Daily Archives: April 17, 2017

APRIL 17, 2017

WE FIND ABSURD, and deserving of total disdain, the religious, racist, and nationalist prejudices that make up the tyranny of certain individuals who, drunk on their own temporary omniscience, seek to subjugate the destiny of the work of art. So wrote 37 Egypt-based artists and writers in their 1938 manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, expressing solidarity with their counterparts in Europe suffering under fascism. This was the beginning of the Art and Liberty Group, an avant-garde movement also known as Egypts Surrealists.

Modern art in Egypt was always a pale copy and a delayed copy, says the contemporary Egyptian painter Adel El Siwi, but for the first time in our history, we have this very rare moment where what was going on in Paris was in parallel to other things going on in Cairo. The Art and Liberty Group forged connections with Surrealists and Trotskyists abroad while shaping their own identity. Working in tandem with their European peers, they also grappled with the circumstances of an increasingly militarized Egyptian capital, where trends in art and publishing remained conservative. They responded to the fault lines of interwar Cairo and were of a piece with them.

By the time of the 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt, which led to the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the rise of a new Egyptian nationalism and later pan-Arabism, the members of the Art and Liberty Group had been dispersed: many were exiled or imprisoned. All that is left of their experimental exhibitions in wartime Cairo are catalogs and reviews. A couple of their canvases hang in the permanent collection of the state-run Egyptian Museum of Modern Art and others in private collections, but the full extent of their legacy, which extends beyond drawing and painting into political criticism and radical publishing, has until recently been largely overlooked.

Two efforts to curate this revolutionary art movement from the archive have sparked debates about the Art and Liberty Group and Surrealism in the Middle East. In October, the Centre Pompidou launched the exhibit Art et Libert: Rupture, War, and Surrealism in Egypt (1938-1948), with support from Qatar, which will tour Europe throughout 2017 and 2018. It is now showing at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa in Madrid. A few weeks earlier, in September, the Sharjah Art Foundation and Egyptian Ministry of Culture opened a sprawling show in Cairo, When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938-1965). This was associated with Cornell Universitys three-day academic conference on Egyptian Surrealism, convened at the American University in Cairo in November 2015.

Art et Libert portrays a discordant group that both broke with the establishment and also contained a multitude of perspectives, eventually leading some younger members to break away and form the more folkloric Contemporary Art Group and others the more militantly political Bread and Freedom. By contrast, When Art Becomes Liberty imposes a sense of continuity within the group and suggests that its impact can be felt in the work of many successors. The substance of Art and Liberty Groups revolt their Marxist critique of Egyptian tyranny, their antifascist bent is concealed. Instead, Sharjahs curators emphasize how Surrealist motifs persist in the folk nationalism and social realism of midcentury Egyptian artists. The fact that the show was co-hosted by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture might explain this narrative of continuity, which obscures the groups radicalism.

To grasp the Art and Liberty Groups rallying cry against anything that impedes expression, one need only look at the catalog of their Second Independent Art Exhibition in Cairo, from March 1941. The painter works on ruptures, it reads. In fact, he obeys the summons to play a double game of the most radical nature: he crushes what he sees, undoes what he generates, exorcizes what he invokes. All edifices are continually dissolved in order to reveal something new, and this spirit of experimentation was alive in the Art and Liberty Groups late-night gatherings held in the depths of the old Islamic city. After some sessions, they would set their own works aflame. Their public exhibitions involved games and performance. Unfortunately, in the contemporary exhibition spaces of Paris and Cairo, the paintings of this revolutionary movement were frozen in time, divorced from current politics and contemporary art practice, and put on display by wealthy benefactors. The tension between the desire to present the Surrealist movement to an international audience and the concomitant instinct to commodify the movement undermined the power of both exhibitions.

