#sorry that the second one is so u.s.-centric it's just that i live in the u.s.

[ask-jumblr]

Thank you so much to everyone who’s been constructive.

Both commenters, and the anons below who were open about what they’re struggling with. Since all of the asks were either hateful, or seemed to be addressed at me, the mod, I’m going to handle them. 

Before you get too upset that I didn’t give all y’all equal chance to answer: I’m encouraging the anons to send in some asks dealing with the issues they’re mentioning, formatted in such a way that it’s easier for jumblr as a whole to constructively help. Based on their current asks, I can only ask questions about what they practically need.

Because I’ll be addressing the asks chronologically and the constructive asks come later, I’m going to put it all below the cut. If you don’t have energy today, don’t click through. Even the constructive stuff is heavy.

Here were the first two anon’s received:

Isn't Orthodox just exclusionary extremism? Aren't those the homophobes and transphobes who think you shouldn't be allowed to marry a non-Jew? Why aren't we staying focused on reform/recon Judaism?

It’s okay not to know things, although the assumption was a little harsh so I didn’t want to post it directly. In response I made a myth-busting post. Yes, it is American-centric, but here’s why: I can be pretty darn sure anon is American, or at least North American.

Given that you’re upset about intermarriage, you’re probably not Israeli. Given that the U.S. has the largest diaspora population, anon is likely American. Given that anon is referencing “Reform” Judaism as an alternative, they’re probably not in Britain (”Liberal Judaism”) or outside U.S./Britain/Canada/Israel (”Progressive Judaism” everywhere else).

Realistically speaking, I can’t call up every community everywhere. As an American coming out of a mediocre, Anglo-centric education system, I can only speak one other language with any competence and blurt a few words of a few more. If you want to know about a community in a specific place then please, please ask. There have been folks on here asking about communities all sorts of places who have gotten answers here. Jewish geography + the internet is amazing! When anon is American, with misconceptions about American Jews I’m going to assume such.

Orthodox Jews should probably stop existing. 

This ask is hateful and non-constructive. Hence the threat to block.

After this, I got some anons who are getting at some problems that we can really work on. They aren’t American, so I’ve assumed they aren’t the first anon.

hey if your responses and views could stop portraying us jewery as being the only way things are done and that we somehow all have access to the stuff you do, that would be grand

(cont) or where there zero chance of finding a group of that community that'll accept me and not treat me in hateful ways. I'm sorry that Jewery outside the US/NA is that unfamiliar to you and that our viewpoints and experiences makes you uncomfortable but I guess that's the way US Jews deal with Jewish "outsiders".

I’m going to start with part 1 to stay in order even though part 2 is what gets me antsy to help ya. You’re right. I don’t have a ton of experience with non-U.S. Jewery. That’s why I tag thoroughly and encourage folks who don’t know the answer to signal boost. If you’re specific, someone else on jumblr can help you. 

When anon asks are vague and, as they often do, reference U.S./North American terms for branches (”reform” rather than “liberal” or “progressive”), I’m going assume the anon us in the U.S. or greater North America. Most other respondents likely will too. Anon askers who want otherwise need to use terms that are more globally (”progressive”) or locally (”liberal”) appropriate, or give a little more locational information (e.g. city, country, region). Re-my new explanation above about American-centrism. I respect that you didn’t have the benefit of seeing the language in that ask, but I’m here to help you as much as I can without superfluously emailing every rabbi in every country for another anon who’s linguistically and statistically likely to be in New Jersey or Ohio or somewhere else in the U.S..

Now for part 2 (after “(cont)”), your concerns. (Getting something out of the way: Since you’re saying “Jewish “outsiders”” I’m going to assume you’re Jewish. However, many people reading this might not be; this audience has a lot of prospective converts. I want to point out that prospective converts aren’t entitled to conversion via any particular community. I might personally be dismayed, but it’s that community’s prerogative. Getting that community to a place where people who are already Jewish who are LGBTQ, have disabilities, etc. are accepted is going to be my priority if I were to harangue a community that’s not my own. In other words, people like anon. On that note...) I received another ask with a concern similar to part 2, by someone in a similar situation as a Jewish person under the LGBTQ umbrella whose only option is a community that won’t accept them. I’d like to answer these together. Here’s that second ask:

Not your first anon but there's no non-homophobic Orthodox community where I live. I live in Europe and maybe it is different in the US but the Orthodox communities here do NOT accept lgbt+ people. Or if they do it is under the "don't ask, don't tell" form of homophobia where you're accepted as long as you don't display it publicly or ask them to treat you as an equal in any way. So sorry for not feeling endeared to a group that have always hated me.

This means we’ve got a heck of a problem. There are Jewish people who don’t have a community and need one. Y’all (You all) don’t know me irl, but making sure Jewish people who want Jewish communities have Jewish communities is something I’m very big on. I’ve gotten some flack for being too welcoming or too focused on making sure synagogues are welcoming. I want you to know that we want you here. Unfortunately you aren’t close enough for me to personally offer you that hug.

You see, I’m a U.S. Jew, but I’m not one from a place like New York City where there’s a wealth of Jewish community options. (hint: #SouthernJews #ShalomY’all) I know those people near me who feel forgotten, ignored, scoffed at, or unvalued don’t always have another option (or that it’s a loooong drive and lots of gas money away). I am someone who has had to put in the work to build the community she wants and needs, and a community that is welcoming for the people she cares about. 

Putting aside the extent to which I’ve had to patch up my own education while trying to make sure others aren’t on their own doing it, I’ve also had an obstacle you’ll find more relatable. I know it’s not obvious, I’m also under that LGBTQ umbrella (sexuality, not really gender from my current self-understanding). I’m largely closeted irl because being Jewish makes me enough of a target and is harder to hide. I don’t discuss it much on the internet because I don’t want #woke #discourse about myself as I figure out my own identity, and don’t want my own processing  (yay for internalized -isms!) to hurt someone else. It’s fine that you didn’t know, but I want you to know now so that you can understand my experience:

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend in Israel who’s had to make community choices too. My friend (who is also under that umbrella) convinced me that I should go to a shul with a rabbi who was openly homophobic in the past because it’ll be the best balance between programming that meets my needs (adult learning! services!) and driving distance. The rabbi stopped being openly homophobic, so I know I can be in that community. But it’s not exactly my dream. I don’t plan on relying on that rabbi for psak or life-cycle events--at least not until I know more. Then again, I’m lucky. I’m lucky in that there are rabbis I feel comfortable getting psak from who speak my native language. I’m lucky that I know enough to know that a non-rabbi can officiate a commitment ceremony (and actually a Jewish wedding too...), and that I’m from a well-connected extended-family that is friends with rabbis elsewhere (whoot! Jewish geography!) who would happily come in to officiate for me (though it might be costly and they might only do commitment rather than marriage). And I’m lucky that my extended family would be supportive enough to do so for me (they’d be getting eager enough for me to marry anyone...).  I’m also lucky in that I could drive even farther and hit a Reform community that’s been more accepting for much longer. It doesn’t have the resources or programming I need, but I would have hypothetical access to a place with other Jews that has gender-neutral bathrooms and a rabbi who hasn’t said anything (recorded) that’s unaffirming of my existence.

But what about people who don’t have access to an alternate community? Or for whom that other community is even father from being a good fit?                   With work, it is possible to make change. Do you know why that shul’s rabbi stopped being openly homophobic? Maybe compassion. But there was an outside trend too: the community shifted away from homophobia to embrace its LGBTQ members, and he was forced to follow. It’s quite likely that movement stances and responsum helped, but community organizing, changing minds one-at-a-time, those were definitely pieces of the puzzle.

