For far too long Ukraine has been restrained and forced to fight under different rules than Russia. While Russia constantly attacks civilians, apartments, schools, and hospitals, Ukraine was forbidden todo so inorder to get arms to defend itself. Ukraine was forbidden to hurt the Russians in similar ways. Leaving Ukraine to feel all the pain of the war while Russia doesn’t. Recently that has changed. Maybe if Ukraine is allowed to make the Russian public feel as afraid as the Ukrainians, they will tell their government enough. Hugs
Residents of a damaged Kyiv apartment building recovered what remained of their belongings as rescuers sifted through rubble for survivors, a day after a Russian attack killed at least 30 people in the deadliest strike on the city this year.
This is a kids summer camp and the kids seen are very young. The claim is this is an evangelical church in Kentucky doing a mock execution of an illegal immigrant. The kids are chanting “Take him out and blow him up”. The screen says praise the lord and pass the ammo. My question is when did jesus preach hate? I know the bible does, but Christians are to be followers of Jesus and aside from the money changers event Jesus preached love and acceptance of the stranger. Bible traditions said to welcome the stranger. Sodom and Gomorrah is about god being angry the town was not hospitable to the strangers and wanted to dominate them rather than feed / house them.
I googled when did Jesus preach hate and I got this summary. Jesus did not preach hate; rather, He taught love and forgiveness. In Matthew 5:43-44, He instructs, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” emphasizing the importance of loving others, even those who may oppose us. Below was a list of biblical hate passages including two in John. Guess what I read the chapters. The passages were not direct sayings from or attributed to Jesus. So what god are these “Christians” following? As to the YouTuber showing this he is not trans, he is a VTuber and uses an avatar his fans make and like. As all things on the internet it can get weird and he thought that as people kept sending him stuff as a female and a furry he would b=play along with the bit. I skip the fan art stuff at the beginning as that stuff bores me and it is only a few minutes. Hugs
This church performed a mock execution in front of CHILDREN at a BIBLE CAMP. And somehow these people are the ones saying that the left is indoctrinating their kids, meanwhile they normalize public executions to children.
Wow. There is a lot of historic information in this video. The author / presenter has quick cuts to other personality characters she plays to highlight the absurdity of some positions held by the hierarchy. She delvesdeeply into the idea of what is proper femininity, who steps outside it, and who thinks they are responsible for judging or enforcing it. She delves into how many fights against change and equality are about fears by men of emasculation. The lowering of men’s status. When she elaborates on suffrage, all the fears seem to be that allowing women to vote would give women the right to be men and force men to be women. Seem familure? She goes into detail on how each repressive opressive responce to equal rights comes down to the same phrases such as save the children, save the family, or the claims that society it self will end. The clips she intersperses go by far too quickly so I had to stop the video to read them but she does describe what is on them. The begining was choppy and it took me a bit to get her style of presentation but once I did I found it very informative fillwed with facts, history, and fun to watch. Hugs
The transgender bathroom ‘debate’ isn’t new (but it is stupid). I’m looking at you TERF’s…
Looking back through history, gender politics is consistently entangled with race, class, misogyny, and disability. Minority groups existing outside the ‘norm’ are attacked as ‘radicals’ or menaces to society…
But what prevails each time we face oppression AND causes real change in our society?
More Christian privilege and threats for those who are different or they don’t like. There is no hate like Christian love. And if you have listened to Dan McCallen the prohibitions against homosexuality these people like to claim are wrong. It is wrong because they do not understand the culture of the time the bible was written and what the original text / words were. They just want to hate and they think that if it comes from god then it is not their fault. Imagine hating so bad that just people wanting recognition for existing and for equality free from discrimination enrages you. This is why pride is still so desperately needed. As I read what he wrote again the anger, ignorance, and implied violence just because other people have different ways and feelings than he does. And the billerent stupidity makes me worry for the people around him and his children.. His view of being a man or manly is incredibly toxic. There is a video at the end of the post I did not include. Hugs
A controversial former San Francisco Giants player has gone crazy online in a lengthy homophobic rant against his ex-team’s Pride Night debacle. Aubrey Huff took to X on Wednesday morning, and he didn’t pull any punches when it came to his thoughts on general manager Buster Posey’s befuddled response to reporters’ questions on Tuesday.
