LGBTQ2 RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

Book Review: Elliot Page’s timely debut memoir ‘Pageboy’ is powerful, humanizing

By DONNA EDWARDS

yesterday


This cover image released by Flatiron Books shows "Pageboy" by Elliot Page. (Flatiron Books via AP)

“Pageboy” by Elliot Page (Flatiron Books)

Look, I admire Elliot Page as much as the next LGBTQ+ person and was swooning just as hard over this incredible cover and the mystery around the hush-hush book with the super-private advanced copies. In the end, it didn’t live up to the hype.

But it’s better that it doesn’t, because it humanizes the larger-than-life subject.

“Pageboy,” the highly anticipated debut memoir from trans actor, director and producer Elliot Page, begins by warning that the book follows a nonlinear narrative “because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear.” The story flits from memory to memory, following a thread that crisscrosses his life in all its comedy and tragedy and mundanity. There are awkward teen parties, wild surprise car-chase stunts and kids kicking the soccer ball around the yard.

Page reads as a normal guy telling a meandering story that often dips into intimate, raw and powerful anecdotes.

Growing up splitting his time between divorced parents, Page describes a childhood that amounts to death by a thousand cuts. These come from bullies at school, toxic family dynamics, a stalker, and a reoccurring lack of support and understanding.

The bad is presented alongside the good. A tense emotional scene with his father is interrupted by a flashback to a family outing at the same spot, climbing up to see a spectacular view, then getting a scoop of Moon Mist. And he includes the background you need — look no further than the next line to find that Moon Mist is a Nova Scotia-specific ice cream flavor.

That’s just one of numerous instances in which Page drops tidbits of fascinating knowledge, niche cultural insights and little-known historical background.

If you’re looking for a tell-all, know that Page respects people in their own journeys and leaves many of his former lovers and hookups unnamed. At the same time, he reveals intimate details about his relationship with people like actor Kate Mara, whose name appears in the acknowledgements among a list of friends Page reached out to while writing the book.

Page candidly describes time after time when people mistreated him, a long string of awful vignettes. Sexual assault is outlined clinically, slurs and verbal abuse repeated verbatim.

But the same candid verbiage applies to happy times, too, like when he first tastes fresh, homegrown produce at the Lost Valley while learning to live sustainably.

On the whole, reading “Pageboy” is like listening to a friend.

And by the time you reach the end, when Page thanks people for their support, it’s impossible to miss the truth in his words: “I wouldn’t be typing this right now if it weren’t for you and your care.”

Between the timely release of “Pageboy” at the start of Pride Month and the growing onslaught of legislation targeting trans rights, now is an excellent time to read this humanizing and well-written memoir.

In ‘The Blue Caftan,’ Moroccan film director tackles LGBTQ+ love and celebrates embroidery craft

By MARIAM FAM

June 7, 2023

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Director Maryam Touzani stands for a portrait during the 76th international film festival in Cannes, southern France, on Monday, May 22, 2023. In her latest film, “The Blue Caftan,” Touzani, from Morocco, delicately weaves intricate, overlapping tales of love, both traditional and largely taboo for many in her country and its region as she tells the story of a woman and her secretly gay husband who together run a shop making caftans. The marriage grows more complicated when the couple hires a male apprentice. 

(AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

As Mina gets increasingly sick, her body withering away, her husband dotes on her: He washes her hair, helps her change, brings the sweetness of a fruit to her lips. But underneath the genuinely tender moments shared by this on-screen Moroccan couple simmers a longing — of a forbidden kind.

In her latest film, “The Blue Caftan,” Moroccan director Maryam Touzani delicately weaves intricate, overlapping tales of love, both traditional and largely taboo for many in her country and its region as she tells the story of a woman and her secretly gay husband who together run a shop making caftans. The marriage grows more complicated when the couple hires a male apprentice.

Wading into socially sensitive subjects is not unfamiliar terrain for Touzani who has won accolades at international film festivals and, just recently, was a jury member at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “The Blue Caftan,” which had been shortlisted in the international feature film category for the 95th Academy Awards, is scheduled for release Wednesday in Morocco, where gay sex is illegal.