In the 1930s and 40s, the Art and Liberty Group agitated the hierarchies of fine art and sought to extricate it from nationalism, moving it out of the stodgy halls of officialdom. In five annual shows, the group introduced Egyptians to works that defied the bon ton of the academy. Some played with photography, others with installations, sparking curiosity among local audiences and involving Egyptian artists in international debates about modern art. And yet, today, this cast of cosmopolitan characters remains largely unknown outside of erudite circles in the Middle East. New details emerge in an academic study by Sam Bardaouil, co-curator of Art et Libert, entitled Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (I.B. Tauris, 2016).

Each individual could be the protagonist of his or her own study. George Henein, the provocative poet and radical publisher, brought the Art and Liberty Group to international publications and European galleries, corresponding with Andr Breton, among others. Painter and patron Amy Nimr connected the group with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and prominent British Surrealists. Ramses Younan, the painter and theorist who translated Rimbauds A Season in Hellinto Arabic, reworked Pharaonic mythology in his canvases. There are also the Brothers Kamel: Anwar, the Marxist journalist who put out several publications that were quickly banned by Egyptian authorities, and Fouad, the painter and poet. Kamel Telmissany, the painter of grotesques, taught a young woman named Inji Aflatoun, who went on to become one of Egypts best-known painters and spent the 1950s in prison for her communist views. Aflatoun and friends worked closely with the novelist Albert Cossery, who left Egypt in 1945 but continued to write fiction about his homeland from his home at the divey lHtel La Louisiane in Saint-Germain until his death in 2008. Bardaouil has also dug up little-known collaborators like Mayo, a Greek-Egyptian painter who was trained in Paris. Just as many of the names associated with the group remain mysterious, having seemingly vanished from history.

The show Art et Libert concentrates on the turbulent decade of 1938 to 1948. Curators Bardaouil and Till Fellraths selection emphasizes that the movement cannot be subsumed by the master narrative of Western Surrealism. The rooms introduce the group in reference to various themes, including a focus on the body, war, and women, as well as genres like photography, poetry, and literature. In nine rooms, about 130 paintings, drawings, and photographs gathered from the curators extensive fieldwork and never before seen together are accompanied by scores of original documents, snapshots, and periodicals, as well as engaging texts and quotes from the artists. Political cartoons and video reels capture the interwar zeitgeist; this is, after all, not only the story of a long-lost vanguard, but also of the North African front of World War II, the twilight of Egypts monarchy, and the fading days of francophone Egypt.

The curators present the movement and the period through the lens of rupture. Aesthetically, the Art and Liberty Group split with the traditional European-style portraits and landscapes replicated in early 20th-century Egyptian art by drawing crude bodies, dream sequences, and abstractions. These aesthetic choices resonate with the political ruptures of the time, especially conflict between British colonial soldiers and German fighters throughout World War II. There were also ruptures among colleagues. In 1948, the groups founder, Henein, broke with his longtime associate Breton. That same year, a group of young artists broke off to form the Contemporary Art Group, seeking to inform their work with an Egyptian national character.

The exhibition and the monograph Surrealism in Egypt emphasize the movements intrinsic value separate from the legacy of French or British Surrealism, while showing its active participation and communication with leading Western theorists and artists. In spite of the curators underlying claim that the Art and Liberty Group represents a rupture from French Surrealism, a Pompidou press release pegs the exhibition to the 50th anniversary of Bretons death.

Art et Libert, perhaps the first group show of an Egyptian modern art movement held at an international museum, will only tour European cities. Where would you show it in Cairo? says Fellrath, the co-curator. No exhibition space in the Egyptian capital could accommodate the paintings and archival documents, he maintained, adding that few lenders would feel confident that their prized pieces would be able to enter and exit the country freely; six years after the revolution, the political conditions in Egypt are too volatile. So the closest Bardaouil and Fellraths contributions will come to reaching Egypts art community will be through the translation of their exhibition catalog into Arabic.

