Nicole Dennis-Benn on Holding Hands, LGBTQ Podcasts, and More LGBT News
Author: Parrish Turner
September 9, 2017
In other LGBTQ news…
Lambda Literary Award winning author Nicole Dennis-Benn‘s “Modern Love” essay explores what it means to be a black woman holding hands with another black woman:
While a white lesbian couple could walk holding hands or even tongue kiss in the middle of the street, lesbians of color, particularly black lesbians, have a hard time doing the same. I felt outraged when this became more apparent to me, as an open femme, who can pass as straight — the ultimate trigger for men who have a hard time accepting that women like us are out of reach.
Who is the author that has inspired Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes to make family films? Gay author Brian Selznick seems to be getting Hollywood excited again.
Kevin Sessums played twenty questions with writer Tony Masters in advance of Sessums’ new web magazine.
Playwright Paula Vogel discussed”The Myth of Angry Feminism” with Lenny Letter:
I have spent 30 years of my life mentoring people, and to me, when you’re angry, it’s because you want justice. I think anger is very valid as an impetus to write. We do not yet have a cultural model of women as prodigal daughters, but to be a prodigal son is a very romantic mythology… We have a lot of angry young men, and we see that that anger is coming from love for wanting the world to be better, and we embrace that.
Geek OUT celebrated its third FlameCon this year! The convention was not without its controversies. On a panel about the comic anthology Love is Love took a turn when an audience member asked about the lack of diversity within the contributors to the anthology. A video from the panel can be found here.
Author Alice Anderson sat down with The Rumpus and discussed tarot cards, Hurricane Katrina, and mythologies of motherhood.
Tillie Walden’s Spinning has been receiving a lot of buzz. Check out AV Club‘s excerpt here.
Spinning
Spinning
Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts. I always enjoy learning about some new ones and NBC has a list of 11 LGBTQ-inclusive podcasts to check out.
QueerReader sat down with Patrick Ryan to discuss his latest collection , The Dream Lives of Astronauts, and the craft of writing.
From the interview:
I approach characters slowly, and try to make my rendering of them as much of a collaboration between me and them as possible. I put them on the page and have them do something, and then I step back and observe them for a while. And by “observe,” I just mean that I try to get inside their heads and get a sense of what it’s like to be them. No one is entirely good, entirely bad, entirely sane, entirely crazy, etc. Someone doing something mean is quite possibly not very proud of it in the moment. Someone doing something nice is quite possibly feeling resentful of having to be nice. Characters need to be just as complex as real people.
For LitHub, Nick Ripatrazone wrote about the interactions between social media and publication. He asks the age old question: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody tweets about it, does it even exist?
Writer Ariel Levy has added a moving postscript to her New Yorker profile on “the grande dame” of LGBTQ rights Edith Windsor.
Image via New York Times
