About the Contributors! Nanna Venter (Front Cover + pg 2, pgs 19 - 21) More work from Nanna Venter can be found on Instagram @nannaventer
Decolonise Fest (pg 4 + 5) @decolonisefest Stephanie Phillips’ twitter is @stephanopolus
Francesca Vaney (pg 6) Francesca is a zine editor, DJ and reluctant crafter at Fan Club. She can be found on skates with Nottingham Roller Derby @noisyhearts Alanna Jean (pg 8 + 9) Alanna is a Nottingham-based artist. alannajeanillustration.com @alannajeanillustration
Danielle Butterflies (pg 7 + 24) @__needles_and_pens__ etsy.com/uk/shop/NeedlesAndPensStore
Rosie Hughes (Pg 9) Rosie lives in York and is a member of a creative writing group with multi-award winning poet Pat Borthwick. She’s finally starting to take her writing more seriously but is still afraid of the blank page! @ RosebudHughes
Sarah Louise Bennett (pg 10 + 11) Sarah is a music photographer published in numerous publications including Rolling Stone, Upset Magazine, Dork, DIY Magazine, Kerrang!, The Observer & Rock Sound. See more at: www.slb.photography Olivia Ehrhart (Pg 12) More of Olivia’s work can be found on Instagram or Facebook @bearheartdesigns Sarah Lay (pg 12 + 13) Sarah is co-founder of Reckless Yes Records and editor of Louder Than War. She is also a freelance digital content strategist. @sarahlay recklessyes.com Kellie Huskisson (Pg 14 + 15) louderthanwar.com sarahlay.com You can find more by Kellie at Instagram and Etsy @k_doodles_art etsy.com/uk/shop/kelliedoodles Rachel Nelson (pg 16 + 17) Rachel can be found at the glitter stand on a Fan Club night. She loves coffee, reading, friendship, biscuits and glitter. No one could doubt her commitment to Sparkle Motion. @Rachellous Arlan Hamilton (pg 17 + 18) is CEO of Backstage Capital Investments. @ArlanWasHere
Sanaa Asim (pg 18) More of Sanaa’s writing can be found at glumgirls.weebly.com
Kristin Russo (pg 20 - 23) Kristin is amongst other things the CEO of LGBTQ organisation Everyone Is Gay, the author of ‘This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids’, and one half of the incredible podcast ‘Buffering the Vampire Slayer’. everyoneisgay.com
Chloe Cheeseman (pg 24) Chloe can be found on twitter at @chloe_cheeseman
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We really hope you enjoy reading this zine, which is focused on inspirational women. We have a fantastic collection of work by artists and writers to share with you in our tenth issue, from women who find comfort and strength in women’s stories, women who want to give thanks to those in our lives who inspire us, as well as women celebrating themselves. If you’re kicking yourself for not submitting to this issue of the zine, get in touch! We’re always wanting to provide a platform for women’s stories, art, writing and whatever else you want contact us at fanclubzine@gmail.com to chat about your ideas. - Kaylea, Rachel and Francesca xo Fan Club’s focus is to promote female-identifying artists, designers, musicians and creatives, whilst hanging out and making friends in a safe space, dancing and drinking to a female-influenced soundtrack. We strive to be completely accessible in all of the events that we put on, we’re not-for-profit and put 100% of money made from our events back into future events. UPCOMING EVENTS: Galentines Party! 4th February 2017 19:00 - Late In honour of our President Leslie Knope, and all of the amazing gals and pals that support Fan Club, we’re throwing a galentines party! Grab your bestest gals and pals, and celebrate the best day of the year with waffles, snake juice and lots and lots of love. Ladies celebrating ladies. Happy 2nd Birthday Fan Club! 4th March 2017 Times TBC but it’ll be a late one! Last year we put on an incredible all-day festival with talented bands and DJs from all over. This year we’re planning on something even bigger, including a silent disco and DOUBLE the amount of cake, glitter, and confetti cannons. Rosie Crabbe (pg 25) You can find more about Rosie’s delicious baking adventures on her website and instragram teaandcakebakehouse.co.uk @teaandcakebakehouse Rebecca Edwards (pg 26 + 27) You can see more of what Rebecca gets up to in Japan on instagram @edamame.chan or you can sign up to her weekly newsletter Catherine Johnson (pg 27) tinyletter.com/tokyo_today Catherine has been fascinated with Japan since she was 16. Her constant desire to learn about the people and culture of Japan has brough her to the very centre of the country where she spends her days adventuring and drawing. Julie Gough (Back page) japancurious.com You can find more of Julie’s work at apalelandscape.co.uk
@apalelandscale illustratedwomeninhistory.com @illustratedwomeninhistory
@FANCLUBNOTTS FACEBOOK.COM/FANCLUBNOTTS
Event Production/Zine and Design Kaylea Mitchem Zine Managing Editors/Event Support Rachel Nelson Francesca Vaney
What is Decolonise Fest?
