For the first time I filmed myself talking about queer stuff.
The project is intended to be a repository of blog entries, scholarly papers, news articles, videos, music, poetry, etc. etc. available in English but created by (mostly radical) queers from non-English speaking regions, to provide a collection of rad-queer voices in non-Western, non-English speaking worlds that are often overlooked by English-language LGBT journalism.
The Tokyo Rainbow Pride, which I talked about last year on this blog, marked its 3rd anniversary on April 27, 2014. Its commercialization and increasingly neoliberal, militarist, and conservative crystallization of LGBT politics have become almost intolerably, grotesquely obvious. I could go on and on about sponsorships and participation of embassies and corporations at the Pride, but today I am so devastated by the participation of Prime Minister Abe’s wife, Ms. Akie Abe at the Pride, that I am almost in a shock state.
As some of you already know, for the past 4 years I have been doing the Bar OccaMan project in Gunma, Japan with Eva, Cherry, and several other semi-permanent and occasional volunteers. The project is a monthly outdoor queer bar event and since its start in May 2010 we have been quite popular thanks to our loyal regulars in the neighborhood and those who come from other places like Tokyo.
As I was increasingly sick and tired of the allegro call-out culture of Twitter (I quit my main jpnz account recently), I looked for a new platform. Tumblr, maybe? I thought. Then I remembered I had my own domain and hosting here. For a change, I picked a new design template and modified it a bit. Especially useful was Richard’s Modifying OpenGraph Data from WordPress’s Jetpack.
I’m hoping to blog as often as I used to, like in the pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook era.
I added a few more slides to show the larger picture of the way that labor laws operate in the U.S.
To read more about this issue, click here to read Yasmin Nair’s “ENDA, We Hardly Know Ya.”
As I was going through the daily routine of browsing Facebook & Twitter, I found a NYT article, Gay Couples, Choosing to Say ‘I Don’t’, the title of which caught my eye, as I oppose the institution of marriage, and the like-minded people who shared the link in FB/TW seemed content with anti-marriage opinions circulating at last in the mainstream media. Excited, I read on, only to be disappointed, but in a way that was quite unexpected, by the elitist tone of the article.
Queers You Dare Not to Know by Masaki C. Lyrics Video Hangorin’s anti-Olympics statement is used in the video. Hangorin. “WE CALL FROM TOKYO TO…
This is the 3rd queer-themed song that I’ve created and uploaded online, the 1st being “High Heels 6.5″ and 2nd “I Am Nobody”.
I’ve been trying to learn how to use EQs and compressors properly and I think I did my current best in this one. I know there’s a lot more to learn, but I’m eager to make more music and have more experience so that I can be a better musician/composer.
Locked myself in, alone in the closet
Eyes full of fear, just waiting for the right time
“It Gets Better,” say those who have come before me
Magazines, TV shows, they all said the same thing
- a jpnz new middle-class, male-romantic, zigzag bisexual, oral-only camp butch with an identity mess and a feminist mother -