I want this blog to be here for you in figuring out how to make those changes. I began an initiative on here called Tikkunity. It’s a goofy name for an important mission: help people find strategies to make their communities more vibrant, more welcoming, more supportive, more accessible, more whatever someone needs. The ones I’ve put out so far aren’t as heavy as your topic, but Tikkunity is also here for what you’re looking for. I’ve gotten in touch with some other blogs about topics that are less obvious for communities, and a bit heavier too. If either of y’all feels comfortable messaging me from off anon (just make a side-blog with a random url), I’d love to draft a post with you. Alternately, if you send something constructive and specific enough such as “I only have one choice of community and I don’t feel safe or accepted there as a [insert LGBTQ identity/ies] person. How can I make my community more accepting of [my existence/my partnership/my pronouns/etc.]? FOR: Orthodox and [LGBTQ accepting/affirming/or other word or phrase of your choice that describes people who would be in-line with your goal]” or “ I only have one choice of community (there aren’t many Jewish people near me) and I don’t feel safe or accepted there as a [insert LGBTQ identity/ies] person. Does anyone have recommendations of what to do and tools to help me do Jewish stuff to do without the big community? How can I find people from that community willing to join me so it isn’t as lonely?” then I can post it off the bat

As much as I’m not letting askers generalize Orthodox Jews as individually homophobic/transphobic, the U.S. isn’t a utopia for LGBTQ [Orthodox] Jews looking for communities. “Don’t ask don’t tell” is how many U.S. Orthodox communities function. You’ll notice that the Orthodox LGBTQ-acceptance group I linked (Eshel) is an activist-type group from within the Orthodox community. The most effective change comes from within communities, which is why I’d rather you talk to Orthodox jumblrs than me. There are many LGBTQ Orthodox Jews on tumblr who might be willing and able to help you make that change via advice on a Tikkunity post, connecting you with other activists, or via a longer-term messaging relationship as they make change in their own communities. While I don’t think Eshel formally works outside the U.S. right now, that doesn’t mean you can’t ask them about expansion or see if they can connect you  with other laypeople community builders and shifters to provide mentorship and support.

If you can’t start within the community, you can start building alternate spaces with Jewish people you know who have been willing to engage with you. Even communities that are largely homophobic/transphobic aren’t a monolith. There’s lots of advice out there for people making “start-up” communities or “indepedent minyanim” or “chaburas.” It’s not fair that you have to do the work. But don’t take it out on all Orthodox Jews, individually, especially because some of them are on your side.

And if you’d rather move than make those changes then if/when you are able to move this blog can also be a resource for you. If you send in a message with the cities you’re considering and what you’re looking for in a community, someone in jumblr can likely help give some advice on where you’ll find the best community for you.

[imagitory]

If you were President of the U.S., what would you do? I would give the U.S. more economic freedom similar to most European countries (we're #17 for God's sakes), end the War On Drugs, end corporate welfare and lobbying, make victimless crimes a thing of the past, make our healthcare system similar to that of France, and millions more things that I can't mention XD Basically make our government smaller (not too small mind you) and try to mimic other countries like we should be doing.

Oh geez – pressure! Um…well, as I’ve said to you previously, I would never, ever want to be a politician, let alone president. I don’t have the expertise needed, and I don’t have the temperament for it either. But in a highly hypothetical scenario, my interests would be:

+Taxing corporations. Sorry, if they’re considered “people” according to the Supreme Court (and, believe me, if I had the power to shape the courts, I would deal with that ruling forth-with) and they can put so much money into our election process (which, again, I’d have something to say about), they need to pay taxes like people do. And closing loopholes to keep their profits in the U.S. would be a good idea too.

+Raising taxes on the 1%. No one should have as much money as those people do, when there are so many other people who can’t afford to make ends meet. Capitalism may be our system, but many of the people who have that much money didn’t earn it – they oftentimes inherited a good portion of it, meaning they didn’t put in the work needed to justify it. And our society needs the funds to take care of all of its citizens, the 1% included, and those 1% have the money needed to fund such projects – infrastructure, military spending, health care, national parks – those are things that help everyone. There’s no reason to squeeze blood out of a stone by trying to get our funding mainly through middle-class and working-class people…not when the wealthiest among us aren’t even paying tax rates close to what they were paying in the 1950′s (you know, when the middle class was booming?).

+Championing LGBT rights, most significantly adding LGBT protections to the Civil Rights Act so that it is a federal crime to show prejudice against someone for their sexual orientation or gender identity

+Tying the minimum wage country-wide to the cost of living, making it automatically rise to keep up with any changes to the economy. That way it doesn’t have to be voted on over and over and over and it doesn’t become outdated.

+Working with the Food and Drug Administration to develop new programs meant to better regulate pharmaceuticals and help fund professional, government-funded drug treatment centers, so as to put an end to for-profit drug rehab centers that require no certification.

+Working with the Department of Education to develop new programs specifically designed to help struggling college students with their finances: namely, to help reduce the amount of loans they’ll have to take out, give them a path toward paying them back effectively, assist with financial aid, and even provide complete learning materials online to save on the cost of expensive textbooks. Also, creating new federal standards for sex education in public schools, so as to help lower teen pregnancy rates.

+Creating a public option for health care, which would be the equivalent of our public school system: something both easily affordable and accessible that provides everything one needs to be healthy, while health care businesses pick up the slack with “plusher” options. This would make it so, like with our schooling, everyone has access to health care, no ifs, ands, or buts.

+Funding infrastructure and housing projects, which would not only help with creating jobs and boosting our economy, but would help us invest in our future.

+Providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and Dreamers.

+Proposing an amendment abolishing the Electoral College, so that elections are only determined by the popular vote. The system is beyond outdated and it has been used several times now to give the loser of an election the presidency he didn’t earn.

+Advocating for term limits for Congressmen and Senators. If we need to check the president, we must also check people in Congress the same way. And while we’re on the subject, adjusting the privileges members of Congress receive. If the government is shut down, those members of Congress should not get paid, any more than other government employees do. They should receive no better health care benefits than their constituents – otherwise, how can they dare have a leg to stand on complaining about the practicality of government health care, when they’re all on government health care?

+Accept refugees from foreign countries seeking asylum, regardless of where they’re from.

+De-escalating our military endeavors and favoring a more diplomat-centric course for foreign policy. We have more than enough expenditures to take care of at home: a good chunk of our ridiculously sized military budget should be spent on dealing with issues at home. We can take care of security without wasting so much – we spend more on our military than China, Russia, the U.K., India, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and France, combined. No one country needs to waste that much money, particularly if we disentangle ourselves from many of the military conflicts we’ve crammed ourselves into. If we must use military force, we must do it intelligently and in conjunction with our foreign allies.

+Appointing a new task force within the VA specifically targeted on updating the system we use to keep track of veterans and their benefits.

+Regulating guns nation-wide. My ideal goal would be a licensing system not unlike what we have for cars, as well as regulation on who can legally sell firearms and what kind. NO ONE IN THIS COUNTRY NEEDS AN AK-47, I’m sorry.

+Working with the FEC on voting reforms, such as online voting, which would help working-class people (many of whom must work on federal holidays) vote more easily. I would also want to create new guidelines regarding felony disenfranchisement, making it so those convicted of non-violent felonies would be able to vote again once their sentence is completed, as well as investigate ways to help homeless Americans exercise their right to vote. I can speak from first-hand experience that when you’re homeless, voting is very difficult, because you don’t have an address that anyone can send ballots to. Many homeless people use the shelters they stay in as an address, but those shelters are only accessible to people who aren’t working: if you’re working and homeless, you’re basically stuck in this horrible no-man’s land where you make too much to live in a shelter, but are too poor to afford your own place. Because you have no address, you basically don’t exist to the government, and that means you have no one who will speak up for your interests, not only because your voice has been silenced, but because the world makes you think you don’t matter. This doesn’t even touch the issue of transportation that many homeless people face. It would definitely take some investigation into how to deal with this, but there are many people in this country who deserve to be able to speak for themselves that can’t, all because of their bad fortune.

