Loud and Alive

Dear Readers,

Saying goodbye really fucking sucks.

I promised myself that this would be an eloquent post clearly stating why Loud and Alive will no longer be updated but it has proven to be impossible.

Why?

Because this was such an incredible journey.

This was a journey of enthusiasm, through and through, of long nights and incredible articles and stories that blew our minds when we finally got to read them. It was a journey of people supporting us in every way they could and it was a journey of kindness.

Okay, I’m going to stop being sappy because I know that Bethany will probably kick my ass, but we want all of you to know that we appreciate it.

We appreciate every single one of you who read the articles, who left comments. And our contributors – well, we fucking adore you!

Loud and Alive wasn’t just a blog, it was a project, it was a community. And a community cannot be as good as it is without incredible people doing their best to make it succeed.

Thank you for that.

Thank you to our frequent authors and to our contributors, thank you to all the people who have endured our questions, thank you to Rita and Jams for the beautiful header and the logo, respectively, and thank you – every single one of you – for your support.

Thank you for helping us launch Loud and Alive and thank you for keeping us kicking. It means more than we could ever put into words (and we are both writers so it says a lot).

T h a n k  y o u!

In the end, the time wasn’t right. Maybe what the world needs today is less words, more actions. What it certainly needs is more love.

So yes, Loud and Alive will no longer be updated but you can find all of the incredible articles on our Wordpress site that will forever stay up.

And even though we are not going to be publishing new content, that doesn’t mean that we won’t stay alive and be as loud as possible. That’s what we’re here to do. And hopefully, that’s what you came to do here, too.

Thank you again, from the bottom of our hearts. It was a beautiful journey.

It always will be.

Love,

One Netflix Marathon at a Time

by Colleen, @ravenclawpianist

I really like Netflix original series.

Sense8, Fuller House, the multiple Marvel’s Defenders shows, Marco Polo, The Crown- I could go on but you get the picture. I like these shows because they go places shows on TV don’t typically go, whether that means being honest about some of the things women experience (such as the way the line “smile” was used in Jessica Jones) or having complicated plots that wouldn’t be fully fleshed out in a usual television show’s allotted 45 minutes (looking at you, Sense8).

That being said, there is one Netflix show that stood out to me as the most honest, entertaining, and true-to-life.

How to Survive Your First Same-Sex Breakup

by Mira art by Mike Shaw

I came out publicly a few months prior to my twenty-second birthday. I was sitting in the parking lot of a hospital with my partner at the time, coffee for her bedridden mother in the cup holder, and we were avidly discussing our new relationship.

“I don’t know, I like, I really want to make it Facebook official? I just don’t know what my dad’s gonna say,” I said. “But I already told my mum. And she was really cool with it.”

Which was true. I’d told my mother maybe a week before that I’d started seeing someone, and when she asked me for “his” name, I hesitated before saying “Vanessa*.” And she didn’t react. Instead, she asked me where we met. Like she always expected her daughter to be into girls someday.

My adoration, my young and shiny-brand-new love for Vanessa, was so big on that day that I wanted the world to know about my first girlfriend. And with her encouragement, I took my chances with the more conservative half of my family. With shaking, clumsy fingers, I used the crummy hospital Wi-Fi to set my Facebook relationship status to the obviously gay relationship I had. I kissed her in her car in the parking lot. My lipstick probably smudged all over her face. I wanted everyone to know that her red mouth was because of me.

So I wanted to die when she broke up with me a few months later. Because no matter how full I felt of feelings, no matter what kind of future I dreamed of when I held her in my bed at night, she didn’t want those things anymore. She didn’t want them from me. And I wanted to die.

To the Woman Who Posted a Picture Laced with Subtle Racism, and Was Upset by the Backlash

by Kai

You knew people would see that photo when you posted it to your thousands of followers. And you must have known that what to you may have been a harmless photo, to others was a blaring reminder, a threat even, that we are still not safe.

So when people shot their anger at you through the keyboards in front of them, slipping past the defenses you had built to keep them out, and into your Twitter notifications you must understand that it was, a reminder that there will always be people to stand against bigotry and a question as to whether or not bigotry will be a timeless monstrosity.

The Millennial Gospel Project

by Sarah, @sarahtaylorgibson

GIVING TO THE POOR AND WALKING WITH THE OUTCASTS IS PUNK ROCK. If Jesus were a millennial he would be a punk socialist and nothing anyone will ever say with convince me otherwise. Mary Magdalene with artfully placed runs in her black stockings leading down to her studded Doc Martens, are you with me?

When I first read this enthusiastic response to a Tumblr post I had made, I had no idea it was the seed of a 1,600 follower-strong virtual faith family and brew-house of creativity. I just knew it excited me.

The enthusiast in question was Alice, who would become co-moderator of the Millennial Gospel Project, but at the time she was just an internet friend in Alabama with a literature degree and a complicated relationship to her Catholic upbringing. I was eighteen, tentatively shaking off the trappings of mainline Christian evangelism, and trying to assemble a faith walk that fit the fraught Thing I had with God.

DID SOMEBODY SAY PUNK GOSPEL AU? I typed with a grin, and added my own embellishments.

Peter as that Marxist kid with patches on his jacket who usually gets arrested at protests, Mary as a sassy Gen X mom: “I didn’t get slut-shamed by all of Georgia for having you at sixteen so you could grow up to wise-ass me, Jesus Emmanuel.” Jesus is a total introvert (please forward all unexpected social events to Peter or Mary, and don’t do the whole kiss-the-hem-of-his-jeans-in-prostration thing, it makes him uncomfortable) but super fun when you get him to loosen up (Remember that wedding? Water into wine? Best party ever). And his message? Life changing.

I’m Watching It Burn

by Colleen, @ravenclawpianist Image by Jennifer Lee

In high school I went over the deep end with journaling. I carried the journal-of-the-moment with me everywhere, always ready to take an opportunity to stop and write. Rather than try to make friends during the lunch hour, I would find the emptiest table in the cafeteria and spend the time surrounded by my own thoughts. I challenged myself to see how much I could write each day, a challenge which culminated in my filling a journal in a week.

Journaling got me through some really rough times and provided me a safe place to try to work through depression, crushes, hurt over losing friends, confusion about sexuality, and the other typical concerns of growing up. It was a large part of who I was, and journals filled a huge plastic tub I kept in the closet.

Please note the past tense.

On The Edge of Seventeen and Something Bigger: The Reclaiming of the Female Film Protagonist

by Lauren, @kindredsummers

Nadine Franklin is having a rough year.

Though 2016 has been a difficult one, arguably for much of the general population, Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen reminds us that every year is a rough one, when you’re in high school. Beyond the agony of pimples, romance troubles, and friend drama, however, The Edge of Seventeen paints (or splashes, really) a bigger picture- one of the recent twenty-tens trend of the female director-screenwriter combo breaking their female protagonists and their costars out of the boxes that a century of cinema has placed them in.

Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen joins the ranks of Lake Bell’s 2013 film In a World… and Gillian Robespierre’s 2014 indie hit Obvious Child, making a (somehow still) bold statement that perhaps the people who can best write and direct female characters and actors, are in fact, women themselves.

The protagonists of these films swear, and not in a huge outburst kind of way, but a slip-into-multiple-conversations-daily type of way. 

They go to the bathroom, and not just in a drunken haze or to take a pregnancy test. They have dislikable moments, and make you want to sink into your theater seat as if it were quicksand. They are far from perfect, and the filmmakers make damn sure by the end of the film that the audience knows it, too.