I have a confession to make: I actually didn’t do much for Pride Month this year. I feel like I blinked and suddenly all my friends were posting pictures of…
Clitbait Resource List: Queer Pasts, Presents, and Futures.
Discovering your sexuality and gender identity necessitates wrestling with the future. What will your life be like, if you continue to live outside of cisgender and heterosexual expectations? Perhaps it…
A Pride of Lionesses: the Queer Culture of Women’s Football
“She’s out.” My friend whispered, as we watched the Lionesses run onto the pitch. “So’s she. She used to date one of her teammates.” This commentary preceded the Lionesses’ stunning 4-0 semi-final victory over Sweden, which we watched at my local sports pub. My friends and I had been invited to join the table of two women, who we had met at the previous England game. We’d bonded with the couple over not just our love of the Lionesses (after all, half of our group had been loudly cheering for Spain) but through a tacit acknowledgement of our shared queer identities…
“Do you enjoy what you do?”: George Michael, Beyoncé, and the Right to Rest
“The right to rest”, or resting as somehow radical, political, or subversive, are thoughts that I’ve been mulling over since January of this year. In my mind, January is a particularly fraught moment when it comes to rest, leisure, and relaxation. Conventional wisdom dictates that the new year is the time for setting goals and dreaming of future productivity — I’ll exercise more, I’ll finally write that article — but, in reality, lots of us are still hungover and languishing in the post-Christmas lull…
Harnessing the Green-Eyed Monsters
It’s clear that politics and emotions are inseparable across the political spectrum. How could they not be? After all, when we vote, we’re voting based on which candidates and policies best bolster our hopes, assuage our fears, and share our anger. After each election, we see the same images time and again: overtired candidates and campaigners, crowded in some church-hall-turned-polling-station, moved to both elation and tears. It’s just the colour of the rosettes that changes between the photos…
Dreams and Nightmares in Audrey Diwan’s Happening
The night after we watched L’événement (Happening), a 2021 French drama currently receiving a British release, two of my friends had dreams about being pregnant. This, I think, is the greatest testament to the power of Audrey Diwan’s direction and Anamaria Vartolomei’s leading performance: we began dissecting the film the second the cinema lights lifted; carried on for the whole walk home; through three rounds in the pub; and still we couldn’t get the story out of our heads…
The Home Front of the Culture War
Considering that we are currently witnessing one of the most serious conflicts in Europe in recent decades, you’d be forgiven for wondering why so much of the surrounding discourse appears preoccupied with pronouns, gender, and sexuality – topics that perhaps, on their surface, appear only tangentially, if at all, related…
Not Funny Then, and Not Funny Now: Responding to the Changing HIV Epidemic
New figures released last month by the UK Health Security Agency, to mark the beginning of National HIV Testing Week (7th-13th February), have revealed the changing form of the HIV epidemic in the UK. For the first time in a decade, the number of new HIV diagnoses in England is higher among heterosexual people than gay and bisexual men…
Meet the CB Team: Ruby Hann
Meet the Clitbait Team: an interview Ruby Hann, Politics Writer…