The intensity of internet discourse can sometimes create an overinflated sense of just how interested the general public is in certain stories.
For instance, Graham Linehan’s new memoir Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy sold 390 copies in its first week – including pre-sales. A figure that fails to place it in the Top 1000.
To put that into context, titles that did crack the Top Thou include: a large print wordsearch book in at No.551, which sold more than twice that; and a colouring book called Dinosaurs Around The World, which sold over 2,000.
He’s currently claiming to have sold tens of thousands of copies, apparently unaware that “ordered by bookshops who thought serialisation in two national newspapers would mean a lot of sales” and “actually bought by people” are not the same thing. Books not sold are returned to the publisher after a set period.
Hilarious hubris aside, the opening paragraph of the Popbitch piece is key here: that story, and the trouncing of the Tories in last night’s by-election, are yet more evidence that the anti-trans culture war is an obsession of a very small group of people: newspaper proprietors, right-wing politicians and obsessive internet trolls.
Update: in fairness, it’s worth pointing out that the figures won’t include pre-sales sold directly via the publisher, which is where the author’s biggest fans will have been getting their copies from. But that just further proves the point that the general public just isn’t interested.
I went to see the Taylor Swift tour film last night. It’s one of the greatest live music things I’ve ever seen, and if you’re even vaguely interested in pop music it’s definitely worth a trip to the IMAX. Swift is a fantastic songwriter, an incredible performer and the sound and staging of the show are as good as it gets.
I’m well aware that I’m going to sound like an old woman saying this, but I am one so that’s how it’s going to come out. I think I enjoyed the tour movie more than I would have enjoyed the gig. It’s not just the ridiculous cost of tickets (the cheapest ones I saw were £300) and the travelling to Edinburgh, which is the nearest stop on the tour to me. It’s that an awful lot of people who go to gigs are awful, and have become more so since the COVID lockdowns. It’s not an original observation I know but it does feel like a lot of people forgot how to behave in public, and as a result gigs – particularly big gigs by famous people – are often ruined by shitfaced people loudly talking to their friends or worse, FaceTiming them and loudly yelling at the same time.
The other factor is the venues themselves. Football and rugby stadiums were built for football and rugby, not music, and they are places where sound goes to die. Unless you’re down by the front the wind carries a lot of the top end away, and your view will be of faraway screens. While the staging of Swift’s show (and of other big-gig masters such as U2) is built for big spaces and does a good job of spectacle, the view and sound and experience you get from the not-cheap seats isn’t close to what you get from the cosy seats of the IMAX. And yet while Swift tickets sold out in seconds for Edinburgh, the IMAX in Glasgow last night was only half full.
The Conservative government has upped its anti-transgender rhetoric recently, leaving people “scared, tired and alone”, charities have told HuffPost UK.
…It’s not just the prime minister, either. The health secretary Steve Barclay used the Tory conference to announce that he wants to introduce a policy where trans women would be banned from female-only wards. Five other cabinet ministers took aim at the community too.
We’ve seen this happen in other countries and we are sadly very aware of where it leads. Scared, tired and alone doesn’t begin to describe how I feel right now.
“I no longer feel safe as a transgender woman. I no longer feel included.
…Did I mention I was angry? Well, yes, that. But also scared; fearful for my future in a country that can contemplate this; and – having seen how vicious, how violent the anti-trans backlash has been in some parts of the world – wondering just where this one stops.”
Artwork by Wassily Kandinsky, accused of degeneracy by the Nazis
One of the tactics used to dehumanise minorities is to claim they have no culture, that they produce no art – because how can they when they’re not fully human? So it’s not a huge surprise to see disgraced former comedy writer Graham Linehan on his pity party tour claiming in the Daily Mail that trans people “produce no art”. There are “no great trans films”, “no great trans creators”… you get the idea.
And it’s a very old idea.
In far-right and religious extremism, the only art of value is the art produced by the in-group. Art and culture produced by members of the out-group is worthless, degenerate, corrupt, and the people who produce it and consume it are untermensch. Subhumans.
Here’s an explanation from 1942:
The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.
Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.
A subhuman and nothing more!
That particular screed was edited by Himmler.
The Nazis also railed against art specifically from the 1920s onwards, calling it Entartete Kunst – degenerate art. They claimed that such art was created by people corrupted and enfeebled, by people whose goal was to corrupt the minds of others and whose art was not in keeping with racial and sexual purity, that some works were “an insult to German womanhood”.
They started by demonising it, then by confiscating it, then by disappearing the people who made and consumed it.
The Nazi eradication of what was claimed to be degenerate in the symbolic realm of the visual, literary and performing arts was, quite logically, an early warning signal of a philosophy that would soon be applied to selective groups of human beings. Like the paintings that were rounded up and the books that Hitler burned, ostensibly degenerate people were soon dealt with in a final solution.
People on social media are dunking on Linehan with endless lists of great trans artists and works. But they’re falling into the trap, which is to distract. Linehan knows full well that there are great trans creators; before his decline into madness he used to praise some of them, and there’s no way that he’s unaware of, say, Wendy Carlos or The Matrix. But the issue is not that whether there are great trans artists. Of course there are. The issue is the ongoing mainstreaming of far-right views, in some cases actual Nazi views, in the mainstream press without criticism or challenge – and the cowardice of people who could and should be decrying those views rather than promoting them.
