#t cooper

T Cooper

Gender: Transgender man

Sexuality: N/A

DOB: 16 October 1972

Ethnicity: White - American

Hey guys,

So this is kinda just a hypothetical right now but it is common practice for Disney animations only to last 4 Seasons. Obviously, no decision has yet to be made on SVTFOE and whether it is being renewed for a 5th Season or not yet but I just want to plan ahead a bit.

So at present when it airs in the UK I do follow Andi Mack, Cyrus being the first Disney character in a main cast of a show who is canonically LGBT is groundbreaking and it does intrigue me. I’m probably gonna keep paying close attention to this show as long as it airs. Presently I follow the show with SVTFOE in mind but if SVTFOE were to end I’d probably try and get more involved with the Andi Mack fandom. Not sure yet.

Disney is something I absolutely love too so I think I will keep paying close attention to Disney and its media and how it deals with and improves on its LGBT representation.

Once Upon A Time has one last episode next week and it looks like my Alice/Tilly is Star and Robin/Margot is Marco theory will not come to fruition and even if it did given this show is ending it doesn’t do much for the continuity of this blog.

So here is the big and concrete thing. Shows with LGBT representation, particularly those aimed at young adult audiences are something I’m very excited about. When I grew up there were practically none. Channel 4 made “Sugar Rush” but despite being focused on teenagers its themes were quite adult and when released on DVD it was rated 18. I quite enjoyed “The L Word” but short of these two shows, I found a lot of shows and films where LGBT people were the butt of the joke and then films and shows actually aimed at us were largely aimed at or at least rated for older audiences, not to mention they were largely independent so didn’t get the massive advertisement, cinema releases or prime time airing spots.

Which brings me to the next TV series I would love to give this blog and my focus to. There is a book series called “Changers” written by Allison Glock-Cooper and T. Cooper. It is a 4 part book series and the latter book comes out later this year.

Now back in 2015 it was announced that Meryl Poster has picked up the book series in order to make a TV adaption with Lionsgate TV being the producing studio. There’s been no news since the announcement though so I recently sent a tweet to T. Cooper who assures me it is presently being worked on which is super cool and I am glad to hear.

Now “Changers” isn’t an expressly LGBT book series but T. Cooper is a trans man and the premise of the book series is that you have two races of humans. Statics and Changers and the main protagonist, Ethan is a Changer. On the first day of each year of a high school a Changer will wake up as a completely different person and have to live as that person for an entire year. At the end of the 4 years of high school they have to pick one of the 4 people they were in school to live out the rest of their life as but they can’t go back to being who they were before high school. It is weird and confusing and I remain hesitant to call it an LGBT book series but it does a really good job at exploring sexual orientation and gender identity. It also does a good job at exploring racism, mental health, sexism and a bunch of other issues too.

Anyway, I totally advise reading the books. The TV series is being written by Allison Glock-Cooper and T. Cooper which means it should live up to the books and when it does come out I am quite interested in following this TV series on this blog.

And look, I’ll never quite abandon SVTFOE but this blog is quite content driven being a theory blog. If and when SVTFOE ends I will remain open to commenting on it, I may rewatch it now and again and spot new stuff. If Marco is confirmed to be trans, hell I may analyse this show until the day I die. But my blog is very much content driven, meaning the show airing helps a lot. Meaning when SVTFOE ends I’d quite like some continuity.

So eventually, the future of this blog will probably be focusing on the Changers TV series which I am guessing will be 4 seasons long.

WHAT TO READ WHEN EVERYONE IS CELEBRATING DADS

This Sunday is Father’s Day, and whether you are celebrating your father or cursing his name, we have a list of very good books about fathers and the impact they have (or don’t have) on our lives from some of our favorite writers. 

The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Road by Cormac McCarthy 

Hamlet by Shakespeare 

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter 

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt 

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer 

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood 

H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald 

The Shining by Stephen King 

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling 

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht 

Real Man Adventures by T Cooper 

Hey guys, So for my newer followers, when my SVTFOE content dries up I tend to do “Out of Season” content. Last year I namely did YA LGBT book suggestions. My mental health got sorta bad last year during the season break though so I didn’t do much of this but I think this year I’m up to it.

Anyway, usually I will only suggest books I have read and I should have this book read and off my list but I still want to talk about it now.

So you might recognise the above book title and if you don’t, you maybe more familiar with its movie counterpart, “Love, Simon.”

So “Love, Simon” has been exciting on its own being the first mainstream romantic comedy to follow the story of a gay teenager and hopefully it is the first of more to come. I have quite a few books on my book shelf I would love to see be made into movies and I have at least one series I know is in the works for a TV adaption, “Changers” by T. Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper. I’d quite like to see “Being Emily”, “Just Girls”, “Nico and Tucker” and “My Year Zero” by Rachel Gold to make it to the big screen one day, especially “Being Emily”. I think “Just Girls” would be good too. In my mind “Being Emily” is quite easily the trans equivalent of “Simon Vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda” by Becky Albertalli. It’s a story about a trans girl in high school who is just coming out to her girlfriend and family and preparing to transition, but on top of that it isn’t 2 dimensional either. Many books I have read try to hard to force a happy ending or they focus so much on the transition and coming out aspect you end up feeling like all being trans is about is transition. “Being Emily” shows someone with a girlfriend, family and friends who is just trying to be a more fuller version of herself by coming out and being true to herself. It is much like “Love, Simon” felt to me and reading the re-release of “Being Emily” a few weeks ago, I’d recently seen “Love, Simon” in cinema and I had this very clear image of everything going down in a very similar style to that movie. By the way, I was fortunate to get and advanced review copy of the new version “Being Emily” which is why I managed to read it a few weeks back, but it did come out this week and should be available on the US Amazon and from Bella Books.

This is kinda a hope I have though, but I do think “Being Emily” would be a great book to be made into a movie. “Just Girls” too as that one is quite politically relevant for the present day.

But I have gone on a bit of a tangent. So I was in Waterstones today with a friend browsing books and I saw a book with a “Love, Simon” sticker on and picked it up to look. The book is called “Leah on the Offbeat” by Becky Albertalli and is the sequel to “Simon Vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda”, this time being told from the perspective of Leah and as I said I haven’t read the book yet so I am just gonna post the blurb here for you guys to read;

“When it comes to drumming Leah Burke is usually right on the beat - but real life is a little harder to manage. She loves to draw but is too self-conscious to show it. And she hasn’t mustered the courage to tell her friends she’s bisexual, not evenly her openly gay BFF, Simon.

So Leah really doesn’t know what to do when her rock-solid friendship group starts to fracture. With prom and college on the horizon, tensions are running high, and it’s hard for Leah when the people she loves are fighting - especially when she realises she might love one of them more than she ever intended...”