In Art et Libert, Bardaouil and Fellrath never connect the free art of the war period to the current bout of authoritarianism in Egypt, where a military strongman has muffled expression and choked politics since 2014. Yet the works they have painstakingly uncovered from private collections speak for themselves. In particular, a large 1937 painting by Mayo leaves little question as to the relevance of the Art and Liberty Groups work to todays Egyptian audience. From afar, the canvas Coups de Btons is a playful geometric composition. Upon closer inspection, it is a street cafe scene, with blue skies and latticed white fences overflowing with foliage. But the viewer can scarcely distinguish between each abstract, squiggly human on the cafe terrace. White characters wield batons at the denizens. One man is choking, his red tongue hanging out of his mouth. Another has fallen face down; chairs are strewn about, a cigarette pack lies on the floor. Do the batons belong to the police? Or to hired thugs? Its a scene that is all too familiar for Cairenes of the 21st century, who know to avoid street cafes on the anniversary of the January 25 uprising for fear of violence from the police or from thugs operating with impunity.

Of Art et Liberts thematically curated rooms, Women of the City left the most questions unanswered. The room was framed around the active role women played in the group, and aimed to show the artists critique of prostitution in wartime Cairo. A video of archival photographs and footage played to the St. Louis Blues, which included a newspaper photograph of belly dancers in gas masks, emblematic of the contradictions of wartime pleasures and objectification.

Yet the room featured works by mostly male artists, including Ramses Younans woman fractured in three ways and Fouad Kamels and Kamel El Telmissanys grotesque nudes, in which faces of dogs and wolves pop out of the womens chests. The most famous piece, La Femme aux boucles dor, was the portrait of a prostitute with golden locks, peering out of the canvas with a sultry stare. It is by the pioneer of Egyptian modern painting, Mahmoud Said, a former judge and Alexandrian aristocrat; he was not a member of Art and Liberty, but his portrayal of unconstrained libido exerted a huge influence on their work, and this painting appeared in the groups first exhibition. Gazing into the eyes of Mahmoud Saids iconic prostitute, one longs for commentary on how these paintings contributed to a counter-narrative of empowerment rather than engage in run-of-the-mill objectification.

And what about the women of the movement? The catalog indicates that women were patrons and participants in the Art and Liberty Group, but painters Inji Aflatoun and Amy Nimr, and photographers Ida Car and Lee Miller were sidelined. Even the obvious question of why the so-called Surrealists were primarily male was not broached.

In Egypt today, the art establishment against which the Art and Liberty Group rebelled is still ascendant, though its form has evolved. The Egyptian Ministry of Culture, a massive bureaucracy with tens of thousands of employees and dozens of museums and cultural palaces, remains a major benefactor of local artists. But in the past decade, ultra-wealthy institutions from the Persian Gulf have come to dominate the world of Middle East art. Writing of these tensions last year, the Egyptian critic Ahmed Naji described how the Ministrys newfound interest in Egyptian Surrealism is a response to outside forces. Since its inception, the ministry marginalized and rejected what have come to be known as the Egyptian Surrealists, Naji wrote. The resurgent interest in Surrealism results from a cutthroat race underway between the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Sharjah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. The two are competing to present the heritage of the Egyptian Surrealist movement to the world.

Sharjah launched their exhibition first, but the results were decidedly mixed. On the opening night of When Art Becomes Liberty: TheEgyptianSurrealists (1938-1965), the Egyptian Minister of Culture and his entourage walked through the airy atrium alongside the sheikha of Sharjah as scores of journalists snapped photos of VIPs standing in front of 150 works, mostly paintings, in the two-floor labyrinthine cultural palace on the Cairo Opera House grounds.

Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, president and directorof the Sharjah Art Foundation, had worked closely with the Ministry to extract a slew of paintings from the ministrys neglected depositories and ill-maintained museums. Many of these paintings are foundational works of Arab modern art, yet they rarely see the light of day. The ministrys storage places are afflicted by humidity, conditions that are heartbreaking, says Al Qasimi. They dont like works to come out of their storage. Its like high security when it comes to the art world. But I kept saying that it was important for people to see these works.

