the groundhog day project

Todd VanDerWerff, Vox [W]hen you consider that Love, Simon is a major studio release--a teen romance, no less--explicitly about a gay protagonist who's grappling with the best way to come out to his family and friends, the very fact that it's so blandly competent seems all the more remarkable. We're living in a time when gay kids can have their own sweetly mediocre studio movies with all the best intentions. Isn't that something? K Austin Collins, The Ringer : Watching queer go mainstream in the 21st century entails weighing and reweighing how it feels when the rest of the world keeps reminding you that it's still playing catch-up--in slow motion, no less. Meanwhile, you're out and about living your life, or trying to, while having to make the best of that fact. That's the bargain. Every day I get to wake up and ask myself, Shall I be a bitch about representation today? I typically choose not to be, but it's never an easy choice. I happen to ha...

So, for future readers, the Winter Olympics are going on this week and next. Among the competitors is Adam Rippon, a male figure skater from the US who is openly gay. On a post (which I cannot find the specific one I saw yesterday) on Facebook by some conservative page I follow, maybe Fox News, maybe the page that used to be called People Against Obama's Liberal Adgenda [sic], about Rippon, some immediate (and expected) comments were all about how his sexuality is irrelevant, just do your sport and leave politics out of it... Which 1) of course they don't care when it's not about them, or doesn't agree with them. Like they--and I will lump them all together under one "they" for the moment, because fuck them--tell celebrities not to talk about politics, just do their acting job, dance like the trained monkeys they are and shut up about anything else, because actors, as we all know, are not people, are not voters with the same rights as everyone else, and of cou...