SGN October 28, 2022

ISSUE 43

VOLUME 50

FRIDAY

OCTOBER 28, 2022

FIRST SAME-SEX MARRIAGES IN CUBA

Imperia Lake Union offers space for inclusive events

by Georgia Skerritt SGN Intern

As a long PNW winter closes in on the Seattle area, Imperia Lake Union offers a warm and friendly invitation to anyone who might soon be planning community, personal, or business indoor events.

Wives and business partners Danielle Moser (she/her) and Natasha Moser (she/ her) have owned and operated Imperia in the Eastlake neighborhood for almost two years.

In December 2020, they bought what was previously known as the Lake Union Café event space and have since used it to create an inclusive and customer-centric space for weddings and events.

The Mosers were drawn to the Lake Union Café in part because the previous owner was a well-established ally of the Queer community, having opened her venue’s doors on February 13, 2012, the day that Washington legalized marriage equality.

by Mike Andrew SGN Staff Writer

Cubans celebrated their first same-sex marriages in October after the country’s new Family Code went into effect.

The new law regulates a broad range of family issues, allowing — among other things — a free choice for individuals in choosing their spouses. It was adopted last month after 66.85% of voters approved it in a national referendum.

see CUBA page 18

Podcast sheds light on forgotten murders of Gay men in Montreal

by Christiana Lilly Special to the SGN

When you ask about or Google the murders of Gay men in Montreal in the ’90s, it all leads to the podcast The Village: The Montreal Murders LGBT advocates encouraged me to listen to the podcast. Online research [reveals that] only a handful of news stories talked about the murders prior to the release of the CBC’s 2022 podcast hosted by Gay FrenchCanadian journalist Francis Plourde.

“Since the podcast was released, I [heard from] quite a few people who lived in Montreal and were in their early twenties when all that happened, and many of them had no idea this was happening,” Plourde said. “That’s how segregated things were in Montreal.”

Over seven episodes, the third season of The Village investigates the murder of 18 Gay men during the HIV/AIDS crisis, starting with that of 23-year-old activist Joe Rose in March 1989. He was known for his pink hair,

Natasha (l) and Danielle – Photo courtesy of Imperia Lake Union

Francis Plourde – Photo courtesy of CBC Media Centre

Brides Lisset Diaz Vallejo (l) and Liusba Grajales travel in a taxi to the notary office to get married in Santa Clara, Cuba, Friday, Oct. 21, 2022. The couple, who have been together for seven years, is one of the first to make the decision to get legally married in Cuba following the new Family Code, which opened up everything from equal marriage to surrogate mothers.

– Photo by Ismael Francisco / AP

Local News

IMPERIA

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In a recent interview with the SGN, Danielle said, “It’s kind of like it was meant to be: that this woman who is not LGBTQ+ was… such an ally that she just opened up her doors and said, ‘Whoever wants to get married today, come get married.’”

After their own wedding, Danielle and Natasha noticed what felt like an unreasonable amount of stress and struggle in order to both plan and enjoy personal events. “When we were planning our wedding, it felt there were so many options, and it was hard to put everything together,” Danielle recalled.

She described the discrepancies they felt between different aspects of an event (like catering and floral arrangements, for example) and started to imagine a venue that included more aspects of event planning than just the space itself. “After that whole experience, we… talked about how we knew we could create something better... We really just wanted to make it as easy and transparent as possible to throw an event. You shouldn’t have to spend time worrying about throwing your party, you should spend time enjoying your party.”

During the turnover from Lake Union Café to Imperia, Danielle and Natasha were able to keep most of the existing staff on board, including executive chef Ian Hoyt and florist Jennifer (JJ) Jones, which made for a much easier and more streamlined process for the entire team.

“It’s really cool that we got to keep them [on], because it makes us one of the only inclusive venues in Seattle,” said Danielle. Along with a shared passion for inclusion and comfort that stems from personal experiences, they also bring a range of skills to the table in relation to their work at Imperia. Previously a graphic designer at Microsoft, Natasha now primarily handles

the business and licensing side. In addition to the event space, Danielle also continues to work for a nonprofit organization that helps people create small businesses.

“Natasha and I both got to take classes [at the nonprofit], in addition to my working there,” Danielle explained. “I’ve… learned so much about what mistakes to avoid and how to think about financing and projections, things like that.”

From speaking with Danielle and Natasha, or even just from glimpsing their website, it’s clear that the Mosers have made inclusivity and community a pillar of their business. “We’ve been trying really hard to foster an environment where people feel like the space is made for them, no questions asked!” Natasha said.

Danielle also explained that they have worked hard to create an online and social media presence that tells people that everyone belongs at Imperia. “It’s kind of like a warm hug to know that people stand by you,” she offered. “I love that we’ve been able to see so many different points of [view] about what it means to be Queer in Seattle, because that experience is different for everybody.”

The Imperia team hopes to explore more event options for the business, including public ticketed events and 1920s-themed jazz nights (inspired by the building’s original art deco architecture and design).

“I really want everyone to know that we aren’t just a wedding venue,” Natasha concluded. “It is still our main focus, but we

still enjoy having business parties, networking events, mitzvahs, life celebrations, even birthday parties.”

If you or anyone you know is looking for an event space, whether it’s a company event, group reunion, or private birthday party, Imperia will welcome you with eager minds and open arms.

Imperia Lake Union is located at 3119 Eastlake Ave. E, and is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. For more information about event options and/or upcoming public events, check out its website at https://imperiaseattle.com or its Instagram page @imperialakeunion.

Imperia team working on renovations – Photo courtesy of Imperia Lake Union

LGBTQ History

bell hooks: A voice of love, activism, and intersectionality

by Victoria A. Brownworth Special to the SGN

When bell hooks died on December 15, 2021, it was a gut punch. There was no time when her extraordinary writing and feminist and Lesbian theorizing was not part of the Queer community. There was no time when the community imagined that hooks’ voice would not always be in the forefront of our collective consciousness on intersectionality and Queer theory and praxis.

Intersectionality has become a political and cultural buzzword recently, yet few have read the intersectional essays of hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw, who invented that concept and wrote (and continues to write) about it exhaustively and, as Audre Lorde would say, deliberately. Intersectionality describes and explores how race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class might intersect with one another and overlap.

The extraordinary breadth of hooks’ writing and the thematic structures of her books, essays, and poetry all build on each other. She wrote so much of love, so compellingly of emotional and romantic commitment and what it means, that it was stunning when hooks revealed she spent the last two decades of her life unpartnered and celibate.

In an interview for Shondaland in 2017, hooks (who lowercased her name) told Abigail Bereola, “I don’t have a partner. I’ve been celibate for 17 years. I would love to have a partner, but I don’t think my life is less meaningful. I always tell people my life is a pie, and there’s a slice of the pie that’s missing, but there’s so much pie left over — do I really want to spend my time looking at that empty piece and judging myself by that?”

In that same interview, hooks delved deeply into one of her pivotal topics: self-love and what it means for women to love themselves and recognize that they are worthy of commitment and that they do not deserve violence or other oppressive acts in a relationship.

As hooks told Essence magazine in another interview, “I think the revolution needs to be one of self-esteem, because I feel we are all assaulted on all sides… I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.”

In the era of white/MAGA/GOP grievance, the fear of losing the prioritization of whiteness and cis-het maleness has subsumed much of our political discourse, which makes hooks’ work more crucial than ever and her recent death all the more painful a loss.