Decolonise Fest is a festival that celebrates and promotes people of colour in the punk scene. It will take place on 2-3 June 2017 in London. The organising group behind the fest is all punx of colour because we really know best about what we need and what we can create for other POCs. We define people of colour as people who are descended (through one or both parents) from the original inhabitants of Africa, Caribbean, Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Australasia, North America, and the islands of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean.
How did the idea for Decolonise Fest come about?
It came from that feeling that we should have something for us currently but we don’t. I was going to do something similar with my band Big Joanie but we never had the time. Though Afropunk is in the UK now it’s definitely aiming at a different market and there still needs to be support and a space for punx of colour. I was waiting for someone else to start it but no one did basically. The name came about through the idea of decolonising punk and removing the colonial, mainstream, white-dominated rhetoric that has led it to become so linked to the punk scene at the moment and bring punk back to its roots where it is something that everyone can take part it and enjoy. To be punk is to rebel and as POCs we rebel every day of our lives and therefore are punk.
What are the main aims of Decolonise Fest?
We want to create a space for punx of colour in a world that either denies their existence or makes it hard for them to feel comfortable in punk spaces and in our own community. We want to encourage more POCs to get involved in the punk scene, start the band they always wanted to exist and to create a sustainable community in the UK that spreads outside of London and to the rest of the UK. We also want to show the great things that can happen when POCs get together. We’ll have workshops, art spaces and stalls alongside bands which will all be POC focused.
Who are the WOC/QTIPOC punx that inspire you, past or present?
I love Sister Rosetta Tharpe as she defined Rock n roll, influenced a generation, played the most amazing guitar solos and she performed on her wedding day to a crowd of thousands in her wedding dress, which is beyond cool. Also I love Poly Styrene as she was so original and innovative. Currently I’ve been listening to Solange’s new album non-stop like everyone else. She’s inspiring because she really opened my eyes to the different ways to talk about oppression but also celebrate our communities. If any POCs want to get involved in our organising group or want to learn more about what we’re doing email us at decolonisefest@gmail.com
A five-step guide to discovering art by women I’m using ‘art’ as a catch-all term to mean books, writing, films, music, designers, makers, podcasters and more, so whatever form of art you’re interested in, you can find more of it being made by some seriously awesome and inspirational women. Through all these mediums, I think it’s so important to look at the representation of women and focus on increasing and diversifying the ways in which women are represented. There are so many important, interesting, exciting, sad, heartbreaking, uplifting stories to be told by and about women and these should be seen as equally as important as men’s stories. Additionally, supporting women creating art increases the profile and opportunities available for creative women. But it can be hard to find something new if you don’t know where to start, so here’s my tried-and-tested five-step guide to finding more art by women. 1. Ask for a recommendation Friends, bookshop staff, people who work in record shops, stallholders at zine fairs...the list of people you can ask goes on. I love doing this, I’ve discovered some of my favourite things this way, and it’s a great way of discovering something new that may be out of your usual comfort zone. If you don’t know who to ask, there’s always an open call on Twitter or even an internet search for ‘x by women’ to get you started. 2. Listen It can sometimes be harder for women’s voices to be heard, particularly in traditionally male-dominated industries, so you may have to dig a little deeper. There are women creating in all different fields, so if you keep asking and keep digging, eventually you’ll strike gold. Listen to women who are making and consuming the kind of art you’re interested in, and they’ll lead you in the right direction. 3. Explore Once you’ve started looking for art by women, you’ll find that there’s far more of it in reach than you expected. When I was a teenager, few of the bands I listened to or went to see featured any women at all. Now it’s unusual for me to attend a show where no women play, at least on the smaller scale DIY circuit. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to see one band on a lineup and come home a fan of three more. 4. Find a community Related to that, as you look for art by women you’ll find various hubs and communities that champion and celebrate it, and those places can open up so many doors in terms of discovery, and can be hugely valuable in so many ways. Fan Cub itself is a great example of one of these communities, and through the zines, shows, events and DJ sets there are so many amazing bands and artists just waiting to be discovered and, even better, so many people to share those discoveries with. 5. Talk about the art you love Once you’ve found something you love, share it. Whether its snaps of your comic book haul on Instagram, writing a review of a film you’ve seen, lending a friend a great book or just tweeting about something that you think is particularly great will help support the artists you love, show people that there is amazing art by women being created and maybe inspire someone else to check it out. *All of this can apply equally to art by people of colour, people with disabilities, LGBT+ people and any other people or groups that are underrepresented in mainstream media, arts and culture.
