Bourbon & Bluegrass
Accompanied by my oldest friend, Chris, I’d embarked on a road trip centered on bourbon and bluegrass, exploring the back roads of the state where those two American mainstays trace their deepest roots.
Accompanied by my oldest friend, Chris, I’d embarked on a road trip centered on bourbon and bluegrass, exploring the back roads of the state where those two American mainstays trace their deepest roots.
The Sunday Times November 21, 2005 By Will Pavia and Chris Windle
VILLAGERS who protested that a new housing estate would “harm the fairies” living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.
Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000. His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn.
. . . a masculine lesbian wearing “fancy, go-to-bar drag for a butch dyke.” . . .
Stonewall employee Harry Beard said that the lesbian had struggled with police inside the bar. She was handcuffed behind her back and arrested for violation of a New York edict that required each person to be wearing three pieces of “gender appropriate” clothing. Beard related that when she protested the rough treatment, a cop hit her in the head with a nightstick.
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
—Pat Robertson, 1992[4]
In 1991, five months before a Texas jury[5] deliberated on a request for custody of Petitioner’s two year old daughter, she received Notice of Deposition Duces Tecum requiring production of “[a] black veil or any other clothing or article or object related to and pertaining to the practice or use in witchcraft, the occult or ‘new age’ practices in your possession or subject to your control.”[6] She realized she was being accused of practicing witchcraft. Why? What relevance might it have in a child custody case? During the week long jury trial that followed later that year, Petitioner thought that she might be the only woman in twentieth-century America to be “tried” for witchcraft. That was not so.
The goal is to create a digital critical edition, annotated, of everything Twain wrote, from the Mark Twain Papers and Project of Bancroft Library, California Digital Library, and UC Press.
“So here it is - my lesbian terms dictionary. I’ve even thrown in some of the origins of words so you can look extra clued up next time your buddies go out for coffee. I haven’t organized it alphabetically, but in groups of terms that have similar meanings.”
Annamarie Jagose Australian Humanities Review Dec-1996
The appeal of ‘queer theory’ has outstripped anyone’s sense of what exactly it means Michael Warner
The recent intervention of this confrontational word ‘queer’ in altogether politer academic discourses suggests that traditional models have been ruptured. Yet its appearance also marks a continuity. Queer theory’s debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions. Queer is not always seen, however, as an acceptable elaboration of or shorthand for ‘lesbian and gay’. Although many theorists welcome queer as ‘another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual’ (de Lauretis, 1991:iv), others question its efficacy. 1 The most commonly voiced anxieties are provoked by such issues as whether a generic masculinity may be reinstalled at the heart of the ostensibly gender-neutral queer; whether queer’s transcendent disregard for dominant systems of gender fails to consider the material conditions of the west in the late twentieth century; whether queer simply replicates, with a kind of historical amnesia, the stances and demands of an earlier gay liberation; and whether, because its constituency is almost unlimited, queer includes identificatory categories whose politics are less progressive than those of the lesbian and gay populations with which they are aligned.
Something queer is happening to the word “queer.”Originally a synonym for “odd” or “unusual,” the word evolved into an anti-gay insult in the last century, only to be reclaimed by defiant gay and lesbian activists who chanted: “We’re here; we’re queer; get used to it.”
Now “queer” is sneaking into the mainstream — and taking on a hipster edge as a way to describe any sexual orientation beyond straight.
The left wants to wield the righteous sword of politically correct censorship in a hamfisted attempt to protect what they perceive as the otherwise “weak” and “helpless” black man. They wish to neuter the word nigger so that it will not shatter blacks’ fragile nature. You do not see the word in print in mainstream media. And though entertainment companies make serious bank pimping “niggaz” to middle America, you do not hear the word associated with true discourse in the media.
Yet, how many media executives or newspaper publishers who made the decision to amputate nigger into “the N-word” are people of color themselves? Or is it merely “them” deciding what’s best for “us?”
. . .
There is not one individual on this planet who can make a black into a nigger. We can only do that to ourselves. Yet aided and abetted by fear of the right and largess from the left some are all too happy to be accomplices in their own demise.
This is where gays got it right. There was a time when queer was a harsh pejorative for homosexual. But instead of trying to force people into using convoluted phrases such as “the Q-word,” they embraced the word queer. Gays stole it from their enemies, waved it like a captured war flag which they then strung from the standards of pop culture: Queer as Folk. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. By flogging it endlessly they took away its intended sting. So, then, go on and call a gay queer. At worst they will laugh and shake their heads. At the least they may say: “yes, thanks.”
Acceptance of the word does not end homophobia. It does not stop the hate mongers from trying to inject bigotry into the Constitution. However, unlike some in the black community, upon mention of the once dreaded word gays will not drop into a fit of histrionics.