Centering Black women

Born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, hooks began using her maternal great-grandmother’s name as her pen name in 1976. She lowercased her name to signify that she wanted people to focus on her books, not “who I am,” as she explained in a talk at Rollins College in 2013.

Over the four decades of her writing, hooks wrote continually about Black women, feminism, the oppressive nature of patriarchy, and how Black men had embraced that even as they decried white imperialism. In her 1981 feminist classic, “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism,” hooks deconstructed a panoply of issues from slavery to the devaluation of Black women and Black womanhood.

She wrote declaratively that “no other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have Black women... When Black people are talked about, the focus tends to be on Black men; and when women are talked about, the focus tends to be on white women.”

She wrote, “A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years.”

Later, in “Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work,” hooks expanded that discourse, noting, “No Black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’ … No woman has ever written enough.”

Prescient ideas and theories

True to her advice, hooks was always writing more and building on her previous ideas and theories. There is no disengaging of historical and cultural events in her work. She sees everything through a prism of contexts that each impact each other — hence the violence of nationalism cannot be divorced from domestic violence. She could see these links so clearly and write about them with such clarity, precision, and accessibility, that the reader was left convinced and educated.

In a 1995 conversation with digital activist and lyricist John Perry Barlow, hooks said, “I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that’s becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.”

We are in that time now, where the

MAGA GOP has combined fundamentalism and nationalism and added a soupçon of xenophobia. The prescience of hooks’ readings of the zeitgeist and the moment was a critical aspect of her oeuvre as a writer and theorist.

Queer-pas-gay

This was true even of her own identity. Though many people referred to hooks as a Lesbian or Gay, she preferred Queer. In describing herself as “queer-pas-gay,” hooks inserted the French word for not — pas — and said that she chose that term because being Queer is “not who you’re having sex with but about being at odds with everything around it.”

In an event on May 6, 2014, titled, “a conversation with bell hooks,” the thenscholar-in-residence at Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at the New School spoke at length about this issue.

She said, “As the essence of queer, I think of Tim Dean’s [the British queer theorist] work on being queer and queer not as being about who you’re having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it, and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

Background

The details of hooks’ life helped build her perspective and her feminist and Queer theory. She was born and died in Kentucky and often wrote about living in Appalachia (a region often associated with whiteness), but she lived most of her adult life elsewhere.

She had several degrees: a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also worked across the country as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz; San Francisco State University; Yale; Oberlin College; and the City College of New York. Among the issues hooks wrote about in her books was the confluence of health, mental well-being, and racism.

True to another of her sayings — “I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance” — hooks published prolifically: over 30 books and dozens of chapters and essays in books by others. Her publications included the

iconic Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), All About Love: New Visions (2000), Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics (2000), We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004), Soul Sister: Women, Friendship, and Fulfillment (2005), and Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (2013). She also wrote several children’s books, including Homemade Love (2002).

In the last decade of her life, struggling with the renal disease that ultimately killed her, she moved back to Kentucky. On her return to her birthplace, hooks compared her journey to that of author Wendell Berry. “Our trajectories are very similar,” hooks told PBS, “because he went out to California, New York, the places that I too went, and then felt that urge, that call to home, that it’s time to come back.”

There are so many things to be said about hooks’ life and work, so many visionary concepts she developed and nurtured and expanded upon. But at her core, she was always writing a paean to love. She wanted love to equilibrate the world, to mitigate violence, to assuage the pain of racism, misogyny, homophobia, classism.

In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, hooks wrote, “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.”

Victoria A. Brownworth is a Pulitzer Prize–nominated, award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, DAME, The Advocate, and Curve, among other publications. She is the Bay Area Reporter’s television columnist. She was among the OUT 100 and is the author and editor of more than 20 books, including the Lambda Award–winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic, Ordinary Mayhem: A Novel, and Too Queer: Essays from a Radical Life

This article was originally published in the Philadelphia Gay News. Reprinted with permission through the SGN’s partnership with the National LGBT Media Association.

A selection of bell hooks’ works: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and All About Love – Images courtesy of the publishers

PODCAST

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“Silence = Death” pin, and snappy comebacks, with a friend telling Plourde that Rose once said, “If you can’t stand the fruits, get out of the orchard.”

Rose was diagnosed with AIDS at age 19 after donating blood, but he never hid his status, and his goal was to start a chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in Montreal. He never got the chance.

While riding a bus home to the HIV/ AIDS hospice where he was living, four teens yelled homophobic slurs at him, then beat and stabbed him to death. The oldest of the group, a 19-year-old named Patrick Moise, was only sentenced to seven years in prison. The public blamed gang violence because the teens were Black. Others said it was a lack of bus safety. But the LGBT community stood up and said what no one wanted to hear: it was homophobia.

Rose’s story became folklore, and the LGBT community in Montreal and beyond rallied for justice, but unfortunately, his murder would not be the last. The same night, Richard Gallant, 28, was found stabbed to death in his home in the Village. Then 16 other Gay men were murdered in Montreal between 1989 and 1993.

The South Florida Gay News had the chance to talk to Plourde about making The Village: The Montreal Murders and bringing to light a piece of Canada’s LGBT history.

SFGN: This season doesn’t have a single “villain.” How did that complicate things?

Plourde: For a long time, there were fears that there was a serial killer in Montreal, in the late ’80s, early ’90s. Turns out there was one, but that was not the only reason why Gay men were dying in the Village.... So it was a bit of a challenge in terms of, like, so many

of those cases were different and in terms of how they happened, the background of the individual. There were things in common, but there were also big, big differences as well.

So in this case it was a challenge, yes, for research and for storytelling. But at the same time, we wanted to do something a bit different with that season. We wanted to look at the broader context of Montreal and what it was to be Queer in Montreal in the early ’90s. So the series became, yes, focused on those crimes that happened in Montreal, but it was also about the AIDS crisis that was happening at the same time, which was kind of fueling the homophobia that we saw in Montreal in those days. And we wanted to show that it was also a story about the empowerment of a community, a community rising together.

SFGN: What response did you get from sources 30 years later?

Plourde: On one hand, there was this eagerness to share their story because they knew it was important for so many reasons. But it was also challenging… We also met people who were not willing to engage or to do interviews with us because they lost a loved one, like 30 years ago. In many cases, the case is still unsolved. And there was this double pain: the loss of an individual but also the context; in some cases people had double lives, they were not disclosing their sexual orientation to their family, right?

SFGN: And memories can change decades later.

Plourde: Yeah, it’s the challenge with interviewing people who will remember things from 30 years ago. Like if you ask anyone what they did last week or a month ago, often they won’t even remember accurately. Imagine 30 years. But I was still surprised by how much people remember, and I think that’s also because it was so impactful. Like in their life, it had so much impact. So I think that’s why they had such vibrant memories of what happened.

SFGN: I couldn’t help but notice the parallel between the attacks on Gay men, who were blamed for the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the anti-Asian hate we’ve seen during the COVID pandemic. Was that something that struck you?

Plourde: Oh, yes, that was so obvious. It was so obvious to me because I live in Vancouver, and there’s a big Asian community, and I was seeing the same thing in the early days of COVID. I mean, so little was known about the disease. There was this perception that it came from Asia and as such, people were targeting Asian people, trying to avoid Asian markets.

When [Rose] was attacked on the bus, a friend was with him, and the first thing he told first responders was that he had AIDS, so they would take precautions… but there were so many wrong ideas about protections for the diseases, like you avoid the Village, you don’t touch Gay people, and all those kinds of like misconceptions. It kind

of fueled the homophobia that we noticed in Montreal and elsewhere as well. I don’t think that was specific to Montreal, but yeah, it was kind of impossible not to make the connection.