Some of the paintings by Younan, Kamel, Rettib Seddik, and Abdul-Hadi Al-Gazzar were perhaps stronger than the ones on display in Europe. But without a catalog or accompanying book to add context or history to the show, visitors to the gallery were essentially left adrift on the Nile. The vitrines of the movements vast publications featured Photostats, not the originals. No artists were profiled.

The first room contained rare and significant paintings and drawings, some of which appeared in the groups radical publications, but with limited descriptions. The wall text explained the exhibitions goal:

Documenting their relationship with western counterparts, especially the French Surrealists, and their contribution to internationalism, anti-fascist global protest, and decolonization in the 20th century, this exhibition provides a glimpse of the complex and nuanced story of artistic and literary modernisms as they are staged and performed outside of the West.

But When Art Becomes Liberty contained neither a discussion of French Surrealism nor of other modernisms. This was peculiar, given that Sharjah, Cornell, and the American University in Cairo had convened a three-day conference to launch this inquiry into Egyptian Surrealism in November 2015. It seems the questions raised by the international scholars simply havent been considered by the curators, who basically threw the works up on the zigzagging walls.

The very nature of Surrealist imagery, however defined, was left un-discussed, although most observers would note that the paintings actually demonstrated a variety of influences social realism, folk art, and abstraction, to name a few. A section called The Afterlife of Surrealism featured pieces from the 1970s and 80s, which displayed Surrealist techniques more in line with the European avant-garde than with the early Egyptian artists, who had developed their own visual language.

The tacit argument put forth by the Sharjah exhibition was continuity from decade to decade, from the core group to later spinoffs, and across generations. Absent were the ruptures of 1948, when Art and Libertys founders went their separate ways, with some jailed and others expatriated. By obscuring this dramatic demise with the distasteful euphemism a short-lived experiment, the exhibition masked the groups and the nations dynamics and politics.

The hastiness of the staging was also evident on opening night, when a label from Ibrahim Massoudas The Sacrifice, an undated painting of Jesus at the cross, fell to the ground. Weeks later, when we visited the exhibition again, a young Egyptian university student stood puzzled in front of the painting, and asked if we knew anything about Massouda. Although a half dozen of his works were on display and one of them was even on the shows posters and flyers, there was no text on the artist anywhere in sight.

When Art Becomes Liberty is due to open in the Emirates later this year, hopefully with a more fully developed curatorial vision worthy of the revolutionary paintings.

These two exhibitions signal the entrance of Egyptian modern art into the international canon. This in itself is laudable. According to Adel El Siwi, in the 1980s, an exhibition in Milan on global Surrealisms neglected to even mention Egyptian artists or writers. Of course, the current turn toward Egyptian Surrealism on the international scene is inextricably linked to market forces. When it comes to Egyptian Surrealisms new benefactors, the main players are the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Qatari royals. The latter are also behind Dohas Mathaf Arab Museum of Arab Art, and own a vast private collection. They are buying all of Egypts history, the contemporary Egyptian artist Mohamed Abla says of the Gulfs deep pockets.

The sanitized representation of the Art and Liberty Group is a case study in how a radical movement can be reappropriated by and for the establishment. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates share an authoritarian politics anathematic to free artistic production: both countries are ruled by undemocratic dynasties that limit expression, jail dissidents, and forbid many forms of political activity. Even drawing a caricature of a ruler can land you in prison. That so few of the reviews of both Egyptian Surrealism exhibitions have acknowledged that the Gulf drives the Arab art world is a testament to capitals power to suppress discussion of contentious political dynamics which are nonetheless apparent to the naked eye.

The long-neglected artists of Art and Liberty, some of whom held radical views that would be forbidden in the contemporary Persian Gulf, have become collectables in the circles of conservative royals. Younan, Kamel, Telmissany, and Aflatoun, among others, are highly sought after at international auctions, often selling for much higher than the estimated gavel price. Exhibitions in Europe and the Middle East have also raised the price and profile of Arab modern paintings. In this market, dealers and curators are competing to promote specific artists or sell specific art works, says May Telmissany, a literary scholar and the niece of one of Art and Libertys founders. This in my opinion is deplorable because it simply betrays the principles of the Art and Liberty Group, who fought against the bourgeois and capitalist rhetoric and called for total freedom, including freedom from art market impositions.