“I’m really hoping that it would be able to trigger a debate about the LGBT community and its place …, things that we don’t generally talk about because they are sensitive subjects,” Touzani told The Associated Press. “For a healthy society, it’s important to be able to talk about everything.”

Some disagree.

In Rabat, 27-year-old Laila Sahraoui argued some topics are best left behind closed doors.

“Moroccans … worry that their kids could imitate such ideas,” she said, adding that she wouldn’t watch the film. “Because of our Islam, we don’t like such things in Morocco. … It’s absolutely not appropriate for our society.”

But Touzani, 42, said others shared with her how important it was to portray characters like Halim, the husband.

“Morocco is a very complex country where there are very different points of view coexisting,” she said. “It’s about being able to just push certain boundaries and just to question certain things. ... That’s what art can help us do as well, cinema especially.”

Filmmaker Nabil Ayouch, Touzani’s husband who co-wrote “The Blue Caftan” with her and is its main producer, said he is curious about moviegoers’ reactions, but feels confident.

“There’s a younger and younger audience and they want to see new type of movies, new type of cinemas in the Arab world,” he said. “The more conservative audience will probably not be very pleased.”

Part of art’s role, Ayouch said, is to disturb, to stir debate.

While he welcomes the recognition their movies garner abroad, he said it’s important for films like “The Blue Caftan” also to be experienced by audiences at home and in the Arab world.

For those having to “live their sexuality secretly,” he said, “films like this one can give them some courage to face who they are more publicly.”

In “The Blue Caftan,” Mina, the wife, has a sense of humor and a feisty side that she uses to protect her husband, who considers her his “rock.” She’s an observant Muslim; viewers repeatedly watch her pray.

Halim is a man torn. He has a gentle soul and takes pride in his craft — correcting a customer on a fabric’s exact shade of blue — while catering to shoppers in a changing world, with little patience for the time he takes to embroider by hand. He loves his wife, even as he slips into a cabin at a public bathhouse for secret sexual encounters with men.

Sexual tension builds up between him and the male apprentice, Youssef. As Mina’s health falters, Youssef increasingly helps the couple and a love triangle of sorts ensues.

Ultimately, Touzani said, it’s a movie about “love in its many forms.”

That includes love for the traditional craft of caftan embroidery, with sensual scenes of fabrics and stitches.

“One of the things I wanted to show in this film is the beauty of certain traditions,” she said. “There are other traditions that … need to be questioned,” she added, citing scenes when Halim challenges some burial rituals.

In one scene, Halim asks for Mina’s forgiveness, telling her that all his life he has tried in vain to get rid of “this thing.” She tells him she’s proud to have been his wife, then rests her head on his shoulder.

Being a woman of faith didn’t stop Mina from understanding her husband, Touzani said.

“We have the tendency of saying, ‘Well, if you are religious, then you cannot be this or you cannot be that.’ I believe that we can be many things at the same time because we are such complex beings.”

Smail, a Moroccan LGBTQ rights activist who identifies as nonbinary, saw the movie abroad and said it showed that “love is for everyone.” Asking to be identified by first name only due to the sensitivity of the topic, Smail added: “When we advocate for more personal freedoms in Morocco, we hear that the people won’t accept that ... but through Mina’s example, we have a glimmer of hope because Mina is one of the people.”

Ahmed Benchemsi, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, said that while the number of those prosecuted for gay sex in Morocco “is relatively low” and the topic of homosexuality is less of a taboo there than it used to be, “the law is still there and it hangs over the heads of everybody.”

Online, before the Morocco release of “The Blue Caftan,” some praised Touzani’s work as powerful and moving; others accused her of courting the West and catering to its sensibilities over issues more relevant to Moroccans.

“I don’t make cinema to please anybody,” Touzani said. “I just want to be as truthful as possible to my characters and to the stories I want to tell.”

Touzani’s feature-film directing debut, “Adam,” tells the story of two women whose lives intersect when one takes in the other, an unmarried stranger who’s looking for a place to stay until she gives birth after getting pregnant. She talks about plans to give away her baby to shield him from the stigma that would otherwise mar his future.