+Offering statehood or (in the cases of those territories that we acquired through colonialism) national freedom to Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands. The second-class status they’re in is just not fair by any metric. They either deserve full representation in our government, or they deserve the ability to represent themselves. They deserve the right to vote for their leaders. They deserve a healthy economy. They deserve access to good health care and services, and they deserve to be treated as the U.S. citizens they are. If we can’t give them that, and/or those territories are done with waiting for us to give them that, then we don’t have any right to continue taking advantage of them. For D.C. in particular, the people who live there deserve a government outside of federal lawmakers to help them deal with local issues: a government with lawmakers they choose, rather than are foisted upon them.

Wow, that got longer than I expected…but a lot of things just came to mind. I would not have interest in making government smaller, exactly, but I would be very interested in bringing more people on board to not only introduce fresh ideas, but also to help us tackle the astounding workload we have to deal with regarding these issues. We need fresh minds and expert hands, ready to work hard. Naturally we wouldn’t want to completely put our heads in the sand in regards to foreign policy, but we would still want to put more focus on being the best country we can be, so that we can better help others. If our country is prosperous, then it gives us more leverage and power in promoting prosperity elsewhere. If we’re united, then we will more easily be able to stand against injustices abroad. If we take care of our own people, then we can more easily provide aid to other countries.

As I said, though, I have no interest in being a politician and I profess no great expertise in any of these matters, so one can take all of this with a grain of salt. This is just one American citizen’s flight of fancy in response to a friend’s question.

[edgeofisolation]

“Sis, We All Know Why You Don’t Care for It”: The Perpetuation of Covert Homophobia and Heteronormativity in the Digital Age

Society has had a long history of homophobia. Often citing religious texts for the reason for their bigotry, people have frequently listed homosexuality as being abnormal and inherently deviant to the morals of society. In fact, it was only in 1973 that the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from their list of mental illnesses and only this year has India decriminalized homosexuality. In many developing countries, homosexuality is still considered a criminal act in over 70 countries around the world with some even condemning it by death. However, it should be said that in many liberal countries like South Africa, The United Kingdom and The U.S. have made many strides in the normalization of homosexuality and advances in LGBT rights have been considerable in the past 30 or so years. In many of these countries it has now become a societal taboo to be outwardly homophobic, with many of these countries condemning homophobia as hate crime and a human rights violation. Yet still, homophobia continues to consist in society and exists in many forms such as verbal and sometimes physical abuse as well as through structural and systemic discrimination. Deeply entrenched in the very fabric of society, this post seeks to analyse the ways in which covert homophobia still persists in contemporary liberal societies and the ways in which these forms of homophobia represent the broader structural issues of cis-heterosexism that continues to characterize the world we live in despite the commendable efforts to live in a post-homophobic world.

Homophobia is arguably the result of repressive structures imposed by heterosexism and patriarchy. In a study conducted by Neil Henderson, he looks at how heteronormativity in “traditional” African communities reinforce homophobic behaviour and ideologies. Henderson (2015: 109) argues that in societies characterised by heteronormative ideals brought on by a patriarchal system that see heterosexuality as the norm perpetuate homophobia as being inherently deviant and abnormal. He goes on to argue that this sort of hetero-morality is often held up through religion, culture, and education systems with homophobic language being the key perpetrator in the perpetuation on discrimination based on non-heteronormative identities (Henderson, N., 2015: 109). In his analysis of coming out stories by gay men in Cape Town, Henderson notes that in the cases where these men presented more traditionally feminine traits faced the largest brunt of homophobia by their families and their communities as they were more likely to uphold heterosexuality and traditional gender roles as the norm, and thus condemning those who stray from these ideal, suggesting that there is a causal link between homophobia, heterosexism and traditional patriarchy (Henderson, N., 2015: 111-112).

This seems to be strengthened by Thabo Msibi’s study of the experiences of queer youth in township areas in South Africa. In many township schools, Msibi (2012: 518) notes that teachers are often not only inhibitors of homophobia complicit in their silence, but also perpetuate it themselves through repressive structures that aim to hinder and deviate from the perceived cis-heterosexual norm and thus enforce heteronormativity resulting in the lives of many queer black youth remaining bleak in the face of hegemonic masculinities. This, Msibi (2012: 520) argues that this could be because of the rampant poverty experienced by these communities largely due to the legacy Apartheid which caused heterosexual men to aggressively assert their masculinity, condemning all who deviate from it. Thus, in terms of sexual identities (particularly homosexuality), in societies highly characterized by hetero-centricity and heterosexism, the dominant discourses and cultural practices in these societies almost explicitly promote heterosexuality and traditional gender roles as being compulsory, marginalizing those identities who do not conform to this narrative into highly repressive and discriminatory structures (Msibi, T., 2012: 521).

These repressive structures brought on by heteronormativity still persists in contemporary liberal societies in various ways disguised as covert homophobia which suggest that there is still some level of societal acceptance of certain forms of homophobia. Much like “colour-blind” racism that seeks to reflect a post-racial society, homophobia has been rearticulated in more covert forms as a new form of homophobia disguised in the language of liberalism (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 14). Much like covert racism, covert homophobia in liberal societies “fail to dismantle any of the heteronormative structures that privilege heterosexuality and oppress members of queer communities despite what appears to be advances in LGB equality” (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 14). This is done in many ways but for the sake of this post we will focus on the “born this way” essentialism and the “some of my friends are gay…” rhetoric, both which present covert homophobia that is perpetuated by so called allies of the LGBT community. 

The most apparent of these is the “some of my friends are gay…” rhetoric. Much like the “I have black friends” rhetoric, this positions heterosexuals as not possibly being homophobic because they choose to associate with queer people (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 19). This, Teal and Conover-William (2016: 19) argue is a form of ally entitlement where heterosexual identities claim ally status through the association with the queer communities which remains inherently problematic because claiming ally status with the intent of protect yourself against being homophobic does little to eradicate established heterosexist power relations. Furthermore, because the “but some of my friends are gay” rhetoric is often preluded by homophobic comments or slurs (such as calling someone the f-word as an insult), these so-called allies proclaim this ally status to neutralize the effect of their comment which “maintains heterosexism by assuming this neutralization is valid, and sufficient for using anti-queer sentiments,” almost directly implying queer identities should be grateful for their “acceptance” (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 19).

Another more controversial form of covert homophobia lies in the “born this way” essentialism. Put briefly, this rhetoric relies on the dichotomy between the discourses on whether you are born queer or is it a choice. Many queer allies, and even queer individuals themselves, argue that people are born queer and that it is not a choice (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 16). This sort of essentialism is used to justify that homosexuality is normal and presents queer people with the struggle of having to constantly have to prove something that is simply not possible (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 16). Because of this impossibility, many homophobes use this doubt to justify their bigotry arguing that if it can be proven without a doubt that homosexuality is inborn, that they will perhaps change their positions on homosexuality (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 16). As daunting as this may be, this has a second layer to it because by essentializing sexuality as being inborn, many people ignore the social construction of sexuality. In doing so, queer allies (and some queer individuals) use essentialism to argue that homosexuality simply could not be a choice any sane individual would make. Thus, allies make use of covert homophobia to invalidate the possibility that queerness could be an actual, valid choice to make and by “simplifying sexuality into genetic versus choice argument ignores that sexuality is a social construction and devalues queer sexualities by framing them as inherently bad or negative” (Teal, J., Conover-William, M., 2016: 17).

