San Diego Pride major leaguer Alicia Champion has dropped the first video of her solo musical career. And, well, we’re pretty sure your earbuds won’t be rocking much else this summer.
….And… is that Buck Angel we spy there? Be still our beating hearts!
In case you’ve not caught it yet, here’s the trailer for the Amy Winehouse documentary which everyone’s raving about. Grab a tissue. The doc is out on limited release today: check your local cinema listings.
With pride season well and truly upon us, Biscuit regular Valarie Clark-Neff talks us through some ways to honour your badass bi* self without putting up with the crowds…
I don’t know about you, but every year during Pride month I struggle with the thought of participating in our local parade. I love the people, the dazzle of rainbow colors, the dykes on bikes, the in-your-face queerness, and the sense of feeling comfortable with people who share my struggles.
What I don’t like are the crowds, noise, and heat. It’s all a little too much for this socially anxious person. I’m certain many of us struggle with similar issues whether it is anxiety, depression, disability, or any number of factors that keep us from participating. Pride is fantastic, but it’s not the only thing we can do to show pride in our community. So in the spirit of reaching… Continue reading
HBO is in post-production on Bessie (dir Dee Rees, teleplay Christopher Cleveland), the Bessie Smith biopic and the LGBT community have fired up their pens to begin writing commentary. With Queen Latifah in the title role, Mo’Nique playing Ma Rainey and Michael Kenneth Williams as Jack Gee there’s a lot to be excited about, especially as Bessie provides a fine opportunity to raise Bessie Smith to her rightful place as a keystone in our collective history. Autostraddle recently described her as a ‘queer pioneer’; I say, that’s not good enough. She was not just queer. She was bisexual in every sense of the word. This is our opportunity as the bisexual community to speak up and claim her as our bisexual icon. She is a part of our legacy and in many ways was the original, bisexual, black feminist.
Bessie Smith was someone whose life and lyrics presented a challenge to the established order. She was a rebel before rebelliousness became popular in mainstream America and she was most definitely bisexual.
Shiri Eisner tells us in Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, ‘bisexuality holds an enormous potential for subversion and disruption of the patriarchy’. Bessie Smith was the embodiment of this ‘enormous potential’. She performed songs about men, she married men, and still she chose to be with women as well. In her songs one can hear her deep distrust of the worst parts of normative in the early 20th century masculinity. Masculinity, as it has been defined in our patriarchal society, has always worked to uphold the dominance of men; Bessie Smith undermined that dominance both in her songs and in her personal life.
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