With the deluge of news coming your way every day, it’s easy to miss a great story. So this week, we’re recommending some of the best stories we’ve read and listened to from around the internet. These are our picks.
British comedian Eddie Izzard is currently in New York starring in a solo show based on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in which she plays every single character. It’s a wild, fascinating gambit from a singular talent, and this week The New York Times published a profile of Izzard that takes readers behind the scenes as she prepared for the show and includes a revealing discussion of how she decided to begin using she/her pronouns.
“All in all, 2022 has been a ghoulish year for queer folks in the United States,” Bryan Washington writes toward the beginning of his essay on queer spaces in The New Yorker. But despite the seemingly ever-increasing hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community and recent acts of unspeakable violence perpetrated against us, Washington writes that gay bars and nightclubs have become more necessary than ever. “They’ve served as focal points of connection and as portals for sharing information… They’ve offered a way to spend time with people whom you can wear a little less armor around, who might actually be invested in your feeling O.K.”
The discourse around Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale has been both fascinating and, more importantly, necessary. Out comedian Guy Branum has been particularly critical of the film’s treatment of its gay, obese main character (played by Brendan Fraser). This week, he joined host Glen Weldon to discuss the film on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. Spoiler alert, neither of them like the film, but their discussion was one of the best, most nuanced I’ve heard yet about The Whale.
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HBO has been on something of a cancelation bonanza since parent company Warner Bros.’ merger with Discovery. Queer fans were particularly devastated when HBO Max canceled reality show Legendary, removing it from the streaming platform entirely. Other canceled shows have continued to disappear from HBO Max, including Westworld and Minx. In a piece for Vulture, TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk tries to contextualize the seeming current instability of the streaming landscape. TV has historically been an ephemeral medium, she writes, but the disappearance of shows seems to cut deeper now, given the dream of perpetual availability that streaming once offered.
Bisexual English comedian Joe Lycett made headlines this week for a stunt he performed protesting footballer David Beckham’s role as a World Cup ambassador for Qatar. For Americans who may not be familiar with him, The New York Times published a profile of Lycett focused on his activism.
On Friday night, HBO premieres a four-part docuseries based on The Cut’s Sex Diaries column. To celebrate, the site has chosen its 69 best entries. The columns consist of week-long sex diaries written by real, anonymous New Yorkers – and there’s plenty of queer representation amongst them.
