Culture Feature

NikkieTutorials' Coming Out Story Is a Giant Leap for Normalizing Being Transgender

The popular YouTube beauty guru revealed she's transgender in an emotional video.

Nikkie de Jager @ The Costume Institute Benefit celebrating the opening of In America: A Lexicon of Fashion - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Photo by Stephen Lovekin (Shutterstock)

This week, Nikkie de Jager—better known as NikkieTutorials—posted a YouTube video titled "I'm Coming Out," in which the massively popular beauty guru revealed that she is a transgender woman.

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Music Features

Hayley Kiyoko's "She" Is an Anthem for Closeted Kids

Kiyoko's final single from her project "I'm Too Sensitive For This Sh*t" has a music video that will get you in your feelings.

Press Atlantic Records

When I first realized I was bisexual, I didn't know any girls who liked girls in real life.

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FILM

Kristen Stewart's "Charlie's Angels" Character Is "Definitely Gay"—But Is That Enough?

In "Charlie's Angels," our Bella has finally become a swan. That doesn't mean the film can escape some traps.

Charlie's Angels | First 10 Minutes | Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, Ella Balinska | ClipFlix

Kristen Stewart has the Internet in a tizzy thanks to her role in Charlie's Angels, and her performance as Sabrina has a lot of people questioning their sexuality (or celebrating what they already knew).

Thanks to the omnipotence of the Internet, Sabrina's queerness isn't in question. According to Out Magazine, in an interview with PrideSource, the director Elizabeth Banks confirmed that the character is "definitely gay in the movie."

That doesn't mean that Sabrina is exactly overt about her sexuality in the film, though—there are no lines in the script about her sexual orientation. According to Banks, this was purposeful. "When I cast [Kristen Stewart], I just wanted her to be… I just felt like she's almost the way Kristen is. I don't feel there is a label that fits her," she told Digital Spy. "The only thing that was important to me was to not label it as anything. It's fine if the media wants to label it, I think that's OK, but I didn't do that. I just let her be herself in the film."

Apparently, Stewart "wanted to be gay" in the movie, though she's also not hung up on labels. "I just think we're all kind of getting to a place where—I don't know, evolution's a weird thing—we're all becoming incredibly ambiguous," she said in an interview in which she also clarified that she doesn't exactly identify as bisexual anymore. "And it's this really gorgeous thing."

This philosophy feels aligned with our current moment, where the boundaries of sexuality, gender, and other paradigms are constantly blurring and shifting. On the other hand, there's a fine line between refusing labels as an act of protest and refusing labels as a way of ultimately obscuring identities, thus winding up back where we began.

Is Charlie's Angels queer-baiting? It's definitely going too far to say that a film is queer-baiting simply for coding a character as gay without explicitly addressing their orientation, but Banks's and the film's treatment of Sabrina's queerness still raises questions. How important are labels, and is our end goal to normalize them or disintegrate them completely?

In liberal Hollywood circles, perhaps it's enough to express queerness as an implicit character trait, but in a world that still threatens LGBTQ+ people's rights, there's a dearth of characters that are out and proud. On the other hand, queerness and relationships aren't anyone's entire identity, and they shouldn't have to be, onscreen or off.

Despite Banks' insistence that her film is newly "woke," Charlie's Angels has always toed the line between regressive and revolutionary. According to Vulture, "You could chart a mini arc of corporate feminism onto the Charlie's Angels franchise." The film is about three attractive women who are empowered because they do the bidding of an invisible commander, after all, and what could be more reminiscent of the corporate world's rapid consumption of the girl-boss illusion? A capitalist enterprise hasn't improved simply because it's being run by a woman, after all, and a film isn't feminist just because it features female characters in positions of power. "What's so depressing about the new film is that the most radical thing it can think to do to update this concept is to hint that Charlie has actually, this whole time, been a lady," the article continues.

Similarly, a film isn't pro-LGBTQ just because it tacitly implies a character's queerness. It's true that queerness is becoming more widely accepted and less stigmatized overall, though. (Stewart herself just gushed about wanting to propose to her girlfriend, Dylan Meyer). That means that we should be working towards representing more radical politics and more underrepresented identities onscreen, not just erasing all identity politics now that bisexuality has been subsumed into the realm of acceptable traits, and not just calling a film feminist because it stars a couple of women.

Feminist or not, Stewart's performance (and costume choice) are so strong that her character's existence is ultimately a victory even if the rest of the film falters. She's even been branded a Hollywood Chris, after all; maybe that even means that someday, our Hollywood Chrises won't be all white.



CULTURE

Miley Cyrus Is Not a Queer Icon: Do Better

"I always thought I had to be gay, because I thought all guys were evil, but it's not true."

Miley Cyrus

Kobby Dagan

For those still celebrating Miley Cyrus as a queer icon, may we invite you to take a moment to reconsider.

