In her new poetry collection, Morgan Parker says she wanted to rethink the idea of the Magical Negro – the black character who appears in a story solely to help a white character, and then vanishes – “because you never get to know those characters and their interior lives or anything like that. They’re there to serve a purpose,“ she tells NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “And I wanted to reimagine the black experience as having much more agency than that.” Check out their conversation (and hear some poetry) here.
Parkland Student Survivors Brace For 1st Anniversary Of School Shooting
There will be no marching.
There will be no school walkouts.
Only a day of reflection and service and, perhaps most consequential, a time to grieve.
That is how many of the Parkland, Fla., survivors turned activists plan to spend Thursday, the first anniversary of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Seventeen students and staff members were gunned down last Valentine’s Day. Another 17 people were injured. Since the shooting, young Parkland survivors have emerged as the driving force in calling for stricter gun laws in the U.S. through a series of marches, school walkouts and voter registration drives.
So what? You failed your finals. You gained some weight. So what? You’re single again. You lost your job. So what? What now? You live. You try again. That’s what.
“I received an email from him seven days ago. It was as funny as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. It ended with this sentence: ‘Thank you for our good times, Brian. they will never rot’. And it was signed ‘Dawn’.
“I realise now he was saying goodbye.” -Brian Eno on Bowie
Lou Reed sang about her, Andy Warhol filmed her, and most recently she appeared in Jill Soloway's Transparent.
Holly Woodlawn, the transgender actress immortalized in Lou Reed’s iconic song “Walk on the Wild Side,” and was made famous by Andy Warhol, has died at the age of 69. Woodlawn died Sunday in Los Angeles after a long battle with cancer, according to the Associated Press.
Her first film was director Paul Morrissey’s film Trash and her final on screen role was as Vivian in two episodes of Amazon’s award-winning comedy, Transparent, reported Variety.
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.
While visibility of transgender people has increased greatly in recent years, and with it acceptance — to some degree — this population still has many hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is financial.
Gender-confirmation surgery and other transition-related medical procedures can result in bills in the tens of thousands of dollars, notes a new Reuters article. And although the number of employers offering insurance plans that cover these procedures is on the rise, coverage is still far from universal.
Sara Davis Buechner, a concert pianist and music teacher quoted in the Reuters piece, said she spent $10,000 to have surgery in Thailand in the early 2000s, plus thousands more for electrolysis, therapy, and other services. As insurance coverage was rare at the time, Buechner paid out of pocket, even selling a piano to help pay the bills.
“I emptied all my accounts,” she recalled. “And I consider myself one of the lucky ones.” It was worth it, though, Buckner said, because while assigned male at birth, she had always known she was female.
Some who go through transition spend even more. Undergoing all the procedures listed by the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery would total more than $100,000, Reuters notes. And transgender people often have few financial resources. They are four times more likely than other Americans to live in extreme poverty, according to a report that came out this year from the Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress.
Meanwhile, only 5 percent of U.S. companies offer workers insurance to help with these costs, reports the Society for Human Resource Management, and although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, it’s still a tiny percentage. Among large employers, it’s somewhat better, with one-third of Fortune 500 companies providing such coverage, according to the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. And growth in transgender-inclusive antidiscrimination laws and corporate policies will likely lead more employers to offer the coverage.
For those with some resources, the best strategy is to “plan ahead, know what your costs are going to be, and what your insurance will cover, and what it won’t,” Wells Fargo financial adviser Paula Heichel told Reuters. Buechner added, “Just imagine, you have to take every stitch of clothing you own and put it in the garbage. The best analogy I tell people is, ‘What if you moved to Bolivia tomorrow, how much would it cost to start a totally new life?’ The costs are enormous. Start counting.”
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