Alana Storm

Candy Darling as photographed by Robert Maplethorpe with a Polaroid camera

Candy Darling as photographed by Robert Maplethorpe with a Polaroid camera

Mapplethorpe Polaroids: Candy Darling

The Unexamined Life | Lucy Sante Robert Mapplethorpe's work is difficult to see, which is not the same thing as saying it is difficult to look at. It is certainly not difficult to view;

Unsurprising to find that my annoyances with this biography are shared by this (excellent) 1995 retrospective authored by @luxante.bsky.social

Also — "... he seems more fierce in his 1980 drag pictures ..." — relatable. Partial self knowledge is a hell of a thing.

www.nybooks.com/articles/199...

Daily life was such a challenge for Joan that she couldn't provide her favorite child, Robert, with the individual attention he craved.

And some classic “overbearing yet absent mother made him an f-slur” rhetoric

along with "Morning Has Broken," a song written by the seventies pop star Cat Stevens, now a radical Muslim

And wow is 1995 already showing up. In the first handful of pages we get some random casual Islamophobia

Cover of the Robert Maplethorpe biography written in 1995 obscured by an interlibrary loan books sleeve

The 1995 Maplethorpe biography showed up from interlibrary loan

image of a muddled aged woman still figuring out her shot

evolving into some sort of Annie Leibovitz themed pokémon 🤷‍♀️

Went to a tech user group event for the first time in forever last night — three people total showed (including the organizer and me), and the talk was a remote call-in. I feel so far away from someone who cared about computers, and for all the people I helped my third act career options look dim.

datapoint: I remembering finally/first seeing an episode when I was in Ontario for Eden Musicfest in '96, and when I came back to the states I couldn't find it on any stations.

split panel comic pane featuring a woman on a couch with a cat and a woman on the bottom in her car. both are smiling, looking at phone, and a speech bubble with a heart emanates from the phone on the bottom. The caption reads "Alana sends me a nice text message. She is giving, if nothing else, content"

a single comic panel featuring two women in a car. the driver has one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the center armrest console. The second is drawing with a look of "gotta catch up" on her face. The caption reads: 5pm: still catching up on panels when Alana picks me up for the show we're attending later. She is giving, besides the ride, content.

my friend, @erinholographic.bsky.social, does hourly comic day some years which means I get a sweet 2024 - 2026 transition timeline

dings the "having to embody every cliche of this experience is as undignified as it is necessary" bell 🛎️

Could be worse. Could be a Heather.

Zoe Fisher Seattle, Washington

Zoe's still out there -- she has the occasional piece published but writing for the literary world doesn't seem to be her Main Thing™, which I'm thinking about for reasons.

quickaskzoe.com

covers of the Please Don't Kill the Freshman book

The chapbook had been a local DIY success in the years before I moved to Portland.

Cover of the book, please don’t kill the freshman a memoir by zoe trope.

I bounced off this twenty years ago when I realized it was about high school and it felt like the least appropriate thing for a 30-year-old to be reading. Giving it another go.

Newspaper ad for The Bank nightclub in NYC, sometime in the 1990s

Remembering Amy: talked a lot about Catherine Wheel, inelegantly set but present boundaries, her excitement at putting me in black lipstick, how angry I got when she talked down on herself, who told me she wasn't my therapist, and how months after I ended things told me she was strictly a lesbian

I always knew it was a risk, reconciling with my parents after a twenty year estrangement, and my worst fears have been realized —

they're asking for tech support. 😬

I think a lot about the time I was out at The Rambler with a group of girls and one was ranting about some drama on one of the local transition discord servers, and when she was finally done T— got a look on her face and said “girl — it’s just a chat server”

Repression Queen: A Memoir About Gender Transformation Erotica A Memoir About Gender Transformation Erotica

Show me a receipt of you purchasing my book Repression Queen: A Memoir About Gender Transformation Erotica from Bookshop(.org) during the Game, and I’ll hand-mail you a copy of my “Zine That Turns You Into A Girl.”

This is a wacky short-term offer but could fuel some other projects I’m working on.

i have a zine!!! dm if you want one

The experiences of Jayne County, a male-to-female transgendered person active in New York's early punk scene, provide further evidence that punk communities of this epoch were accepting of sexual and gender dif-ference. 49 During one of her shows, she was heckled by a member of the audience, who called her a "queer." When County responded with insults of her own, the man approached the stage with the apparent intention to assault her. She subsequently hit him over the head with her microphone stand and proceeded to attack him with her fists. County was thrown in jail, and upon her release, the club where this incident took place, Max's Kansas City (one of the most infamous venues for New York punk), organized a benefit to cover her legal costs. In her telling of the events, the support for County is clear. She cites the involvement of some of the most prominent members of New York's punk scene at the time: “Meanwhile, Max's organised a benefit to cover my legal costs. A hall was hired uptown, and we got some great bands to perform: Blondie, Robert Gordon, the Ramones... Divine, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, the New York Dolls, Mink de Ville, Talking Heads and Richard Hell.... We had an auction: we sold an outfit that had belonged to Iggy Pop, a pair of David Bowie's platform boots from the Marquee special, a signed poster from Lou Reed, some stuff from Andy Warhol. It went on for hours. For the finale, I came out to thank everyone wearing a black-and-white striped convict's outfit, and I sang "Jailhouse Rock" and "The Last Time."” A disregard of gender norms and sexual conservatism in early punk was not reserved to punk performers. Some empirical research and interviews,

From Vivian Namaste’s Invisible Lives

Photo of Jayne County, a trans woman active in New York’s early punk scene.

Back on my bullshit

Oh, also! What a mind fuck to be twenty six and have your middle aged lover buy you an apartment and fundamentally redefined what “rent” means in your life.

Self Portrait of Mapplethorpe en femme.

Then the Transvestite portraits show up and it's like -- who knows. "Who knows what goes on in the depths of someone's mind", etc.

Just another queer the culture war flattened out and AIDS relegated to the unknowable. 😑

Then the quote from Jack Walls, another lover: "What Robert Mapplethorpe wanted was to be cool. In reality he was shy, and sometimes he could be painfully inarticulate. He could be selfish and giving, cruel and kind and emotionally needy. Robert Mapplethorpe wanted to be seen as tough."

To hear her tell it though, they were simply lovers. They were emotionally close until the end of his life and she was the one to end their physical relationship -- more out of desire for fidelity from a lover than anything else.

For all that gets projected onto him, he doesn't seem to have talked much about himself or what drove his desires. I remember learning about Patti Smith later, and how she was quickly dismissed as either his beard or every gay man's clinging to the closet of a faux-straight life.

Image of the Hardcover book Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits, featuring his portrait of Kathy Acker on the cover.

I thought I was going to rearrange some bookshelves and instead ended up thinking about Mapplethorpe. The whole Jesse Helms/Perfect Moment thing happened when I was fourteen, and I'm pretty sure Mapplethorpe was the first of the New York City bohemian art fags (complimentary) I became aware of.

A magazine cover featuring the word Finder and two bike hipsters.

A magazine cover featuring a young dad with a messy kid on his shoulders.

The covers end up being a weird aesthetic snapshot of Portland's evolving hyper gentrification. The 2005 vs. 2013 covers stand out to me in particular: bike hipster to young dad.

Archive of an old Mastodon thread of mine collecting 15 years of magazine covers from the Willamette Week's Finder magazine, a city guide that the pandemic killed.

gliff.org/posts/finder...