Words by Francesca Vaney Illustration by Danielle Butterflies
Frida Kahlo is a massive inspiration in my life. I find her inspiring because she lived for her art until the very end. She struggled with disability and pain, all of her life, but she never let that hold her back. Her work reminds me to make my art, despite all that I think might be stopping me; I think that she is just amazing.
Words and illustrations by Alanna Jean
Grandma’s Library Kitchen I honey-glazed her war-poem collections, she rolled out her Hemingways and Bill Brysons, and soaked her bird books in hot spiced rum. She lined the shelves with fondant icing and nursery rhymes came hot from the oven. Candied orange peel marked favourite pages. We whisked together her gardening books, made delicious rose and lavender meringue, her pearl necklace chiming on her apron. We once made passion fruit cake and looked up hieroglyphics, tore out words like papyrus, Egyptians, and folded them into the mixture. Afterwards, we would sit by the Aga to eat our fill, chatting and singing between each blackbird taking flight from our mouths.
By Rosie Hughes
Emotion is the common thread that connects all great music and that’s what has always drawn me to photograph it. The power of someone’s honesty and spilling their guts on stage will never not give me the chills. My work as a music photographer is predominantly within the maledominated realms of the rock and punk music that I grew up listening to but, as a woman, I increasingly want to hear other women’s stories. I want to hear their passion, their anger and their joy because it’s what I know and relate to. I want to see it too, and as a photographer I believe it’s absolutely vital that these women are visible to other women. Women deserve to see photos in magazines of other women actually doing things and being totally badass and awesome at those things. Rock music media in particular has a
legacy of unnecessarily sexualising, and in turn, trivialising women - when it can be bothered to even feature or depict them at all. Perhaps it’s because of the age-old notion that women should be seen and not heard that women have to battle for every inch of column space in this particularly loud and aggressive genre, but I feel like, ever so slowly, we are starting to make progress. More girls and women and their work are being featured in print, though tokenism is rife, with a clear lack of effort taken to seek out any new or unproven femaleled music.
Words and images by Sarah Louise Bennett
Personally, as I find myself being commissioned to photograph more and more female-led bands, I am making every effort to show them as the powerful, talented, multifaceted humans that they all are.
You know how it is: you have a couple of gins; buy a few website addresses with the vague but noble idea of Changing Your Life; randomly speak to a guy on the internet who was in a band you loved when you were 16; and the next thing you know you’ve left your middle management job in local government and are running a record label with that guy. Or at least that’s how it happened to me. Reckless Yes Records appeared ever so slowly and then suddenly all at once at the start of this year. Now as we near our first birthday we have three vinyl releases under our belts and are putting on shows with almost alarming frequency. The long road I took to get here started back when I was a teenager and I fell in love with music, and writing about it. In my bedroom I would devour the pages of Smash Hits, Melody Maker, Select and the NME, I would listen to Peel, Lamacq and Atlantic 252 (I don’t believe in guilty pleasures and I won’t hide my love of pop). I dreamed of being a music journalist, of running a record label, maybe joining a band, and writing some books. My life was going to be full of words and music and that was that. Except it wasn’t. You fall in love, you go to university, you get very poorly for a while and have to recover, you get married and have children; you get distracted. Life happens and the career you think you’re going to have doesn’t materialise. Or sometimes the train is just really late into the station. I by, accident rather than design, carved out a different career that, happily, I mainly loved, doing digital stuff in local government. I got quite good at it. Writing and music became something I did for myself to fill evenings after my children had gone to bed,
to pass a lunchtime. But in the back of my mind, the words and ‘what ifs’ of that life I’d imagined as a teenager fluttered. On days where shadows were deep I’d think to myself ‘I could have been someone’, on the brighter ones I’d think ‘I still could’. I decided not to settle when a bereavement made me take a look at myself. There was a realisation that beyond the amazing chaos of existing at all, time is terribly short and no one is going to make stuff happen for you. You have to do it yourself. I grew up, and in doing so let go of lots of things people tell you are needed for a proper grown up life. I started writing more while also pushing forward in my day job. I stopped thinking of reasons why I couldn’t do things and started saying yes to opportunities. Fear became exhilaration and even when things didn’t work out or were really really hard, they were also fun. I went on lots of good adventures like properly embracing being a music journalist