It is little wonder that Egyptian galleries have sought to profit from the newfound interest in local modern art. For Art et Libert, the private Al Masar Gallery lent about a dozen paintings and drawings by the Contemporary Art Group. Concurrently, Al Masar held a small show in Cairo to sell further works from this period, and from the very artists on display in Europe. Similarly, Safar Khan Gallery, which also lent items for Art et Libert, recently hosted a show of sketches from Inji Aflatoun entitled Freedom After Prison. The buzzword Surrealism now appears in many gallery promotions in Cairo for artists whose works are anything but.

Gulf money is art power, the unacknowledged political force that is defining the way that Arab modernism is being exhibited in the Middle East and conveyed to the world. Perhaps that is why neither exhibition noted the parallels with the current political moment in the Middle East region, where expression has been stifled and artists have been censored.

Some 80 years later, we are again in a period where terror and conflict have come to define Egypt. The Art et Libert show devoted its second room to the theme of art grappling with war and destruction, while When Art Becomes Liberty barely touched on the groups antiwar sentiment. Yet, in the parking lot of the Cultural Palaces grounds, not far from the Sharjah exhibit, were a couple of life-sized cannons being prepared for a theater production. It was a sort of cosmic joke and reminded us of the Art and Liberty Groups raison dtre. In this hour, when the entire world cares for nothing but the voice of cannons, wrote Henein in the leaflet of the First Exhibition of Independent Art, held in Cairo in 1940, we have found it our duty to provide a certain artistic current with the opportunity to express its freedom and its vitality.

Jonathan Guyer is a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs and contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

Surti Singh is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo.

Originally posted here:

The Double Game of Egyptian Surrealism: How to Curate a Revolutionary Movement - lareviewofbooks

Photo via Flickr

Everything was quiet in New York City the day after the 2016 election. The city was stunned into silence. Matthew Breen remembers people crying randomly on the street, comforted by friends and strangers. We were totally blindsided, Breen says. People were trying to look kindly on one another. It was such a raw and fragile moment.

Breen, now the editorial director of LOGO, was in his final weeks at The Advocate, where he worked for nearly six years as the editor in chief. Having publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, Breen says that the LGBTQ publication was totally blindsided, and his last issue as EIC wasnt the one he expected. The December cover of The Advocate depicted an American flag in which two of the stripes have fallen off. Meanwhile, a man and a woman stare out helplessly into the distance, struggling to figure out whats next.

The blunt title sums up the sudden and unexpected fear that gripped the LGBTQ community in those early days: Time to panic, it read.

The election of Donald Trump to the White House has radically transformed the relationship between the press and the Oval Office, a shift felt acutely among LGBTQ media as the industry has taken on a more adversarial role. Prior to the Trump presidency, many in the community wondered whether there would be a need for LGBTQ-specific news outlets in the futurethat queer and transgender people would be so fully integrated into society that outlets like Out, NewNowNext, Washington Blade, The New Civil Rights Movement, and LGBTQ Nation would no longer be necessary.

But as publishers and editors tell CJR, that has never been the case. The past five months have illustrated the vital importance of LGBTQ media in US society, as these publications provided support, information, and comfort to a community forced to adapt to a drastically different political landscape. Theres an even greater responsibility to tell the stories of the marginalized, ones that might otherwise get left behind, in a news cycle dominated by Trump. And readers have responded by visiting LGBTQ media outlets more often and sticking around longer, editors tell CJR.

The past three months have been a call to arms for LGBTQ media, but five decades ago, The Advocatethe nations first monthly LGBTQ magazinewas founded in the wake of bar raids in Los Angeles. The first issue acted as a protest newsletter to help the community fight back. As much as the 2016 election was a wake-up call, it also represented a return to the movements roots.

