Featured Writing
A community of urban ballroom dancers in Detroit has been decimated by covid. But the survivors aim to keep on dancing.
The Washington Post Magazine, Feb. 2, 2022.
Charlotte Andrews has hazy memories from the three weeks she spent on a ventilator in the early part of the pandemic... Her life wasn’t the only thing that hung in the balance. Andrews, who is 72, was put on a ventilator March 16, the same day that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an emergency order closing bars and restaurants across Michigan. That order shuttered Club Yesterday’s, a nightclub Andrews opened in 1996 to be a home to Detroit’s distinctive style of couples dancing, known as club ballroom, urban ballroom or Detroit-style ballroom. The dance community she had been building and celebrating for nearly a quarter-century was also fighting for its life...
Trans People Leaving Ukraine Face Danger and Transphobia. This Organization Is a Safe Haven.
Teen Vogue, June 1, 2022.
Olha Poliakova first realized something was wrong at 5:20 a.m. when her cat leapt from his usual sleeping spot on her shoulder...
Poliakova and her team arrived in Transcarpathia to find that an emergency LGBTQ shelter in the region was filling up with people who couldn’t leave. The shelter’s manager, a Ukrainian staffer with a European LGBTQ organization supporting Ukraine’s queer movement, asked Poliakova if Gender Stream could take on the work of helping displaced people with male documents navigate the military bureaucracy and the border patrol.
“I didn’t know that [this task was] impossible, and said ok,” Poliakova told Teen Vogue. “If we need to do that, we will do that.”...
They Wanted to Be a Better Class of White Nationalists. They Claimed This Man as Their Father.
Fifty years ago, France lost a war while trying to keep millions of Muslims French citizens. One French writer launched a movement to rethink “identity” in its aftermath and helped reinvent nationalism for the 21st century.
BuzzFeed News, Dec. 27, 2017.
PARIS — The man the alt-right claims as its spiritual father is a 74-year-old who lives with four cats in a Paris apartment around the corner from a Creole restaurant, a West African clothing store, and a Peruvian supermarket...
