By Ann Rostow–
Deadline? What Deadline?
Hello, my friends. Today we begin with a quiz from Kayla Kumari Updhyaya, writing in Autostraddle, headlined: “Which Lesbian Cleaning Tool Are You?” And, no. The quiz has nothing to do with cleaning tools, focusing instead on the supernatural along with a few of those “what’s your personality?” questions that we used to read aloud to one another out of teen magazines when we were so desperate to see our futures.
“Help!” wrote Updhyaya. “A witch placed a curse on me that forces me to write a sapphic personality quiz that doesn’t really make sense every Sunday! I was just trying to go on my nightly eerie bog walk, and the next thing I knew, a bog hag emerged and declared I must become beholden to the unique powers of the lesbian personality quiz.” Cute, but whatever.
Naturally I took the quiz because a) I love quizzes, and b) This column is due shortly so I’m looking for distractions. And I was gratified to learn, after I finished my thirteen answers, that I am a “Dyson V-10 Animal,” (cue: MGM lion roar).
But perhaps everyone is thus categorized regardless of their quiz results, I wondered. After all, what do we really know about the Autostraddle quiz mistresses? I tested this suspicion by responding with completely different answers and was told I was now a “Toilet Brush.” Since my second answer set was deliberately counter-factual, I was proud that, in real life, I was nothing at all like the sort of person who would wind up under the “Toilet Brush” rubric.
I’ve also decided to add this offering to my weekly challenges, which include The New York Times news quiz, The New York Times flashback game, and the Monday New Yorker crossword puzzle.
That last sentence reminded me to do this week’s “flashback” puzzle, which I totally blew. I’m great on American dates, but don’t ask me when the frigging Sumerians invented the first board game (2500 B.C.) or when someone stole the Mona Lisa before it was famous (1911). Meanwhile, before we start on important GLBT community news, a friend of mine just sent me a snippet from the Cleveland, Ohio, police blotter about two women charged with shoplifting.
“Could have been us back in the day!” my friend mused. No, we weren’t thieves, but I did recognize our fun-loving spirit in the women who were caught stealing two vibrators and six shot glasses from Spencer Gifts, which they secreted in their bra and in a baby carriage in front of a security camera. (If we had been thieves, I can’t imagine we would have sidelined the store inventory in front of a recording device.) The shot glasses were about $50, while the vibrators came to roughly $225.00, which we both agreed was more expensive than we recalled from our misspent youth. And what’s with the baby carriage? Was this a robbery device, or was there an actual infant along for the heists? Police blotters did not elaborate.
Between What I Write, and What I Skip
Here’s an article from Foreign Affairs that I’ve set aside for thoughtful consideration, titled: “The Global Threat to LGBTQ Rights.” The time has now come for me to shrug off the mindless nonsense that I find so compelling and devote what looks like an hour at least to carefully reading about the dangers our community members face around the world and the complicated 20-year backstories that set the stage for our precarious positions in numerous countries.
But you know what? I’ve decided to skip it. We already know we’re in bad shape. We know our civil rights movement is taking two, three, dozens of steps back. We know the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but as the first part of the quote observes, the arc of the moral universe is also long. Very long. Right now, I can’t even see it.
The search results for GLBT news are filled with the financial hits to local LGBTQ centers, which have lost public and private funding thanks to the backlash against equality and diversity. I dropped the subject of “cost cutting” from my news list, because I would have spent 2,000 words hopping from Milwaukee (lost $900,000 in federal cash) to San Diego (dozens face layoffs), to, of course, the eradication of the “press three” option on the 988 suicide hotline.
Since 2022, GLBT callers under 25 could press three to speak to a person trained to counsel troubled gay or trans youth. That option was summarily removed on July 17, although the option to press one for veterans remains. The specialized service cost taxpayers about $25 million a year, and over nearly three years, calls tripled from about 20,000 to about 60,000 a month as awareness of the option grew.
You don’t need to be reminded of the suicide statistics for gay and trans youth. They’re high.
So, the bottom line is that I am tired of bad news. I have a couple of newsletters that feature good news, or optimistic news, or no-politics zones. But strangely, I’m kind of tired of them too. We just slapped 100 percent tariffs on Micronesia for no reason and sent a U.S. citizen to a jungle prison in the Amazon basin, but look at the bright side! A park ranger saved a bear cub! (And yet, I’ll read every word of the bear cup story, won’t I?)
RIP Andrea
I was trying to come up with a title for the last section’s juxtaposition of bad news and look-the-other-way news, and I heard an echo in my mind of a poem by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, which begins:
Between what I see and what I say,
Between what I say and what I keep silent,
Between what I keep silent and what I dream,
Between what I dream and what I forget: poetry.
I have an analytical mind, not an artistic one, but this idea of liminal spaces and the richness of meaning that falls into those spaces and cannot be expressed—this made me feel as if Paz had given me a gift. I also thought the last word there could just as easily have been “music.” Maybe, I’ll have to think about that. The problem is, as soon as you name something, as soon as you say it or write it, you weigh it down and kill it in a way. Unless you’re a brilliant poet, I guess.