at Louder Than War, meeting people whose poster had been on my teenage bedroom wall, writing a novel, debuting on the international conference circuit. So this saying a reckless yes - agreeing to something even when it scares you - was a motto by which I’d been living for a while when I met Pete Darrington, that guy from that band, and we committed to Reckless Yes together. This year we have fallen in love with the possibilities of our label and our bands. The music industry is in collapse and the days of Bollinger-scented boardrooms are gone but we’re happy as we’re doing something we adore with all our heart. There are challenges, of course. Leaving full time work earlier this year for freelance life means I’m poorer of pocket but a little richer of soul; it also means the financial side of funding records and running a label is not always comfortable. It’s a patchwork existence too, sometimes you’ll let a spinning plate fall without meaning to, sometimes someone else will send them crashing, sometimes you just have to be pragmatic and decide what to let go. And sometimes, no matter how committed to being an equal partnership we are and how blind we are to our genders when we’re making business decisions, other people are programmed to favour the man. I become the invisible girl. That’s probably the hardest part. The money and the time and the last minute changes are all just the way of things. Recognising and speaking up when assumptions are made that only one of us is *really* running this label is hard, but necessary, and fortunately not an everyday thing. I’m lucky that I have the privilege of a safety net that has allowed me to make some bold, if not entirely reckless, decisions about how I manage my work life. I’m grateful that my upbringing instilled in me a belief I could do anything and that I’ve found a friend and business partner who is as committed to equality as he is to us building a record label which we would love even if we weren’t the ones running it. Our first year as Reckless Yes coincided with me taking on the editorship at Louder Than War and together this combination of music and words has been the most thrilling adventure, the most exciting part of which is that 20 years after I started to dream about it the real fun, and the real work, has only just begun.
Sarah Lay is co-founder of Reckless Yes Records recklessyes.com Cut out image by Olivia Ehrhart
Rachel Nelson interviewed Arlan Hamilton, one of her besties, who also happens to be a successful venture capitalist.
Arlan Hamilton has been in my life for over ten years now. She’s taken on many titles throughout that time- magazine founder and editor, successful blogger, tour manager- but I think her latest is definitely the strangest: Arlan is a venture capitalist. When I sat down to talk to her, I didn’t know much about venture capitalism. All I knew was that it involved a lot of money; I imagined it as the career of someone with a trust fund. Arlan is so not that person; everything she knows about this business, she learned from books she read while touring with bands, and from people who were kind enough to email her back when she asked questions. When she started Backstage Capital, she was sleeping on couches with no home to go to. To say she’s a self-made business woman would be something of an understatement. There’s a lot I admire about Arlan, and her ability to create her own opportunities is definitely up there, but the best thing about her new career is not that she’s entered a predominantly male, white,
wealthy world and managed to take a seat at the table, it’s that her aim is to bring a dozen more seats with her and fill them with people who wouldn’t usually get a look-in. Arlan is AfricanAmerican, gay, and she grew up in conservative Texas. She knows what it’s like to be a square peg in a round hole. Her company invests in start-up tech by women, people of colour, and people who identify as LGBTQ. When I asked what drew her to this business model, she explained, “I have always said that I don’t really care about trying to make Facebook or Twitter or those ma jor companies in Silicon Valley more palatable for underrepresented people...I’m more interested in enabling the people who are minorities to create their own culture...if other people want to be involved, great, but if not, they’re not made or broken by traditional cultures”. Because of this, Arlan is actively changing things in Silicon Valley; she’s not trying to fit into someone else’s worldview, she’s creating her own. That’s why she likes tech so much; the outside world is frustrating, racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, especially with the rise of the new President-elect. She talked to me about the history of slavery, the few jobs that African-Americans are allowed to excel in, and the rising incarceration rate of minority groups. But the glimmer of hope she sees, comes from investing in start-up tech. She told me, “This is a hack, this is our hack. You can’t stop me from starting a company from my living room. You can’t stop me doing that. And I think that’s one of the most powerful things ever”. To put it in perspective, currently 0.2% of venture funding goes to black women. Backstage Capital recently invested in their 9th black woman this year. To be able to screw up those statistics must be incredibly satisfying.
