As a follow-up to Monday’s post about Calamity Jane, I’ve arbitrarily declared today Doris Day Day. To celebrate, three songs: Continue reading →
16
Jun 10
Don’t be sad when the sun goes down / I’ll never fall in love again
Lady Gaga & a wary Stephin Merritt
Lady Gaga has a proposition for you: want to be her “Summerboy”? More specifically, in her track of the same name she sings,
Crazy, get your ass in my bed
Baby, you’ll just be my summer boyfriend
But beware the limitations of this arrangement, as outlined in the chorus:
Don’t be sad when the sun goes down
You’ll wake up and I’m not around
I’ve got to go oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
We’ll still have the summer after all
Doesn’t sound all that bad, right? You get to be Gaga’s summer fling, and who wouldn’t want that? Continue reading →
15
Jun 10
They only want you when you’re Seventeen
One of the best things I’ve discovered recently is The Seventeen Magazine Project. Eighteen year old high school senior Jamie Keiles is spending one month living according to Seventeen Magazine, and reporting back on her experience with a great mixture of insight, humor, and feminism. Totally badass, especially for a high school senior! I’m really impressed with her level of writing and analysis.
14
Jun 10
Calam & Katie
I was looking around today for a Doris Day song called “Secret Love,” which I hadn’t realized was from the musical Calamity Jane, with Ms. Day in the title role. I’d never seen Calamity Jane before, and boy oh boy, was I in for a treat. I think it gives Wicked a run for its money in the “Most Lesbian Musical” category.
Let’s review the gay: Continue reading →
10
Jun 10
“We knew we were courting violence”
I’ve been more than a little in love with Joan Nestle lately. She co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1972, and is a beautiful and fabulous activist, writer, historian, and all-around lesbian. Watch this clip from a documentary about her called Hand on the Pulse (that I will hopefully be able to one day locate and see):
She’s so confident, so articulate about her desires and her entitlement to them. And trust me, that’s not something that lesbians are taught to be. I love this quote by her, from her essay “Butch-Fem Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” which I found a few years ago in a book called Queering Religion, and found so moving much that I wrote it down right on my folder, and hadn’t realized until recently that it was by her:
In the fifties, when we walked in the Village holding hands, we knew we were courting violence, but we also knew the political implications of how we were courting each other and chose not to sacrifice our need to their anger.
That last part is my favorite: “we…chose not to sacrifice our need to their anger.” That’s something that queers of all stripes would do well to keep remembering today, as assimilation has become the new order. We’re allowing our identities to become subsumed under the umbrella of capitalistic identity politics, something that we consume, rather than something that we carve out ourselves and wear proudly in the world. Oh, but for a few more Joan Nestles in the world!
