“Fuck Your Gender”

I generally agree with that post going around about how you should let kids fuck around and find out with physical play but it carries this weighty implication that if you don’t develop kinesthetics at an early age you’ll never develop them at all, which is a very discouraging way to talk about the real possibilities of adult life

by Pierpaolo Ferrari & Muarizio Cattelan

It's common for transphobes to see us as our gender only when it can be used against us. The trans man is a man only when being intimate with him would make you gay or when his masculinity and the idea of him being a man disgusts you, but never in a context where it would be affirming to him. In the mind of a transphobe, he can be both a disgusting predatory gay man trying to turn a straight man gay and a woman who will never ever be a real man. He can be a deranged female fetishist preying on gay men and also a naive girl who just wants to escape misogyny. He can be a butch lesbian groomed into transitioning by homophobes who want to turn her straight and gender-conforming and also an unsafe man who deserves no protection and must be kept out of women's spaces. Transphobes can hold multiple of these pairs of beliefs at the same time about the exact same person because they're bigots and that's how bigotry works. The enemy is both too weak and too strong.

That’s Mr. Dyke To You

BILL PAXTON in Near Dark, 1987.

Grace Kelly by Philippe Halsman, 1954

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991) dir. Gus Van Sant

The centerpiece of River’s performance, and the film, is a campfire scene with Reeves. Scott Favor takes Mike Waters on a road trip (on a stolen motorcycle) to visit Mike’s brother. At night, sitting by a fire they’ve made, they discuss their respective childhoods: “If I had a normal family and a good upbringing, then I would have been a well-adjusted person,” Mike insists. What’s really on his mind: he’s in love with Scott, and he’s terrified of saying so.

 “I only have sex with a guy for money,” a reclining Scott tells him. “Two guys can’t love each other.”

 A miserable Mike says haltingly, “I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn’t paid for it. And I love you, and you don’t pay me.” Curling up in a ball, he tells Scott, “I really want to kiss you, man.” The scene ends with Scott gently holding Mike, stroking his hair.

“This is the best part in the film,” Van Sant said, “and was chosen by River to be his big scene.” At River’s request, Van Sant scheduled it for the last day of shooting. River rewrote it himself, making it more lyrical and making his love for Scott explicit (in Van Sant’s original script, the relationship was more ambiguous).

 “‘I love you, and you don’t have to pay me’—I’m so glad I wrote that line,” River said. “I think that in his private life, Mike was probably a virgin, so he only relates sex with work.” River had spent some time thinking about situational virginity, and the emotional consequences of having sex when you didn’t want to have it.

— Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood he left behind by Gavin Edwards

’Don’t Touch My Crown’ is my ongoing portrait series exploring the unearthly richness of our origins and beauty of Black hair // Portrait by Bobby Rogers

Brigitte Lin in Peking Opera Blues (1986) dir. Tsui Hark

Light me a cigarette, will you, angel?

The Big Sleep (1946) dir. Howard Hawks