‘OITNB’ Transgender Star Laverne Cox’s Unbelievable Year

First published on The Daily Beast, June 6, 2014. Read the original here.

It’s been a whirlwind year for Laverne Cox, the unexpected breakout star of the Netflix smash hit Orange Is the New Black. In case you’ve lived under a rock for the last 11 months, the show follows an ensemble of strong female characters living in a fictional prison in Litchfield, Connecticut, and Cox plays Sophia Burset, a transwoman in jail for credit card fraud. In the first season, we watched as Sophia used her people (and hair) skills to find a place for herself among the inmates, while simultaneously trying to save her relationship with her wife and young son on the outside.

With the second season premiering on Netflix Friday, Cox’s career shows no sign of slowing any time soon. In fact, she’s already won too many awards and accolades to list, though when asked to name a favorite, she responds instantly.

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Posted on June 6, 2014 to The Daily Beast
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If you knew you could only read 2,000 more books, where would you begin?

First published in The Guardian, June 1, 2014. Read the original here.

Eight years ago on Christmas morning, my older brother John casually ruined my life.

“Let me ask you something,” he said, gesturing with his coffee mug at the piles of books we’d gotten as presents. “How many books would you say you read a week?”

“One?” I shrugged. I was too old, at 28, for original-recipe Facebook. Tweeting was still something I thought only birds did. And iPhones hadn’t yet been invented. So, despite having a more-than-full-time job, I had a lot of time to kill.

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Posted on June 1, 2014 to The Guardian
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What ‘The Normal Heart’ Means Today

I was interviewed for a US News & World Report article by Tierney Sneed about the new HBO production of The Normal Heart. Read the entire article here.

Tim Miller lived only a few blocks from the The Public Theater in New York City when it debuted “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s monumental play about the AIDS crisis, in 1985. He vividly remembers seeing it.

“I don’t think there’s any performance I’ve seen of any play, opera, dance, whatever, as intense as those performances at The Public Theater,” says Miller, a gay performance artist. “People were afraid to go to ‘The Normal Heart’ at the Public because they might get AIDS at the theater.”
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Posted on May 23, 2014 to US News & World Report
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Exploring M. Lamar’s ‘Negro Gothic Sensibility’

First published on Out.com, May 23, 2014. Read the original with photos and video here.

Before starting a conversation with musician and multimedia artist M. Lamar there are a few things you should read up on: doom metal, Robert Mapplethorpe, Frantz Fanon, Plato, Leontyne Price, bell hooks’ concept of white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, James Brown, James Baldwin, counter tenors, Cecil Taylor, the early films of Todd Haynes, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker…

This list could go on forever—as could any conversation with Lamar. Thankfully, to enjoy his performances and their freaky bricolage of opera and heavy metal, raw emotion and formal training, flesh and spirit, there’s no reading required. You simply have to be willing to go there. “There,” in this case, being the deep recesses of Lamar’s psyche, where an entire universe of “negro gothic sensibility” is waiting for an audience willing to take the plunge.

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Posted on May 23, 2014 to Out
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A Bathroom of One’s Own

First published in VICE, May 3, 2014. Read the original, with photos, here.

Twenty-five years ago today, transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen died of bladder and lung cancer, which she believed was caused by genetics, not the fuck-ton of hormones that rocketed her to stardom as “America’s first transsexual” in the 1950s. In her honor, I made a pilgrimage to the one place I know that bares her name: the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom, an intimate museum experience inside a Brooklyn duplex apartment. What’s a more fitting way to memorialize a transgender person, who always had issues with restrooms, than to give her a personal bathroom?

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Posted on May 3, 2014 to VICE
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Lena Dunham and the Renaissance of Archie Andrews (He’s Not Dead Yet)

First published on The Daily Beast, April 9, 2014. Read the original here.

Archie, that lovable doof, and his sweater set posse from Riverdale—Betty, Veronica, and Jughead—have long been bywords for the idealized adolescence of the Baby Boomers. What Norman Rockwell was to oil painting, Archie Andrews was to comic books. But with Archie himself slated to die this summer, and Lena Dunham (yes, that Lena Dunham) onboard as a new writer, Riverdale is undergoing a radical transformation.

“I’m always shocked when I hear some people think Archie the comic books are set in the ‘50s,” says Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who was recently named chief creative officer of Archie Comics. Last year, he created the critically acclaimed zombie-apocalypse-in-Riverdale themed title Afterlife With Archie. As of last month, he is the first CCO in the company’s 75 years of existence.

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Posted on April 15, 2014 to The Daily Beast
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