One key example of cover homophobia in action is Kim Kardashian’s brief ‘beef’ with model Tyson Beckford. Herein, Tyson Beckford made a comment on a popular Instagram page The Shade Room where he said he did not like Kim’s body, calling her apparent surgery as being a botched job. Shortly after, Kim took to Instagram to defend her body by shaming a sexuality he does not even identify with, boldly stating “sis we all know why you don't care for it” (EOnline, 2018). This is very problematic for a number of ways. Most notably, Kim centres her rebuttal solely on the fact that the only possible reason he doesn’t like her body is because he must be gay. Furthermore, by framing her rebuttal with the gendered noun “sis,” Kim is acting in a way that reinforces heteronormative ideals of what a straight man should be, attempting to shame his sexuality and his masculinity by reducing it to the “diminutive” femininity. Unsurprisingly enough, Kim defended her comments by saying “for anyone to say that I am homophobic for the comment of saying 'sis' like, I'm sorry, I'm the least...all my best friends are gay, I support the community, I love the community, they love me” (EOnline, 2018). This echoes the “but my friends are gay…” ally entitlement that Kim uses to justify her covertly homophobic remarks. Kim thinks that just because she is an “ally” who “loves and supports” the community, that she immediate gets a backstage pass to using any homophobic sentiment that she pleases. Kim is entitled. Kim is homophobic. Kim is reinforcing heteronormativity. Kim is far from being the ally she so boldly claims to be.  

From the above discussions it can clearly be seen that homophobia is alive and well. By people positioning themselves as liberal who do not care if you “gay, straight, black, white or blue,” liberal allies act in ways that reenforce their heteronormativity onto a community desperate to be accepted, and disguise their homophobia by common sentiments such as jokes or essentialism. By the mere fact that a celebrity as prominent as Kim Kardashian can use covertly homophobic sentiments and leave from it virtually unscathed, this shows that society, though hiding under the veil of liberal ideals, is still unashamedly homophobic. Until this is addressed, repercussions are felt, and healthy discussions are had about contemporary forms of homophobia, covert homophobia will continue to repress the lives of queer individuals even in the most progressive societies.

References:

Cohen, J. 2018. Kim defends dissing Tyson Beckford over body shaming comments. Accessed on 10 September 2018 from the World Wide Web: https://www.eonline.com/au/news/959088/kim-kardashian-defends-dissing-tyson-beckford-over-body-shaming-comments

 Henderson, N. 2015. The persistence of homophobic discourses: Narratives of a group of gay men in Cape Town, South Africa, Agenda, 29:1

 Msibi, T. 2012. ‘I'm used to it now’: experiences of homophobia among queer youth in South African township schools, Gender and Education, 24:5

 Teal, J. & Conover-Williams, M. 2016. Homophobia without homophobes: Deconstructing the public discourses of 21st century queer sexualities in the United States. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations. 38.

[gustavowilh]

Accolade, Concur, and the ROI of Customer Love

Customer love might sound fluffy, but it doesn’t have to be.

We were thrilled to host Mike Hilton, Chief Product Officer at Accolade and Co-founder of Concur, at this year’s Customer Love Summit. In his talk, Mike shares how customer-first strategies contribute to success, and how to put ROI against customer love. He also shares actionable advice on how to create a culture of customer obsession to create products customer love.

Specifically, Mike’s talk covers:

How to drive real business results from delighting customers

Five strategies for customer love

Tips for measuring success

If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Alright, good morning everyone. They asked me what song I wanted to come in on and I thought that was a really appropriate one. Given that, it’s a real pleasure to be with you all. Good morning. Red, I’m sorry, I forgot the memo about the wings and the halo. Next year I’ll bring those. I just wore a jacket so not nearly as cool. But I’ve got about 25 minutes or so to talk to you about customer experience, really, customer love and focusing on the customer and really how that translates to ROI.

That’s a really hard problem. I know a lot of you in this audience focus on customers, customer experiences, customer feedback, and a lot of times it can be really hard to tie that back to really driving…how does focusing on that drive concrete value. And I’m just going to relate some of my experiences over my career and some of the things that I think matter the most that really drive being customer-centric and customer-focused and how those things have translated to value in the experiences I’ve been a part of.

You know, at Accolade, where I am now, we have a great tradition of starting with a customer story or a customer quote in a lot of our company meetings and just meetings in general. And it just seemed really appropriate, given this audience and the theme of this whole conference and my talk, to kind of do the same. I think it’s one of those small things that can have a big impact over time. It reminds everybody why you do what you do every day. And this is a quote from one of our Accolade users. We happen to be a tech-enabled service.

And so we have a human component and a digital engagement component to what we do. I’ll talk a little more about Accolade in a second, but this is a quote from one of our users. And I love those feedback loops and always starting anything that I’m doing in the business with, “Let’s remember why we’re all here, who we’re serving and why that’s important.” And this is an example of one of our customers who really felt some empathy from someone they were talking to at Accolade. And it’s a reminder for our engineers, for our UX people, for our salespeople, everyone in our company, these are always great reminders of why we do what we do and the ultimate measure of success of what we do.

I want to just talk a little bit about who I am and my background just to give you some context. I’ve been in software my whole life. I started my early career at Apple. A million years ago I was a software engineer. I worked on a product called MacWrite. Some of you in this audience may even know what that is. You’re dating yourself like I’m dating myself right now if you do. It was the first word processor for the Mackintosh. I worked at Apple for a few years on that. I learned a lot about customer-centric software design and focus and feedback loops early on in my career and early on in the industry. I went on to co-found a company called Concur. Some of you may be users, some of you may love or hate me for knowing that.

No one loves expense reports. Hopefully, we made it a little bit easier over time. But I was part of Concur from its founding in the apartment all the way through to our sale to SAP about three years ago. And getting to about 30 million users and about 15 million mobile users at the end, over a million active users a day, I learned a lot about customer focus, customer feedback, customer love, and tying that back to business results. I’ll talk a little bit about that.

For the last two and a half years, I’ve been in a company called Accolade as the chief product officer, really trying to bring some customer love to the healthcare experience for the U.S. consumer. I think you can all agree that that’s a place in our lives that needs some customer love. The customer love bar is pretty low in healthcare. And doing it through a tech-enabled service that we sell to corporations, but we serve consumers.

So, it’s sort of a B to B to C type of business. And I’ll talk about…we serve about a million and a half people today. We’re a few hundred thousand mobile users. Mobile’s a new consumer experience that we introduced relatively recently. And I’ll talk a little bit about that. That’s kind of my background and gives you some context for what we’ll talk about going forward. I always like to get to the punchline and then kind of work my way back in presentations like this.

I’m a huge believer that when you focus on the customer, you focus on delighting that customer and you focus on having a really high-bandwidth, high-functioning feedback loop with that customer, you drive real business results. And the company I’m at today is really interesting in that consumer delight and consumer engagement is actually one of the core selling value propositions we have to corporations that we sell to.

So, for us, really being customer-focused not only drives ROI internally for us, making our software development more efficient, we’re having a much more efficient iterative cycle with our software development, it’s also something that sits on our prospect sales decks and presentations. We’re selling customer delight. We’re selling employee MPS and employee engagement as one of the core value props to corporations. And so it is really embedded in what we do in my current job, both internally and also externally. And these are some of the core sort of value pillars that I live with every day. We save money for our customers. We, you know…building trust… Healthcare is one of those things where there’s not a lot of trust, right?

