A potentially very alarming blog comment about tonight’s anti-trafficking legislation:
“It just passed, but the -entire- text of the law was replaced with different wording that seems odd to me, sentences are dramatically reduced, and the wording is possibly unenforceable. Is it -legal- to require STD testing of criminals? I was unaware that people forfeit their bodies to the state unless they’re incarcerated.”
I wasn’t there, unfortunately, so this is all I know right now.
It’s kind of a sad day for celebrity news, with Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both dying. But on a brighter note, director Paul Morrissey seems to be doing better after being hit by a U-Haul truck the other day. Though the internet is almost completely devoid of information on this subject, Bruce LaBruce’s Twitter reports that the filmmaker is doing better and isn’t, as previously reported, brain-dead.
According to the website contactmusic.com–I don’t know either–the seventy-one year old director of two of my favorite films–Flesh and Blood For Dracula–was more concerned about his accident upsetting the health of his ninety-six year old mother. Morrissey was a regular at Warhol’s Factory, despite the fact that he was straight-edge and not super-gay. I have no idea why he stuck around, but his work with Warhol, especially Trash, is (sometimes) really beautiful.
[image: Joe D'Allessandro in a still from Flesh]
Filed under: hookers, people from rhode island | Tags: prostitution, rhode island, taiwan
Tonight the Rhode Island senate is going to be voting on the anti-prostitution bill. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to pass, which is a good thing, and it also doesn’t seem like people are even that interested; the Providence Journal article about the senate hearings mentioned that six of the ten senators on the committee didn’t even stay to hear all the testimony.
That didn’t stop URI professor Donna Hughes from calling the event a circus, though. In an editorial published yesterday she describes the “outrageous appearance” of people who didn’t support the bill, mentioning, basically, that one had tattoos and the others were Asian (!). Megan from Oh Megan–the one with the tattoos pictured above–responded with a letter that’ll be published in tomorrow’s Journal:
Putting quotation marks around my profession was insulting. And yes, it is not “made up” that I am a contributor to the sex-workers magazine $pread. Is it so shocking that sex-workers can read?
It’s true, Hughes does like to use quotation marks, even referring to sex in her editorial as “it.” If she were my grandmother, that would make sense and be fine, but this woman teaches women’s studies and was presumably raised at some point after 1930. You’d think her views of sex would be a little less spinsterish. But no. At least the editorial has a bright side, in that she’s pessimistic about the bill actually passing.
In other news, Taiwan today (or yesterday, I guess, or maybe tomorrow–I don’t understand time zones) opted to decriminalize prostitution, thanks to sex workers advocating for their own rights.
A Connecticut news team reported on a story about the Manifest Glory Ministry, a Bridgeport Church that perfomed a gay exorcism and then put it on YouTube. It’s pretty grim, despite the usual hilarity/awkwardness about local television news using YouTube as source material.
It’s kind of easy to forget that stuff like this happens in New England and not just in the rural South. (I don’t mean that in an anti-South way. It’s just that this kind of zealotry and homophobia is completely foreign to me.)
I went to the Eagle last night to see Team Robespierre and the Chinese Stars. Team Robespierre are awesome live, despite the fact that their recorded output sounds like a Brooklyn-y version of They Might Be Giants. In a live setting, the singer’s voice isn’t nearly so grating and the melodies are a lot more memorable. Highly recommended, if they come to your town. Also, the drummer is wicked hot.
The Chinese Stars are probably–and have been for a while now, probably–my favorite local band, and they were awesome as well. Formed a while ago now from the ruins of Arab On Radar and Six Finger Satellite, they’ve managed to pull off the noisy hipster dance-punk thing a lot better than most people who go that route, probably because they’re a little older and not so American Apparel-oriented. (Although the show was attended by a number of girls wearing glasses three times the size of their head. What the hell.)