Yes, she came out as pansexual and genderfluid in 2015, soon proving herself to be an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community by founding Happy Hippie foundation for homeless queer youth. Then, after ending her marriage to Liam Hemsworth, Cyrus briefly dated reality TV star Kaitlynn Carter before moving on to Cody Simpson, with whom she did an Instagram live on Sunday. Here's where things got...dicey, to say the least.

In the midst of the livestream, Cyrus stated, "There are good men out there, guys, don't give up. You don't have to be gay, there are good people with dicks out there, you've just got to find them," She said, while Simpson laughed. "You've got to find a dick that's not a dick, you know? I always thought I had to be gay, because I thought all guys were evil, but it's not true. There are good people out there that just happen to have dicks. I've only ever met one, and he's on this live."

Oof. Miley, honey, it's 2019! Twitter, of course, immediately popped the f*ck off.

Soon, Cyrus wielded a powerful, often misused celebrity weapon: the notes app apology.

So. There's a lot of toxicity to unpack here. Let's start with the easy part: Cyrus' implication that the only good man she has ever met is Cody Simpson. *Cue her father, brothers, and Liam Hemsworth giving the camera a long, Jim Halpert-esque look.* Misandry aside, Cyrus implied that 1.) Being queer is a choice. 2.) Dating men is always preferable to dating women, even if you're queer. 3.) Cyrus herself chose to date women because of a distrust for men, not necessarily an attraction to women. None of these things were addressed in her apology; in fact, she didn't even bother to claim that she misspoke or that it was meant as a joke. All she really did was re-enforce that men are sh*tty.

To be clear, for anyone still living in 1950, being queer is not a choice, dating within the LGBTQ+ community is not an exciting and temporary foray into counter-culture on your way to a heterosexual relationship, dating men as a bisexual/pansexual woman is not somehow inherently preferable to dating women, and you don't get to call yourself queer just because you find men annoying sometimes. Being queer is defined by being attracted to genders other than the opposite gender to your own, and again, it is NEVER a choice. Just a little bit louder for those of you in the back: BEING QUEER IS NEVER A CHOICE.

If you still aren't sure, here's some science for you: A 2019 study by Andrea Ganna, lead author and European Molecular Biology Laboratory group leader at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland, said that while her study did not find a "gay gene," it revealed "there are a number of genetic variations that can influence sexual behavior." Essentially, the research reinforces that queerness is simply "a natural part of our diversity as a species." That means that women being attracted to women is not simply a matter of thinking "all guys were evil" and so resorting to women—it's a matter of bonafide, biological sexual attraction.

Please do better, Miley.

CULTURE

Countering the Whitewashing of Pride: NYC Honors Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the city of New York has announced that they will commemorate two seminal LGBT rights activists, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, in the form of a public monument.

On Wednesday, the city of New York announced a permanent monument honoring gender non-conforming and trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

The Times reported that the two statues are proposed to be installed in the Ruth Wittenberg Triangle, a block away from where Johnson and Rivera played a key role in the seminal Stonewall Uprising––the 1969 resistance (initiated by Stormé DeLarverie in response to a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar) that paved the way for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.

As pioneering figures in the fight against racism, sexism, and transphobia, Johnson and Rivera were both drag queens afflicted by homelessness and cultural hostility at a time when trans rights were hardly recognized. In 1970, they worked together to found the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, a group that advocated for homeless gay youth (the term transgender was not widely used at the time).

This is not the first time the city has set out to commemorate the formative Stonewall uprising in a public memorial. In 1992, the city erected a set of statues in Christopher Park, featuring four seemingly cis-gender figures painted white. The monument, while probably made in good faith, was criticized for its failure to depict specific figures or include transgender women or people of color. In fact, it's been widely noted that the narrative of the gay rights movement often involves the erasure of trans women and POC activists. The statues of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera will hopefully go a short way towards combating that trend.

"The LGBTQ movement was portrayed very much as a white, gay male movement," New York's First Lady McCray told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday. "This monument counters that trend of whitewashing the history."

While the monuments are ostensibly a step in the right direction, this gesture can't undo the years of systemic violence against the trans community, particularly towards its POC members, by the city of New York. Despite Greenwich Village's storied past of gay rights liberation, the neighborhood has since become increasingly gentrified, rendering it financially, and perhaps culturally, inaccessible to many. Considering Johnson and Rivera's struggles with the erasure of marginalized trans bodies from the broader gay liberation movement, Greenwich Village's history is fraught with privilege and exclusion.

That being said, this announcement does demonstrate the city's effort to address New York's blatant gender gap in its public art. Among the hundreds of statues across New York City's five boroughs, only five depict historic women. The city says this monument to Johnson and Rivera will be one of the world's first for gender non-conforming and trans individuals.

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Photo by Shane (Unsplash)

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