To Do list №20 June

June bursts with roses, and as it does, glimpses of hope shimmer in the distance. We all need something to look forward to, and last year we waited without promise. This year it seems we can begin to look forward once again. This months email brings you fresh positivity, blooming love and heat, humour, intelligence, thoughtfulness...through the lens of LGBTQ. 

Your poem of the month

to remind you- we only live once, regardless of the choices you make. Live now! Live for happiness!

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, 

yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, 

no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, 

harsh and exciting 

-over and over 

announcing your place in the family of things.              

 Mary Oliver
Wild Geese

Two Films this June, and 2 of my FAVOURITE films! Watch both ASAP. 

SHOW ME LOVE (Fucking Amal)

"Fucking Åmål shows us, in part cinéma vérité style, the dissimilar lives of two schoolgirls living in painful smalltown Sweden. Agnes is that certain breed of outcast with a Morrissey poster on her bedroom wall; her only friend is bound to a wheelchair and all her other classmates either bully her or don’t know she exists. She’s deeply enamoured with Elin, a popular blonde whose photo Agnes stares at longingly in the school yearbook. Elin is bored to death with the dull routine of life in Åmål and its uninteresting boys. In search of any new experience, one night she drags her sister “as a joke” to a birthday party Agnes’ parents are making her throw. It’s on that night they fall for each other. 

The film has the slamming of one’s head against a school desk moaning “everything is boringgggg”, the guzzling of wine straight from the bottle at a trashy party, and the picking one’s brain for any pharmaceuticals in the house that could potentially get them high to escape the reality of being destined for all that is superior and magical while being confined to lame teenage existence. There’s also a backseat makeout scene set to Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is”. Fucking Åmål captures the bittersweet desperation of youth: a tragedy as it’s in the midst of occurring yet such a comedy in hindsight. It’s a totally endearing love story free of artifice — with an optimism rare for these sort of flicks."

https://www.indiewire.com/2014/01/rewatching-the-queer-canon-part-1-fucking-amal-214801/

SAVING FACE

"When Alice Wu’s first film, the instant queer classic “Saving Face,” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2004, no one was more surprised than her. The product of five years’ work, Wu loosely based the film on her own experiences coming out as a lesbian to her traditional Chinese family. Fourteen years before Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” Wu’s film was also populated almost exclusively by Chinese actors (many of whom spoke Mandarin in the film) and was deeply rooted in the immigrant experience.

“Who the hell thought that movie would get made?,” Wu said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “I thought, ‘I’ll just have to go back and get a job doing something else.'”

What unfolded instead was something far more unexpected. Wu didn’t have to give up her big-screen dreams — an all-too-common story for female directors and filmmakers of color — but it took nearly two decades before she made her sophomore feature, Netflix’s charming teen rom-com “The Half of It.”

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/04/alice-wu-saving-face-follow-up-the-half-of-it-netflix-1202227619/

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

If you haven't read this book by now, you are truly missing out. Perhaps you've only seen the film and feel it would be pointless- but you would be wrong. It is a must read. Prepare to go on vacation, because you will be immersed in this summer book. It's romance is staggering, and you'll weep for joy and loss. If there is any question in the world that love is love, this book is the answer.

“I'm like you,' he said. 'I remember everything.'

I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name”

“They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.” 

“Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.” 

Try something new this month! African cuisine perhaps!

"Zoe Adjonyoh grew up in London with a Ghanaian father who never really taught her how to cook. As an adult, she decided to connect to that heritage, and taught herself to cook. Now she runs a restaurant based on all she’s learned and recently released her debut cookbook, Zoe's Ghana Kitchen. Host Francis Lam asked her for a primer on Ghanaian cuisine. She left us with recipes for Yam & Plantain Peanut Curry and a separate Peanut Sauce, as well as Chalé Sauce and the magical hot chile paste called Shito."

https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2017/07/20/aromatic-wholesome-african-cuisine-inside-zoes-ghana-kitchen

A new “unbreakable” rainbow celebrating the LGBTIQ community has been built in Poland after the previous version was destroyed by far-right groups.

The dazzling rainbow display, lit up in a busy intersection in central Warsaw, bounces rainbow lights off of a curtain of water vapour and can’t be damaged.

It was unveiled ahead of Warsaw’s pride parade last weekend and was organised by local groups Love Does Not Exclude and Equality Parade 2018, with support from US ice cream chain Ben and Jerry’s.

The organisers describe it as “an unbreakable symbol of love, peace, LGBT rights and equality.”

“This rainbow signifies the start of a wider campaign to raise awareness of LGBT rights and in particular the fight for marriage equality in Poland,” Love Does Not Exclude chairperson Ola Muzinska told the Telegraph.

The first rainbow structure, made of artificial flowers, was originally built in Zbawiciela Square in 2012 but was repeatedly vandalised and burned down by anti-gay protesters, the Telegraph reported. Following the attacks, it was removed in 2015.

Poland doesn’t recognise same-sex marriages or civil partnerships, and adoption, IVF treatment and surrogacy for LGBTIQ individuals and couples are also banned.

A number of political parties in the country have advocated for LGBTIQ law reform in recent years, but Poland remains Europe’s second most homophobic nation according to a ranking of 28 European countries by the International Lesbian, Gay, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA).

This gorgeously frothy dresses perfect for spinning through the city, dancing on roof tops, or standing out at the party. Imagined in Italy, dancing barefoot on the Trevi fountain...