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The fear of erasure in Trumps America

Merryn Johns knew the election would go badly. Born in Australia, the editor in chief of Curve magazine, a monthly magazine for lesbian and bisexual women in the US, came to the 2016 election as an outsider. While all of her friends went out on the evening of the election expecting to celebrate Americas first female president, she stayed in and began working on an editorial explaining why Trumpwidely expected to lose in a landslidehad won.

Any time I heard Trump speak, I could hear him saying what a certain number of people wanted to have been said, Johns explains. I felt it was going to swing in his favor. He was tapping into a zeitgeist Clinton wasnt.

Johns says that for LGBTQ-focused publications, having Trump in the White House has been a huge reversal from the previous administration.

LGBTQ advocates had been gaining attention and notching wins for the past eight yearsfrom Obama enacting nondiscrimination rights for federal contractors in 2014, to the Supreme Court legalizing marriage equality a year later. Many felt that progress would continue under a Clinton presidency, but feel President Trump has already begun to reverse those gains. On March 27, the POTUS overturned an Obama executive order preventing federal workers from being fired on account of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Many of Trump Cabinet picks, including Secretary of State Jeff Sessions, have noted anti-LGBTQ track records.

What we had under the Obama presidency was that he acknowledged us, Johns says. He mentioned us in his addresses. We were on the website. We were getting legislation pushed through. We were invited to the White House. That is all being rolled back, and its made us feel quite insecure. Its not only a fear of not being seen. Its a fear of being erased.

A changing media landscape

If Johns claims that the very concept of media has changed under the current administration, it has also shifted the role LGBTQ media sees itself playing during a contentious political moment.

Lucas Grindley, editor in chief of The Advocate, says it has been important for LGBTQ publications to reflect what the community is feeling during an emotional time. During the week following the election, Grindley wrote an editorial taking his Republican family members to task for casting their ballot for a politician who campaigned on rolling back same-sex marriage. Ive been betrayed by my own family, Grindley wrote. Odds are, so have you.

People felt like theyd been betrayed and it took awhile for people to be willing to say that.

His op-ed, which was shared more than 20,000 times on Facebook, clearly touched a nerve.

People felt like theyd been betrayed and it took awhile for people to be willing to say that, Grindley tells CJR in an interview. The goal of The Advocate is to make you forward on a story and say, Finally, someones said what Im thinking. I dont feel alone.

Although hard data can be difficult to quantify, LGBTQ publications report that traffic has been up as readers seek out spaces that reflect what theyre feeling about the Trump administration. The Advocate reports a nearly 25-percent increase in unique pageviews for the first quarter of 2017 over the first quarter of 2016, while subscriptions have held steady. (CJR requested subscriber information from other LGBTQ publications, but they declined to provide hard data.)

Given that demand, many LGBTQ publications have shifted greater resources to covering the daily happenings of the Trump administration and telling community members how to take action. In the days after the election, The Advocate started The Resistance, a Friday newsletter listing protests taking place in your area; that newsletter morphed into a video series. NewNowNext created Five Dollars/Five Minutes, a recurring feature that offers quick and easy action steps for readers who want to get involved. Go Magazine, which covers queer and lesbian nightlife, includes demonstrations and political activities in its monthly calendar.

One challenge is striking a balance between taking a hard look at the current reality and offering healthy escapism for readers, says Trish Bendix, editor in chief of GO Magazine.

Its an everyday battle, Bendix says. Theres definitely people out there who arent just interested in going out and dancing, but you dont want to be too depressing and to pump out stories that make us feel things are hopeless. Our community has enough problems with suicide, depression, and self-harm as it is, so there has to be a way to keep it positive while being very clear about what our missions are and what we have to do now.

Our community has enough problems with suicide, depression, and self-harm as it is, so there has to be a way to keep it positive while being very clear about what our missions are and what we have to do now.

Bringing everyones stories to the table

The Advocate has aimed to balance not only levity and advocacy but coverage of topics that arent traditionally viewed as specific to the LGBTQ community. During the 2016 primaries, Grindley sent out a memo to staff to treat Donald Trump as an LGBTQ issue, meaning anything he does is news for Advocate readers. Since that time, the publication has covered the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority nations, and Trumps stated intent to increase the deportation of undocumented workers.

