jalwhite:

SPIN: Buzzing New York Rapper Le1f Responds to Homophobia

From Afrika Bambaataa to André 3000 to Danny Brown, rap has long been full of flamboyance, but no gifted MC has quite flaunted his originality in the manner of New York’s Le1f via the just-out video for his bounce-addled track, “Wut.” In one scene, wearing high purple daisy dukes, he slides across the floor, working his skinny legs like mechanical cranks edging him closer to the camera. In another, after a brag about “getting light in my loafers,” he straddles the knee of a buff male model, fast-rapping with flair.

Yes, Le1f is a gay man. His profile has been slowly growing since Greedhead (the label run by Das Racist’s Himanshu Suri) dropped the free Dark York mixtape back in April. With beats by left-fielders like Nguzunguzu and Matt Shadetek, it’s hardly the usual rap blog fare, but ever since the Fader debuted the “Wut” video on Thursday, the headlines have been accumulating, and some are downright shameful.

The worst comes courtesy of Bossip with the words, “See What Frank Ocean Started?” Meanwhile, the comment sections of the same blogs are on fire with the hate, homophobia and confusion that Ocean was seemingly spared (to some extent). In the Fader profile that ran yesterday, Le1f seems unshaken by the anger, and likens his swag to that of any other showy, sex-obsessed male in the business.

“I am gay, and I’m proud to be called a gay rapper, but it’s not gay rap. That’s not a genre. My goal is always to make songs that a gay dude or a straight dude can listen to and just think, This dude has swag. I get guys the way straight rappers get girls. I’m not preachy. The best thing a song can be called is good.” [Source]

People deserving of success: Le1f

(via thefistofartemis)

curate:

Zanele has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to replace her equipment – PLEASE watch the video and donate what you can

I”ve lost all the work I produced from 2008 – 2012. Also backups were stolen.
I thought of the day I spoke with another friend about alternative storage. Now it is too late.
I feel like a breathing zombie right now.
I don’t even know where to start. I’m wasted.
I’ve sent out a note to friends to tell them about the incident.

The person/s got access to the flat via the toilet window, broke the burglar guard and got away with my cameras, lenses, memory cards and external hard drives, laptop, cellphones…
Whoever ransacked the place got away with more than 20 external hard drives with the most valuable content I’ve ever produced

I am hoping that a few of my good friends are willing to go to pawn shops or to other places where this type of equipment is sold. I do not even want to know who the thief is.

Campaign to replace Zanele Muholi’s stolen photography equipment

On the 28th April, Zanele returned home from Seoul, South Korea to discover that all her work between 2008 and 2012 stored on 20 hard drives and including backups had been stolen on the 20th. The thieves also stole her cameras, lens, memory sticks and laptops. There are no words to describe Zanele’s feelings at this time as an entire original archive of Black queer lesbian history has been destroyed and that impacts on all of us – makes invisible what Zanele has worked so hard to make visible and speak of through her photography. via blacklooks

(via derica)

Mobile Homecoming is an innovative and loving response to a deep craving for intergenerational connection. A craving that lives in the hearts of queer black same gender loving elders and visionaries. A craving that has taken over the minds of two young queer black women. Julia Wallace of Queer Renaissance and Alexis Pauline Gumbs of BrokenBeautiful Press have decided to dedicate the next phase of their lives to collecting and amplifying the social organizing herstories of black women, trans men, and gender queer visionaries who have been refusing the limits of heteronormativity and opening the world up by being themselves in the second half of the 20th century.

via http://www.mobilehomecoming.org/

transfeminism:

There are only 3 days left to fund this project!

Pay It No Mind: Marsha P. Johnson

About this project

Dear Friends, Documentary Film Supporters, Activists, and Admirers of Great Courage,

We are in the final post-production stage of an hour-long documentary about the revolutionary trans-activist Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. was a seminal figure in the downtown New York City scene from the ‘60s through the ‘90s. Known as “The Saint Of Christopher Street,” Johnson was an instigator at Stonewall, an Andy Warhol model, and a proud, take-no-nonsense drag queen. 

