The Latest
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Drag as Storytelling: A Conversation with Hieu Minh Nguyen
One thing I love about drag is the opportunity to become someone else. I’ve never been especially good at pouring energy into myself. A lot of my writing comes from the position of a witness or observer. Poetry was my…
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Singing History, Speaking Liberation: BlackStar Film Festival at 15
What does it mean to claim and maintain liberatory independence in a cultural landscape cloaked in the murk of careening fascisms and punitive censorship?
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God of My Father
You tell yourself this is an act of decolonization but really, you’re here because the health care system has failed. This kind of stepping outside of capitalism isn’t so much an act of radical liberation as it is a way…
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Their Clear Unobstructed View
We lived in a place for people who did not matter. No one considered it a town—just an overpass above the freeway, dry fields to the east, overgrown hills to the west, a place cars passed under without stopping. We…
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Heaven, Hell, and Nowhere: Gregg Araki’s Changing Los Angeles
Lights pulse in nightclubs, shadows expand in the middle of the night, and beautiful young people dream and experiment, seeking transcendence through drugs, alcohol, sex. Where his earlier films make cheap motels and marginal spaces feel charged with possibility, I…
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The Missing Word
The problem is not simply what Israelis know about 1948. Israel needs a new story about itself. The old one has become a trap. It knows how to tell Jewish stories of exile and return, but not Palestinian ones. It…