Christiana Lilly is an award-winning journalist whose work ranges from lifestyle and community reporting to hardhitting investigative pieces. She has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists Florida chapter, Florida Press Club, and Florida Magazine Association. She lives in Pompano Beach with her husband and their pup.

This article was originally published in the South Florida Gay News. Reprinted with permission through the SGN’s partnership with the National LGBT Media Association.

A protest flier to commemorate the three-year anniversary of Joe Rose’s murder – Photo courtesy AIDS Activist History Project

“The Village: The Montreal Murders” podcast graphic and Francis Plourde – Photo courtesy of CBC Media Centre

Arts & Entertainment

Opera star Laquita Mitchell brings Josephine to life

Soprano talks historical significance of revolutionary icon

by Daniel Lindsley SGN Staff Writer

On October 30 in the Nordstrom Recital Hall, Music of Remembrance — a nonprofit classical chamber music organization with a focus on works composed by victims of the Holocaust — will host a performance of American composer Tom Cipullo’s Josephine. It’s an opera about Josephine Baker, the colorful and revolutionary Black performer who left a lasting mark on the arts, aided the French resistance in World War II, and was active in the American civil rights movement. She was also, as it turns out, Bisexual.

Starring in the title role is Laquita Mitchell, who took time out of her busy final day before her trip to Seattle to talk about the show and give some background. Mitchell has been singing opera professionally since 2005, and has performed Josephine for crowds in New Orleans and online for the Colorado Opera.

“The piece is about 40 minutes, but it’s nonstop singing,” Mitchell said of the show. It’s presented like a one-sided interview, she said, with a silent journalist listening while Baker is “reminiscing about her life.”

“This is a woman who has been performing since, what, 1921, and she passed in 1975,” Mitchell said. At the time of the fictional interview, “she’s been telling this story about her life, and about her singing, for 50 years. So you can imagine there might be embellishments.”

Narrator reliability aside, the opera is far from fictional. It’s based on a biography titled The Hungry Heart, written by JeanClaude Baker, one of Josephine’s twelve adopted children.

“She was just an amazing woman, who fought for the French resistance,” Mitchell said. Baker used her fame as a performer to ferry information to England, such as German troop movements, airfields, and harbors.

Mitchell also described Baker as “a tortured sort of person, because of the trauma of what she experienced growing up in the United States.” She spent her childhood in the slums of early 1900s St. Louis, witnessing the horrors of the race riots there

in 1917, and suffering abuse from the white families she worked for.

“But what she left behind is this long legacy of movies, and writings, and books, and photos,” Mitchell continued. “She really ushered in this thing of the Black person having to leave the United States. James Baldwin did it, Langston Hughes did it.... Everybody had to leave, if they wanted to do something with their lives.”

To prepare for the role, Mitchell researched Baker thoroughly, all the way down to her mannerisms, although Baker had long been something of a household name for her. The more challenging parts of the opera, though, don’t involve singing.

“As a singer, the talking is a bit difficult,” Mitchell said of certain segments. “You just want to sing, you know? But you get used to it, and you deal with it, and you adapt — and you do your best to breathe in the essence of who [Baker] was.”

Performing the piece is also emotionally taxing, since it hits so close to home. “It’s a wonderful piece, but it brings up a lot of feelings as a person of color, because things

may have changed for [Baker], but they have not really changed in this country,” Mitchell said. “That feeling of marginalization, and that feeling of having to prove herself over and over and over again for fifty years — it’s quite exhausting.”

Though Baker’s early career was in the vaudeville style, the opera is much more contemplative, meant to depict the performer later in life, when the days of her famous “Banana Dance” were long over.

“She was a Black woman, living in Paris, who had her own club. She had her own dancers, she had her own singers — she did whatever she wanted to do,” Mitchell said. “And then there came many husbands, and there came this big, extravagant life.” (Her son Jean-Claude wrote that she had relationships with women too, like blues singer Clara Smith.)

By most accounts, Baker seemed to have it all. She made friends with celebrities of all kinds, as well as fashion designers, directors, and musicians, who all wanted a part in what she was doing.

“But there was still this burning within

her of the issues with being a person of color,” Mitchell said, “and not having the rights that she felt her people deserved.”

“We end the opera with her speaking at the March on Washington — the famous March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gives the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” Mitchell said. Baker was the only woman to give a full, official speech at the event, in her Free French military uniform. Before that, she had also worked with the NAACP.

“She was one of our early, early, early freedom fighters, but she fought in a different way.”

You can learn more about Josephine and buy tickets for the show at https://www. musicofremembrance.org/show-details/ josephine. It will be paired with the world premiere of “Wertheim Park” by Lori Laitman, a dramatic song weaving music and poetry together in a moving elegy for the Dutch Jews lost to the Holocaust, and chamber works by Holocaust-era composers Max Vredenburg and Erwin Schulhoff.

Laquita Mitchell – Photo by Matthew Placek

Josephine – Photo courtesy of Music of Remembrance

Film SQFF 2022 announces jury award winners

by A.V. Eichenbaum

SGN Managing Editor

Three Dollar Bill Cinema announced the winners of the 27th annual Seattle Queer Film Festival on October 26. The festival featured 150 films representing 27 countries and included an international premiere, two world premieres, and multiple PNW premieres.

The four juried competition categories include Best Narrative Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best Short Film, and Best Youth film.

The winners for this year’s Seattle Queer Film Festival are:

How Not to Date while Trans

– Best Short Film

Directed by Nyala Moon, the rom-com centers on a Black Trans woman navigating the perisl of dating. The film has won numerous awards, including an award at Three Dollar Bill Cinema’s TRANSlations: Seattle Tran Film Festival

Black As U R

– Best Documentary

Directed by Micheal Rice, the jury concluded it stood out for its “depiction of the reality of living in the intersection of Black and LGBTQIA cultures without patronizing the members of the communities.”

Soy Niño

– Best Youth Film

Directed by Lorena Zilleruelo, Soy Niño won because of its “moving originality and compelling filmmaking that gives a glimpse into a life that has rarel been seen on screen.”

The category for Best Narrative feature ended in a tie between Mars One, directed by Gabriel Martins, and El Houb, directed by Shariff Nasr. The jury noted that “El Houb’s vibrant uplift of Muslim Queer stories reminds us that the more deeply personal stories are, the more relatable they are,” and “Mars One queers family film in a deeply human way.” Mars One is also Brazil’s entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

In a joint statement, Three Dollar Bill’s Managing Director Billy Ray Brewton and Festival Artistic Director Kathleen Mullen said the following:

“Our jury award winners represent the diverse breath and power of Queer stories from across the globe. As the LGBTQ+ community and our rights continue to be under attack, it is more important than ever to showcase and amplify Queer imagery and storytelling on screen; representation that is integral to our vision of elevating the spectrum of queer stories to help create a just and equitable world.”

Three Dollar Bill Cinema will present a festival encore, including a selection of jury and audience award winners and staff favorites. The encore screenings will be available virtually from November 4 to November 6. Audiences in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska will have a 72-hour viewing window to watch the films of their choice after the start of the film.

