Weekend Update: The $60 Million Birthday Boy

Weekend Update: The $60 Million Birthday Boy

So this weekend, Donald Trump celebrated turning 80 by throwing himself a UFC fight card on the lawn of the White House. Not metaphorically. Literally. A 5,000-seat temporary arena, complete with an octagonal fight cage, was erected on the South Lawn of the White House. Where Marine One lands. Where kids scramble around during the Easter Egg Roll every spring. They called it UFC Freedom 250 - a $60 million spectacle nominally honoring the 250th anniversary of American independence, but timed specifically to Trump's birthday.  [https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/white-house-ufc-primer-9.7232386]

Pink Patriarchy: Pride Edition - The Good Queers and the Bad Whores

There is a particular kind of progressive politics that loves queer people right up until queer survival becomes inconvenient. You can see it everywhere once you recognize the pattern. Organizations celebrate LGBTQ inclusion while supporting laws that criminalize sex work. Politicians march in Pride parades while funding expanded policing powers that disproportionately target trans women. Feminist groups issue statements about bodily autonomy while endorsing "end demand" frameworks that destabilize the lives of many queer and marginalized people surviving in underground economies. The same institutions that post rainbow graphics in June will quietly back legislation in September that makes criminalized communities measurably less safe. And somehow, remarkably, this contradiction is rarely treated like a contradiction at all. That is not an oversight. It is a feature.

The Lesbian Feminist Who Refused to Abandon Sex Workers: Pat Califia and the Politics of Sexual Dissent

One of the strangest recurring patterns inside institutional feminism is how efficiently it forgets the women who challenged its boundaries most aggressively. Not accidentally forgets - the forgetting tends to be too consistent and too convenient to be accidental. The women who are quietly edited out of official histories are usually the ones whose existence raises questions the institution is not prepared to answer. The ones whose politics could not be absorbed without requiring something to change.

Pink Patriarchy: Pride Edition: Pride in Pastels - How Queer Liberation Got Sanitized

This episode examines how corporate branding and institutional sponsorship have sanitized Pride, erasing its origins in criminalization, survival economies, and radical queer resistance. It highlights how marginalized groups—sex workers, trans people, incarcerated queer folks—are often treated as public relations liabilities rather than communities in need of protection, and argues for a return to pride as a challenge to state violence, poverty, and exclusion.

The Lesbian Feminist Who Refused to Abandon Sex Workers: Pat Califia and the Politics of Sexual Dissent

One of the strangest recurring patterns inside institutional feminism is how efficiently it forgets the women who challenged its boundaries most aggressively. Not accidentally forgets - the forgetting tends to be too consistent and too convenient to be accidental. The women who are quietly edited out of official histories are usually the ones whose existence raises questions the institution is not prepared to answer. The ones whose politics could not be absorbed without requiring something to change. Especially queer women. Especially kinky women. Especially sex workers. Especially anyone who refused to separate sexual liberation from political liberation, or who insisted that the two were not just compatible but inseparable - that a feminism willing to use the state to regulate sexuality was not actually a feminism interested in women's freedom. That is a significant part of why Pat Califia remains such an important figure, and one so often deliberately overlooked, in both feminist and LGBTQ history. Califia's work was foundational. It was also, for large portions of the institutional feminist world, deeply unwelcome - and that combination of foundational and unwelcome is precisely why the erasure has been so persistent and so instructive.