Arlan began working when she was 15. She worked in retail, sometimes up to 40 hours a week - while also completing high-school - to help her mom pay the rent. She didn’t dislike working for other people, but she did struggle with falling in line with the ‘natural order’ of things, which so often put women, and people of colour, towards the bottom of the pile. She laughed telling me that, no matter where she worked, she never had the right clothes; she spends most work days now in her Backstage Capital hoodie. There’s no doubt that 9-5 was not for Arlan; she remembered ‘the physical act of clocking in, when I used to hear the sound of that punch, my soul used to die. It was like a gunshot’. When I asked what gave her the confidence to be her own boss, not just with Backstage Capital, but with all of her previous endeavours, she told me she was certain it came from her mom, who never allowed her to believe she didn’t have a right to be at the table. She explaine, “I just never knew anything else. I never knew I wasn’t supposed to be in the room”, and recalled hearing her mom explaining to her friends, “I want Arlan to do much more than I ever dreamed of doing that’s what every generation should strive for”. There’s a lot I’d like to say about Arlan to give you a full picture of who she is: smart, funny, kind, brave. I could tell a lot of stories about her, I could fill this article with the intelligent, moving quotes I collected from our conversation, but I have minimal space so I’m going to try and narrow it down to the most important pieces. Arlan has integrity, which is not the first word that comes to mind when you hear ‘Silicon Valley’. She recently turned down an investment that was worth
around $500,000 because it came from a company who refused to condemn Peter Thiel’s $1.25m investment in Trump’s presidential campaign. It would be easy to see money as Arlan’s entire business, but people have always been her main priority, and to take money from anyone connected with Donald Trump was out of the question. President Obama recently held an event at the White House called ‘South by South Lawn’, which celebrated the spirit of innovation. Arlan was nominated for an invitation, so she spent October 3rd walking around the White House lawn, pinching herself as the DJ played Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ and 2Pac’s ‘Changes’ (laughing to herself as she caught the line And although it seems heaven sent / We ain’t ready to see a black President), amongst people like civil rights leader John Lewis, Common, Ty Burrell, and oh, Leonardo DiCaprio. I asked how she felt being there and she replied, “It was like, no matter who you were, you couldn’t be the most famous person in the room, right? So everyone was kind of equal. It was like this calming place that doesn’t really exist”. In Silicon Valley, a company that is worth a billion dollars or more is called a unicorn; if you ask me, whether Backstage Capital ever gets there or not, Arlan is one heck of a unicorn.
Arlan Hamilton is CEO of Backstage Capital Investments. She can be found tweeting at @ArlanWasHere Rachel Nelson is one third of Fan Club. She can be found covered in glitter or tweeting at @Rachellous
My female role model is the poetess , Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, who lived in Cordova, Spain from 1001 till 1091. She was rumored to be the ideal beauty of the time - blonde hair and blue eyes, fair skin, pretty typical to beauty standards even now. Don’t get me wrong - she was not just a pretty face; far from it. She was the daughter of the Ummayad Caliph who was assassinated in 1026. She inherited all the land and wealth, and opened up halls for mixed poetry discussion and lessons, teaching women from any background whether they were noble women or slaves. Poetry and the arts was dominated by men at the time, yet she was adamant in pursuing them. One favourite pastime of the locals was to sit in a square and have poetry competitions off the top of their heads. Despite there being just men in these competitions, she entered and won many of them. She was openly defiant of traditional gender roles, taking care of property herself. She was proud - she refused to wear a veil , infuriating the local mullahs. She scandalously wore a see through tunic, embroidered with her poem, implying that her cheek is reserved for only her lover: On the right side: I am fit for high positions by God And am going my way armed with pride. And on the left: I allow my lover to touch my cheek And bestow my kiss on him who craves it. Her other poems are just as direct. Wallada is more well known, especially in Cordova, for her love affair with the famous poet and politician Ibn Zaidun. They had a Romeo and Juliet-esque secret love, being from opposite political ties. They were desperately in love and they showed it through their poetry. However, that is not the reason why I love her; I love her and her poetry because of its directness and how easy it is to relate to life now. I loved her confidence and independence, which doesn’t fit the preconceptions people have of 11 century Arab culture. Not to mention, this woman was all sorts of sassy - after she caught Ibn Zaidun cheating , she wrote this diss poem: Ibn Zaidun, though a man of quality, loves the unbent rods in men’s trousers. If there was a phallus instead of a tree, he’d fly after it like a woodpecker. Oh shit. Absolutely brutal. I daydream about learning arabic and time travelling back to the 1000s, to Cordova, just to have a little chat