     We are so close to finishing this inspirational film, and interest in it has been such that we were invited to screen the rough cut version at New York’s IFC Theatre. We want to share this documentary with you, but we need just a little help with some finishing funds to help us pay for archival video clips, historical photographs, a sound mix, videotape stock, digital transfers, and a few film festival application fees (programmers are already interested in the film).  

     Antony, founder of the musical group Antony and the Johnsons has generously donated his music and contribution gifts to make this documentary a reality. (And for those of you that didn’t already know, Antony originally named his band in honor of the documentary’s subject, Marsha P. Johnson.)  

     This historic documentary includes interviews with performer Agosto Machado, author Michael Musto, performer/director Jimmy Camicia, Warhol superstar and poet Taylor Mead, and the Stonewall Uprising historian David Carter, among many others.

Please help us to tell this vital, entertaining, and moving story. 

Everyone working on this film has donated their labor. We just need a small financial push to get Marsha’s story out to the world, where it rightly belongs.

Thank you for your love.

(via so-treu)

ubleproject:

Featured Interview: Jackie Anderson, 69

From The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project documentary, by tonia.m.

(via ubleproject)

tiona.m. is a multi-media artist whose mission is to make the invisible, visible and humanize her subjects. She believes that her work as a filmmaker and visual artist can inspire various communities by affirming their existence in contemporary society and culture. Her last film, black./womyn.: conversations with lesbians of African descent, provides a platform for Black lesbians to speak for themselves and to confront the hyper-sexualized image of the Black lesbian.

Tiona continues to develop and create films on progressive topics with the hope of directing a narrative feature-length project in the near future. She is currently in production with her next feature length documentary The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project,a short narrative film Bumming Cigarettes, and an experimental short series called Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, which is an magical realism themed take on the Black American experience.

[via  her tumblr in the meantime… + trailers on vimeo ]

Barbara Hammer. Double Strength, 1978. Four stages of a lesbian relationship explored in an experimental film starring performance artists Terry Sendgraff and Barbara Hammer on suspended trapezes and ropes. (via Brooklyn Museum: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Barbara Hammer)

William Yang has documented the gay scene in Sydney since the 1970s. At this time many were celebrating new-found freedom, greater acceptance in society and the start of the Mardi Gras parades. In these images from the 1990s Yang investigates the impact of AIDS on his friends and community, as well as the broader social implications of the disease. The works act as memorials which acknowledge both individual fears, the illnesses that AIDS and HIV bring, the repercussions on the gay community, and the importance of public displays of recognition and remembrance.

Darrin and Linden (part 3), (1991, printed circa 1992) by William Yang

Text reads: “They showed me a Herb Ritts photo that they liked. The two men in it were in a stylised pose and they were naked. Could I do for them something like that? I explained I couldn’t reproduce the pace as that would be too difficult, moreover it was imitation, but I got the idea of what they wanted. They wanted sexy shots, but they wanted them artistic, definitely nothing pornographic. You see, they were madly in love.”

(via William Yang – The Art of Seduction | Iris Prize Short List 2011)

William Yang, The Art of Seduction Doco. 2010. Dir. Craig Boreham  [image ‘Alpha’ by by William Yang, Brisbane late 60’s]

William Yang is a third-generation Australian-Chinese artist whose work examines his Chinese family history and gay identity. This documentary looks at one aspect of William’s work as a photographer - male nudes - the most personal and vulnerable of his work because it always involves a negotiation or transaction.

Glitter Tongue is an online collection of love poems by thirty queer and trans poets, launching Valentines Day 2012. It grew out of a collective writing effort among Margaret Rhee, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Tamiko Beyer, Oliver Bendorf, Meg Day, and Ching-In Chen, and then expanded to community. This is the result. We invite you to read on for poetic introductions and then explore the poems collected here.

(Source: bravenewgirls, via etiquette-etc)

Race, gender and sexuality are important concepts in your work. Can you talk about how these concepts inform your art practice?

