Wild Rose Brunette

🌈 In honor of #NationalComingOutDay (#NCOD), we partnered with Archie Comics to envision #ABetterUniverse! 🌈

In this world, everyone is met with love and support when they choose to disclose their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. If you’re coming out today, we hope that you’re acknowledged and celebrated like those featured here in the Archie Comic Universe. 

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Today Queer as Fiction dives deep into the past as we discuss the Mesopotamian poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Join us for a riveting discussion featuring ancient gods, axe-based sexual metaphors and research findings so good they make you take your clothes off.

Gay mathematician, scientist, and WWII codebreaker Alan Turing has just been announced as the new face of the British £50 note!

I couldn’t find this mentioned in the sources you linked, so I was wondering if you had another source for this? It’s not something I came across in my research so I’m keen to read more. (2/2) 

Thanks for your help!

Neither of us have been able to find a source which says that Marsha ever asked people to use her birth name, or to refer to her with he/him pronouns. The source of the confusion was a misremembering of this quote from David Carter’s Stonewall: the riots that sparked the gay revolution (p.66-7):

“But Robert Heide recalls another side to the childlike Marsha, who could be both helpless and charming. He sometimes saw a demon emerge, especially when Marsha was in his male persona as Malcolm. “I think we all have that to some degree, but apparently in Malcolm/Marsha’s case there was this real duality and it wold take hold. There was a schizophrenic personality at work, for Malcolm Michaels could be a very nasty, vicious man, looking for fights. You could say hello to him and if he was Malcolm that day, he might not even recognize you or you might be in trouble or a fight might ensue.” Heide’s experience of this side of Malcolm is borne out by Randy Wicker, who took Marsha in as a roommate decades later. While Marsha was generally an ideal living companion, on one occasion she wrecked Randy’s residence. A 1979 Voice article also reported that Marsha’s “plumed saintliness” was “volatile” and quoted a Christopher Street shop manager who described her as a “bully under that soft sweet manner” and listed a roster of gay bars from which she had been banned.”

There are a few things to note about this quote. Firstly, this passage uses very ableist language when talking about aspects of Marsha’s behaviour which are likely linked to mental illness. Marsha was mentally ill throughout her life, and this is something that I do regret not being able to talk about in much depth in our podcast - I made the decision to focus on other aspects of Marsha’s life, such as her gender identity and her activism. There’s no one simple source of information on this topic, but if that is something you’d like to know more about I recommend you have a look at our list of sources on Marsha.

Secondly, with only this information to work from, and no comments from Marsha herself, we cannot pass judgement on how this information ties in with Marsha’s gender identity. We don’t know whether this idea that she had a “male persona” is something she understood about herself, or if it was an explanation imposed on her behaviour by Robert Heide.

Lastly, this passage does not refer to Marsha asking for anyone to use he/him pronouns or her birth name. We can confirm that, to the best of our knowledge, that is not something backed up by historical sources, either in Carter’s book, in interviews with Marsha, or elsewhere.

One of the few photos from the first night of the Stonewall Riots, photographed by Joseph Ambrosini. Featuring street queen Jackie Hormona (in the striped jumper) and several others whose names are unknown.

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Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, quoted in David Carter’s Stonewall: the riots that sparked the gay revolution p.84

pride 2019 5/30 | tove jansson

Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson is best known for creating Moomins. Tove first started drawing Moomins in anti-fascist cartoons in the late 1930s, and went on to incorporate them into 14 children’s books and a long-running comic strip. Many of her characters were based off people in her life, including two of her female partners - Vivica Bandler (bottom left), and Tuuliki Pietilä.

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Flier written by activist Craig Rodwell, 29 June 1969

pride 2019 06/30 | irish marriage equality referendum

pride 2019 02/30 | lesbians and gays support the miners

Deregulation strikes again.

Here’s a five page comic about the invention of gender Swap potions in Pool, my fantasy comic!

Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached  her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…

Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him. 

Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…

Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!

Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)

This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it. 

Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….

Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.

The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins… 

So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.