For tickets and more information, go to threedollarbillcinema.org

Mars One – Photo courtesy of SQFF

El Houb – Photo courtesy of SQFF

Soy Niño – Photo courtesy of SQFF

Black as U R – Photo courtesy of SQFF

How Not to Date While Trans – Photo courtesy of SQFF

Film

Tedious Black Adam is a super-powered misfire

by Sara Michelle Fetters SGN Staff Writer BLACK ADAM Theaters

Much like Sony/Marvel’s Morbius earlier this year, Warner Bros/New Line Cinema/ DC’s latest cinematic superhero showcase Black Adam is nothing more than a splashy, two-hour coming-attractions reel for future films. It’s a better motion picture overall than that earlier one was, and there are certainly a few moments that forced me to sit up slightly straighter and pay moderately more attention. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving this one a recommendation. Far from it.

I’m not familiar enough with the character created by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck to know how closely director Jaume Collet-Serra (Jungle Cruise, The Shallows) and writers Adam Sztykiel (Rampage), Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani (The Mauritanian) mirror the source material. Not that it matters. It’s like the team took a Superhero Storytelling 101 course and this is their final project. It’s connect-the-dots filmmaking, and precious little comes alive or ever feels emotionally authentic.

That’s a shame. There are plenty of commendable building blocks that Collet-Serra and his team lay down as a foundation. They’ve populated their world with a talented cross-section of established superstars and promising newcomers. They’ve chosen a uniquely intriguing Middle Eastern setting for all the chaos and carnage. They broach several complex topics that pertain to international peacekeeping and all that goes with it.

They just don’t do anything substantive with any of it. Everything is rushed through and glossed over. Why the fictional country of Kahndaq is under the thumb of a multicultural gang of surprisingly well-equipped thugs known as “Intergang” isn’t clear. The left-field connection of the mysterious “big bad” to the film’s 2600 BCE prologue and the person who has been secretly pulling the strings of this country’s occupation is underdeveloped and poorly revealed.

These are only a handful of this production’s issues. It’s as if a new item springs forth every other minute to shake one’s head at in annoyance. For every terrific moment — and there are terrific moments — there are at least four or five that are

either obnoxious or troublesome (or both). With rare exceptions, there is no momentum to the action, and even less urgency. Also, the ancient magical crown the evildoers are trying to get their claws on is a throwaway McGuffin that serves zero purpose until the random second it’s needed — and then all hell literally breaks loose.

This comic book tale revolves around Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson). Having been asleep for 5,000 years, the fabled Kahndaqian “hero” is released from his stone prison by Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), a tomb-raiding freedom fighter who has been a major thorn in Intergang’s side. A group of powerful wizards led by the original Shazam! (Djimon Hounsou) bestowed upon Adam the power to overthrow an evil king, but his anger got the better of him and he almost destroyed the entire country instead of saving it from tyranny.

Few know that part of the story, and this includes Adrianna’s adventurous teenage son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui). He looks at Adam and only sees his country’s savior. But Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) knows exactly who they are dealing with. She

sends the leader of the Justice Society (or JSA) Carter Hall, aka Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), and a small band of fellow heroes to Kahndaq in hopes they can convince Adam to surrender before he starts making an angry and vengeful menace of himself.

What follows are a series of disconnected scenes in which Adam rips through Intergang like butter, bonds with Amon as the latter tries to teach him how to be a superhero, and has a couple of fights with Hawkman and his compatriots Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), the latter two out on their first save-the-world assignment from Waller. There is also the search for that aforementioned mystical crown, as the person who unlocks its secrets will tap into some seriously demonic, potentially world-ending powers.

The first fight sequence between Adam and Intergang after his awakening is borderline awful. Collet-Serra attempts to channel his inner Zack Snyder and fails miserably. But the director redeems himself with the first confrontation between the awakened antihero and the JSA. This is a nicely staged

slugfest that does a solid job of spotlighting everyone’s various powers without the aid of individual origin stories. From there, one confrontation leads to another, with spontaneous bits of (mostly worthless) exposition sprinkled throughout.

Yet all of this leads nowhere and only sets up character motivations and scenarios destined to be explored in future adventures, not this one. Even the climax doesn’t resonate, and no matter how final the decisions by some of the characters may prove to be, these sacrifices carry no weight and even less meaning.

The cast does what they can, especially Hodge and Brosnan, both of whom are excellent. But it’s not enough. Collet-Serra’s sojourn into comic book theatrics is tedious and never justifies its existence other than to suggest what’s on the horizon for DC’s catalog of heroes. In all its zeal to expand this universe, the film forgets about the here and now.

It’s going to be a hit. There will be sequels. This character will return. But that doesn’t change my reaction. Black Adam is a super-powered misfire.

Pierce Brosnan and Dwayne Johnson in Black Adam – Photo by Warner Bros.

Aldis Hodge in Black Adam – Photo by Warner Bros.

Ticket to Paradise is an enjoyably forgettable showcase for Clooney and Roberts

by Sara Michelle Fetters SGN Staff Writer

TICKET TO PARADISE

Theaters

Ticket to Paradise is a perfect example of the magnetic power bona fide movie stars still have to captivate an audience, no matter how weak the material. Director Ol Parker (Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again) and screenwriter Daniel Pipski do not attempt to reinvent the rom-com wheel. They are content to follow a tried and true path, and nothing that transpires in their cheerfully forgettable film is even slightly unexpected.

But what they do have is a pair of aces. Parker and Pipski know they have George Clooney and Julia Roberts at their disposal,

and they utilize them to their full potential whenever possible. The duo dominate to such a degree that it’s easy to lose track of what the core plot is supposed to be about and instead revel in the stars’ effortless backand-forth bon mots. They’re sublime.

This is a good thing, because otherwise Parker’s latest comes across more like an exquisitely shot commercial for tropical vacations and a picturesque postcard for the otherworldly wonders of seaweed farming than anything character driven or emotionally complex. It’s as narratively thin as anything I’ve seen in 2022, and even at briskly paced 104 minutes, there’s barely enough content to fill the running time.

After graduating from a prestigious law school, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) and her best friend Wren (Billie Lourd) head to Bali

for a tropical vacation. Just over a month later, estranged exes David (Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts) are on a plane headed for Indonesia. Lily is their beloved daughter. She has announced her intention to marry Balinese seaweed farmer Gede (Maxime Bouttier) and would love it if they could be there for the ceremony.

Call it a parental riff on My Best Friend’s Wedding as David and Georgia agree to put their post-marital acrimony aside and conspire to stop their daughter’s nuptials before she makes what they believe will be a colossal mistake. This means trying to convince Gede that his simple life as a farmer won’t keep Lily content forever, planting seeds of doubt that the pair are truly meant to be together, and even stealing the matrimonial rings before they can be properly blessed.

It also forces David and Georgia to reevaluate the reasons for their own divorce, as being civil to one another is a potent reminder of why they fell in love in the first place.

Again, this all works out exactly as anticipated. Parker and Pipski are not at all interested in trying to toy with basic genre formulas. But it’s all so threadbare that none of the character connections matter, nor do any of the goofy set pieces ring with anything resembling authenticity. It’s a frothy fairy tale — a gorgeous and astutely assembled one, to be certain, but a fairy tale nonetheless. This is the kind of story that one enjoys in the moment but vanishes from memory the second it concludes.

That it does have any resonance, no matter how minute, has everything to do with Clooney and Roberts. The talented Dever is fine as Lily, and Bouttier makes suitable eye candy as the object of her affection, but they are not the ones who make the film worthwhile. Clooney and Roberts could do this sort of thing in their sleep, and they know exactly which buttons to push to keep an audience happy. Their chemistry fills the theater with its rapturous ebullience, and with so few actual movie stars of their caliber left, watching them so effortlessly work their magic is an undeniable treat.

