A year ago today, I brought a cake to the hospital so my friend Chiara D’Agostino could celebrate her 48th birthday during her chemo appointment. Chiara died this August 4 of a complication of stage 4 triple negative metastatic breast cancer — leptomeningeal disease, in which the cancer invades the fluid around the brain and…
What Wendy Wore: Art by These Pink Lips, Part 2
In September, which was either last month or a thousand years ago, I introduced you to Iris Barbee Bonner, who creates wearable art — the best kind of art! — under the name These Pink Lips. You’ve seen Iris’s custom work on Cardi B … and me. View this post on Instagram Here’s a solo…
Throwback Thursday: Designer Patrick Kelly
Every time I think I’m settling back in to a daily blogging schedule, the urgent fight against white supremacists and dictatorship calls me away. Sometimes breaking news even cancels planned protest actions, like last weekend, when the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg caused my team to postpone our #TrumpRat art project in…
What Wendy Wore: Art by These Pink Lips, Part 1
Last year, I asked artist Andrew Lyko to paint my old motorcycle jacket so that it would be appropriate for cold-weather protesting. I requested a tribute to Never Again Action, a grass-roots collaboration between Jewish and immigrant-rights activists that started protesting U.S. concentration camps last summer. I wear the jacket to other protests too, so…
Like Audre Lorde Said, Find Your Work and Do It
Nearly every day, someone asks me if I have hope, and shares that they feel hopeless. I wish I could pour people a serving of hope the way I might supply an imaginary neighbor with a cup of sugar. (Do people still do that somewhere? “Borrow” sugar?) To be honest, I feel low on hope…
19 Years Later: Hypocrisy and Community
Nineteen years ago today, I was working at a building complex across the street from the World Trade Center. I was supposed to go to a meeting at my company’s WTC offices, but I decided I’d participate by phone instead. That was a stroke of luck, because that morning, 19 men — 15 of them…
Guess Who’s Back … With a Trump-Rat GoFundMe!
Hello? via GIPHY Is anyone out there? It’s been a long time since I’ve been on the blog, though I thought about it guiltily every day since my 13th-blogversary post in July. (By the way, unproductive, self-inflicted guilt: zero out of 4 stars, do not recommend.) If you follow my personal Instagram, you know that…
Meet the Rightful Queen on My 13th Blogversary
In honor of my 13th blogversary today, I’ve overcome some long-running technical problems and broken into my own blog in order to say hello. My dire need for a new website/blog developer (comment with your resume!) reminds me of the good old days of my blog’s random removal from listings by the now-defunct search-engine Technorati…
Throwback Thursday: The Man, the Dog, and Liza
I’ve been away from this blog for 2 1/2 weeks — the longest I’ve gone without posting since I started on Blogger in July 2007. If you’ve visited me here at least a few times since November 2016, you can probably guess what I’ve been up to. I’ll get into the ultra-serious stuff in the…
RIP, Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer, a writer and one of the earliest AIDS activists, died today at age 84. You can read his full resume in the many obituaries that have been and will be published but, in short, Kramer was a co-founder of two AIDS activism groups — Gay Men’s Health Crisis, in 1982, which provided support…