“I can pretty much guarantee you I know exactly what Buster wants to say about having to answer irrelevant non-Baseball questions that pertain to the sexual preference within the LGBTQ fudge packing community,” Huff began.
“I’m not wearing this gay bulls–t. Queers don’t watch Baseball anyway. They watch The View, enjoy therapy, & fudge packing sessions. And anyone inside the LGBTQ community, or those who support them don’t like what I just said, then I say to you…. Go f–k yourselves, & eat a d–k. And I mean that in the most literal sense,” he said.
Under a single spotlight, a tall figure in a hooded robe strutted onto the stage, their back to the audience. After a suspenseful beat, three words in large bolded lettering lit up the screen behind them: “NATURE IS GAY.”
With a twirl to the crowd, Pattie Gonia unveiled their ginger-red hair and matching mustache, dancing in an earthy blue-and-green crop top and skirt barely covering their chiseled body. The crowd of over a thousand broke into roaring applause.A 2019 video of Bill Nye the Science Guy, pulled from his appearance on John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” punctuated the dramatic reveal. “By the end of the century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another 4 to 8 degrees,” Nye said. “What I’m saying is, the planet’s on fucking fire.”
These are just the first few seconds of environmental activist and drag queen Pattie Gonia’s “Save Her” tour, a one-of-a-kind show that calls for the protection of the dolls — and the planet. The drag queens and kings who created and star on the tour aim to counter the exclusion of their communities by promoting the inclusion of everyone.
For eight years, Pattie Gonia, who goes by Wyn Wiley out of drag, has amassed an impressive following of over 2 million people across their social channels and through their environmental activism on and off the stage. They’ve pushed boundaries, set records and earned accolades, including being featured as one of TIME’s most influential creators in 2025, named as one of National Geographic’s 33 “agents of change” and invited to speak at TED Talk. They have also raised millions of dollars for environmental and social justice non-profits, co-founded the environmental equity organization Outdoorist Oath and a job board to help the queer community and allies find work in the environmental sector.
Last year, Pattie Gonia completed a 100-mile trek from Point Reyes National Seashore to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in full drag — hair, heels and all — to raise $1 million for non-profit environmental and social justice organizations.
Pattie Gonia performs at the “Save Her! Environmental Drag Show” during Climate Week, Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Brooklyn, New York. (Alyssa Goodman/AP Photo)
Last month, they did it again, completing a five-day hike at Yosemite.
As show attendee and D.C. drag king Lionel Bitchie said, “She’s not one of the most followed drag queens for no reason.”
But they haven’t done all this work without ruffling a few orange-tinted feathers — and sparking division even among their own fans. During the 2024 presidential campaign season, they were targeted in a Trump campaign ad. Most recently, Pattie Gonia has been in the news for getting sued by the clothing brand Patagonia.
The lawsuit arose after Pattie Gonia filed a trademark application for exclusive rights to use the Pattie Gonia brand on commercial products and events, a move that Patagonia claims would compromise its brand identity. The drag queen responded on social media, posting that suing a climate activist is a “betrayal” of Patagonia’s core mission. Patagonia, for its part, acknowledged their shared goal of caring for the planet and the outdoors, but has held firm on the conditions to end the litigation.
Online, people in Pattie Gonia’s own fanbase have expressed conflict. While some view the lawsuit as harmful to the queer community and stopped using Patagonia’s products as a result, others disagree the clothing brand unfairly sued the drag artist.
Pattie Gonia said the timing of the lawsuit, filed on January 21, hits especially hard because it has come at a time when marginalized communities have been under fire. Several climate, gender and equity-related terms have been erased and banned from federal agencies. The Trump administration has rolled back key protections and visibility for LGBTQ+ communities, including limiting access to gender affirming care, removing mentions of LGBTQ+ history in national parks and banning transgender service members in the military. It also has slashed environmental safeguards for clean air and water, gutted funding for national parks and public lands, and expanded the use of polluting fossil fuel industries.