Because the Trump administration is attacking different marginalized communities, its brought all those communities together, Grindley says. Were all combating mutual opposition.

LGBTQ media has been criticized in recent years for marginalizing issues that affect people of color. #GayMediaSoWhite, a hashtag that went viral in 2016, drew attention to the fact that the covers of Out, The Advocate, and Attitude, a British gay publication, regularly feature straight white celebrities to sell magazines. Critics claimed that bottom line is calculated at the expense of non-white people, women, and transgender people yearning for the same platform. A Fusion survey found that between June 2011 and May 2016, 85 percent of the faces on the covers of these three magazines were white.

Les Fabian Brathwaite, a senior editor at Out who is black, admits that LGBTQ publications have done a terrible job of racial inclusion in the pastand stressed that fixing these issues is crucial to addressing the intersectional problems posed by a Trump presidency.

People are well-intentioned, but if you only have a bunch of gay white men talking about diversity, you have to have other people to in the room to address that as well, Braithwaite says. Our responsibility is to bring everyone to the table, tell everyones story, and make sure, as much as possible, that everyone has a chance to tell their own. To speak truth to power, you have to make sure everyones voices are represented in the conversation.

We need LGBTQ media because no one else is going to speak for us.

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Its particularly important for LGBTQ publications to be more inclusive watchdogs because, as Breen argues, many stories impacting vulnerable subsections of the community may get lost in a media cycle dominated by Donald Trump. Trump has swamped the news, and it has crowded out stories about all kinds of populations, marginalized or not, he says.

Three months into the new year, eight transgender women have been murdered as hate crimes against the LGBTQ community increase across the country. Nearly a dozen LGBTQ centers have been vandalized in 2017, and an employee of Casa Ruby, which offers support and services to Washington, DCs trans community, was attacked by two men who targeted the building. These stories have received attention in mainstream press, but they have yet to receive the traction such important subjects deserve. It is not only the responsibility of LGBTQ publications to fill that gap, as Johns argues. Its why these outlets will continue to be irreplaceable.

We need LGBTQ media because no one else is going to speak for us, she says. We are planting a flag in the sand to say: Were here, we exist, and you cant get rid of us.

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Read more from the original source:

'No one else is going to speak for us': LGBTQ media rise in age of Trump - Columbia Journalism Review

50 years after hippies, free love, getting high and flower children entered our cultural lexicon, Indrajit Hazra looks back at the legacy of that short summer in 1967

Well, lets face it. Most of us rewatch Woodstock, the 1970 documentary film, not just to refill our dipping musical quotient, but also to see those acid-tripped out women dancing naked and displaying their ample bottoms. (Please do note how effectively Ive made the collective of us come in handy to cover my own derriere.)

There was a time when all this counterculture free love, peace and joss sticks part-outraged, part-titillated a generation that was as dogmatic about family values and tradition as their instigators were about turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Today, 50 years after American mainstream media first caught the zeitgeist to effectively introduce the world to a (21st century jargon alert) lifestyle choice, the Summer of Love of 1967 in San Francisco and its many descendants come across as cute, silly, and fun(ny), like one of those PG rated films you saw with a thrill as a kid, but which now looks not just tame, but Nat Geo-worthy.

Janis Joplin performs in Golden Gate Park

In the summer of 1969, over 40,000 people gathered over four days at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in upstate New York. With it, the counterculture movement had reached its apogee, that apogee decided by Life magazine and other mainstream media publications. But it was two years earlier that hippies, free love, getting high and flower children firmly entered the American cultural lexicon. It then quickly, via media, spread its grooviness in the country called London, and then to other parts of the world where the term gap year was yet to be invented.