It was inspired by Touzani’s parents hosting a woman who showed up at their doorstep under similar circumstances. When Touzani was pregnant with her son, she felt “the violence” that the woman endured in having to relinquish her baby because “socially she couldn’t do otherwise.”

Broaching topics “unspoken of in Arab and Islamic societies” is one common thread between “Adam” and “The Blue Caftan,” said film critic Cherqui Ameur.

“We hope to have fewer taboos in our society through discussing all issues,” he said.

In 2015, “Much Loved,” a movie directed and written by Ayouch, in which Touzani worked in various capacities, was barred from release in the country. Authorities at the time charged that the movie, portraying female sex workers, was offensive to Moroccan women and values. The movie, excerpts from which appeared online, sparked uproar; it was defended by some on freedom of expression and human-interest grounds and criticized by others who said its language was crude and scenes too explicit.

Born in Tangier to a Moroccan father and Moroccan-Spanish mother, Touzani, an avid reader, studied journalism in London but eventually turned to filmmaking.

She said she gravitates toward telling stories of people on the margins. On the screen, she wants to give them the voice they may not have and the possibilities that may not exist in real life.

“These are the people that inspire me, that touch me, that haunt me,” Touzani said. “These are the people that really make their way inside my heart and stay there naturally without me looking for it.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Protesters brawl as Southern California school district decides whether to recognize Pride Month

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Conservative groups and LGBTQ+ rights supporters protest as police try to maintain order outside the Glendale Unified School District offices in Glendale, Calif., Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Several hundred people gathered in the parking lot of the district headquarters, split between those who support or oppose teaching about exposing youngsters to LGBTQ+ issues in schools. 

(Keith Birmingham/The Orange County Register via AP)

GLENDALE, Calif. (AP) — Protesters briefly scuffled and punches flew Tuesday as a Southern California school district decided whether to recognize June as Pride month.

Several hundred people gathered in the parking lot of the Glendale Unified School District headquarters, split between those who support or oppose exposing youngsters to LGBTQ+ issues in schools.

Some opponents wore T-shirts emblazoned with: “Leave our kids alone.”

It was the same slogan used by some demonstrators last Friday outside Saticoy Elementary School in Los Angeles to protest a planned Pride assembly.

As in Glendale, police officers had to separate groups of protesters and counterprotesters who came to blows.

Across the nation, Pride month celebrations are kicking off amid rising backlash in some places against LGBTQ+ rights. Community parade organizers, school districts and even professional sports terms have faced protests for flying rainbow flags and honoring drag performers. While some Republican-led states are limiting classroom conversations about gender and sexuality and banning gender-affirming care, some Democratic cities and states are seeking to expand LGBTQ+ rights and to honor the community’s contributions.

In Glendale, police quickly moved in to stop clashes, separated the two groups and cleared the parking lot. Police said they arrested two people on suspicion of obstructing officers and one person for unlawful use of pepper spray. TV reports also showed a man being taken away after lying down in the street and refusing to move.

No injuries were reported.

Inside the packed meeting room, the school board late Tuesday night approved, for the fifth year in a row, a resolution designating June as LGBTQ+ Pride month.

However, most of those who addressed the school board discussed broader issues of how sex and gender are handled under district policy, with supporters arguing that LGBTQ+ children need to feel safe and included in classrooms while opponents contended that schools are usurping parental authority and pushing unnecessary and even harmful views on gender.

In an earlier statement, the district said “intentional and harmful disinformation has been circulating about what is being taught” and said it follows state law and education policies.

Earlier Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District school board unanimously voted to recognize Pride Month. The resolution also encouraged all schools in the nation’s second-largest district to incorporate lessons on the LGBTQ+ community into the curriculum and affirmed a “commitment to creating a safe, welcoming, and inclusive learning environment for all LGBTQ+ students, families, and staff members.”