All the while, Pattie Gonia has embraced their own form of protest in the national “Save Her” tour, focusing it on climate activism and partnering with local drag queens at each of the tour’s stops, in more than 20 cities. At the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. — a historically inclusive space for Black performers steps from U Street’s former Black Broadway and a 20-minute drive from the White House — artists and attendees weren’t afraid to get political.
“A lot of time drag can be escapist, and not confronting the reality of dealing with fascism and climate decline, so I like drag that is a call to action and inspiring,” local drag artist and attendee Brooke N. Hymen said. “Pride month can be a celebration and it should be, but it should also be resistance against the forces that want to see us eliminated. And I feel like climate activism goes hand in hand with trans and queer activism.”
“Drag is political, so in a way this is like a rally,” Lionel Bitchie added.
One by one, each act gave their own climate-themed performance, with the majority of them stripping down to their “Fuck Donald Trump” pasties and underwear. Between acts, a parodied Smokey the Bear logo on stage read: “Only you can prevent fascist liars.”
Drag artists Brooke N. Hymen (left) and Lionel Bitchie (right) attended Pattie Gonia’s 9:30 Club show. “Drag is political, so in a way this is like a rally,” Bitchie said. (Jenae Barnes for The 19th)
“It’s a fantastic outlet for joy and rage all in one,” said attendee Kirby Callaway, who works in the environmental space. She said when she saw Pattie Gonia perform at a previous drag show, her “cheeks were hurting because I was smiling so much.”
“It’s so unique, [and] so much of the way that I interact with it in the real world is very doom and gloom,” Callaway said. “I don’t feel like a lot of places get to celebrate and find joy and laugh at these issues.”
Co-headliner and drag queen Sequoia (yes, like the tree) donned an upcycled outfit made of clothing relics from their closeted past and did a performance about the gender fluidity of plants and animals. The screen behind them displayed the words, “Nature is queer, and so am I.”
Going for a wildly humorous take on the issue, drag king Uncle Freak shuffled on stage to perform a striptease as a geriatric man, complete with a fake white mustache and a receding hairline that even NASA couldn’t find on the Hubble telescope. The environmental theme? How climate change worsens the effects of aging.
“Climate change accelerates biological aging in older adults by increasing vulnerability to extreme heat, dehydration and air pollution,” read the screen they pointed at with their cane on the stage.
But the show wasn’t all fun, games and nipple tassels. D.C. drag royalty King Molasses performed to Phil Collins’ ‘80’s hit “In the Air Tonight,” using the tune’s famous crescendo of intensity to parallel the “rising tension” of the climate crisis.
“In the Air felt very correct, in the sense of this urgency that we are now as a people finding ourselves in when it comes to saving the planet. By saving, I mean the impact of technology, of data centers, the climate skewing hotter, the ice caps melting, storms getting more severe,” the inaugural winner of the “King of Drag” reality TV show told The 19th. “There are so many things that are becoming more and more pressing at an alarming rate. And there will be a point where the consequences of our actions will be impossible to ignore.”
King Molasses performs to Phil Collins’ ‘80’s hit “In the Air Tonight.” (Maya Lopez)
Pattie Gonia came on and sang a heartfelt “bird song” about resilience and visibility in times of hardship. “No one can erase us, we’re here and we’re staying, we sing cause we made it, we made it through the night,” they sang as the crowd softened during the piano-accompanied tune and several people melted with tears and hugs.
Co-headliners Sequoia and Vera! joined Pattie at the climax of the show to perform a piece on social justice in front of the backdrop of an American flag. Written on each stripe, a different call to action: “Eat the rich. Protect the dolls. Free Palestine. Black lives still matter. No one is illegal on stolen land.”
Amid rampant erasure, censorship and oppression of the queer community and environmental advocates, the tour is more than a late-night rendezvous; it’s a rallying cry, Molasses said.