However, Lourd is wasted in the standard throwaway “kooky best friend” role that Judy Greer used to be perpetually stuck in throughout the 2000s (13 Going on 30, 28 Dresses, and The Wedding Planner all come to mind), and if she gets typecast because of this film, that’s going to make me furious. I also can’t say I liked the almost puritanical take on marriage and gender roles the plot seemingly stumbles its way into; Lily’s intelligence and agency are strangely sidelined the closer the young woman gets to marrying Gede.

Thanks to Clooney and Roberts, I find it impossible to hate on this rom-com with any sincerity. The two stars made watching this trifle a breeze, and it isn’t as if it’s so unbelievable or its negative aspects are so egregious or offensive that its missteps aren’t still simple enough to forgive. Ticket to Paradise is more staycation than vacation, and as such it is equally as memorable.

George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Ticket to Paradise – Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures

Maxime Bouttier, Kaitlyn Dever, Billie Lourd, George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Ticket to Paradise – Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures

Books Claribel A. Ortega brings cozy fantasy vibes with new middle-grade series

by Lindsey Anderson SGN Staff Writer

Halloween novels can be great for a good scare, but sometimes, the most frightening part of a good spooky story happens off the pages. For YA and middle-grade writer Claribel A. Ortega, the scariest part of their fantasy novels has been the publishing process.

The never-ending nightmare of publishing

“My process was pretty much a roller coaster,” they said. “There were a lot of twists and turns. Nothing turned out the way I expected it to, but I feel like that’s how it is with most authors.”

Ortega knew they wanted to be a writer in the early 2010s and began working on their first novel. By 2016, they had a finished manuscript and sought to publish their work. Ortega found an agent quickly but unfortunately couldn’t get their book to sell.

“I parted ways with my agent, and I found a new agent pretty quickly after, [then] wrote and sold Ghost Squad in 2017, and it took a couple of years to come out. It was published in 2020.”

Finally seeing their first novel on shelves was a testament to Ortega’s tenacity. They refused to give up, despite the many pushbacks they faced.

“Along the way, there were a lot of things [that went wrong],” they said. Having to switch agents was just the beginning.

“I almost signed with a scam publishing company at one point. They turned out to be a husband and wife in their house catfishing as their authors — pretending to be them — and sending emails and phone calls with other authors, convincing them to come on.... It was pretty wild.”

Despite the setbacks, their hard work paid off, and Ortega has a newfound appreciation for those who have had the guts to get through the muck of the publishing world. “It was a very twisty journey. Aside from the catfishing publisher, it isn’t unusual to have a lot of things happen. There’s a lot of people who deal with stuff like that,” they said.

“[In] publishing, you are dealing with people whose dreams are for sale. When you’re a new author, you see everything through these rose-colored glasses, and your writing is so important to you, and people can prey on those feelings and on your dream of writing books. I think it is rife with scams, and it is important to talk about it, so authors don’t fall prey to that.”

A new writing process emerges

In April of 2022, Ortega’s second novel, Witchlings, came out. With many difficult lessons learned from their first daunting dive into publishing, Ortega used a different tactic with Witchlings

“For Witchlings [my writing process] did [change]. Sort of in the revision stages, though,” they said. “Before Witchlings, I was what’s known as a pantser. So, I sort of just flew by the seat of my pants, which is where the expression comes from. I just wrote whatever came to me. I had a general outline, always, when I wrote a book, but just… a paragraph or two with a synopsis of what happens.”

With tighter deadlines to work with the second time around, Ortega decided to switch up their strategy. “I realized how much revision that leads to, and once you’re on deadline and have multiple projects, as I do, time becomes scarce. I started to outline a lot more heavily once I got into the revision process with Witchlings. Once the book sold, I started working on it with my editor.”

Ortega now swears by outlining, and says the updated process has helped them stay more organized in their writing process. “Now I do a chapter-by-chapter outline.

Each chapter is intensely outlined. I know exactly what’s happening in each chapter, and I go in, I revise, and I write. That way, I have a guide. It doesn’t always go the way I planned it, but that makes it a lot easier and less time-consuming.”

While Ortega is a detail-oriented planner when it comes to their drafts, the inspiration for their stories is a lot more free-flowing.

“Each story depends on how [it] comes to me. I don’t sit down and go, ‘I want to write a fantasy about this and this.’ It’s usually just like the plot comes to me first. Like, ‘Oh, what if there was a story about a girl who doesn’t get into a traditional coven?’” they said.

The style of her YA and middle-grade novels tends to change depending on the ideas Ortega gets. “Whatever voice the characters have when they come to me is what I write them in. So, for Witchlings, it was very clearly middle-grade. Actually, the very first thing that inspired me to write the book, or that came to me, was the first line of the book, which is: ‘It was the night of the Black Moon Ceremony, and the very last thing Seven Salazar wanted was to be a spare witch,’ and that just sounds middle-grade.”

Move over Harry Potter, being special is boring Ortega has a talent for writing novels for older children. “I think middle-grade voice also really comes naturally to me. I enjoy writing both YA and middle-grade, but I think I feel the most comfortable writing in middle-grade. I tend to get a lot of story ideas that live in that world.”

The Witchlings story first came to Ortega as the antithesis of a popular middle-grade fantasy trope. “Witchlings was inspired by a couple of different things,” they said. “I think in the very beginning, I just wanted to [write] a magical story about a kid who was the opposite of the chosen one. So, in the story, the main character, Seven, is a spare witch, which means she’s sorted into a coven of leftover witches. She doesn’t belong with anyone else, except the other two leftovers, Valley and Thorn.”

As Ortega worked on the story, they started to notice parallels between the idea of a “leftover witch” and current events. “As time went on, it was also informed by things that were happening in the media and… other stories that I grew up with that I didn’t feel like I could rely on on anymore. I wanted to write an alternative to those stories, from a place of love and understanding and for every kid to belong.”

Writing about identity in a way that kids could digest was very important for Ortega as well. “I’m a Queer Nonbinary person, and it was really important for me to talk about those things in the story in a way that wasn’t directly talking about them. That feeling of being left out and not belonging anywhere, or being ashamed of who you are, came both from my queerness and also being a diaspora kid and feeling like I never really had a home one way or another. I think all of those things inspired Witchlings — as well as the Hudson Valley, because Ravenskill and all the twelve towns are based on the river towns along the Hudson River in New York.”

LGBTQ+ representation

While Ortega uses the metaphor of magical misfits as a stand-in for queerness and gender identity, they also include explicitly LGBTQ+ main characters. “As soon as I started writing Valley Peppercorn, who is Seven’s bully in the book and ends up being in her coven — which is not a spoiler, it happens immediately — I always knew that she was Queer. …In writing her, it just sort of happened naturally. In the first book, there is queercoding that is a little more subtle, but in the second, there are full-on crushes and girlfriends and all of that, so I’m very excited to get to that. …It’s going to be great,” they gushed.

They are already excited about the second Witchlings novel, which is slated to come out on May 2, 2023. Fans of Ortega do not have to wait until the new year to get their hands on more of her work, however. On October 18, Ortega’s first graphic novel, Frizzy, hit the shelves.

“[Frizzy] is about a young DominicanAmerican girl named Marlene, who is tired of getting her hair straightened at the salon every weekend and goes on a journey to wear her hair naturally, and it doesn’t go according to plan,” they said.

Fans of Ortega’s can expect to see more LGBTQ+ and Dominican-American representation in their future work as well. “I just so happen to be Dominican-American, and those are the stories that I love to write and feel most comfortable writing,” they said.

