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A Friendship Of A Lifetime - Paul Newman & Robert Redford

There was a time, awhile back, when I was trying to get an apartment in New York. So I wrote a few friends, to see if they would support me and give me a good references. So I would like to share with you tonight, the letter that Paul wrote the board.

“To whom it may concern: Mr. Robert Redford has owed me 120 bucks for over 3 years. He will not assume his obligation under threat of loss of friendship, honor, loyalty. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend him for anything.”

Robert Redford Honors Paul Newman At The Kennedy Center, 1992

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“Shelley Jackson’s Skin project, a 2095-word story published exclusively in tattoos, one word each on as many willing volunteers, so it can never be read in its proper order, but just exists, pulsing, out in the world at all times.”

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STOP. moment of gratitude for those precious times of breathing from your nostrils when you don't have a stuffy nose

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I know that some British people take umbrage at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

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How Very Dare They: More Thoughts on the Bears

That photo frame, and the various photos in it, has been my favourite thing about the bears since it appeared at the Montreal show. So far we’ve seen: Frank ‘foo-foo’ Lamarr, Larry Grayson (!!!!! still not over it !!!!!!), John Inman, Quentin Crisp, Stella Artois (identifying her was good work), Mado Lamotte, Liberace, Bette Davis, Judy Garland and Ken Dodds. 

I’m not really trying to decode the bears (although I got as excited as anyone else with the countdown).  As I’ve said before the only message I take from the bears is that they are consistently presented as gay and occasionally presented as Harry and Louis. And everything I want to say about them comes from those two observations. I love the photo frames, because that’s where the bear tableaus engage most with queer history. I think the queer figures appeared in those frames are an exploration of quite a specific theme – and I think that theme is important.

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Frank Lamarr and Larry Grayson both started their working lives as drag acts.  There was a demand for that in the 1940s and 1950s, a circuit.  Entertainment was a way for working class gay men (boys really Grayson left school at 14 to start work) to earn a living and be around other gay men. Sex between men was still illegal, but queer culture had a place in mainstream entertainment – pantomimes and drag acts in particular, but also highly camp comedic acts.  All these acts were connected to much older cultural practices that had developed as part of the marginal lives queer people lived (the history of queer people in the entertainment industry and the cultures that developed is fascinating and goes back well before the twentieth century – polari is a fascinating place to start if you’re interested). By the time Lamarr and Grayson were getting started these sorts of acts were a coded language that everyone understood.

I’ve written a little bit about Frank Lamarr who remained a Manchester drag act his whole life and became a cultural institution. Danny La Rue had a similar career to Lamarr, but was London based and did a lot of work in Pantomine. Larry Grayson and John Inman’s careers went in a different direction from Lamarr’s (John Inman had started as an actor, rather than as a drag act, but operated within the same cultural sphere as Lamarr and Grayson – he worked a lot in Pantomine). In the 1970s, both Inman and Grayson got jobs as highly camp television performers – Grayson presenting game shows and Inman in the sitcom Are You Being Served.

Here they were bringing camp queer characters to a British television audience for pretty much the first time (The Carry On film series started in the 1950s, but the BBC moved much slower).  These characters, and the actors who played them, were operating in a new environment – sex between men was legalised in 1967 and obviously the 1960s and 1970s was a time of huge cultural and political upheaval – both of which meant there was a small space for queer representation that hadn’t existed before.  Quentin Crisp’s autobiography – The Naked Civil Servant – was turned into a television play in 1975. It was part of the same wave of queer visibility – a visibility limited to very camp characters – but a new visibility nonetheless.  But it was a much more high culture version of the story – John Hurt who played Quentin Crisp won a BAFTA (this was appropriate and reflecting the endless importance of class in British society – since Crisp himself was middle-class while Grayson and Inman were working-class).

All the queer figures that have featured in the frames have been part of the coded camp queer culture that Inman and Grayson took to television.  In fact for a long time Liberace was most famous in Britain, because of his part in a legal dispute about that code.  In 1956, a columnist from The Daily Mirror (Louis’ least favourite tabloid) described Liberace as: “…the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.”  Liberace sued for libel.  In response The Mirror claimed that they hadn’t meant to imply he was gay (they obviously had – pay attention to the phrase ‘mother love’ – it’ll be back) and Liberace testified (untruly) that he was not gay. The Mirror lost and Liberace got awarded reasonably substantial damages.  Here queer codes fell apart when exposed to public and legal scrutiny. Everyone was denying that they meant what they very much did mean.

Mado Lamotte and Stella Artois are contemporary drag queens - and they are keeping that much older culture alive.  I think this video of Stella Artois, which I found on youtube, is very interesting:

Two things Steve Phillips says while getting ready to perform as Stella Artois are I think particularly relevant.  He talks about performing as a job.  All of these figures were working entertainers and all (even Mado Lamotte and Stella Artois) started working at a time where the only way you could be visibly queer and an entertainer was by working as a drag act, or in Pantomine or in other high camp comedy. Then Phillips quotes Barry Humphries who said that if Dame Edna Everage (Humphries drag persona) was punched in the face then Humphries wouldn’t have a bruise.  Which is such a powerful statement of both the homophobic violence that these performers faced and the way that the high visibility of drag acted as armour and helped people negotiate violence and oppresion.

The bears have been exploring a very particular of queer entertainment history (Divine fits this same theme – although an American independent film version – very visibly queer, but in the 1970s at least, not out.  Although given that Divine was the first such figure it’s possible that he was chosen as part of the queer history of Baltimore and the development of a theme came later).  These are performers who were visible through their campness, but often not out, and were consciously part of a long cultural tradition of men who had created very similar spaces in very similar ways.  With each additional figure I become convinced that the bears are being curated by at least one person who is actively interested in queer history. These figures are not picked just because they are prominent or famous, they are picked because the people picking them have something to say.