As consumers, we struggle to trust the insurance company. We sometimes struggle to trust our employer, do they really have my best interests at heart? And if you’re going to try to deliver a consumer experience on top of all that, you need to have trust as one of your brands. And so it’s a huge part of what we sell. We have extraordinarily high MPS with consumers. And so, it’s really at the center of what I do every single day. And as I talk about…I’m going to talk about five things that I think I’ve learned over my career that really sort of tie being customer-centric to value and some of the things that work. And you know, at Accolade we’re really lucky today. We have a mobile app that’s got a five-star rating.

I will say it’s been, you know…and Robi talked about this. I first discovered Apptentive at Concur. We were one of the first users. It was a core part of what made our mobile product successful there. When we built our mobile product at Accolade, Apptentive was at the core of it from the very beginning. I think the delight that we have with our mobile solution… Some of you maybe have used mobile apps in the healthcare world. They don’t have a great reputation as being easy to use and delightful.

Having a five-star mobile app with, you know, hundreds of thousands of users is something I’m extraordinarily proud of. And I think a lot of that comes back to, “Do you really know who’s delighted and who’s not, and do you have feedback loops that make that happen?” It’s something that we’ve accomplished at Accolade that I’m really delighted with.

But I want to just quickly go through five strategies that over my career have really worked well around being customer-centric. And I want to start with one that I think a lot of people miss. And in my experience, these are directly correlated to success. And the basic idea is that I think if you don’t have employees that love working at your company, it’s really hard to have customers that love your product. Those two things are highly correlated. I think that customer love does start at home. And when I say at home, I really mean…there’s very few companies I would submit that have extraordinarily delighted consumers or customers and have really unhappy employees. Those things end up correlating extremely highly.

And I think there’s multiple things about that that are really important. One is, do you really care about how happy your employees are every day as much as you care about how much you love your customers? And also, is your customer love really embedded in how you think about your employees as well? Do your employees really value customer love as deeply as you do as a leader? I think those are extraordinarily important points. A lot of people skip over that step.

And I think they’re extremely highly correlated, and all the way to… You know, and I think it’s a loop. I think when you really focus on customer delight, and you start delighting customers, it has a funny way of making your employees happier as well. Employees want to be successful and a lot of being successful is serving your customers well and delighting them. And that feedback loop to me is extraordinarily important. And in my career, I have found that if one of those starts going south, the other one’s going to go south and they really play off of each other very closely.

And so, I think there’s a lot of specific things that you can do to really make sure that that loop is really tight and that you’re focused on both. One of the most important ones to me is, have you really embedded customer love in the culture of your company or of your team? I think that matters a lot. You know, at Accolade we have cultural cornerstones that include really customer love and, are we taking care of customers. Robi told a story about sort of how we measure success as a company, the metrics that drive things like how we’re bonused and how we grade ourselves as a whole company.

Customer NPS is one of the core tennets of how we do that. Revenue, profitability, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction, those four pillars define success. The health dashboard of Accolade is based on those four pillars. And customer love is one of those four pillars for us. If our customers are not delighted with the service we’re delivering, we’re not succeeding as a business.

I would just submit, like ask yourself and your company, is customer sat embedded that deeply in success? All the way to how people are bonused, how you think about, is the company even succeeding or not? We put all four of those pillars on sort of an equal weighting. And I think it bleeds into everything. You know, are you hiring the right people? I think that customer focus is one of the most important dimensions when I’m interviewing people, especially at the leadership level. I think those things really matter. I think when you want to really walk the walk of being a customer-centric organization, you’ve got to really look at those things and think about those things.

So I think that thinking about employee delight and customer delight hand in hand and embedding that into how you operate is really important. Second, thing I really wanted to speak about this morning is this idea of trust. I think trust and love are two words that are not very far apart from each other. And, you know, it’s an interesting thing in the modern world. I think in a world of digital engagement, which a lot of you are really centered around, and I’ve been centered around in my career, digital engagement makes it really hard to build trust, right?

There’s not a human relationship there. There’s a digital relationship, and trust can be hard to build. And I think trust is everything in the digital world and it’s really hard to earn. It’s extraordinarily hard to earn and it can be destroyed in an instant. And I think the biggest problem with trust in the digital engagement world is that it often gets destroyed without you even knowing that it’s being destroyed.

It’s the worst thing that happens, right? You find out through the lagging indicator. You’re losing users. You’re finding out on social media. You’re finding out in all these places that are too late. And I think it’s an extraordinarily hard problem. I think it’s one of the most important cornerstones. If you’re going to delight consumers, they have to trust you at some level. And I think there’s some key cornerstones around how you do that. And I think one of the most important is, do you have the listening mechanisms in place that are leading indicators, not lagging indicators?

It’s the most important thing is that do your customers have a pathway to tell you that something’s wrong before they go out to Twitter or before they start talking to all their friends, or before you start creating a snowball? It’s extraordinarily important because, you know what? Even the greatest companies that are great at delighting customers screw up sometimes and make mistakes. And I think feedback mechanisms that are in place that give you that feedback loop, you have to shorten that loop to the shortest degree possible.

And I think solutions like Apptentive are a big part of how that happens. And I’ll talk more about that in some of the other places where I think it matters, like meeting the customer where they are. Embedding that in the middle of the consumer experience that they’re in, in the moment that they’re having challenges, is extraordinarily important. The other thing is I think being transparent is extraordinarily important in the digital world, perhaps even more so than in human relationships. If you screw up, you have to be honest about screwing up, telling the truth and being honest.

I think we live in an interesting world, in the digital space, where I think trust is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. You know, privacy is one that gets a lot of attention today in the consumer space. But it’s an issue no matter what your consumer experiences is. I think trust is extraordinarily important. And transparency, holding yourselves accountable, being honest, but more than anything, having that feedback loop, in my experience, matters the most. I can think of many, many times when our software development teams found out something was wrong, that if we had not caught it then and course corrected right away, we would have had a 10x or 100x worse problem a month or two months or three months later. I can’t say enough about how important I think that is.

Which kind of leads to my third point, which is you really have to meet the consumer where they are. And a lot of you in this room really understand this extremely well. A lot of you focus on the consumer experience and making it delightful. Again, I think that this is one where, you know, technology and innovation just in the digital world in general keep changing the goalposts, right? I can remember very much at Concur, you know, we had a solution that was run through a browser and that’s how everyone used our product. And, you know, the iPhone got launched, you know, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and we knew right away like, this is something new and if we can embrace it in the right way, we can transform our business.

And we ran to it. We ran to it right away and we’re one of the first people to really adopt it in our industry and do something interesting with it. And it changed our entire business in terms of engagement, and customer sat and a whole bunch of dimensions really exploded by embracing it. And, you know, you look in the modern world and, you know, the number of things that are out there that can change your consumer experience just keep multiplying.

And, I think you always have to be on top of that. But to me, more than anything else, you know, when you look at the traditional ways you listen to your consumers and customers, they’re pretty terrible. And I’ve been victim in the past of, you know, you try email surveys or phone calls and things that the feedback loops that are just really ineffective.

The post Accolade, Concur, and the ROI of Customer Love appeared first on Apptentive.

from Blogger http://gustavowilh.blogspot.com/2018/09/accolade-concur-and-roi-of-customer-love.html via IFTTT

[michaelmikkelson]

Accolade, Concur, and the ROI of Customer Love

Customer love might sound fluffy, but it doesn’t have to be.

We were thrilled to host Mike Hilton, Chief Product Officer at Accolade and Co-founder of Concur, at this year’s Customer Love Summit. In his talk, Mike shares how customer-first strategies contribute to success, and how to put ROI against customer love. He also shares actionable advice on how to create a culture of customer obsession to create products customer love.