“The opportunity that this tour gives all of us artists is that drag allows us to play and show something that feels like entertainment,” Molasses said. “But if we can do it in a particular way, we are able to not only entertain but are able to call our community to action.”
While I detest the end song he plays I love Mark’s take on issues. He doesn’t pull his punches and lays out the facts. In this case it is important to watch to the end where he elaborates on the current attempt to genocide trans people by making them illegal as Russia has. Now requiring that no business, event or medical facility that takes any government money can allow any kind of support or positive affirmation of trans people. He talks about how important it is to let trans youth socially transition and live as the gender they identify with, and to get puberty blockers to not go through the wrong puberty. He mentions trans children figure out their gender the same way and ages that cis kids do. Hugs
Panic over the existence of LGBTQ+ people is becoming so ridiculous it’s almost impossible to tell if it’s satire or not. In this video we’ll look at some of the most ridiculous examples of right-wing hysteria over queer people. Well also talk about how conservatives have successfully weaponized their outrage against queer people and how culture influences politics.
The Humanist Report (THR) is a progressive political podcast that discusses and analyzes current news events and pressing political issues. Our analyses are guided by humanism and political progressivism. Each news story we cover is supplemented with thought-provoking, fact-based commentary that aims for the highest level of objectivity.
Carson McCullers’s debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is published.
On June 4, 1940, the day her debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunterwas published, 23-year-old Carson McCullers was alone in New York City. She’d come with her husband to promote the book, but he was off sailing with a friend. “She knew almost no one in New York except the kindly older woman acquaintance who had found her the room,” writes Mary V. Dearborn.
“She was nearly penniless, but she had to scrape together enough money to buy something to wear to a meeting with her editor the next week. June 4 was a pause. On one side were Carson’s years growing up in provincial Columbus, Georgia, and the succession of Southern towns to which her husband’s job had called them. On the other side, she assumed, would be the exciting life of an author, living glamorously in New York City, meeting the writers, artists, and musicians who had peopled her fantasies.”
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was hotly anticipated, despite—or because of—its strangeness. “It did not fit any of the accepted and expected categories of mainstream fiction,” Dearborn explains. “It was neither a love story nor a bildungsroman, it did not have characters whom readers could recognize as like themselves, it did not have a happy ending, and it did not have a single strong narrative line.” It was a book about misfits, written by a misfit. But, importantly, McCullers was a young misfit, and publishing has always loved nothing better than a wunderkind. “Readers were flabbergasted to learn that this tour de force was the work of someone so young and, despite her gender-ambiguous name, a woman,” writes Dearborn. “It was hard to believe she knew so much about the ‘lonely hearts’ of others, said one critic. She seemed sui generis, unique, and as it turned out, as odd as some of her characters.” Richard Wright compared her favorably to William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and wrote that “whether you will want to read the book depends upon the extent to which you value the experience of discovering the stale and familiar terms of everyday life bathed in a rich and strange meaning, devoid of pettiness and sentimentality.” A lot of people wanted to read it. The novel became a bestseller, and McCullers, at least for a time, was offered entry into the artist’s life of her dreams. “I became an established literary figure overnight and I was much too young to understand what happened to me or the responsibility it entailed,” she said later. “I was a bit of a holy terror.” It’s hard to hold it against her, though. By the age of 30 she would have had two major strokes; she died much too young, at 50, after a brain hemorrhage, leaving behind years of literary potential along with her enduring classics.
The Pentagon is moving to recruit hundreds of troops to appear as spectators next month at President Donald Trump’s UFC cage-fighting event on the White House lawn, and requiring those who attend to pay their own way and meet height and weight requirements, according to people familiar with the matter and internal memos reviewed by The Washington Post.
The Defense Department in recent days has solicited troops across the services to attend the June 14 event. Officials are seeking junior enlisted personnel and junior officers specifically, according to internal messages that make clear travel will be “member-procured.”
Junior troops make up the military’s lowest pay grades. One memo, circulated within the Air Force, stipulates that to be eligible, personnel “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO and current physical fitness standard.” Troops will be required to wear their short-sleeve dress uniforms, the memo adds.
Scottie's Playtime 