U2’s Achtung Baby is the greatest album ever made. Okay, maybe not to you, or to most of the Earth. But to 19-year-old me – the album was released the day before my 19th birthday – it was the most amazing and important record I’d ever heard, and it was followed the year after by the most amazing tour I’ve ever seen: Zoo TV. I know every note The Edge plays, and what guitar pedals he used to get each sound. I can hammer out every beat of Larry’s drums and know every word and every note of Adam’s basslines off by heart.
I’m not such a fan any more; I fell out of love with U2 around the late 1990s and while I’ve seen them a few times since – they remain a superb live band who do interesting things in arenas – I don’t experience the same fierce joy they used to give me. Bono’s increasing Sinatra-isation of his vocals when he does the songs live is a particular irritant for me, and the band have long passed the point where the new music matches the highs of the old. But nevertheless, when U2 announced that they’d be playing Achtung Baby in full in The Sphere, a new and exciting venue in Vegas, part of me really, really, really wanted to go. I can’t possibly afford it – the affordable (and that’s a relative term) tickets went fast so the cost of show, hotel and flights would have been way past £2K, which is madness to go and see a show. But I still really want to go. I mean, look at it!
Pictures don’t do it justice; you really need to see the video to appreciate the scale of it. And that’s where reality comes crashing in (assuming you can hear anything because of the constant whooping of audience members as the visuals change) because the videos demonstrate that, as my brother put it, it’d be great if it were soundtracked by the U2 of 1991. But it’s not. It’s soundtracked by the U2 of 2023.
U2 2023 isn’t U2 1991. It’s a different band not just because drummer Larry Mullen Jr is absent, recovering from back surgery. It’s a different band because the fire and energy of 1991’s U2 isn’t there any more, and because Bono’s voice isn’t what it used to be, and because a band that was once hungry and vital has mansions around the world and hangs around with presidents. Despite the big screen and the equally big revenues, playing a Vegas residency means exactly what it’s meant from the residencies of Elvis to those of Britney Spears: the creative well has run dry. Sure, there’s new music. But it’s not great music.
This happens with every band, or at least the ones who keep going; REM avoided the same fate by splitting up. I suspect U2 never will; as long as there’s breath in Bono’s body and a crowd to play to, he’ll perform. But they’re not the band they used to be, and can’t be – any more than I can be the person who fell in love with Achtung Baby more than 30 years ago. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but perhaps some things are best left as memories.
One of the major drivers in anti-trans media and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic is the Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF for short. When there’s a Christian bully taking legal action claiming oppression, the ADF is there. When there’s an anti-trans test case trying to remove healthcare, the ADF provides “expert” witnesses. And for at least six years, trans and other LGBTQ+ people in the UK have been trying to raise the alarm that their ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.
This week, The New Yorker reports on how the ADF’s ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.
There’s more to it than that, of course. As the article points out, the ADF is effectively trying to remove any and all restrictions on what religious extremists can do and say, even if that means opening the door to even more vile people such as violent racists. That may even be a feature rather than a bug, as bigotries tend to apply to multiple groups, even if the bigots are usually careful not to admit it.
As ever with reporting like this, it’s both valuable and worthless: valuable because it’s well researched, accurate and clearly sets out the danger; worthless because the people who need to read it won’t read it. And here in the UK, both print and broadcast media will continue to platform the ADF without explaining to readers and listeners what it is and what its goals are. I’m long past the point of caring whether that’s incompetence or malevolence because the result is the same.
I really love Cat Valente’s writing, and her latest essay – Pain Is Not Penance – is a thoughtful piece about pain and our understanding of it. Some of it feels like an exorcism.
Pain, Valente writes, is something many of us have learnt to believe is a punishment:
For something you’ve done, something you’ve been, something you failed to do, something you wanted, chose, strove for, resisted, something you couldn’t stop, something you turned away from or turned toward or turned into, something you gave in to, something you saw or didn’t see, something you lost or took or abandoned or wouldn’t let go.
And that can lead to one of the most dangerous beliefs in our society:
Pain is payback. You earned this hurt. It didn’t happen to you, you collided with it. It isn’t random, it is your pain, for you, because of you, and if you’d only been better, if only you’d been stronger, if only you’d held on a little longer or let go a little sooner, if only you’d been more, if only you’d been less, if only you’d managed to be Goldilocks’ Own Brand Pristinely Precisely Perfect Fucking Porridge, you wouldn’t be doubled over in the dark right now, burning alive from the inside out.
I don’t want to spoil the rest of the article. It’s well worth your time.
all of these things speak to me, but I am not welcome in the places where they are being spoken.
The piece also links to an important slice of trans history, the manifesto Don’t Call Me Mister You Fucking Beast. The language around transness has changed a lot since it was written in 1972, the same year I was born, but it remains timely.
When we’re alone we tend to accept the stereotypes. By getting together we’ve discovered how ridiculous they really are. No one in the group has ever said, ‘What horrible trick of nature has made me a woman trapped in a man’s body?’ We just don’t think that way.
…The important thing is, no one should tell you, as a man or a woman, this is the role you have to play, and you have to play it all the time.
