Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • A cosmic thing

    I went to see The B-52’s last night, a band I’ve long loved but never seen live. They were huge fun, but the show was also very emotional for me. The band’s fifth album, 1989’s Cosmic Thing, was very important to me when I was a lot younger, and was the soundtrack to a long summer mostly spent with my best friend, the two of us unsuccessfully trying to meet girls.

    There’s a real melancholy to the album – it was the band’s first after the death of their innovative guitarist, Ricky Wilson – and that melancholy is amplified for me because the friend who let teenage me play Cosmic Thing constantly on his car stereo died far too young a few years ago.

    There’s a strange feeling seeing The B-52’s live, partly because the band were already nostalgic when they began: their vibe is a stylised, almost mythical 1950s America of B-movies and jukeboxes and beach parties. So in a way, seeing them in 2026 is nostalgia for something that was already looking back decades.

    It’s complicated for me too because in 1989 I was still battling against being me, and for a long time I’ve considered Cosmic Thing not just the soundtrack to part of my old life, but also the soundtrack to the life I never got to lead, the hot girl summer I never got to inhabit. The “wild girls” of Deadbeat Club talking a mile a minute, dancing in torn sheets in the rain, crashing “that party down in normal town”; the same girls in Dry County sitting on the porch, swinging, to chase away blues that “whomp you up on the side of the head.” I heard myself in those songs, and felt pure joy in songs like Roam and Topaz. 

    I didn’t know the background to the album at the time; speaking in 2023, Cindy Wilson said that “It was very depressing days. It was a dark time. It was just so awful with what was going on with the AIDS epidemic and so many lost loved ones and friends. We were all so depressed and didn’t know what was going to happen.” AIDS took their friend and guitarist Ricky Wilson, as well as many of their friends in the wider world. 

    As Pete Crighton writes in his 33 and 1/3 book about the album, “dark times are when queer people find their strength. It’s the dark times, when we’re backed into a corner, that we come out swinging the hardest. Just ask Marsha P. Johnson, or any of the heroes of the Stonewall uprising. Instead of hiding their heads in the sand, or quietly fading out of the pop culture landscape and letting their catalogue languish in the remainder bins, the B-52s decided to go to work. Whether it was conscious or not, they resolved to fight through their grief and show the world that queer people would be visible, that they would dance, that they would sing, and in the face of tragedy, they would still find a way to smile and honour their friends.”

    I almost didn’t go to the show last night because I was sad; once again, these are dark times. But I’m glad I did, because at long last I was able to hear songs live that have lived in my head for decades and dance to a band who can turn sadness into joy. As Crighton says of Cosmic Thing: “There is real emotion. Real depth. Real tenderness. And a whole lot of horniness.”

  • This would be a bargain at twice the price

    My publisher, 404 Ink, will be closing their online shop on 30 June – and until then you can buy all their books for just £5. Naturally I’d recommend Carrie Kills A Man and Small Town Joy, but there are many more excellent books as well as the fantastic Inklings series. Fill your boots (with books)!

  • Two lies

    Helen Belcher for Byline Times on the two lies being pushed by the EHRC:

    The position the UK now is in is driven by two big basic lies. The first is that the Equality Act was actually an act which excluded trans people from single-sex services and spaces aligned to their lived in gender but that the courts, Parliament or the EHRC, had somehow not noticed this until last year. The second lie is that trans people are always identifiable, and when they aren’t, they’re intentionally deceptive.  

  • Queerphoria starts today

    I’m delighted to be one of the contributors to Queerphoria, a new anthology of queer writing from Verve Books. £1 from every copy sold goes to Switchboard LGBT+. The eBook is out worldwide from today and the UK print edition comes out on 25 June. It’s getting rave reviews from readers and from publications such as DIVA, and it’s a genuinely excellent anthology with a huge range of voices.

