*If you're 12 or under, it's not legal for anyone to collect your e-mail address. You can subscribe to this blog in a reader and follow me on twitter to get much of the same information, just not put together in tidy packages. But heck, if you're 11 or 12, you already know that life isn't always tidy. Thanks!
Our Gender Queer Friend Lucy, a.k.a. Benji, continues the conversation about gender with Nenu Cruz, who explains their own journey with gender, and introduces us to the term "Maribri."
Here's that amazing image of Maribri again, and my thanks to artist Cindy Segura for allowing me to share it with you all!
Maribri
"A Maribri is a hybrid that transforms into their own image without limits or expectations. The mix of a Mariposa (butterfly) and Colibri (hummingbird). The hybrid of masculinity and femininity and neither. A third gender that wants to be liberated from the social construct roles and their own."
- Nenu
I'm so glad to have met Nenu!
Namaste,
Lee
ps- my apologies for the video quality being so inconsistent.
Personified colors interact. Red (a red dot) teases Blue (a blue dot), and makes Blue feel small.
The other colors are afraid to stand up to Red, who gets bigger and bigger.
When someone new comes along, the titular ONE, and Red tries to bully them, too, something different happens. ONE stands up.
How all the colors (including Blue) learn to stand up to Red, and how Red figures out they can do things differently is the heart of this beautiful story.
"ONE" would be a great conversation-starter (and read-aloud) about bullying and standing up for yourself and others. It would work for pre-schoolers all the way up to bigger kids. Heck, I'm an adult, and I loved it, too.
The art is beautiful - and like the story, seems simple but there's so much heart to discover in it.
"ONE" is a picture book I wish had been read to me when I was a little kid.
It's a book you should get, and share, and discuss.
Namaste,
Lee
ps- my thanks to Essia Cartoon-Fredman, the librarian at Pressman Academy in Los Angeles, for telling me about "One," and how they've used it as a read-aloud with their Kindergarteners.
Featured in the upcoming movie BULLY, Ty Smalley was 11 when, after years of being picked on and bullied, he finally had enough and physically reacted to his bully's taunts. Ty was caught for 'fighting'. Suspended from school. And he killed himself.
Ty Smalley
Ty's parents Kirk and Laura have made it their mission to stop this epidemic of bullying, and they're taking action through STAND FOR THE SILENT.
I was fortunate to attend Kirk's assembly program at a Los Angeles Middle School this week. It was powerful, and wrenching.
Kirk had the kids on his side, supporting him as he told the story of his son, and of other children like Ty who took their own lives because of bullying.
He asked for a show of hands, who there had ever been bullied. Every single person raised their hand.
He asked for another show of hands, who there had even been a bully. Four hands went up.
He told us that every seven seconds, someone is bullied in our world.
There's work to do.
And then, he got the entire auditorium of 800 plus students to take this pledge out loud:
"From this day forward I promise to respect those around me as well as respect myself. I am somebody, and I can make a difference. I can make another feel loved. I can be the helping hand that leads another back to a path of hope and aspiration. I will not stand silent as others try to spread hatred through my community. Instead, I pledge to lift up these victims, and show them that their life matters. I will be the change, because I am somebody."
It was such a powerful moment.
Kirk spoke with passion and deep emotion, and I cheer him on. We need all our voices raised to empower children and teens to stop bullying and make their world - our world - better.
Here's a CNN story on Kirk - and in it you can see how raw and honest he's able to be about his loss, and the promise he made to his son on the Father's Day after Ty's death, that he'd stop this from happening to another child.
So let's do it. Let's stand with Kirk. And let's Stand For The Silent.
Let's each of us do everything we can to end bullying.
Princess Dong-Young was originally a boy, but had to become a girl to accept a betrothal to the Emperor of the Underworld. Unable to accept her future with the Demon King, she realizes that her only choice is to run away. Her plan is to join the human world disguised as a schoolboy! Now all of the Gods from Heaven and Hell are searching high and low on the Earth trying to make sure that a wedding happens.
There's a great description of all 13 volumes in the series here.
My thanks to Robin Fosdick, the amazing librarian at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library in Oregon for her amazing Teen GLBTQ graphic novels list, which is where I found out about this series.
Add your review of the Angel Diary graphic novel series in comments!
The white board at Marlborough School showing me as their Alliance Gay of the Week!
