fake gays, is Reputation overrated? & Passing (2021) dir. Rebecca Hall

Some scintillating takes for listeners on season 3's episode 3 of The Lavender Menace! Including but not limited to: are "fake bisexuals" real/bad/an issue? (Short answer is no. The issue is always heterosexism.) Is Taylor Swift a good person? Are Letterboxd reviewers the worst? Renaissance and Sunny fervently defend Taylor Swift's album 'Reputation' in response to our 17 year old gaylor listener's hot take submission, discuss the political implications of her potential "coming out" (which we argue, has already occurred), and how she operates as an artist in the world we live in. After the regularly scheduled hot take portion of the pod, Renaissance discusses how the recently released Rebecca Hall adaptation of Nella Larsen's Passing, available on Netflix, portrays inter-community Black issues in a nuanced and intelligent way that many audience members are seeming to miss. Sunny looks at Passing from a comparative analysis perspective as someone who read and loved the classic Harlem Renaissance book the film is based on. In cross-referencing fictionalized experiences to real life people's history, as recorded in the seminal nonfiction book Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton Jr.'s chapter 7, titled "Crossing The Color Line" (available to read for free on Archive.org), Sunny and Renaissance discuss the historical and pop cultural relevancy of the questions Passing brings up about racial identity, visibility and Blackness, and the legitimate unique racial experiences regarding cross-cultural and boundary crossing that people experience. Renaissance also compares the experience of watching the film to reading the Toni Morrison short story, Recitatif, in their similar authorial manipulation of racial perception for the narratives' consumer. And transitioning into the regularly scheduled third part of the podcast, Sunny recommends the semi recently released and critically acclaimed Brit Bennet novel The Vanishing Half, which follows two sisters over the course of their lives and the varying racial experiences they have as white passing Black women in 20th century American society. Renaissance recommends the movie Aimée and Jaguar (1999) dir. Max Färberböck for the lesbian period piece goodness of it all, as well as its portrayal of the dynamics and contradictions of racial/ethnic perception in the context of another 20th century caste society- Nazi Germany.

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