Hippies the term having the same source as todays hipster, which, in turn, came to initially describe liberal-minded young folks moving into New Yorks arty beatnik haven of Greenwich Village or San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury district had existed before The Summer of Love. Inspired by the Beat movement of the 1950s and its protagonists like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the hippies method-acted life in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, with more than just a solitary child-like couple and plenty of great music thrown in.

The Summer of Love, with its numerous bed-ins and events and its emphasis on being part of a collective (that ironically rejected the herd), was the culmination of all that was gathering prior to The Beatles coming out with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Timothy Leary presenting his The Death of the Mind lecture in colleges across the US describing the joys of the LSD experience.

Communal living, rejecting authority, and turning ones back against consumerist society was the credo. The Summer of Love was seen as the natural result of a new generations Winter of Discontent.

In 1960, the Pill, the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill (COCP), did far more to usher the sexual revolution than the ones Jefferson Airplanes White Rabbit mentions makes you larger and makes you small. Poet Philip Larkin was as right as any Baby Boomer who came after him insisting that liberation came with free love and howling at the moon, when he wrote in Annus Mirabilis in June 1967: Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) -/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles first LP.

But it was far easier to capture in pictures the Beautiful People than the Pill, or the words of a poet from Hull.

The anti-consumerist tag was somewhat ironic, considering that the Summer of Love itself was a product to be consumed through fashion, music, the stage, advertising, and the shimmering billboard of sex and drugs and rocknroll or, at least gentle strumming and/or incredibly long jam sessions that could be appreciated only with a generous amount of marijuana intake. And, there had to be long hair, as a counter-uniform.

Hippies dawdle at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, in San Francisco in 1967

In London, the Summer of Love took upon itself to be more openly consumerist, a throwback to the era of the Dandy. And if Austin Powers version of Londons Swinging Sixties is a comic exaggeration of what was really going on in Paradise with its centre at Carnaby Street, it is only a slight exaggeration. Rebellion was no longer confined to the slightly dangerous Marlon Brando-ian Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against? Whadda you got? (That Teddy Boy switchblade cockiness would resurface with punk.) Now, it was Peace, man, Live and let live, and about sharing accommodation, food, recreational drugs, bodies. This was New Testament-style Christian brother/sisterhood with dollops of pagan intercourse.

As all collective movements go, the birth of the Summer of Love was as imaginative as its death, announced prematurely in typical exhibitionist fashion when a ceremony was held on October 6, 1967, with the funeral notice: In the Haight-Ashbury District of this city, Hippie, devoted son of mass media. It is with reason that own-man Bob Dylan refused to take part in the Woodstock festival, even though he actually lived there. Ostensibly, as he wrote later in Chronicles Volume One, he was upset with moochers showing up from as far away as California on pilgrimages. rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry.

But Dylan also mentions why The Counterculture could be as stifling as The Culture: all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul nauseating me the streets exploding, fire of angel boiling the contra communes the lying, noisy voices the free love, the anti-money system movement the whole shebang [I] didnt want to be in that group portrait.

But plenty of others will be in that (re)group portrait this summer. Throughout the year, San Francisco will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Retired Baby Boomers will reconnect and recollect when their bodies were beautiful and before they made a Silicon Valley out of All You Need Is Love. According to organisers of the celebrations, there will be a wealth of events, ranging from wine tastings to sailboat regattas, a 60s dance party, featuring a Beatles cover band and more groovy stuff, Folsom Street Fair this sub-culture festival attracts leather fetish enthusiasts from around the world. Sounds groovy.

But the Summer of Love did do something that for all its fun, flakiness and ephemeral quality (read: double-standards) has left its mark as the new normal: emphasising more than anything else the value of individual freedom.

It was also there in 17th century Paris, 18th century Awadh, 1920s Berlin and New York. But the Summer of Love democratised free spirit. It was no longer the monopoly of aristocrats, nawabs and flappers. Love, and much more, suddenly was there to flaunt for the middle-classes. One day, perhaps, our very own Romeos and the youth could also come to the same happy, far out conclusion, without being tied to their parents aprons.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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One swallow that made the Summer of Love - Times of India (blog)