  • This is what oppression looks like

    Brynn Tannehill on fiery form in Public Notice:

    One of the most popular and profitable grifts in the world of the religious right and MAGA is the production of propaganda to convince Christians that they are horribly discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the government and government funded entities.

    …This victimhood narrative is central to their identity. But it also raises the question: would they recognize what actual oppression looks like?

    Sadly the article is just as relevant in the UK.

  • 17,000 articles to make a moral panic

    QueerAF:

    Seventeen thousand articles were published about so-called ‘trans issues’ by just four British newspapers in five years, according to new research from Amnesty International UK.

    The four newspapers – The Sun, The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph – mentioned JK Rowling 106 times in their coverage, with 202 mentions of a prime minister or political party leader.

    Trans people themselves were mentioned by name just 24 times. Sixteen of those mentions were murdered teen Brianna Ghey, and eight were convicted rapist Isla Bryson.

    Most of the media reports in the four newspapers, between 2020 and 2025, had a negative sentiment about trans people. When trans people were mentioned in reporting it was as criminals or murder victims, the research found.

    The same report found that the number of anti-trans groups dedicated to attacking trans rights had increased from 3 in 2017, when gender recognition reform was first mooted and widely supported, to 51 today. Three of those groups have spent £3.6 million between 2019 and 2024.

  • “The most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world”

    Liberal Currents:

    “A very small group of very well connected people, funded by international fascism, have decided that trans identity is, at best, a delusion that has been tolerated for far too long. In the space of a few years they have been able to reorder our society and politics to effectively segregate them.

    …This is not a hypothetical. You are less free now. Your security, dignity, and safety is in the hands of nasty, petty, monumentally stupid bigots. They can take it from you at a whim.”

  • Foxes in the hen house

    TACC has answered an important question: how did the EHRC Scotland suddenly become hostile to the trans people it’s supposed to protect? The answer, at least in part, is that a high profile anti-trans activist became one of their commissioners. As with the English EHRC, the body has become captured by “gender-critical” activism.

    TACC:

    it is difficult not to draw the obvious conclusion: that the appointment of Mandy Rhodes – a political commentator by background, with absolutely no stated experience or expertise in the field of equality or human rights, but with a prolific, half-decade+ output of anti-trans articles in the mainstream media – was entirely designed to serve the ideological objectives of a captured EHRC. 

  • Excellent ebooks for even less cash

    My publisher, 404 Ink, is running a promotion where you can get 50% off their ebooks – including Carrie Kills A Man, Small Town Joy and Fierce Salvage. They were all bargains at twice the price.

    There are lots of really great books in this deal but you’ll need to move quickly, as 404 are closing down the ebook shop at the end of May.

  • The Office for Students learns a lesson

    The High Court has reversed the Office for Students’ (OfS) decision to fine Sussex University over half a million pounds for supposedly suppressing free speech (ie, not stopping people from criticising a vocally transphobic academic). The verdict is damning and makes it very clear that the OfS was operating from a position of blatant bias and a desire to set a chilling precedent: the OfS had a “closed mind” and a predetermined strategy.

    As the University put it in a statement:

    The Court’s judgement is a comprehensive vindication of that position. It is a devastating indictment of the impartiality and competence of the OfS, implicating its operations, leadership, governance, and strategy. It raises important and urgent questions for the government as it plans to grant ever more powers to the regulator. 

    The High Court found that the OfS erred in law in respect of its jurisdiction, in its interpretation of the law, and its understanding of freedom of speech and academic freedom, and that its process was fatally flawed by bias in the form of predetermination. 

    It’s important to understand that this is not a case of the OfS making a mistake. The OfS did exactly what the Conservative government wanted it to do, under the guidance of its head who was put in place specifically to wage a culture war on higher education. Exactly the same thing has happened in the BBC and EHRC and NHS, which is why those organisations have become the enemy of multiple marginalised groups. The Tories’ Kemi Badenoch boasted about doing this, but the current Labour government has done nothing to undo any of it. If anything, they’ve been even worse than the Tories.