Instinct Magazine ran a piece on my summer tour for Accidental Bear with Big Dipper, Conquistador, Rica Shay, and Darling Gunsel today! Click HERE to read it on the Instinct site, or keep reading for the transcript.
Thanks for helping us spread the word, Instinct!
From Instinct Magazine:
“They say blondes have more fun, but we’re starting to think it might be the bears!
AccidentalBear.com has announced their 2013 Queer Music Summer Tour kicking off this July in support of LGBTQ mental health services at The Stonewall Project (SF), Q Center (Portland), the Ali Forney Center (NYC), and our good friends over at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center (LA).
Logan Lynn (pictured) will be headlining the tour alongside Conquistador, Big Dipper, Rica Shay, and Darling Gunsel, with a bunch of other amazing (and hairy!) queer acts opening for the headliners in each city.
Look for shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and New York City, with ALL proceeds going to the aforementioned organizations in their respective cities!
For more info on the tour, charities, and Kickstarter campaign, click HERE. And for sponsorship, click HERE.
Will you be attending Instincters? It promises to be a bear-y good time! (Sorry.)”
Recently I have witnessed a great deal of conflict within Portland’s local queer community online, in the press, and in real life. Much of this seems to come about as a result of heated debates around social issues, sex, politics, art, and the complicated inner-workings of the LGBT community in PDX (and everywhere). I believe there is much to be learned from conflict, but the way some of this has been playing out lately in the public sphere has felt mean spirited and has been difficult to watch at times.
It is my belief that we were all born inherently kind and connected to one another. Each of us was handed our own set of circumstances at birth, which are sometimes pre-destined long before birth, but most babies are not born angry. As kind queer babies are growing up, we sometimes find ourselves mistreated, abandoned, and ridiculed for being different. We are held down by layer upon layer of systemic oppression buried centuries deep in a culture that has its head shoved so far up its own ass it cannot see the part it plays in the cycle of abuse. This is painful and infuriating.
So what do we do with the fury we carry from having this history? How do we reconcile these justified feelings of outrage? Many of us might not feel powerful enough to take on our families, bosses or governments at the root of our feeling oppressed, so we aim lower and end up putting our pain on one another. Instead of queer people banding together to fight external oppression, we end up oppressing ourselves through infighting. It’s a tale as old as time, but all that cutting our friends amounts to in the end is a divided community, and a divided community is not a strong one.
We are still in the midst of a culture war, friends. While many changes have been made in our favor, we cannot forget that we still live in a country that treats queer people like second-class citizens, and in a state that actively perpetuates this discrimination. I fear sometimes Read the rest of this entry »
