it’s a fascinating idea, if the wee babby can be kept emotionally and physically safe.
🎥 BBC’s Gender and Identity correspondent, Megha Mohan, talked to people from Indian, Native American, and Aboriginal cultures on how gender has always felt fluid to them in this video.
🎥 Have you watched the movie The Handmaiden? It’s available on Amazon Prime. It’s a 2016 Japanese / Korean language adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, and it’s about a Japanese manor lady and a Korean maid who fall in love. Did we mention it’s also an actual, proper Gothic horror movie set in East Asia?! *heavy breathing*
🎥 A New Yorker-suggested documentary, Word Is Out, from 1978. It’s sometimes considered to be the first feature film about gay people by gay people. It’s on vimeo!
🎥 Disclosure is an eye-opening documentary that looks at the depictions of trans people in film and television. It features trans thinkers and creatives like Laverne Cox and Lilly Wachowski. Watch it on Netflix.
📖 /🎥 Did you know that Shakuntala Devi - yes, that Shakuntala Devi, the mathematician on whom we just had a biopic - was closely associated with the queer community? Her husband, Paritosh Bannerji, was gay, and she wrote a book called The World of Homosexuality, in which she supported the community. This essay in the Hindustan Times talks about both her and her biopic’s position on queer issues. One of us, who has watched the movie, thinks it did fairly well in opening a conversation about queerness, even if it isn’t a big part of the movie. You can watch it on Amazon Prime.
📖 / 🎥 While Mumbai Queer Film Festival is over, Feminism in India have a piece on Leonard Cortana’s documentary Marielle’s Legacy Will Not Die, which was shown at the festival. A memorium for queer Black actvist Marielle Franco, it shines a light on the transformative power of human rights defenders in Brazil.
📖/ 🎥 Another movie from the festival, Tathagata Ghosh’s Miss Man, navigates the queer experience through the eyes of its protagonists, all of whom are battling with their own identities.
📖 / 📷 Black transwomen in Vogue? Yes. Yes. Yes.
📖 / / 📷 This beautiful piece in Out Magazine that celebrates African queer narratives and the Pan-African Pride march that we told you about in the last Franken-letter.
🎁 / 📖 Here is a bunch of queer books that were released this week - Rainbow Crate (the website and book service) updates a list every week!
📖 / 📣 If you want to read more on the Transgender Persons (Protections of Rights) Act, Pinklist India has made a great resource. Among the problems that many trans activists have with it is the lack of specific welfare measures for transgender persons and no reservations in education or jobs for the community.
📖 / 📣 Want to know more about the original NALSA judgment about inclusion of the transgender community, and its effects on individual rights and liberty, and state policy? Check out this comprehensive series of articles from News18.
📖 / 📣 This piece looks at the National Education Policy through the lens of gender, highlighting how a provision in the new policy that boosts public-private partnership in education could risk schools getting more expensive and therefore inaccessible to women and trans people from low income families.
📖 This is old news but we literally just found out that not only is American Horror Story actress Sarah Paulson very queer, but she’s also dating actress Holland Taylor (the mom from Two and a Half Men)! Here is Sarah’s interview with Advocate Mag about their relationship.
📖 A pretty interesting interview with Mary L. Trump (yep, she’s Trump’s niece), on her experience of being queer in the Trump family, which she has also turned into a book.
📖 Bishakh Som’s Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir is the story of a trans artist who quits her job as an architect to work on a graphic novel, which is the DREAM, tbh. The story is interspersed with the voice of Som’s cisgender quasi-avatar Anjali, which creates an interesting narrative.
📖 Scroll.in got in touch with writers of queer stories during the pandemic and spoke about what they have in the works. We think the queer novel A Thousand Dreams Within Me Softly Burn (2017) by Sahil Sood sounds fascinating - it’s a “supernatural fantasy revolving around a gay man who does not know whether he is dead or alive.” Dang.
📖 Need more pronoun help? Here’s a gender-neutral pronouns crash course.
📖 Our friend Jake Doyle has written an incredible essay on 19th century Irish medical professional extraordinaire, James Barry, who was also trans.
📣 And to finish, we missed posting about the second anniversary of Section 377 being struck down, so here’s a round-up of the pieces on it we found interesting:
📖 There’s this slightly academic but very thorough look at the belief that every human being deserves to live a life of dignity, and the role that this plays in a justice system like India’s. We learnt that one of the main objections to the legality of Section 377 was that it goes against the Right to Privacy.
📖 This article from Forbes looks at experiences of cis gay men from Indian royal families - the royal titles, of course, being unofficial - and what they’re doing, two years on, to bring LGBTQIA+ narratives to the forefront.
📖 A reporter from Vice India asked a bunch of religious leaders if their opinions about LGBTQIA+ people had changed after the striking down of Section 377. In many ways the responses were unsurprising. We liked the diversity of leaders they spoke to and we would have loved Buddhist and Jain perspectives as well, given that the religions seem to prioritise non-violence and tolerance.
📖 This article from Firstpost that talks about queer Indians who live outside metro cities - we hope some of y’all reading this letter are from non-urban areas!
📖 And finally, a writer we love, Sandip Ray, spoke about his hope that a happy gay story is possible in a post Section 377 world. We sure hope so.
Donate to the community
Orinam, a social-support-arts-advocacy group in Chennai, have a list of fundraisers. You can access them here.
Mental Health Resources:
Sahaya Help Line: 080-223 0959
Operates: Only on Tuesdays and Fridays, 7 pm - 9 pm
Sappho Helpline: +91-9831518320
Operates: 10 am – 9 pm
Space: (toll-free tele-counselling helpline) 1800111015
Operates: 10 am - 6 pm every day.
A list of other places to call if you need help, clarity, or just someone to talk to.
A non-exhaustive list of queer+ve therapists in India bought out by Gaysi Family.
Amrutam is an Ayurvedic wellness community that also has a list of LGBTQIA+ therapists.
Queer Quote of the Week:
‘Who was I now — woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.’
from butch lesbian, transgender and communist activist, and author Leslie Feinberg’s novel, ‘Stone Butch Blues.’
Thank you for reading, and see you for our next letter!
Send in tips and stay in touch: queeringabout@gmail.com.