Calribel A. Ortega – Photo courtesy of the author

As promised, the next Witchlings novel is also shaping out to be much Queerer. “The Golden Frog Games is the next book in the Witchlings series. It is all about a magical competition in Ravenskill where Thorn LaRue is the first spare champion competing in the fashion trials. …Then her competitors start getting turned into stone by a serial hexer, and the witchlings need to figure out who it is, because Thorn might be next!”

Ortega is busy with many more projects in the pipeline as well. They are not able to disclose much about their other future works but assure readers everything to come is

very Gay. As they become more and more comfortable in the public eye, Ortega can put more of themself into their work.

“It’s only going to be more intense. I think there’s sort of fear at first, I think similar to when I first started writing. All of my characters just happened to be white, because that’s what I was used to reading. It wasn’t until I started to read more fiction by people of color that I felt like I had permission to do that. It’s always scary, because you open yourself up to another world, a wonderful world of readers, but also of things that are not so great.

But the young adult novel I am working on is a sapphic murder mystery fantasy, so I am very pumped about that one.”

Heavier plotlines

The more of themself they put into their work, the more readers take away from it, Ortega notices. They hope readers can find the messages they are looking for. “I just hope they take away whatever they need to take away from it. I think every reader is different,” they said.

Ortega warns that the plotlines of their first novel in the new series can get a little

deep but believes they are necessary, especially for younger readers who may find themselves in a similar situation: “There are some storylines that are a little bit heavier in the book. If any kid is going through any sort of abuse at home or knows someone who is going through that, Witchlings is a good tool for them to deal with that. It’s something that happens in the book.

“I just really hope they can enjoy it and that they can escape for a little while and that they fall in love with the characters the way that I did.”

Aside from some of the heavier plots, Ortega says Witchlings is also a fun escape from reality. “It gives much-needed happiness in this world where we have a lot of bad news. …There’s a lot that goes on in the book, but at its core, it is a cozy fantasy, and I think that it gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling when you read it… That’s my biggest hope.”

Witchlings is just the right book for fans of Halloween fantasy who may not want to dive into the clutches of the horror genre. As Ortega admitted, “I love watching, I would say, semi-scary movies. I am a chicken and I can’t handle anything too scary. Anything that lives in the Hocus Pocus or Halloweentown realm, I love it. I just love that feeling of safe scary movies, where you know nothing is going to happen, but you still feel a little bit creeped out. Those are probably my faves.”

For any readers fascinated by the fantastical worlds of The Owl House and Harry Potter, Witchlings is the perfect cozy series to start this Halloween.

Three spooktacular reads to haunt all ages

by Terri Schlichenmeyer

Special to the SGN

© 2022 (various publishers) $16.95–$29.99

various page counts

The leaves are crunchy beneath your feet. There’s a chill in the air, too, and darkness creeps into the day earlier and earlier. It’s the perfect time to get terrified, isn’t it? These three books will do it to you...

Let’s start with something for everybody over the age of 8 in your haunted house: Tales to Keep You Up at Night by Dan Poblocki (Penguin Workshop, $17.99). In it, young Amelia’s grandma has disappeared, and it’s natural that Amelia would look for her, right? But grandma’s not in the attic. What is there is a book, one that sure looks like a library book — but the library says it’s not. Nope, it’s a book of stories, and as Amelia begins to read them, they start to look a lot like real life, making her wonder exactly what’s merely story and what’s not.

This book is written in chapters that are the perfect length for reading aloud every evening. Start a tradition: turn off the lights, bring a spooky candle, but do it well before bedtime.

Are all ghosts made alike? No, as you’ll see in A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts by Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes (Citadel Press, $16.95). The ghosts among us are as different as the stories of their lives before death, say the authors, and their haunting methods are equally unique.

This book traces the history of female ghosts, famous, not famous, and infamous. You’ll read about the ghost of Mary Surrat, who was implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Learn about the woman who haunted Joan Rivers’ apartment. Read about ghosts who haunt cemeteries, ghostly groups, and female specters who will never let anyone forget how they died.

Bonus: there’s hidden history in these stories, making them even more interesting.

And finally, if a good session with bad monsters is more to your liking, then find Screams From the Dark: 20 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow (Nightfire, $29.99). Sure, you’ve read plenty of tales about vampires, werewolves, demons, and yeah, they might

make an appearance or two in this book.

But what about the other things that make you jump and yelp? What about monsters that don’t look one bit like your stereotypical ones? Yikes.

This is the kind of book that you don’t have to read from cover to cover. You can

pick and choose your chills, ignore some and read others twice, laugh at this one, lay wide awake all night after reading that one. For the most part, though, this anthology of stories by various authors will scare the socks off you, and make you want to sleep with a teddy bear close and a light on.

Still not scared enough? Well, then, you need to haunt your favorite library or bookstore. The people there are experts on scary stuff, monsters, ghosts, and things that make you scream. Ask for their help in finding the best boo-k, and don’t leaf without it.

Image courtesy of Scholastic Press Image courtesy of Scholastic Press Image courtesy of First Second

Photo by Terri Schlichenmeyer

News

Is Liz Cheney the last of the mavericks?

A look at the Republican politician’s rise, fall, and future

by Lindsey Anderson SGN Staff Writer

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for political scientists and politicians, who avidly watch the polls and political trends with more earnest anticipation than a child on Christmas Eve. It’s midterm election season!

Conservatives and liberals are dipping their toes in, teasing 2024 presidential runs and endorsing candidates vying for a spot in the room where it happens. It’s an exciting time, when anything can happen.

And while all eyes tend to be on big players like Herschel Walker and Kim Schrier, one name Americans shouldn’t forget is Liz Cheney.

Who is Liz Cheney?

As much as voters try to cast Cheney into irrelevance, the soon-to-be former congresswoman seems to claw her way back into the headlines.

First elected in 2016, Cheney has served as Wyoming’s lone representative to the House for the last six years. Thought to be one of the last “mavericks” of the Republican Party, she originally ran on economic issues ,such as cutting taxes and regulations, creating jobs, and expanding industries like coal.

Cheney made a name for herself in DC. Daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, she has amassed an impressive résumé of her own, including deputy assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, former Fox News correspondent, and chair of the House Republican Conference from 2019 to 2021.

By all measures, Cheney was a wellrespected conservative with a promising career — until she poked the beast.

On January 13, 2021, just months after casting her ballot for Donald Trump, Cheney voted to impeach the sitting president of the United States, one of only ten Republican representatives who voted in favor. Her vote came after the infamous January 6 insurrection, which Cheney believes Trump incited.

Following this vote, Cheney also voted in support of the select committee to investigate the insurrection, stating, “I will do everything I can to make sure the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

The fall of Cheney

Cheney’s brand of conservatism aligns her closely with many of her famous supporters, including former president Bush. Her willingness to step away from party lines on occasion, remain poised, and rise above name-calling insults are reminiscent of the days when the American people were less divided. Cheney’s political poise tends to fall closer in line with former senator John McCain, who on the campaign trail defended his rival, President Obama, as a “good person” when far-right conservatives attempted to sully his name.

Cheney’s downfall depicts a trend political scientists have been noting in the Republican Party for years: a shift away from moderation and a broader focus on extremist, populist ideals.

Following her public opposition to former President Trump, Cheney’s career began to tank. The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Wyoming voted to censure her and removed her from her seat as chairwoman of the Republican Conference in 2021.