As a queer person of colour, I am fascinated by how others construct their identities and how it manifests in other people’s bodies. I have a sense of how it manifests in my life and I am interested in exploring that in my work, but I suppose I am fascinated by how other people do that – perform their gender and their race and whether its important to them or not. Gender and sexuality were my first strong interests before realising as each work shed a skin, there were other things that were present in each work. My fascination was with human bodies and peeling away the surface, or puncturing the surface to find out what’s inside.

via Interview with Owen Leong | Peril magazine

“Trying to find ways to do lovemaking pics”

Tee A. Corinne has created a large and lasting body of photographs of lesbian eroticism. She was a revolutionary, she did what no one had done before her – she made erotic art for lesbians from a lesbian perspective. “Every new generation of lesbian photographers who follow her look back on her work as some sort of norm – the basic lesbian photograph.

The feminist movement argued that heterosexuality and hence erotic art objectifies women, thus it became increasingly difficult for feminist artists to deal with sexuality in their work. Tee A. Corinne found several ways to deal with the problem of representing lesbian sexuality. To avoid the male gaze, she either used specific techniques to create abstract or metaphoric images, or she insisted that sexually explicit work was only displayed in women-only exhibitions and publications.

In 1982, Tee A. Corinne produced a large series called “Yantras of Womanlove”. While these photographs are explicit, Corinne used the technique of arranging multiple prints into yantras to camouflage their outspokenness. Apart from that, she was also concerned for the models’ privacy. Thus she created abstract images of lesbian sexuality by using several techniques, such as solarisation, flipped negatives, images printed in negative and multiple exposures. These heavily manipulated images function not only as a protection for the individual model’s identity, but also as a correlative for the status of the public lesbian: present yet invisible, out yet hidden, provocative yet in need of protection

via Tee A. Corinne

(via Tee A. Corinne)

MAKING RELATIONSHIPS VISIBLE

In 1975, the year in which I most fully came out, I started making self-portraits that combined my own image with that of a lover. Photographer Honey Lee Cottrell (see Nothing But The Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image) was my beloved at that time, and together we explored ways to make images that ìreadî as lesbian. In some of these pictures, I am nude and she is partially clothed. In one, I have my hand on her thigh and am looking into the camera as she looks at me.

via An artist visualizes Israel as a non-democratic state by Lisa Goldman

For her senior project in visual communications at the Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), artist Sivan Hurvitz exhibited a series of illustrations called “Turn right at the end: the future of a country that gave up on democracy.”

In her strikingly realistic, detailed illustrations -  six in all – Sivan imagines “an apocalyptic, harshly exaggerated, imaginary, future scenario” in an Israel that is no longer a democracy. Her purpose, she writes, is “to provoke and raise questions among Israelis about the direction the country is going in and to think if this is the country we want to become in the future.” She notes that, while the scenarios are purposely exaggerated, each illustration was inspired by a real-life event that is described in the caption.

Pride and Prejudice, by Sivan Hurvitz

Inspiration: In May 2010 a member of Be’er Sheva’s city council, Zachariya Ohev Shalom, attacked the municipal decision to sponsor a pride parade in the city of Be’er Sheva. He stated: “I don’t hate the gay-lesbian community in Be’er Sheva, they are simply sick and in need of treatment.”

Notes (LG): The building looks like a typical Israeli national health clinic, but it is called the National Institute for the Treatment of Sexual Deviations.” The slogan over the poster on the right, showing the heterosexual couple, is “I’m cured!”

(via STEVENSON | Sabelo Mlangeni)

Sabelo Mlangeni, Iduku 2007

Black Men in Dress comprises a series of portraits photographed at the Johannesburg and Soweto Pride, a yearly event for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) community. These portraits remind Mlangeni of a childhood where, as he describes:

[M]ost communities had what we call ‘uSis’bhuti’. This is a term used to describe a boy who behaves like a girl. Why then do we hate these boys when they have grown up to be men who dress as women? Why do we turn and call them names, pretending that we’ve never seen it? These are some of the issues I try to bring to the fore in this series.

As in Mlangeni’s previous series Country Girls, a dramatic sense of fashion and a performative and playful manner is explored by gay men to engage with their sense of belonging and identity.