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I say people, I mean Harry and Louis.  There were really good reasons, even before Louis began his latest quest to make sure everyone knew his involvement with the bears, to think they were involved.  I want to start with 2011 Sugarscape videos (which contain answers to all of the world’s most important questions).  Literally 8 million things happen in this 75 second video (and I have so many questions - mostly did Harry really say “that he’s gay”, but also it’s just occurred to me what Louis meant hen he said he’d been teasing Harry loads).

But most relevant to the bears is Louis’ reaction to his boyfriend mentioning Eleanor and thereby implying he’s straight:  “How very dare you”.

Louis’ comment is a reference to a recurring sketch in the Catherine Tate show (you can see every example here). In this sketch, Derek is a highly camp character who hits all the coded ways that Inman and Grayson conveyed to television audience that they were gay, but acts absolutely outraged when a character assumes he’s gay – “how very dare you!” is his response.The sketch itself is referential – contrasting a hyper-stylised, coded, marginalised gay culture with a society that is more open (and I could say a tonne more about it than that, but I want to get this finished – so I’ll leave it for now).  And Louis’ use references both the sketches and the culture.

That’s not the only reference Louis made to camp British culture of the 1970s in November 2011.  When they went on Alan Carr (who is a direct descendent of Larry Grayson in particular – camp for a whole new world) – Louis greeted him “Hello Gorgeous” and then told Carr that he would out-camp him during the dance-off.  Then there’s the interview where he talks about Harry in a dress (link because I can’t get the embed code to work).Both what he’s saying and how he’s saying it are so much part of that particular camp, coded way of talking.

I think there’s an important distinction to be made between Louis’ very brief, active references to camp culture, and this interview:

Both are incredibly gay in form and in content, but in different ways.  In the sugarscape interview (from January 2011), Louis is describing gay experiences and comes across as quite camp – but neither is particularly deliberate.  By November the same year he was consciously adopting coded language that had a long association with gay men in entertainment.  (there are other example which are a little more general than those I’ve mentioned - he talks about bringing Mr Camp in another sugarscape interview and described himself as flaboyant in New Zealand in April 2012).

We can’t know why consciously camp Louis shined so briefly (and if anyone has any earlier examples I’d really like to see them). But I believe (I think it’s a reasonably common belief) that somewhere between auditioning on X-factor with a girlfriend and the UK media blitz of autumn 2011, Louis Tomlinson became someone who was quite comfortable with being seen as gay. I’d go further and say that part of this was embracing the conscious, coded, queerness of camp British culture.

(Every post is improved by a video of this G-A-Y performance, to make the point about how happy Louis was)

But he only got the briefest window to share that part of himself. It was one of the first things that got taken away – it was one of the first thing that got taken for him.  There’s a huge sad irony there – that this code that was developed specifically so that gay men could be visible in a time when they were completely marginalised – was taken away from a young gay man, because it was too gay, in a supposedly more liberal time.  

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When Frank Pearson’s father first saw him perform in drag as Foo Foo Lamarr he threw a bar stool at him. Larry Grayson and John Inman bought that coded queerness that Lamarr’s father found so threatening straight into people’s living rooms. What I love most about the bears is their exploration of the different way that generations of entertainers have found ways to be openly queer, even though their sexuality was marginalised, criminalised and terrorised. 

There is a final layer of queer history to this – history that is being made now.  Within the context of a One Direction concert queerness is once again in the margins (albeit also under the spotlight for that one concert in London).  The bears elaborate queer codes are tucked away from the stage.  Because their owners cannot (yet) be visible in the way that the people they put in frames have been. 

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🔹 Someone else's fiction cannot cause you physical harm.

🔹If someone else's fiction is causing you emotional or psychological harm, or distress, you can put it down and not read/watch it.

🔹Your emotional well-being is not the responsibility of fiction writers.

🔹Someone else's fiction is not about your personal trauma.

🔹When reading or watching fiction, you always have the power. You can always stop. You are never reading fiction without your own consent.

🔹Fiction writers are not responsible for other people's mental health.

🔹The content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of its author.

🔹Just because someone writes about bad things happening, doesn't mean they want those things to happen.

🔹Don't like? Don't read.

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The sentences "Asexuals can still have sex" and "Aromantics can still date" need to go up on the high shelf for everyone except aces and aros talking about their own experiences. From now on, everyone else has to use the revolutionary new phrase "Asexuals and aromantics can do whatever the fuck they want forever."

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I feel like starting an urban legend about a demon that kills you if you don't have headphones on when browsing tiktok in public

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being smart has never stopped me from being a complete fucking idiot

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you dont have to be a parent to understand the horror of walking into a room to discover that the baby crawled out of his crib and onto that pottery wheel you forgot to turn off, and while the baby is spinning around and around, the dog is sitting there all calm, like a person, gently using his paws to fashion the babys soft cartilage head into something a little more modern.  it might be the classic tale of bad parenting, but lets see where the dog is going with this

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Hey, I have a question, so a group of construction workers has recently built a nest outside my home and seem to want to spend the summer months there. They've already started construction on a project, so I assume they're healthy, but is there anything I can do to make sure they get the nutrition they need throughout the hot summer months? Do I need to have a steady supply of beer or energy drinks?

construction workers are expert foragers and don't take well to interruptions, so the best you can do is leave them be.

if you want to encourage them, however, you can spend three to four hours on the street watching their project with your hands clasped behind your back. this makes them feel like they are doing a good job

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"God never gives you more than you can handle" is survivorship bias. People who got more than they could handle are dead.

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everyone needs a creative outlet to stick a creative fork into

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i've always felt like whatever sabrina carpenter has going on is deeply heterosexual business that does not concern me