I loved going to Marlborough School in Los Angeles last week and presenting my Smashing Stereotypes! Workshop to a psychology class of 11th and 12th graders, sharing my SAFE SPACE: Ending Anti-Gay Bullying in our Culture... and at YOUR School Assembly with the entire 8th grade, meeting with the school's Gay-Straight Alliance club, and then working with the wonderful librarians to pull books from their collection and set up a special display to encourage students to read deeper and broader - books about GLBTQ teens, books about teens who are like the students themselves, and books about teens who are different from them - so they can see and internalize our shared humanity.
An absolute highlight was my lunchtime Q&A with Marlborough's Alliance. The students had prepared lots of questions in advance, and the discussion was fantastic.
Dr. Banner, the club's faculty advisor, wrote after my visit to share the news with me:
I thought you'd like to hear that at our meeting on Friday, you were unanimously voted the Alliance Gay of the Week. This places you in the august company of Vonn Walker, Ellen DeGeneres, Zachary Quinto, Dan Savage, and Albus Dumbledore, some of our past honorees. :)
I am incredibly honored.
Being named Marlborough's Alliance Gay of the Week has made my year.
Rick Nash of the Columbus Blue Jackets; Duncan Keith of the Chicago Blackhawks; Brian Boyle of the New York Rangers; Matt Moulson of the New York Islanders; Joffrey Lupul of the Toronto Maple Leafs; Claude Giroux of the Philadelphia Flyers; Daniel Alfredsson of the Ottawa Senators; Scott Hartnell of the Philadelphia Flyers; Corey Perry of the Anaheim Ducks; Andy Greene of the New Jersey Devils; Dion Phaneuf of the Toronto Maple Leafs; and Henrik Lundqvist of the New York Rangers.
Patrick Burke hopes You Can Play can help achieve his late brother's dreams for the sport in every level: That it becomes a place of acceptance, support and safety for gay athletes, to the point that one day an openly gay player can compete for a National Hockey League team without incident and feeling secure about it.
Last Saturday, the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER) and Broadway Impact presented the West Coast premiere reading of the play “8” before a sold-out crowd in Los Angeles and a worldwide audience watching on YouTube.
“8” is an unprecedented account of the Federal District Court trial in Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now Perry v. Brown), the case filed by AFER to overturn Proposition 8, which stripped gay and lesbian Californians of the fundamental freedom to marry.
“This play will continue to show Americans—one by one—that truth and justice can prevail over prejudice and fear,” said AFER Board President Chad Griffin. “Try as they might, the anti-marriage proponents of Proposition 8 cannot hide their discriminatory arguments from the American people. The fight to secure marriage equality is at the heart of our generation’s search for greater freedom—this play shows why.”
Dustin Lance Black, who penned the Academy Award-winning feature film Milk and the film J. Edgar, based “8” on the actual words of the trial transcripts, first-hand observations of the courtroom drama and interviews with the plaintiffs and their families.
Watch. (The performance starts 30 minutes in, and is about 90 minutes long.)
Witness.
And resolve to continue to fight for marriage equality.
...at this moment, intense capitalist accumulation, we’re living with one model of success and failure and one model alone. And that model is, that to make money and to advance professionally is what it means to be successful, and everything else is failure. That’s given us a zero-sum model against which we can judge our achievements in life, and that’s very unfortunate, because it squashes out all kinds of people doing alternative things for alternative reasons that may be much more valuable to their communities and to the world. So if you’re absolutely dedicated to organic farming, recycling, playing in a punk band on the weekend, and blogging, and you do some temp work in your spare time, you’re making a big contribution to the world we live in but you are not able to feed into the model of success that we’ve set out. So the book suggests that in such a moment, the moment of Occupy Wall Street and the one percent and the 99%, we need better models of success and failure. We need to measure ourselves against different standards. And the book proposes that queer people have actually been doing this for a long time precisely because we quickly fall out of the prevailing model of success and failure by not managing to meet the standards of gender and sexuality set for us by our usually straight families. Therefore there might be insights into failure that come out of queer art and queer culture.
Sarah, Jenna, Lauren, and Cassie may look like ordinary girls, but they're not.
They're delinquents whose lives collide when they're sent to an experimental juvenile detention program on a farm run by a lesbian couple... and it's in the middle of nowhere.
As the girls face up to the crimes they committed, three of them will heal the wounds of their pasts and discover strengths they never dreamed they had.
And one, driven by a deep secret of her own, will seek to destroy everything they've all worked so hard for.
Add your review of "Getting Somewhere" in comments!
Fat people and the Queer Community are natural allies, as we're among the last of the groups it's still seen as "okay" to demonize.
