Just a quick reminder. Our favorite crazy queer piratecore dance party, Booty, has finally landed at its new home at Acme. So celebrate the homecoming and get your groove on. AR!
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Summer 1996 was one of the first times I saw Sleater-Kinney, so named for the now infamous road just outside Olympia, Wa. It was a festival for SPRGRL Conspiracy, and convention I helped put together and to see these 3 women on be a part of the same thing I was a part of was exhilarating, amazing, overwhelming. They were an integral part of the Portland/OlyWa queer community then and one of Chainsaw record’s flag ship bands. Girls swooned at their feet and a newly born internet was giving rise to an entire community around riot grrlz and queercore in the NW. (See what I’m talking about in this earlier post). According to their website they have gone on an “indefinite hiatus.” Now I have to say I am sorry that I have stopped keeping my ear to the queer rock scene gossip ground nearly as well as I used to. I did not see this coming. More QPDX SK posts: The lovely weather is here, and to take advantage of the summer’s travel opportunities I offer you PlanetOut’s 2006 Travel Awards. However take these recommendations with a grain of salt. One of their event runners-up included Philly Pride which I found to be one of the most un-fun pay-to-be-gay festivals with an ultra short parade, which is sad considering how much bigger than li’l ol’ PDX Philly is. Another really great resource for the queer who knows where he/she wants to go is PurpleRoofs.com. This website allows to to stay gay where ever you go and I appreciate the freedom. Though you may have seen the hordes of rainbow glad Kaiser Permanente marchers at the Pride Parade and seen the booths of docs, therapists, and naturopaths at the festival the truth is that it can still be difficult to find healthcare professionals that are not only sensitive to the needs of queer patients but knowledgeable about our differing medical needs. Resources PDX, a project of Outside In, is the first local website I’ve seen that lists healthcare providers that recognize, respect, and want to work with our community. While there may be specific needs, such as finding psychiatrists willing to work with trans individuals to get them the hormones they need, sometimes it is also just nice to know your massage therapist isn’t freaked out to work on a naked queer body. Either way, I’m quite glad this resource is out there and will be expanded upon, even if the interface isn’t quite up to the “Queer Eye” design standards yet. As if you needed and excuse to look outside your sad little kitchen for nosh, use tomorrow to dine for gay rights. A slew of Portland area restaurants will donate 15% of the day’s proceeds to Basic Rights Oregon. Now being gay doesn’t have to mean being hungry… Last month a gave you a run-down of my personal top 10 queer books list to get you started on your summer reading. Seems I’m woefully uninformed on whats out there at the moment. Princeton Prof Edmund White has a whole set of great gay fiction laid out for the summer, claiming we are currently in a gay fiction renaissance. None of my horribly mainstream selections even made the list. So whether you prefer the popular or the literary, we’ve got you covered. (Ok, so I know you may not all be bookworms like me either. I’m working on a movie top 10 but I’m so picky its tough. Recommendations?) One more thing. This article is part of the Village Voices’s Queer Issue, which is probably not terribly helpful if you don’t plan to be in NYC this weekend, nevertheless, worth checking out, especially the featured story, which rings so true to me…
A site user by the name of Justin Riel has been quite prolific with his camera. Oh my but I’ll be working all day on getting these Pride Parade photos up but here’s the first gallery. I’ll be adding to this post as I get more of them up. Thanks so much Justin! As usual, todays Pride was a lovely mixed weather day full of sequins, bikes and gender bending. We all ran into our buddies from high school we didn’t know were gay and our exes we were really hoping to avoid. The parade itself seemed a rather perfect length this year with the intermixing of church groups with bdsm groups a fabulous juxtaposition. Let me just name another of my shortcomings this year as well. I neglected to bring a camera. And while I attempted some shots with the cell, they were truly horrid. (Is that a boy in a skirt or just a big blob of brightly colored paint?) I guess technology isn’t quite there yet. But The O, bless their hearts, did get some decent shots this year so here’s their gallery (as well as their own recap). And please, send in your own Pride photos and we’ll get them right here in this blog and up on the site. Here’s our handy little form for submission. Yesterday a reader emailed a response to language used in this blog and called out for an apology. While I am always excited to hear feedback of any kind, and I welcome challenges to the opinions voiced here I must respectfully decline. The offending line the reader refers to is: “Portland’s queer community isn’t all about skinny white boys on Stark Street.” He goes on to say: “Substitute ‘black’ for ‘white’ and see if this passes your smell test. To the degree that you can be racially disrespectful, in this case, of whites [and in an off-handed way, of blacks too], you have found a way.” Firstly, while I realize that he did not specifically use the term racist I just want to clarify that, while one can have prejudices against any individual, one cannot be racist toward Caucasians. Racism relies upon oppression, and whites, as a social category, are not oppressed. However, as far as “racially disrespectful” this is a much more subtle criticism and, though I need more time to think it over, might be willing to concede that this is a possibility. Finding a distinct example, however, is difficult. The reader admits so himself by saying “…to the degree that you can be racially disrespectful…” I don’t believe my words qualify because the switcheroo argument just doesn’t work for me. What I think is important here is that you cannot apply the same rules to the words “black” and “white,” nor can you interchange them and have the meaning of the sentence in which they live stay the same. There is a difference, a distinct one. No, I wouldn’t say: “Portland’s queer community isn’t all about skinny black boys on Stark Street,” and I didn’t. Not least of all because it doesn’t make sense. The ruling group in the gay community is white and male and GWMs have plenty of space in the gay culture of American cities, in Portland, and in the historically gay area of Portland known as Stark Street. Slender, Caucasian males are not an oppressed group in this country. Are gay people of any kind oppressed? Yes. But many GWMs, despite their own oppression, are in a place where it becomes easy to oppress or ignore others members of the queer population who may not possess the great privilege that they do…even in this great liberal town. Who hasn’t seen women turned away from or treated poorly at Silverado’s for example? White males, in general, are trained to take up space in their world and Stark Street is no different. My aim was in stressing that other queer people are entitled to space in this city’s gay culture and we are claiming it. Was it colloquial? Yes. Offensive? I don’t think so. As for the latter part of the sentence, that it is off-handedly offensive to blacks as well, I am completely mystified and am open to hearing the reasoning behind this. Even the idea that there are only 2 dichotomous races in the queer community seems a much more offensive implication to me. So, despite my disagreement, I am quite pleased to hear what you have to say. Besides, what’s a blog without a little controversy? |
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And though they have evolved over the course of 7 wildly diverse albums they have still maintained a top stop in my list of the best bands ever. And now I’m pretty glad I put away my “I saw them when…” hipster pride and actually attended their last Portland show this December because…
Granted Corin Tucker has kids now, and Janet Weiss keeps busy with her other popular band Quasi but neither of this is new and they seemed to be doing well. They were getting some real media attention (I even saw a video of theirs playing in American Eagle Outfitters, not that that is ncessarily a measure of sucess…) and their music is as fantasticly evolving as ever. Their latest album, The Woods (
Here’s a quick glance of the awards:
Hey, who wouldn’t want to get their 
There did seem to be a lack of two key, if totally unrelated elements: boom boxes and revolutionaries. While all the huge floats had sound systems of course, a lot fo the medium sized marchers could have really done with some sound, even if the appearance is really enough sometimes. The latter example is a bit more troubling. There were several political groups, of course, and union organizers but the truly freaky politicos, like the coffin wielding, clown bike riding Queer Revolution were nowhere to be seen…Not that I made it happen this year, but who else will balance out Nike and Starbucks?