Ruling on Tennessee’s anti-drag law leaves questions about enforcement, next steps

By ADRIAN SAINZ and KIMBERLEE KRUESI

June 6, 2023

 Drag artist Vidalia Anne Gentry speaks during a news conference held by the Human Rights Campaign to draw attention to anti-drag bills in the Tennessee legislature, Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023 in Nashville, Tenn. A federal judge says Tennessee’s first-in-the-nation law designed to place strict limits on drag shows is unconstitutional. In a 70-page ruling handed down late Friday night, June 2, 2023, U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker wrote that the law was both “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad” and encouraged “discriminatory enforcement.”

 (John Amis/AP Images for Human Rights Campaign via AP, File)

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — As LGBTQ+ advocates celebrate a federal judge’s ruling declaring Tennessee’s so-called anti-drag show law unconstitutional, questions remain over whether the law will be enforced after the court declared that the decision only applied to the state’s most populous county.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker ruled that the first-in-the-nation law was “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad,” and encouraged “discriminatory enforcement.”

The ruling came just as many Pride events were scheduled across the heavily conservative state, including events where drag performers were expected to appear publicly and many of which were designated for all ages.

Yet even after Friday’s ruling, questions remain about how prosecutors will respond. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement that the law remains in effect outside of Shelby County, which encompasses Memphis. However, Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy told reporters Tuesday that he believes district attorneys won’t enforce a law that a federal judge says violates the First Amendment.

“We are reviewing the order and expect to appeal at the appropriate time,” Skrmetti said.


Drag artist Cya Inhale, center, visits with guests during the Franklin Pride TN festival, Saturday, June 3, 2023, in Franklin, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Wren uses a fan to keep cool during the Franklin Pride TN festival, Saturday, June 3, 2023, in Franklin, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

The lawsuit seeking to overturn the legislation was spearheaded by a Memphis-based LGBTQ+ theater group, Friends of George, which argued that the law would negatively affect them because they produce “drag-centric performances, comedy sketches, and plays” with no age restrictions.

Initially, the complaint listed Mulroy, Republican Gov. Bill Lee and Skrmetti as defendants. The plaintiffs later agreed to dismiss the governor and the attorney general as defendants, — although Skrmetti continued to represent Mulroy.

Because Mulroy’s authority only applies within Shelby County, Parker’s ruling applied solely to that jurisdiction.

Mulroy told reporters Tuesday that the Trump-appointed judge was clear the statute violated the First Amendment.

“Therefore, I think it is unlikely, or should be unlikely, that other DAs around the state will enforce it,” he said. “And then, if they do attempt to enforce it, I think the defendant will have a very strong First Amendment defense.”

Mulroy, a Democrat, added that he was “probably never been happier to lose a lawsuit.”

“I’ve always thought that the drag show bill was a solution in search of a problem and that by chilling free expression and making the LGBT community feel targeted has done more harm than good,” he said.

Gov. Lee has refused to weigh in on whether district attorneys should continue enforcing the law. Instead, the Republican said he would defer to Skrmetti about enforcement.

Lee added that he had not spoken to the attorney general about Parker’s ruling and that he “no plans to” because “it’s in the judicial branch.”

“That bill was created to protect children for the state. I’ll continue to do that whenever we can,” Lee said.

Tennessee’s Republican-dominated Legislature advanced the anti-drag law earlier this year, with several GOP members pointing to drag performances in their hometowns as reasons why it was necessary to restrict such performances from taking place in public or where children could view them.

Notably the actual word “drag” doesn’t appear in the statute. Instead lawmakers changed the state’s definition of adult cabaret to mean “adult-oriented performances that are harmful to minors.” Furthermore, “male or female impersonators” were classified as a form of adult cabaret, akin to strippers or topless dancers.

The law banned adult cabaret performances from public property or anywhere minors might be present. Performers who broke the law risked being charged with a misdemeanor or a felony for a repeat offense.

While LGBTQ+ rights advocates praised the ruling, Republican lawmakers quickly urged Skrmetti to appeal the decision. So far, he hasn’t.

The drag law marks the second major proposal targeting LGBTQ+ people passed by Tennessee lawmakers this year. Lee also signed into law GOP-backed legislation banning most gender-affirming care for minors, which is being challenged in court.

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Kruesi reported from Nashville, Tennessee.