Specifically, Mike’s talk covers:

How to drive real business results from delighting customers

Five strategies for customer love

Tips for measuring success

If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Alright, good morning everyone. They asked me what song I wanted to come in on and I thought that was a really appropriate one. Given that, it’s a real pleasure to be with you all. Good morning. Red, I’m sorry, I forgot the memo about the wings and the halo. Next year I’ll bring those. I just wore a jacket so not nearly as cool. But I’ve got about 25 minutes or so to talk to you about customer experience, really, customer love and focusing on the customer and really how that translates to ROI.

That’s a really hard problem. I know a lot of you in this audience focus on customers, customer experiences, customer feedback, and a lot of times it can be really hard to tie that back to really driving…how does focusing on that drive concrete value. And I’m just going to relate some of my experiences over my career and some of the things that I think matter the most that really drive being customer-centric and customer-focused and how those things have translated to value in the experiences I’ve been a part of.

You know, at Accolade, where I am now, we have a great tradition of starting with a customer story or a customer quote in a lot of our company meetings and just meetings in general. And it just seemed really appropriate, given this audience and the theme of this whole conference and my talk, to kind of do the same. I think it’s one of those small things that can have a big impact over time. It reminds everybody why you do what you do every day. And this is a quote from one of our Accolade users. We happen to be a tech-enabled service.

And so we have a human component and a digital engagement component to what we do. I’ll talk a little more about Accolade in a second, but this is a quote from one of our users. And I love those feedback loops and always starting anything that I’m doing in the business with, “Let’s remember why we’re all here, who we’re serving and why that’s important.” And this is an example of one of our customers who really felt some empathy from someone they were talking to at Accolade. And it’s a reminder for our engineers, for our UX people, for our salespeople, everyone in our company, these are always great reminders of why we do what we do and the ultimate measure of success of what we do.

I want to just talk a little bit about who I am and my background just to give you some context. I’ve been in software my whole life. I started my early career at Apple. A million years ago I was a software engineer. I worked on a product called MacWrite. Some of you in this audience may even know what that is. You’re dating yourself like I’m dating myself right now if you do. It was the first word processor for the Mackintosh. I worked at Apple for a few years on that. I learned a lot about customer-centric software design and focus and feedback loops early on in my career and early on in the industry. I went on to co-found a company called Concur. Some of you may be users, some of you may love or hate me for knowing that.

No one loves expense reports. Hopefully, we made it a little bit easier over time. But I was part of Concur from its founding in the apartment all the way through to our sale to SAP about three years ago. And getting to about 30 million users and about 15 million mobile users at the end, over a million active users a day, I learned a lot about customer focus, customer feedback, customer love, and tying that back to business results. I’ll talk a little bit about that.

For the last two and a half years, I’ve been in a company called Accolade as the chief product officer, really trying to bring some customer love to the healthcare experience for the U.S. consumer. I think you can all agree that that’s a place in our lives that needs some customer love. The customer love bar is pretty low in healthcare. And doing it through a tech-enabled service that we sell to corporations, but we serve consumers.

So, it’s sort of a B to B to C type of business. And I’ll talk about…we serve about a million and a half people today. We’re a few hundred thousand mobile users. Mobile’s a new consumer experience that we introduced relatively recently. And I’ll talk a little bit about that. That’s kind of my background and gives you some context for what we’ll talk about going forward. I always like to get to the punchline and then kind of work my way back in presentations like this.

I’m a huge believer that when you focus on the customer, you focus on delighting that customer and you focus on having a really high-bandwidth, high-functioning feedback loop with that customer, you drive real business results. And the company I’m at today is really interesting in that consumer delight and consumer engagement is actually one of the core selling value propositions we have to corporations that we sell to.

So, for us, really being customer-focused not only drives ROI internally for us, making our software development more efficient, we’re having a much more efficient iterative cycle with our software development, it’s also something that sits on our prospect sales decks and presentations. We’re selling customer delight. We’re selling employee MPS and employee engagement as one of the core value props to corporations. And so it is really embedded in what we do in my current job, both internally and also externally. And these are some of the core sort of value pillars that I live with every day. We save money for our customers. We, you know…building trust… Healthcare is one of those things where there’s not a lot of trust, right?

As consumers, we struggle to trust the insurance company. We sometimes struggle to trust our employer, do they really have my best interests at heart? And if you’re going to try to deliver a consumer experience on top of all that, you need to have trust as one of your brands. And so it’s a huge part of what we sell. We have extraordinarily high MPS with consumers. And so, it’s really at the center of what I do every single day. And as I talk about…I’m going to talk about five things that I think I’ve learned over my career that really sort of tie being customer-centric to value and some of the things that work. And you know, at Accolade we’re really lucky today. We have a mobile app that’s got a five-star rating.

I will say it’s been, you know…and Robi talked about this. I first discovered Apptentive at Concur. We were one of the first users. It was a core part of what made our mobile product successful there. When we built our mobile product at Accolade, Apptentive was at the core of it from the very beginning. I think the delight that we have with our mobile solution… Some of you maybe have used mobile apps in the healthcare world. They don’t have a great reputation as being easy to use and delightful.

Having a five-star mobile app with, you know, hundreds of thousands of users is something I’m extraordinarily proud of. And I think a lot of that comes back to, “Do you really know who’s delighted and who’s not, and do you have feedback loops that make that happen?” It’s something that we’ve accomplished at Accolade that I’m really delighted with.

But I want to just quickly go through five strategies that over my career have really worked well around being customer-centric. And I want to start with one that I think a lot of people miss. And in my experience, these are directly correlated to success. And the basic idea is that I think if you don’t have employees that love working at your company, it’s really hard to have customers that love your product. Those two things are highly correlated. I think that customer love does start at home. And when I say at home, I really mean…there’s very few companies I would submit that have extraordinarily delighted consumers or customers and have really unhappy employees. Those things end up correlating extremely highly.

And I think there’s multiple things about that that are really important. One is, do you really care about how happy your employees are every day as much as you care about how much you love your customers? And also, is your customer love really embedded in how you think about your employees as well? Do your employees really value customer love as deeply as you do as a leader? I think those are extraordinarily important points. A lot of people skip over that step.

And I think they’re extremely highly correlated, and all the way to… You know, and I think it’s a loop. I think when you really focus on customer delight, and you start delighting customers, it has a funny way of making your employees happier as well. Employees want to be successful and a lot of being successful is serving your customers well and delighting them. And that feedback loop to me is extraordinarily important. And in my career, I have found that if one of those starts going south, the other one’s going to go south and they really play off of each other very closely.

And so, I think there’s a lot of specific things that you can do to really make sure that that loop is really tight and that you’re focused on both. One of the most important ones to me is, have you really embedded customer love in the culture of your company or of your team? I think that matters a lot. You know, at Accolade we have cultural cornerstones that include really customer love and, are we taking care of customers. Robi told a story about sort of how we measure success as a company, the metrics that drive things like how we’re bonused and how we grade ourselves as a whole company.

Customer NPS is one of the core tennets of how we do that. Revenue, profitability, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction, those four pillars define success. The health dashboard of Accolade is based on those four pillars. And customer love is one of those four pillars for us. If our customers are not delighted with the service we’re delivering, we’re not succeeding as a business.

I would just submit, like ask yourself and your company, is customer sat embedded that deeply in success? All the way to how people are bonused, how you think about, is the company even succeeding or not? We put all four of those pillars on sort of an equal weighting. And I think it bleeds into everything. You know, are you hiring the right people? I think that customer focus is one of the most important dimensions when I’m interviewing people, especially at the leadership level. I think those things really matter. I think when you want to really walk the walk of being a customer-centric organization, you’ve got to really look at those things and think about those things.

