The Language of Love

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Seventeen-year-old Kim Ho was one of the winners of the monologue competition Love Bytes, held by Fresh Ink, a development program for emerging playwrights from the Australian Theatre for Young People.

As one of the competition’s winners, Kim was assisted with transforming his original three-minute video entry, Transcendence — which tells the story of a young gay teen struggling with his sexuality and the love he feels for a boy in his French class — into the beautiful nine-minute short film The Language of Love.

Queer YA books see record sales despite US book bans

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When Phil Stamper was growing up in the early 2000s, he couldn’t go into a Barnes & Noble and find an LGBTQ+ section for young adults.

“There weren’t enough books to fill those shelves,” Stamper, a popular author of contemporary, queer young adult (YA) novels, told The 19th. His latest book, “Small Town Pride, released in May, is deeply rooted in his own lived experience of being gay in a rural community which now, thanks to books like his, might feel less isolating.

“Now, you can go into any bookstore or library in even the smallest and most conservative town, and you will find a section. It’s crazy to go home to rural Ohio, where I was raised, and find my book in any bookstore there.”

But Stamper recognizes that this meteoric rise in popularity, visibility and scope of representation for queer authors and characters in queer YA has also created a backlash, one evident in state governments and school boards across the United States.

“It’s not a coincidence that increases in queer visibility are going to be tied to more legislation against this kind of visibility and more opposition to it as well,” Stamper said.

Book bans and restrictions are going into effect across the country with school districts limiting the access of books with LGBTQ+ subject matter. An April report by the PEN America Foundation found there were 1,586 individual instances of books being removed from shelves between July 2021 and March 2022, and books that have a protagonist of color or LGBTQ+ themes were disproportionately banned.

Read on…

Harry Styles wants to show gay sex as ‘tender and loving’

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As summer comes to an end, we’re on the eve of Harry Styles’ “Movie Star” era, and Rolling Stone is starting the buzz early with a glossy new profile in which the so-called “new king of pop” addresses queerbaiting allegations (sort of) and previews the intimate gay scenes in his upcoming drama, My Policeman.

On the former matter, Styles keeps things typically vague. Rolling Stone touches on his glam-rock, gender-fluid fashion sense and brings up the fact that some have criticized him for “profiting off queer aesthetics without explicitly claiming the community.” But Styles doesn’t really comment on the matter, instead pulling something of a “look over there!” moment, courtesy of Jaida Essence Hall:

“Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone. If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship or something.”

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