Everyone's a Jackson Pollock

Actress Alia Shawkat has been on queer women’s radar for a while, but in a recent interview with Out, she talked specifically about identifying as bisexual and bringing queerness into her work. A snippet: 

You’ve taken on more explicitly queer roles, like when you played Ilana Glazer’s look-alike lover on an episode of Broad City. What was that like?

I’d been mistaken for Ilana a lot, and I’d heard from her friend that she’d been mistaken for me too. Next thing I know, I’m on a group text with the girls. Then I had a script. I’ve been recognized so much since. A guy in New York pulled up and said, “Hey, you Ilana’s lover, huh?!”

How do you identify with these characters?

I was a tomboy growing up, and I remember my mom asking me when I was 10, “Are you attracted to boys or girls?” I said I don’t know. Now I consider myself bisexual, and I think balancing my male and female energies has been a big part of me growing as an actor.

Did working with Portia de Rossi on Arrested Development help shape your identity?

Portia started dating Ellen DeGeneres during the show’s first three seasons, and I’d met her previous girlfriend, but I think my influences are more from growing up in Los Angeles and being exposed to lots of gay artists.

How do you feel in the current climate, moving forward as a queer artist?

I co-wrote and star in a new film called Duck Butter, which opens later this year. I love that it was written for a man and a woman, but we couldn’t find the right guy, so now it happens to star two women [as lovers]. I used to be less outspoken. But as a woman, an Arab-American, and a member of the LGBTQ community, I have to use whatever voice I have. There’s no more delicacy in being quiet.

© CHRISTINA HOLMES

http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Gay-Men-s-Chorus-carries-on-A-quarter-century-2533823.php

At every rehearsal during the 1980s and early 1990s, there were announcements about who was in which hospital room and when the next memorial was scheduled.

“I could see all these people dropping all around me, and there was no official response from any health department at any level,” said Tony McIntosh, who joined the chorus in 1985 and lost 25 friends to AIDS. “It was maddening. The chorus gave us an outlet for all that anger and relief from the feeling that nobody in the world seemed to care.”