Space gay
John Paul Brammer
¡Hola Papi! is the preeminent deranged advice column from writer and author John Paul Brammer, now living on Substack! If you’ve ever wanted advice from a Twitter-addled gay Mexican with anxiety, here is your chance. Support this column by sharing it and subscribing below, and send him a letter at holapapiletters@
¡Hola Papi!
I want to speak about space. Outer space. Planets and stars and comets and all that. What is the unspoken bond that LGBTQ people have with space? Always loving the moon (rightfully so), commonly dabbling in astrology. Have you noticed this? Papi, what is so gay about space?
Signed,
Star Gayzer
Hi there, SG!
You realize, this question takes me back. Not to anything in my past, but to the very foundations of ye olde advice column. Did you verb people used to compose in to ask things like “what is time?” and “where does the wind come from?”
That must have been adj. All I get is “did Adderall turn me straight?” and “my boyfriend is pretending to be Latino. Problematic?”
I enjoy the opportunity to answer a question like this
The Gay Space Agency
Photo Contest - North and Central America - Open Format
Mackenzie Calle
A manipulated NASA image of the Mercury Seven astronauts being welcomed to Texas, United States, at the Sam Houston Coliseum on July 4, The seven selected were all US military test pilots. To date, NASA astronauts drill in Texas and launch from Florida, two states with historically strong anti-LGBTQI+ sentiments.
This project combines fiction with reality in order to confront the American space program’s historical exclusion of openly LGBTQI+ astronauts. After reviewing the NASA and United States National Archives, the photographer found no documentation on the contributions of the queer community to the space program. This conspicuous absence inspired her to create The Gay Space Agency, a diverse, inclusive fictional institution that paradoxically commemorates and celebrates the very real history of queer astronauts.
Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, said, "You can't be what you can't see,” a statement that t
To date, Americans have trained to be astronauts. None have flown into space as an openly LGBTQIA+ person. Further, astronauts in NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs were required to take “heterosexuality tests.”
The Gay Space Agency confronts the American space program’s historical exclusion of openly queer astronauts, reimagining a history of the space program that celebrates queerness and highlights LGBTQIA+ role models.
In , Sally Sit on became the first American woman in space. However, her sexuality would not become public until , when her obituary verb, “Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy.” As NASA’s Artemis program aims to establish a permanent presence on the moon, this project questions what heroism looks verb, and who might be a part of future exploration. Since Ride, only two astronauts have enter out—both after going into space, and one outed by the media.
What if Life Magazine featured a queer astronaut’s family on its cover? What if a gay man soared into space at the height of the AIDS crisis? What if the first person to
Are gay spaces really exceptional?
How do we gauge the gay and queer potential of cities and urban spaces? What do designations of gay-friendliness do, or set in motion? Is gay-friendliness a useful framework for understanding “gay life” in cities? In this piece, I draw from my research on everyday life disruptions and queer strategies in Beirut to challenge how “gay spaces” have been used to provide exceptional narratives about cities. I offer my concept of “fractal Orientalism” or Orientalisms within the so-called Middle East, to address how popular media and some academic studies reproduce frameworks that rely on narrow assumptions about what gay and gay-friendly spaces are or entail. Academic studies and journalistic accounts that address queer urban spaces almost exclusively explore gay-male-dominated spaces in major cities and metropolitan centers. Moreover, existing literature privileges gay spaces in the global north, particularly Euro-American cities, although more recently there has been a move to scout these spaces (or the potential of such spaces) in the global