Tag Archives: Dazed

‘True Love’ Web Series Shows What It’s Like to Be Queer in Homophobic South

It’s hard being gay in the American South. Unless you live in Charlotte or Atlanta, walking down the street holding hands with a same-sex partner could get you shot. Then again, people in big cities are not always safe, as illustrated by the devastating Pulse nightclub attack on the liberal southern city of Orlando, Florida in 2016.

Being gay in the South is hard enough. Being gay in working-class pockets of the rural south is a death wish. The vast majority of the working-class South voted for Trump, and the entire blue-collar region isn’t known for its liberalism as much as it’s known for its KKK rallies.

Dazed Digital‘s True Love web series follows stories of unlikely, sometimes unlucky, queer lovers around the country. The series debuts with the story of Sarah and Bri, a “young lesbian couple from Nashville, Tennessee, who are at odds not just with lingering family disapproval, but wider society.”

The series follows Sarah and Bri’s first meeting, discusses their burgeoning sexuality and documents the mixed reactions from their conservative community. Sarah’s family was relatively accepting; she came out to her father via letter at fifteen. Bri’s family was much more upset.

In order to be together, Sarah and Bri contacted each other via secret phones, watched each other through binoculars when physically separated, snuck around behind Bri’s parents’ backs, and stood up to their homophobic community.

When Bri’s family caught Sarah and Bri in the middle of a romantic encounter, they called the police and demanded that Sarah be arrested for statutory rape. Her parents claimed that the age difference between the two girls meant that Sarah raped her. Luckily, Sarah got off safely – barely.

She says,

We beat the law by ten days. If would have went to jail if I had been any older the day her mother called the police on me.”

The show’s producer, Elise Tyler, says that the show goes beyond pointing the finger at poor communities and calling them homophobic. The show aims to show that poor American communities are a victim of larger American society.

She says,

There is a war on poor people in this country, and it is frightening. It is not something we addressed directly, but I think the air of each episode alludes to the struggles so many Americans currently face.”

Watch the first episode here.

‘I Want A Dyke For President’ – Watch Mykki Blanco Recites Powerful Poem

Ahead of next month’s Presidential election, queer artist and musician Mykki Blanco has been enlisted by Dazed to recite legendary poem “I Want A Dyke For President,” written in 1992 by artist/AIDS activist Zoe Leonard.

Written nearly 25 years, the peom aggressively questions the violent banality of our elected politicians – remains as relevant and striking as ever.

Especially as we watch Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump battle it out for control of America, as xenophobic politicians helped the United Kingdom leave the EU, and as Russian bombs drop on Syria

It begins:

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.

I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying.

I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harrassed and gay-bashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape.

I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy.

I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.”