Allies are incredibly important in the movement to create change, understanding and a culture where we get beyond talking of tolerating differences, or even accepting differences, but where we are CELEBRATING Differences.
It's important to consider where we can be allies for others in their struggles.
To ask ourselves and our GSA groups and our queer organizations,
How we can be UPstanders and not Bystanders when we see injustice against black people, or muslim people, or women, or fat people, or any other group that's targeted just for being themselves?
Like John Amaechi said, they're all heads of the same monster: prejudice.
And if we join forces against prejudice, we will be unstoppable.
Namaste,
Lee
ps - My Thanks to Adrienne for telling me about this amazing Fat Rant video!
pps - The prejudice against Fat people is everywhere - Just last month Disney launched their fat-shaming Habit Heroes website and exhibit. And then they yanked it due to negative public response.
And I believe the movie's honest window into bullying can open eyes, get people talking, and contribute towards making things better - but not if it has an "R" rating and kids under 17 can't see it!
Here's the trailer (that's rated okay for "Appropriate Audiences")
Lee Hirsch, the movie's director, said about the "R" rating:
"I made BULLY for everyone to see, kids who are bullied, who bully, and the vast majority who are witnesses ...those kids can make change by speaking up, becoming upstanders instead of bystanders. We have to change hearts and minds in order to stop this epidemic, which affects more than 13 million young lives a year in our country. The stark realities of bullying are that kids say terrible things to each other...and kids in junior and senior high-school use profanity. ~~ It is devastating that the MPAA, in adhering to a strict limit on certain words, would prevent this film from being seen by those who need its message the most...."
There was an appeal to the ratings board. It was rejected.
As the Bully Project wrote, an R rating
"could potentially ban the very students who are on the front lines of America's bullying epidemic from seeing the film unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Clearly, this is unacceptable."
Katy, a high school student from Ann Arbor, Michigan launched an online petition on change.org urging the MPAA to reconsider. In less than 24 hours more than 100,000 people had signed on - but they still need more signatures!
Check out this kiss between Brandon Morgan and his partner Dalan Wells when Brandon came home.
It was posted on the Facebook Gay Marines page and in 3 days got over 36,000 likes and more than 8,000 commments. It was written about on Joe. My. God. (a site with adult content and language. You can see the post here) and The Huffington Post.
Brandon's reported response to all the comments:
"To everyone who has responded in a positive way. My partner and I want to say thank you. Dalan, the giant in the photo, can't believe how many shares and likes we have gotten on this. We didn't do this to get famous, or something like that we did this cause after 3 deployments and four years knowing each other, we finally told each other how we felt. As for the haters, let em hate...to quote Kat Williams, everyone needs haters, so let them hate. We are the happiest we have ever been and as for the whole PDA and kissing slash hugging in uniform...it was a homecoming, if the Sergeants Major, Captains, Majors, and Colonels around us didn't care...then why do you care what these random people have to say? In summation thank you for your love and support. I received a lot of friend requests off this. I don't just accept requests so if your request was because of this post message me and let me know. Goodnight all, and Semper Fi." --Brandon Morgan
Pretty awesome.
You can watch an interview with Brandon and Dalan here.
Disclosure: As of July 5, 2020, if you click on a book here on this blog and it takes you to bookshop.org, there is an affiliate relationship in place where 10% of that book order will come back to me, Lee Wind. I hope that works for you. And if it doesn't, no worries. I hope you buy your books somewhere that feels good to you. Thanks!
What if you knew a secret from history that could change the world?
“Get Balanced with Dr. Marissa Pei” Talk Radio show - Lee booked as featured guest on September 25
October 2018 - Publish Date of Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill: Oct 2, 2018
Lambda Literary Festival - panel on Crowdfunding Queer Lit and reading - online Oct 1. Register here.
Star Style Radio Show with Cynthia Brian - Lee featured guest on October 3 program. Listen here.
Pasadena Fall Art Night - YA panel on Oct 12 in Pasadena
West Hollywood Library Teen Read Week - 10:30am October 13
San Gabriel Valley Pride - Authors Tent presentation, 1:00 pm on Oct 13 in Pasadena
Launch Party at Highways - 7:00pm in Santa Monica
Models of Pride - present "Discover our LGBTQ History" and give out free copies of Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill from the Camp Brave Trails booth on Oct 20 in Los Angeles
November 2018
Book Baby Independent Authors Conference - lead networking session "How do you measure success?" in Philadelphia, PA
Presentation and Reading at Palm Springs Public Library on Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill on Nov 7
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