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Micha Frazer-Carroll wrote this for Gal-Dem last year: Everyone loves a laugh – but at whose expense? …post-watershed blackface, that operates under the guise of the comedy sketch show, found its own, horrid golden age in the early 00s. For many marginalised people, it was a truly cursed era of TV that not only mocked blackness,… [more]
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It took me a very long time to realise how good Bruce Springsteen is: like many people, I misinterpreted Born in the USA as a tub-thumping, chest-beating, USA! USA! USA! anthem and didn’t investigate further. I’m a lot older and a little bit wiser now, and while I wouldn’t call myself a fan – I… [more]
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The Guardian: Little Britain has been removed from all UK streaming platforms due to concerns about the use of blackface by its two stars, David Walliams and Matt Lucas. The comedy sketch show, which first aired in 2003 on BBC Three, has been removed from Netflix, BritBox and BBC iPlayer – with the pair’s follow… [more]
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Jessica Valenti, writing on Medium: Not All Opinions Matter. while police across the country are violently attacking peaceful protesters — actual state suppression of speech— powerful people are working hard to characterize disinterest or criticism as some kind of horrific rights violation. …It is not a coincidence that powerful white people are painting themselves as… [more]
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The thing about bored celebrities taking pops at trans people isn’t so much what they say: we have heard it all before. It’s that their celebrity means we hear it again and again and again. I don’t follow JK Rowling, whose opinions on trans people are well known (and no longer explained away as “middle-aged… [more]
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Here’s an interesting thought, which someone (I’ve lost the link, sorry) posted on social media earlier. What if 2020 isn’t the most awful year we’ve experienced, but the most important? That’s not to say it isn’t awful. Of course it is. But history is full of awful times that, with the benefit of hindsight, turned… [more]
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Katelyn Burns, writing for Vox: The LGBTQ civil rights fight is far from over. Often, the common perception of LGBTQ people’s lives in the US is filtered through the experiences of white, upper-middle-class, cisgender lesbian and gay people [who] live in coastal cities and happen to have access to large media platforms. Kirchick’s piece is… [more]
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You’ve seen pinkwashing, when firms who don’t particularly care about LGBT+ people pretend to care about LGBT+ people so they can sell stuff during Pride month. You’ve seen greenwashing, when firms who don’t particularly care about the environment pretend to care about the environment so they can sell stuff to people who do. And now,… [more]
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How’s that for a headline? The British Computer Society commissioned me to write some books about effective writing, and this month they’re offering them as the Writing In IT Bundle with a whopping great discount. They even made a video! These books are designed to be practical and useful: you’ll discover how to optimise your… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