So I think that thinking about employee delight and customer delight hand in hand and embedding that into how you operate is really important. Second, thing I really wanted to speak about this morning is this idea of trust. I think trust and love are two words that are not very far apart from each other. And, you know, it’s an interesting thing in the modern world. I think in a world of digital engagement, which a lot of you are really centered around, and I’ve been centered around in my career, digital engagement makes it really hard to build trust, right?

There’s not a human relationship there. There’s a digital relationship, and trust can be hard to build. And I think trust is everything in the digital world and it’s really hard to earn. It’s extraordinarily hard to earn and it can be destroyed in an instant. And I think the biggest problem with trust in the digital engagement world is that it often gets destroyed without you even knowing that it’s being destroyed.

It’s the worst thing that happens, right? You find out through the lagging indicator. You’re losing users. You’re finding out on social media. You’re finding out in all these places that are too late. And I think it’s an extraordinarily hard problem. I think it’s one of the most important cornerstones. If you’re going to delight consumers, they have to trust you at some level. And I think there’s some key cornerstones around how you do that. And I think one of the most important is, do you have the listening mechanisms in place that are leading indicators, not lagging indicators?

It’s the most important thing is that do your customers have a pathway to tell you that something’s wrong before they go out to Twitter or before they start talking to all their friends, or before you start creating a snowball? It’s extraordinarily important because, you know what? Even the greatest companies that are great at delighting customers screw up sometimes and make mistakes. And I think feedback mechanisms that are in place that give you that feedback loop, you have to shorten that loop to the shortest degree possible.

And I think solutions like Apptentive are a big part of how that happens. And I’ll talk more about that in some of the other places where I think it matters, like meeting the customer where they are. Embedding that in the middle of the consumer experience that they’re in, in the moment that they’re having challenges, is extraordinarily important. The other thing is I think being transparent is extraordinarily important in the digital world, perhaps even more so than in human relationships. If you screw up, you have to be honest about screwing up, telling the truth and being honest.

I think we live in an interesting world, in the digital space, where I think trust is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. You know, privacy is one that gets a lot of attention today in the consumer space. But it’s an issue no matter what your consumer experiences is. I think trust is extraordinarily important. And transparency, holding yourselves accountable, being honest, but more than anything, having that feedback loop, in my experience, matters the most. I can think of many, many times when our software development teams found out something was wrong, that if we had not caught it then and course corrected right away, we would have had a 10x or 100x worse problem a month or two months or three months later. I can’t say enough about how important I think that is.

Which kind of leads to my third point, which is you really have to meet the consumer where they are. And a lot of you in this room really understand this extremely well. A lot of you focus on the consumer experience and making it delightful. Again, I think that this is one where, you know, technology and innovation just in the digital world in general keep changing the goalposts, right? I can remember very much at Concur, you know, we had a solution that was run through a browser and that’s how everyone used our product. And, you know, the iPhone got launched, you know, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and we knew right away like, this is something new and if we can embrace it in the right way, we can transform our business.

And we ran to it. We ran to it right away and we’re one of the first people to really adopt it in our industry and do something interesting with it. And it changed our entire business in terms of engagement, and customer sat and a whole bunch of dimensions really exploded by embracing it. And, you know, you look in the modern world and, you know, the number of things that are out there that can change your consumer experience just keep multiplying.

And, I think you always have to be on top of that. But to me, more than anything else, you know, when you look at the traditional ways you listen to your consumers and customers, they’re pretty terrible. And I’ve been victim in the past of, you know, you try email surveys or phone calls and things that the feedback loops that are just really ineffective.

The post Accolade, Concur, and the ROI of Customer Love appeared first on Apptentive.

[fashiontrendin-blog]

We Need To Talk About Armie Hammer's Bonkers Billy Graham Movie

https://fashion-trendin.com/we-need-to-talk-about-armie-hammers-bonkers-billy-graham-movie/

We Need To Talk About Armie Hammer's Bonkers Billy Graham Movie

Armie Hammer is enjoying a nice little career renaissance, one that has earned him a ticket to Sunday’s Oscars, where 2017’s finest movie, “Call Me by Your Name,” will compete for Best Picture. After wading through flops like “The Lone Ranger” and “The Birth of a Nation,” Hammer is once again beloved. In the coming months, he’ll appear in the jocular Sundance highlight “Sorry to Bother You” and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic that’s sure to be part of next year’s awards conversation.

Countless profiles have already traced Hammer’s roots as the aristocratic great-grandson of an oil magnate, and almost all of them herald 2010’s “The Social Network,” in which he pulled double duty playing twin Olympic athletes suing Mark Zuckerberg, as the actor’s illustrious Hollywood breakthrough.

Sure. “The Social Network” was Hammer’s breakthrough, and it’s certainly the movie that made him famous. But most profiles overlook the few projects that came before it, particularly one that caught my eye the other day: “Billy: The Early Years,” a biopic in which Hammer plays the one and only Billy Graham, who died last month at the age of 99.

Yep, Sir Armie ― the charming hunk who smooched Leo DiCaprio in “J. Edgar” and took a bite out of Timothée Chalamet’s semen-stained peach in “Call Me by Your Name” ― once portrayed America’s most famous evangelist, a Southern-fried live wire who popularized tent revivals, became the youngest college president in U.S. history, counseled actual presidents in the White House, called homosexuality “a sinister form of perversion” and urged his following to vote for Donald Trump despite the crude “Access Hollywood” tape that leaked during the 2016 campaign. 

But let’s not get sidetracked by Graham’s politics when we have a movie so deliciously bonkers to dissect.

“Billy: The Early Years” is a true wonder of the world, far more vapid and unskilled than your average inspirational biopic. Distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures, a conservative company that would later release “Atlas Shrugged: Part I” and Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016: Obama’s America,” it opened Oct. 10, 2008, on 282 screens ― a decent number for a limited release ― and collected all of $347,328 at the box office.

Further clogging this enigma, “Billy” is directed by Robby Benson, a minor ’70s heartthrob who lost out on the part of Luke Skywalker, voiced the Beast in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” and helmed a handful of “Friends” and “Ellen” episodes.

According to a Los Angeles Times report from 2008, “Billy” cost $3.6 million ― more than the budgets of “Saw” and “Moonlight” combined. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association declined to endorse the film, calling it “greatly embellished,” even though it’s a saccharine portrait that paints Graham in an wholesome, exceedingly favorable light.

“They wanted to make a movie about someone whose face could be chiseled into a mountain,” Benson said, referring to the producers, who’d recruited him for the job. “I said, ‘Let’s make it fun and funny.’”

Well, it’s fun and funny, all right. It’s also a fascinating case study of an actor making an odd career choice on the pathway to fame. Let’s recap the film’s highlights.

‘Billy: The Early Years’: An Incredibly Specific Plot Summary 

Following a Brooks & Dunn cover of Johnny Cash’s “Over the Next Hill (We’ll Be Home),” the movie opens with a framing device. Martin Landau ― yep, Oscar-winning Martin Landau ― plays the elderly, hospice-ridden Charles Templeton, Graham’s evangelist BFF who later denounced Christianity.

He’s giving an interview to a documentary crew, though said documentary’s only purpose in the film is to provide Templeton interludes that fade out to reveal Graham-centric flashbacks. Every shot in Landau’s hospital room is overlit like a second-rate sitcom.

The first flashback cue: “Billy’s life was like a fairy tale. […] Billy grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting.” The stage has been set. We transition to Charlotte, North Carolina.

As it turns out, all Billy Graham really wanted to do was play baseball! Armie Hammer ― or someone who looks like him; we only see his backside ― hits a ball into a starry night sky in slow motion.

Six minutes in, here comes the Armie we know and love, dressed in a trim baseball uniform and delivering flowers to his mama.