Illustration by Nanna Venter
with her ( probably a little bitch about Ibn Zaidun as well), it’s my default daydream. Though, being a Muslim myself, she may not be the most religiously moral person to admire, she still continues to teach women like me today. Since discovering her poetry back around May time, she has opened a world of new discovery for me as I read the poems of those she mentored and other female poets at the time, and modern arab female poets such as Nazik Al-Malaika. Now thanks to her I’m interested enough to study Arabic at university. Her refusal to be anyone she wasn’t inspires me to be the same. She is an inspirational woman, who is often overshadowed by the intrigues of her love affairs rather than her brilliant mind, as is the case for too many women in history. Not many poems are still preserved - well, she was born over a 1000 years ago! The ones that were are brilliant and I wish I could return to read those that couldn’t make it till today. I hope this inspires you to look her up (and look at her other diss poems, they’re my favourites!). Words and image by Sanaa Asim
INTERVIEW: Kristin Russo  Kristin Russo is (amongst other things) the CEO of LGBTQ organisation Everyone Is Gay, the author of ‘This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids’, and one half of the incredible podcast ‘Buffering the Vampire Slayer’. WHAT WAS YOUR ORIGINAL CAREER GOAL AND WHAT LED YOU TO PURSUE A MASTERS DEGREE IN GENDER STUDIES? I went to school for theatre and I definitely did that with the intention of acting. When I finished I started a theatre company with a good friend of mine, and I was really into that, I was really into the creation of our own material and having creative control. I much less enjoyed auditioning, so I think my vision, my ultimate goal when I left undergrad, was to be a very respected theatre / play actor. I didn’t want to be famous, it was never about money, it was about the craft and being very respected in my field. I had this theatre company for a few years, we did four productions in total and then my theatre partner got into a conservatory in the UK and after she left I was just sort of like ‘I don’t really want to work with anybody’. So i got a job at a hedge fund of all things, and while I was there I decided I wanted to go back to school. I felt like, as far as acting was concerned, you had to be a person who was waking up every morning and thinking ‘theres nothing else I can do, I have to do this’ and I didn’t have that, I didn’t have the fire. So the other thing that really moved me when I was in undergrad was courses I had taken on gender and sexuality. And you know, I had come out at 17, I was raised with a super-religious extended family, in an moderately religious household, and so I really thought exploring that sort of thing could be fun, but I had no end goal at all when I went to school for gender studies. I mean, everybody is sort of like ‘cool, what are you gonna do with that?’ and I was
like ‘I don’t know’. I wanted to learn more, I wanted to explore ideas and concepts with a bunch of like- minded people who wanted to do the same. AND HOW DID EVERYBODY IS GAY (EIG) BEGIN? EIG started as a Tumblr before anything else. So in April of 2010, me and my former business partner Danielle, who I had just met, started a Tumblr. I was about halfway through my degree, she had just started a Tumblr called ‘lesbians who look like Justin Bieber’, and like those two vantage points fused together at the right time and the right place. Our thought at the beginning was we wanted to be funny and silly, we really didn’t start out with the intention of helping anybody, but then it was helpful. There was a huge need that I hadn’t been aware of and people were asking all sorts of questions and so we started answering them on Tumblr, first in written form, and then about six months later we started a Youtube channel. Youtube was still pretty new, I think it started in 2008 and this was 2010, so nobody really knew what they were doing, we just like made these videos and we lipsynced to songs and it sort of snowballed. People were just excited about two people being really honest about who they were, being matter of fact, and the work allowed people to laugh, in addition to processing,
‘fuck it, lets do it,’ so we quit our jobs and then we just chased after this thing. For the first three years of EIG it really just felt like we were running after it, it was like ‘I know what I’m gonna be, so you wanna come with me or not?’ And we just ran, you know?