In August of this year, Cheney’s seat in the House was up for re-election. Despite receiving endorsements from former President George W. Bush and US Sen. Mitt Romney, and raising more than $15 million in political donations, Cheney lost her

seat in the primary to challenger Anthony Bouchard.

In spite of Cheney’s political success, legacy last name, and emphasis on economic growth, Bouchard ran his campaign on a promise of loyalty to Donald Trump. He accused Cheney of being “out of touch” with Wyoming voters due to her impeachment vote.

“Wyoming was President Trump’s best state both times he ran,” Bouchard said. “That’s because Wyoming voters are strong conservatives who want our leaders to stand up for America, defend our freedoms, fight for our way of life, and always put working people first, as President Trump did.” Bouchard received endorsements from many influential conservative leaders, including Trump.

The new Republican Party

While speculation on what exactly caused Donald Trump’s 2016 election win — a mass dislike of Hilary Clinton, dissatisfaction with the Obama years, or Harambe — will continue into the ages, his victory paved way for the rise of a new breed of Republicans. The age of decorum was quickly fading away, and an actively and unapologetically racist, sexist, and homophobic man in the White House opened the doors for the far right to take charge.

With radical conservatives like Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz now redefining what it means to be a Republican, and overt white supremacists on the ascendant on the far right, “moderates” like Cheney are struggling to find a place for themselves in the party. While there are still true moderate Republicans who do not share the same harsh views as those at the helm of the party, they have become the nearly silent minority.

Now, all eyes are on Liz Cheney, wondering if she can resurrect her career by moving farther right, or if she’s going down in a blaze of glory.

Speaking out

As far as anyone can tell right now, she appears to be doing the latter. Doubling

down on her beliefs that the 2020 election was fair, Cheney is now speaking out against election deniers seeking office in the midterms. Speaking to a group of conservative students at Arizona State University on October 5, she said the state’s Republican candidates for governor and secretary of state threaten America’s democracy.

“In Arizona today, you have a candidate for governor in Kari Lake, you have a candidate for secretary of state in Mark Finchem, both of whom have said — this isn’t a surprise, it’s not a secret — they both said that they will only honor the results of an election if they agree with it,” she said. “They’ve looked at all of that, the law, the facts, and the rulings, the courts, and they’ve said it doesn’t matter to them.

“If you care about democracy, and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand — we all have to understand — that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections.”

Cheney’s making enemies with conservatives left and right. After calling out election deniers, she went on to slam Fox News, for its coverage of the war in Ukraine, and Republicans who have supported Putin. “You can’t look at something like what’s happening today with Russia and Ukraine, and say America is neutral in that,” she said. “That’s a frontline in the war of freedom, and America must support Ukraine.

“You see news outlets like Fox News, running propaganda. You’ve watched it not just on Tucker Carlson’s show, although he is the biggest propagandist for Putin on that network. You have to ask yourself, whose side is Fox on in this battle? How could it be that you have a wing of the Republican Party that thinks that America would be standing with Putin as he conducts that brutal invasion of Ukraine?”

Anti-Trump social club

She is also continuing to speak out against Trump, making it her mission to stop him from gaining the Republican nomination in 2024. Following her primary loss in August, Cheney told the Today Show, “I will

be doing whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.”

For months, she has been hinting at a 2024 bid, not necessarily with eyes on the White House, but with the sole intent of stopping Donald Trump.

“The first thing that we have to understand is that we’ve never been where we are. We’ve never been in a phase, a place where we’re facing this kind of a threat. And that’s because we’re facing a threat from a former president who is attempting to unravel the republic,” she said in Arizona.

While neither Cheney nor Trump has yet to formally announce their candidacy for 2024, the soon-to-be former congresswoman is sitting on a promising stockpile of donations left over from her last election. Using rhetoric to align herself with Lincoln, whom Cheney noted in her concession speech also lost notable congressional elections, Cheney has labeled this stockpile “The Great Task.” She has vowed to invest the remaining money in “The Great Task” to fund campaigns against election deniers this November.

Cheney 2024?

It may be early for 2024 poll numbers, but a theoretical Cheney bid does not look great for either party. First, Cheney’s name does not register on most major polls, which see the big names in 2024 shaping up to be Trump, Biden, Harris, and DeSantis.

However, if Cheney does somehow manage to gain enough momentum to run outside of the Republican primary, political scientists predict that she will cause more damage to the Democrats than the Republicans.

Some Democrats have been disappointed in the primary winner for the last two elections. Democratic moderates pull more voters than those on the far left, like Bernie Sanders, who evoke hope in young and passionate people who are otherwise apathetic when it comes to showing up on election day. The main sway Joe Biden held in 2020 was the fact that he was not Donald Trump. Some worry that Cheney’s name on the ballot could split the “not Trump” votes between her and the Democratic nominee, especially if it happens to be a moderate again.

While many voters will be looking for someone other than Biden to vote for, Cheney is not the progressive candidate her recent anti-Trump advocacy may have some believing. Despite running on economic issues and leaving most of the hot-button social issues, like LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, out of her rhetoric, Cheney — a 57-year-old mother of five and a baby boomer — still holds a strong record of voting against progress when it comes to social issues. Most recently, she voted against the assault weapons ban, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and the Equality Act.

In her time as Wyoming representative, Cheney has voted for legislation that has incarcerated undocumented immigrants and held them in detention centers at the border, stripped what little gun control America has, and cut funding to Planned Parenthood. She may be a maverick, but a vote for her is still a vote against progress for the LGBTQ+ community.

Related: Vote with Pride events

“It is critical that our community vote for representatives that will serve the needs of the LGBTQIA+ community, because we are so vastly underrepresented in all levels of government,” said Krystal Marx, executive director of Seattle Pride.

For members of the LGBTQ+ community looking for advice on who to vote for in the midterms elections, or hoping to get more involved with national politics, Seattle Pride will be hosting a free Vote with Pride ballot party on October 26 at the Capitol Hill Library, on October 30 at the Burien Library, and on November 2 at the Northgate Library.

U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney – Photo by David Stubbs / Reuters

Combat breaks out at Oregon drag queen story hour

Proud Boys and neo-Nazis assault event, supporters fight back

by Mike Andrew SGN Staff Writer

Combat broke out at a Eugene, Oregon, pub when a gang of Proud Boys and neo-Nazis tried to disrupt a drag queen story hour. Witnesses said that attendees fought back when the right-wing groups tried to storm the pub, after throwing rocks and smoke bombs at people waiting to attend the event.

The story hour was scheduled for Old Nick’s Pub, and was to feature 11-year-old Vanellope MacPherson DuPont, a favorite with children who attend the story hours.

Right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo charged Old Nick’s with “sexualizing children” and posted photos of Vanellope along with the day, time, and place of the event on his Twitter account.

According to Eugene’s Register-Guard, crowds started to gather at Old Nick’s around 10:00 a.m. on the day of the event,

October 23. Several hundred LGBTQ community members and allies gathered in front of the pub, while dozens of opponents gathered across the street.

Many of the opposing crowd were identified by locals as Proud Boys and members of a Portland neo-Nazi group, the Rose City Nationalists. Some displayed assault rifles, witnesses said.

Eugene police were also on the scene.

“Because opposing groups were communicating plans to attend, possibly armed, Eugene Police created security plans to allow for a safe environment for everyone in the community to exercise their constitutional rights and freedoms, to protect the lives and property of all involved, and prevent safety disruption to uninvolved community members,” the police said in a statement.

According to The Torch, a Lane Community College newspaper, the violence started when the right-wingers tried to enter the pub

through a side door and were pushed back by community members. This precipitated an all-out assault on the pub. Police later intervened to separate the two sides.

