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Adam Ant on Tour

his current badass self rocking a skirt for London’s Fashion Week.

There are only a few US dates left, and I am pleased as punch I got to see him in Milwaukee. He still has so much stage charisma it’s ridiculous, and he’s doing a ton of the old punk songs – like “Zerox Machine”! – which makes antfans like me seriously happy.

If anyone out there wants to buy my round-trip airfare to the Pacific NW, I’d love to go see the Seattle & Portland shows which happen this upcoming weekend! Really. I’m not kidding. Even a little. I nearly drove to Minneapolis the day after the Milwaukee show to see him again.

Here he is doing a cool version of “Antmusic“, and for those of you who never saw him, this is the beauty that was Adam back in the day, doing “Physical (You’re So)” (which some of you may know from when NIN’s Trent Reznor covered it).

Here he is in the late 70s, back in the punk days, in the Derek Jarman film Jubilee, with the band that would eventually become Bow Wow Wow, playing “Plastic Surgery”.

& The best part of this clip is all the aging punk rockers doing the “Prince Charming”.

I can’t even begin to explain how or why this man saved my life, but he did.

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Janet Mock on Misgendering of Islan Nettles

If you haven’t read this piece by Janet Mock about how it felt to hear Islan Nettles misgendered at her own memorial yet, do.

My heart dropped each time I watched your face cringe with each misgendering. This is more than semantics, more than a family issue, this is our lives. We all know Islan was beaten to death because she fought hard to be Islan, to be she, to be her. Many of us come from black families, complicated families, families that take their own time with pronouns and names – so we were quiet, giving a grieving mother space to mourn her baby – yet we could not ignore that the misgendering that happened in that space was triggering and it was not merely a private matter. It was public and it was made public by the cis gay and lesbian organizers who distributed the flyers that called it a “community vigil,” who sat the grieving black family center stage for the media to photograph, who invited the local camera crews to capture the footage, who gave the mayoral candidates a “gay community-friendly” photo op.

It’s a beautiful, if heartbreaking piece, and I wonder how long it will take, & how many women like Janet Mock, before we get our act together.