As we learn, 16-year-old Billy didn’t have much of a thing for religion, probably because of his devout, uncaring father. For example, during a prayer at the dinner table, the little rebel sneaks a bite of food. (Maybe this is a good time to note that it’s the Great Depression? Multiple characters mention it, but the movie doesn’t delve into many of the era’s social dynamics.) 

Billy swears he’ll never become a preacher (or an undertaker, which we can’t fault him for). In his eyes, evangelists are “money-grubbing” hacks, period.

Blissfully, “Billy: The Early Years” has no time to waste. Immediately after he condemns preacher-hood, a farmhand invites Billy to attend to a tent revival. For the uninitiated, that’s an outdoor worship service where a man in a boxy suit shrieks about eternal damnation. There, the reverend addresses Billy directly, leading to the quickest change of heart ever known to changes of heart. Time to go to Bible school! 

But forget all that altar-call stuff. The movie gets good ― real good ― in the next scene, when Armie dons overalls and tends to farm work like something out of a fetish fantasy. Luckily, his mama approves of Bible college! (Told you it was the quickest about-face.)

Oh, and “Billy: The Early Years” Armie is just as handsome as “Call Me by Your Name” Armie, but he’s slightly less sculpted, giving him a plantation-twink vibe. He was 22 when the movie came out, and more young boys would have come out too, had they seen it. (Little did we know the peach-related intrigue that awaited us.)

The movie returns to Landau for some fodder on Templeton’s less dogmatic religious conversion. Boring.

Meanwhile, Billy has begun selling hairbrushes door to door, bringing his chewy Southern cadence and calculated charm to one home after the next. Knock on my door, Billy!

Here he is cheesing at evangelism-school orientation. Look at those blue eyes shimmer.

When seminary begins, Billy’s roommate tells him preaching is no different than selling brushes. Voila! It all makes sense now. But phooey on that one girl in class who rejects his advances. “I just don’t think you’re going to amount to much,” she says, after showing up at a dance with another boy despite having told Billy she’d go with him. Ouch. What a fool.

As for Billy’s first sermon, well, I’m not sure what we’re meant to make of it. Amid a staggeringly earnest story, the scene jolts into a surreal whimsy that’s just plain confusing. Billy stands at the lectern nervously, fiddling with his notes and observing a clock’s defeating tick.

Then, as if a lightning bolt has struck him, he starts shouting to the room in nonsensical fragments (“And what about David and Moses?!”) as the camera zooms toward him feverishly. Zany hoedown music plays as he yaks. At first it seems like a fantasy sequence, something taking place in his head. A homily on LSD, if you will.

But it’s all too real. I think?

The congregation’s reaction shots ― also captured via quick, tilted zooms ― seal the deal. A diamond in the extreme rough, that Billy.

Now it’s back to his romantic life. He’s crushing on the girl who will become his wife, Ruth Bell (played by Stefanie Butler). After he passes her a note in the school library and ignites their courtship, Billy and Ruth start romancin’ it up. Naturally, it’s a sexless arrangement, as far as we see it, until children enter the picture. Gotta stay pure.

But remember how baseball was once the only thing Billy wanted to do? Well, apparently he’s no good at it anymore. Ruth knows how to throw a ball, but Billy does not know how to catch it without hurting his cute little hand. (Or his big hand. Armie Hammer is 6-foot-5!)

He squeals in pain every time. Does it really hurt that much to catch a baseball? (This is a real question. I wouldn’t know.)

Billy then has the dreamiest split-screen phone call with his mother to proclaim his love.

One quick serious note: Lindsay Wagner, the “Bionic Woman” and “Six Million Dollar Man” actress who portrays Billy’s mother, is actually rather lovely in this movie. She has a delicate way of making silly dialogue seem authentic. Bravo, Lindsay Wagner. Someone give her a real role.

OK, so we’re a little more than halfway through this 85-minute gem when, for some reason, Billy starts preaching to anyone who will listen. Literally. I guess that’s what evangelizing means? Sort of? Cut to him standing outside some dilapidated sheriff’s office wearing this oddly patterned suit and converting a nonbeliever in a matter of seconds. And to think how hopeless he was the last time we saw him orate.

Meanwhile, Martin Landau is still stuck in that hospice bed, recounting his own evangelism days and his friendship with Billy, who is now preaching to larger and larger crowds.

In the best moment so far (other than the overalls), we get this cool shot of Landau imagining his younger self, played by Kristoffer Polaha.

Polaha’s Templeton is suddenly everywhere in Billy’s life, including at the birth of his first daughter. But Charles’ faith is shaken by the horrors of World War II ― which, sure, fair. Makes sense. Nazis are horrific.

Things keep on zipping, and after a title card informs us that two years have passed, Billy goes from farmland sermonizing to being president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis at the age of 29. He doesn’t want to be one of those money-grubbing preachers he slammed at the start of the movie, so he tells his staff to make sure he’s “accountable for every penny collected” and can avoid whatever might precipitate the “downfall of an evangelist.” 

Here’s when things get Mike Pence-ish. In order to avoid a scandal, Billy decrees that “no man is to be in a room alone with a woman other than his wife.” It’s the most sexually explicit moment yet, other than the overalls. (But just wait.)

Charles’ crisis of faith intensifies as the war rages on. He brings his dilemma to Billy. How can God leave Hitler to run amok? How can the Almighty allow such travesties to blanket the globe? 

They sit together on a couch, seemingly on the precipice of a big ol’ smooch. Little did Armie know, he was auditioning for “Call Me by Your Name” almost a decade too soon. 

Charles abandons the pulpit, but Billy keeps praying nonetheless. When he next sees his friend, it’s the summer of 1949, four years after the end of World War II. Charles has doubled down on his agnosticism, and Billy, now 31, has doubled down on his convictions.

More importantly, they’ve both doubled down on their sexual tension. This is presumably unintentional, but let’s ignore that boring detail and accept the scene at face value.

Now, with less than 12 minutes remaining, a seed of doubt has been planted in Billy.

He has a dark night of the soul ― literally. In the next scene, he teleports like a ghost, appearing in the middle of the woods somewhere. Now we know where that $3.6 million went: The CGI is lit. 

It’s his come-to-Jesus moment. He is coming to Jesus to beg for proof of the Bible’s veracity. “Where are you?” he yells, after which a montage of moments from his still-young life flash by. That’s it! Mystery solved! It only took recalling his past to move on with his future.

“I hear you, Lord,” he says, again proving that Billy Graham had the hastiest religious conversion ever known to preachers whose net worth totals $25 million.

And now, everything’s hunky-dory. Billy’s “early years” are coming to an end, and so is the movie. Suddenly, he’s preaching about his friend Charles in his own tent revivals and telling the masses that Jesus “came from that part of the world which touches Europe and Africa and Asia” ― aka the Middle East ― and “probably had brown skin.”

Considering how much some fundamentalists love White Jesus, this is maybe sort of a progressive idea to include in this otherwise ginger movie? 

Anyway, apparently this is what it looks like to stand in front of a sky. (Note: The sky is gray at the start of this concluding sermon, but grows progressively bluer as Billy continues. It’s a metaphor!)

And the crowd! What a mighty crowd! He made it though the wilderness! (Yeah right.)

That’s the final shot. The end credits roll to the sounds of Michael W. Smith’s “Amazing Love.”

Here’s what we learned about Billy Graham from “Billy: The Early Years”: He’s a walking version of the hymn “Old-Time Religion,” blessed with a pleasant working-class upbringing and a squeaky-clean respectability but cursed by a sex appeal he can’t take advantage of and what seems to be no desire to visit his old friend, who is stuck in hospice giving interviews about Billy’s life.

You should watch this movie. It’s a masterwork to behold. 

A representative for Armie Hammer did not respond to our request for comment.