By Nanna Venter which was really the key and set us apart from a lot of other things that were happening at that time. SO AT WHAT POINT DID YOU THINK ‘OKAY WE CAN MAKE THIS INTO SOMETHING BIGGER?’ Well in 2010 in the US there was huge media coverage on suicides that were happening related to LGBTQ bullying. We already had the Tumblr, we had the Youtube channel, we were talking with hundreds, thousands really, of young people so we sort of said ‘hey, what else can we do?’ and so many people wrote back and said ‘Come to our schools, talk at our schools...the way you talk would actually reach people, people will listen to you.’ Danielle also has a theatre background and so we happened to be moderately equipped to do this, so we put together a programme and booked a six week tour on our own and just sort of tried it. What happened was we were really successful, people were really excited about it. On that first run we went to schools like Harvard, and we were walking into the building like ‘I don’t know if they know we’re just impostors here...’ but they loved it, and by the end of the tour we had enough funding from the schools to survive for three months. So with no business plan, no nothing, we just were like
AND DID YOU FIND YOU HAD ANY NEGATIVE FEEDBACK FROM THE SCHOOLS? Most of the universities invited us, and also the audience tends to be very self-selected, so usually the queer people come, but our favourite events to this day are the events where its not predominately the queer community, it’s actually the larger community and we see a really good response. University of Toledo was one of my earliest memories where there was tension because of our presence. We were being brought by the Panhellenic group so the sororities and fraternities all had to go either to our event or the To Write Love on Her Arm event a couple of weeks later, and you know the posters were all over the school and our organisation’s name is Everyone is Gay, and a lot of the posters we saw had been written on like ‘no we’re not’, so there was definitely some tension. We had 500 people in the audience which was huge for us at that time, and 80% of the audience had never heard of us and didn’t really want to be there. It was really pivotal for us because they loved it, and it’s because of the way we approached it. We weren’t lecturing; we started with a choreographed dance to the Black Eyed Peas, Danielle would talk about ‘lesbians who look like Justin Bieber’, we would do these really silly role-play scenarios that involved people like Taylor Swift, you know, it was just very very funny and engaging. We were able to win over audiences, who would then listen to us when we got to the suicides and the statistics. We were laughing, and they were laughing, and so we felt connected to each other, and then they trusted us enough to listen to us and what we had to say, so it was pretty cool.
I WROTE MY MASTER’S THESIS ABOUT THE FEAR OF USING WORDS LIKE HOMOSEXUAL OR GAY IN SCHOOLS, AND THE PARANOIA THAT SAYING THESE WORDS WOULD CAUSE SOME KIND OF CONTAGION, SO I THINK IT’S AMAZING THAT YOUR ORGANISATION IS CALLED EVERYONE IS GAY AND YOU WERE INVITED TO SPEAK IN THOSE KINDS OF INSTITUTIONS. To be totally honest I’m certain there are lots of schools we didn’t go to because we were called that, especially lower schools like high-schools and middle-schools. And I think it’s also because people relate talking about sexuality with talking about sex, which is not at all right, we don’t talk about sex at all. High-schools would sometimes bring us and we would say we’re happy to talk to middle-schools too, and they would say ‘no no no no’. We would go to the high-school, do the event, and they would say ‘oh man, now that we saw it, we really wish we had the younger kids here too.’ But people are afraid, teachers and school administrators especially, because of the parents. Most of the teachers we worked with were completely on board and the only thing they had hesitations about was making sure that they had a way to explain it to the parents. We had a handful of kids whose parents opted them out of the assembly because they didn’t want them to be in an assembly run by EIG, but for the most part those were very few and far between, most of the experiences we’ve had have been super positive. WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR BEST ACHIEVEMENT SO FAR? OR MOST UNBELIEVABLE MOMENT? It’s so hard to pick one, but something I know I am endlessly overwhelmed by is that we’ve been able to expand our resources to parents and families. We wrote a book in 2014 called ‘This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids’ and it’s a real book, a publisher got it and made it look all nice, so seeing that and holding it in our hands! We went on a 21-city book tour, and seeing parents there with their kids,
