Jessie & Sam
Photos by America’s Finest Kids
“Jessie and Sam at Jimmy’s place, in San Francisco, California. We all met there and spent about 5 days hanging out. These are some of the photos we took during the week. Jessie and Sam are now living in Canada and are happily married”.
Tumblr was sold, porn ban stays
Rumours about Tumblr being sold were making the rounds for a few months now and many people hoped that a new owner might get rid of the site’s dumb porn ban that effectively killed the platform.
Alas it wasn’t supposed to be. PornHub, who promised to undo the porn ban if they manage to buy tumblr, let us down. After driving Tumblr into the ground, Verizon just sold the site for peanuts to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. And they’re keeping the porn ban in place so Tumblr’s days of being a haven for the queer community, nsfw content creators and fandoms are definitely over.
Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.” — Wall Street Journal
In a statement made up of words that definitely mean something, Verizon characterised its sale of Tumblr as “the culmination of a thoughtful, thorough and strategic process” and called Automattic “the perfect partner” which “will unlock new and exciting possibilities for Tumblr and its users.”
LOL.
Update: Reportedly Verizon/Yahoo sold Tumblr for less than $3 million. We could have bought it with a GoFundMe. For comparison, Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Amazing how easy it is to burn a slick billion and destroy one of the biggest websites in the world just by banning porn.
Call Me By Your Name director will create queer coming-of-age show
Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name is looking to bring his work to television for a change. Observer is reporting that Guadagnino is working on a queer coming-of-age series, directing the first two episodes (at least) and writing scripts with a pair of co-writers. The series has the tentative title We Are Who We Are and is set in Italy. The show centres on Fraser and Caitlin, a pair of teenagers discovering themselves while living on a military base.
One detail from this report stands out: “Fraser is actually missing his friend from home, Mark, while also developing an innocent romantic connection with an older soldier named Jason.” While that’s not exactly a Call Me By Your Name redux, it does seem like there might be some thematic connection between Guadagnino’s highest-profile film to date and his biggest TV foray yet.
Transgender Rights
Last week America did a step towards equality but it’s still a long road ahead.