The story hour went on without interruption.

“We had a wonderful safe day,” the Old Nick’s posted on its Facebook page. “Thank you to every one of you in our community who stood with us. Please be gentle with our staff this week. Almost all of us are queer and it was not easy for any of us. But we did it. Love wins.”

The post received nearly 700 positive reactions.

Meanwhile, a similar event in Orlando, Florida, was canceled to avoid threats of violence. The LGBT+ Center Orlando announced it would cancel the event, scheduled for October 29, out of caution.

“Due to several threats from hate groups aimed at The Center and to those partici-

National news highlights

by Daniel Lindsley SGN Staff Writer

Beloved actor Leslie Jordan dies in crash

Actor, comedian, and musician Leslie Jordan has passed away after a car crash in Hollywood on the morning of Monday, October 22.

Jordan was best known for his roles in Will & Grace and American Horror Story, the former of which won him an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.

Officer Leizeth Lomeli of the Los Angeles Police Department told the Los Angeles Times that Jordan was driving a BMW when he crashed into a building at Cahuenga Boulevard and Romaine Street. Fans have since gathered at the site of the crash to mourn him.

Jordan made his Gayness and his short stature (4’11”) a feature of all his characters, which has — along with his charming pandemic Instagram videos — made him a Gay icon in the eyes of many.

pating in Drag Queen Story Hour, we have decided to cancel the event for this Saturday’s Halloween Edition scheduled for 2PM,” the Center said in a Facebook post.

The event, which had been supported with a grant from the City of Orlando, was to feature Bridgette Galore. According to the Orlando Sentinel, 75 tickets had already been sold to children and their parents.

Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, an Orlando Democrat and one of three openly Gay lawmakers in the Florida Legislature, said it’s a shame hate can shut down a community event.

“I’m sad and angry that threats like these continue to happen against the LGBTQ community,” he said. “Neo-Nazis organizing in Florida against Drag Queen Story Time? This is really dangerous and scary.”

A representative for Jordan posted on his Instagram: “The love and light that Leslie shared will never go out, and we invite you to share your memories and comfort each other during this time.

In the coming days we will be giving a glimpse of a project Leslie was really proud of and was looking forward to sharing with the world.”

Elections Gayer than ever this year

A record number of LGBTQ candidates are running for office right now, and some big wins are likely, according to data compiled by the LGBTQ Victory Fund. Of the l,065 candidates, 678 won their primaries, an 18% increase since 2020.

Democrat Maura Healy is poised to become Massachusetts’ first openly Gay governor, and in Vermont, Democrat Becca Balint is favored to win the state’s only seat in the House of Reprentatives, also a Gay first.

But these likely wins arrive in the face of broad efforts by Republicans to pass anti-LGBTQ laws and policies, especially against Trans people.

Annise Parker, president and CEO of the Victory Fund, said, “This November, we have an opportunity to elect more LGBTQ people to office than ever before. Sitting on the sidelines isn’t an option when our rights are on the chopping block.”

Leslie Jordan – Photo by Evan Agostini / Invision / AP

Photo by Chris Pietsch / The Register-Guard via AP

International news highlights

by Daniel Lindsley SGN Staff Writer

Policy peril possible in new Italian government

Italy, and the world, has its eyes on Giorgia Meloni to see what kind of conservatism she favors. She has become Italy’s first female premier, and is forming a new government from not only her far-right Brothers of Italy Party but also the right-wing populist League and the center-right Forza Italia.

More specifically, Italians are keeping an eye on key issues. The country is facing an energy crisis. The cost of power has risen more than tenfold since 2019, and in response, Meloni has advocated for a European price cap on Russian gas.

In addition, the European Union has joined Queer Italians in anticipating whether Meloni’s government will join the likes of Hungary in Poland in violating EU human rights and democratic standards, especially as they apply to the Queer community. Meloni has hinted at limiting the EU’s influence in the past, though she chose a pro-EU candidate as her foreign minister last Friday.

Overall, women and minority groups fear for their rights, since Meloni has criticized the “LGBT lobby,” and her party platform is explicitly against abortion, Gay marriage, Gay adoptions, and surrogate motherhood.

Russia expands

Queer “propaganda” ban

Russian lawmakers voted on Thursday, October 27 to expand an existing ban on the promotion of what they consider “LGBT propaganda.” The ban, which previously only extended to children, has been extended to people of all ages in an attempt to oppress sexual minorities. Under the new legislation, offending citizens may be fined up to 400,000 rubles (roughly $6,500), while offending legal entities such as corporations could be fined up to 5 million rubles. Non-Russian individuals found guilty of promoting LGBTQ lifestyles and/or allyship would face deportation from the country.

Russian authorities previously used the existing ban to detain LGBTQ+ activists and to stop public pride parades. Supporters of the ban argue that they are defending morality against “un-Russian” liberal values promoted by Americans and the West.

CUBA

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The Cuban Communist Party campaigned vigorously for the measure, as did Cuba’s leading LGBTQ rights advocate, Mariela Castro, daughter of retired Cuban president Raúl Castro and niece of Fidel, the founding father of the Cuban revolution.

It was opposed by Christian evangelical groups, traditionalist Catholics, and also some people in the LGBTQ community who felt that their rights should not be up for a public vote.

“Many people in the community were against voting ‘yes’ because they don’t believe that they need some paper to tell them they have this on paper [to be recognized as a couple]. I think we do need the right, that it protects us,” Liusba Grajales, one of the first to be married under the new code, told the Associated Press.

For Grajales, though, the day was an occasion of joy.

“It’s a big day,” she said. “Love is love, just the way it is. Without imposition, without prejudice … I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry. It’s a mix of so many strong emotions.”

Although the Family Code received 70% approval in Havana and 66% in the suburb where Grajales lives, in the country’s more rural southeast, it only won 53% of the votes.

According to Francisco “Paquito” Rodriguez, a blogger and one of the first Cuban LGBTQ activists, the relatively low approval rate in some parts of the country “indicates that we have to keep working in those areas and deepen and direct educational work.”

“In 2007, we celebrated for the first time the International Day for the Fight Against Homophobia and Transphobia in Cuba. It took 15 years of fighting to make it law,” Rodriguez said. “It seems like a long time in the life of an individual, but it’s an achievement in the course of our history.”

Marriage equality was first proposed by the Cuban government during the 2019

revision of the nation’s constitution, but opposition from traditionalist groups made the government withdraw the article relating to same-sex marriage. The strategy then turned to the new Family Code, which was written to allow free choice of spouses for all people.

In addition to allowing same-sex marriage, the new law does the following:

• regulates surrogacy, and forbids surrogacy for profit

• defines the rights of grandparents and stepparents in cases of divorce

• defines who gets custody of minors when it’s necessary for the child’s welfare

• allows for separate property regimens for married couples,

• authorizes parents to choose the order of their children’s surnames

• extends protections for the disabled and elderly

Liusba Grajales (l) puts makeup on her daughter Ainhoa as her partner Lisset Diaz Vallejo gets ready as they prepare to get married in Santa Clara, Cuba, Friday, Oct. 21, 2022. – Photo by Ismael Francisco / AP

Newly-weds Lisset Diaz Vallejo (r) and Liusba Grajales hug after getting married at the notary office in Santa Clara, Cuba, Friday, Oct. 21, 2022. – Photo by Ismael Francisco / AP

Giorgia Meloni flanked by coalition leaders – Photo by Robert Monaldo / LaPresse via AP