Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i GAY TIMES

It’s been our biggest and busiest Pride season here at GAY TIMES. With the current conversation around LGBTQ+ rights becoming increasingly concerning, we were adamant that we wanted to create spaces where our community felt safe and celebrated. Our Pride Placard Pop-Up store on London’s iconic Regent Street saw thousands of people stop by to create their statements of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community to carry during Pride marches this summer. From young children to older members of our community, we saw so many of you come together to create banners calling for greater protections for our trans+ siblings, LGBTQ+ refugees, LGBTQ+ education, our drag performers, queer people of colour, and our community as a whole. It was a space abundant in creativity and connection, all fueled by our collective…

Trashy Clothing SS23 Desert Delights Collection From £30 It’s time to trash societal conditioning and get subversive! Trashy Clothing is the Palestinian fashion label that is using fashion to question outdated beliefs and perceptions of the Middle East. Omar Braika and Shukri Lawrence are the creative minds behind the ready-to-wear label. Characterising their brand as a daring mix of satire, kitsch, and wit, the label’s goal is to address difficult political circumstances by conveying design statements of anti-colonial resistance and joyful artistic militancy. In the face of the ongoing occupation, joy is weaponized through fashionable humour to actively resist colonial attempts of erasure. The brand produces and showcases collections tackling issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, using fashion as a medium for challenging pre-established knowledge. With a focus on…

"We're making history because we've never seen Asian faces in this way,” says Joy Ride star Sherry Cola. Directed by Adele Lim, the acclaimed film is, unquestionably, an instant comedy classic for its rare depiction of Asian people - in Cola’s words - ‘doing drugs’ whilst having ‘fun, sex and a K-Pop music video fantasy!’ From the co-screenwriter of Crazy Rich Asians, Joy Ride stars Cola, Ashley Park, Shephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu as four mismatched chums on a bonkers and debauchery-filled adventure to China. Cola, best known for her role as Alice Kwan on Good Trouble, plays Lolo, a sex-positive artist who makes, well, sex-positive art. “This is the most liberated version of myself that I've ever portrayed because, stereotypically, society has put us in the box of ‘timid’…

Alexis Michelle describes her run on Drag Race All Stars 8 as - no surprise here - “controversial”: “I take responsibility. I said what I said. I did what I did. Did I feel great about it then? Not necessarily. Do I feel great about it now? Not necessarily.” From her seemingly duplicitous lipstick choices to the hysterical outbursts that memorably elicited viral death stares from Jessica Wild, as well as her perplexing stance in the Kandy Muse, Heidi N Closet and Jimbo saga, Alexis took centre stage in a majority of this season’s conflama. (Give her a producing-related Primetime Emmy now.) While the Sister Mary Koontz star arguably deserves her flowers for elevating a rather divisive season of Drag Race, her social media has been a feeding ground for…

South Asians make up the largest minority group in the UK, with British Asians making up 9.3% of the population. It might surprise you, then, that 2023 marks only the third South Asian Heritage Month in the UK. South Asian queer history is rich, from kinky Mughal paintings of women repurposing carrots as sex toys and the renowned carvings in many Hindu temples of orgies, to the revered hijra (often translated as ‘third gender’) communities across the subcontinent, who are invited into homes to bless newborns. Yet with both South Asian history and LGBTQ+ history frequently overlooked, the same is true of the intersection of the two. Dr Rohit K Dasgupta is an academic at the University of Glasgow. Together with Dr Churnjeet Mahn, he worked on the Cross Border…