Speaking of which, I’ve been haunted recently by the poet Andrea Gibson, whom I had never heard of until they died young the other day. They were 49, but I consider anything under 60 “dying young,” a limit that rises with every new landmark age I happen to hit myself. Gibson was felled by ovarian cancer, but what struck me as I read their obituary and some of their poems was their kindness and their ability to inhabit those spaces we were just talking about. Facing death, they embraced it and held it back and came at it from a timeless place where we all exist at once in some way. I suggest you look them up rather than rely on my cumbersome interpretation.
Finally, Gibson seemed to be such a good person. These days, I am inundated by negative emotions from all sides of the political, generational, and cultural divides. It’s exhausting. I sense it saturating my psyche. Reading about Gibson reminded me that it’s possible to feel compassion and gratitude and empathy and forgiveness towards anyone and everyone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not that nice personally. I just wish other people were.
To Russia With Love
Here’s a story I sort of enjoyed, because as I just mentioned, I’m nice, but not super nice. It’s about a 40-something Texas guy who took advantage of a bizarre-sounding Russian deal, called the “Shared Values Visa,” which allows you to relocate to Russia if you’re sick of the politically correct ethos of the United States. I’d think you would have less of a problem with woke sensibilities these days, but let me continue.
According to the media and their own YouTube channel, Derek Huffman moved his wife and three pre-teen daughters to a village outside Moscow that was founded by another loony American ex-patriot, blogger Tim Kirby, who helps others escape the “LGBTQ+ indoctrination” and the “liberal gender norms” of the U.S. Huffman was under the impression he would become a war correspondent or a mechanic, but instead he’s being sent off to the frontlines of combat with next to no training. Oops!
His wife, DeAnna, tells her social media friends that he’s received no pay, and, in fact, he and his fellow “recruits” had to pay 10,000 rubles for their own equipment, about $125.00, which is not helpful for a family that had to crowdfund to pay for their relocation to their lovely new home. Now, Huffman’s wife complains he’s been “fed to the wolves.” Owww wooooooo!
Meanwhile, CNN and others report that Russia is sending badly wounded troops back to the front, including men on crutches and others fresh from surgery. The news service said videos show one man who says he had surgery “yesterday.” Inside his vehicle, CNN reports, “he shows his badly wounded leg, where a large injury has recently been operated on, he says. He also holds up his wounded hand. ‘I don’t have a finger; they also sewed it up yesterday. I can only move using crutches.’” Another passenger on the route to the frontline tells the camera: “There’s a tube in my stomach.”
According to another soldier, the government pays up to $30,000 for a combat injury, but is trying to avoid such obligations. “They’re sending cripples back to the front … to avoid paying money,” the soldier says. “If the person is missing, the family doesn’t get paid money. For the proof, a body is needed, and if there’s no body, that’s it, sorry, goodbye.”
I’ve read other unsourced stories about wounded men being shot rather than transported to medical facilities. And other iffy reports describe the brutal, if not murderous, treatment of men who don’t fight hard enough or displease their commanders in some other way. As I mentioned, this is hearsay, not reporting.
Lastly, an unconfirmed, and likely untrue, story in The Maltese Herald says Huffman was killed on July 23. However, there is no confirmation of this account, DeAnna says Derek is not dead and she YouTubed a conversation with him on the 25th. I don’t think he’s dead, but I bet he’d rather be organizing a Pride parade in Waco than dodging Ukrainian drones with a bunch of invalids in the fields of Donetsk.
Odds and Ends
Before I gave up on the foreign affairs article about worldwide disaster for the GLBT community, I read a fascinating take on the situation in Hungary, where the crackdown on gays, trans, and everything woke might just be reaching its limits. After Viktor Orban and company outlawed pride celebrations, between 200,000 and 250,000 people took to the streets of Budapest on the last Sunday in June in what turned out to be the nation’s largest political protest in over a decade. If I’m honest, the article was only “fascinating” because, unlike the foreign affairs piece, it made me happy to read, and hopeful about the Hungarian elections next spring. Read it for yourself in The Insider.
I was also going to mention a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, written by Judith Schiavone of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Greenfield, who came out of the closet in 1978 when she was 18, bemoaned the treatments now available for (some) transgender kids. “I was always a tomboy,” she wrote, “and if I were a teenager today, I would likely be medically transitioned. I strongly believe society must stop medicalizing gender nonconforming youths.”
Say what!? You’d be “medically transitioned” by whom exactly? What has this lady been smoking? It’s quite possible to be a tomboy, climb trees, and like girls without being or wanting to be a transgender boy.
Oh, I’ve got an interesting court case out of the Ninth Circuit. I’ve got a bunch of women who get together poolside in the D.C. area and pretend to be mermaids. I’ve got the number crunchers at The Advocate telling me that 21 states have proposed 600 anti-GLBT measures and 67 have made it into law this year. And I just watched a video of a man in jeans and a blue shirt playing the Moonlight Sonata to an old elephant, who swayed and flapped his or her ears in what looked like pleasure.
arostow@aol.com
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on July 31, 2025
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