or seeing kids there without their parents, saying they were gonna come out to them by giving them that book, or parents who were there without their kids who thought their kids might be gay but they didn’t wanna ask so they came to the event...just all manner of things. That was and is really powerful in an ongoing way. It was super powerful to me to know that we were able to create this resource that will just continue to give, and to bridge this divide. Last year the book came out in Italian and Japanese! Holding the Japanese copy in my hands...I was like ‘I don’t even know what this says!’ That was really powerful too; thinking about the fact that somebody somewhere had sat down with my words that I had painstakingly put so much love and tears and heartache into, that somebody had sat across the world translating it into their language so people there could share it with their families too...that’s a thing that I’m like ‘that didn’t happen, right?- it wasn’t really me, it must have been somebody else’. That’s really cool. ONE OF THE THINGS I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT LATELY WITH THIS ZINE IS WHETHER WOMEN FIND IT EASIER TO WORK WITHIN THEIR OWN BUSINESSES/ORGANISATIONS, INSTEAD OF WORKING WITHIN AN ESTABLISHED COMPANY WHICH MAY FEEL LIKE A MICROCOSM OF SOCIETY. I WONDER IF WOMEN END UP TAKING THEIR ‘PLACE’ IN A COMPANY AND NOT REACHING THEIR FULL POTENTIAL BECAUSE OF THE VIEWS OF THEIR MANAGEMENT. I think that as a woman, as a queer person, you walk through the world knowing that it’s going to be harder, that you’ll have to work harder to achieve the same thing. I did a panel with Gaby Dunn and on the panel she said she had a lot of straight, cisgender, white male friends, and any time she asks them “what are you working on at the moment?” they’re like “oh I have this one project that I’m doing” and then anytime she talks to her queer friends or her friends who are women they’re like “well I’m doing this and this and this and this...” we’re just kind of running circles and it’s because, just based on the way the world is, you really
have to throw a lot at the wall just to get something to stick. I think that being a queer woman definitely has primed me to know I’m going to have to work hard and I’m going to have to keep picking myself up when I fall down and that’s a huge strength. It’s unfortunate that I have to have that, but it is a very powerful tool to have when you run an organisation. And I’ve worked jobs where, even with other queer people, there has been a dichotomy of: who are the white men, and who are not the white men. That’s difficult; I’ve seen how my feedback is taken differently because I’m a woman. I’m much more easily lumped into the ‘well she’s too loud’ or ‘she’s so opinionated’ or whatever, and that’s a battle, and I lean on my female feminist friends hardcore in those moments. Some of those moments the only reason I’ve gotten through them is because I’ve had those friends to say ‘argh, this thing is happening!’ and they say ‘I know, I see you, it’s happened to me too’. I think you get strength from it. I do hope for a day when that’s not the case, but for now I’ll at least take the silver lining of it all which is that we’re pretty damn strong. YEAH, I AGREE, YOU CONSTANTLY HAVE TO CHECK WITH OTHER PEOPLE: ‘AM I BEING CRAZY? IS IT JUST ME?’ AND IT’S SO COMFORTING WHEN YOU SPEAK TO OTHER PEOPLE AND THEY SAY ‘NO, YOU’RE NOT CRAZY, THIS IS NOT OKAY.’ Right and that’s one of the biggest things that we have gained from the internet, that we see we’re not crazy; we see that other people feel the same way we do and we can say ‘hey this happened to me’ and a million people will share it, and like it, and say ‘me too, me too, me too!’ and that’s really powerful. That’s a tool that I didn’t have growing up. WHAT INSPIRES YOU? Gosh, so many things. I think people inspire me. I really pull a lot of my inspiration from the strength of the people around me. Amanda Palmer is somebody
whose presence in the world I lean on, because I see how honest and loyal and resilient she is, and I take a lot of inspiration from that when I feel like ‘maybe i’m too old to talk to these people’ or ‘maybe something I’m saying is stupid’. I lean on people like her to say ‘you know what, they do whatever the fuck they want and that’s whats important’. I’m inspired by the people that read my work and tell me how it’s helped them. I tell them this all the time but that is the only reason i’m still doing it, it gives me a strength that nothing else could, to hear that I’m helping and to hear that the words that I have shared are having an impact. Once you start to hear that, it’s really hard to think about doing anything else because you realise the power that your words can have, and that just by talking you can help people figure out how to talk too...it’s like this ripple effect. Kristin can be found on twitter at @kristinnoeline, @everyoneisgay and weekly wherever you find your podcasts. We can’t recommend Buffering the Vampire Slayer enough.
I AM 30 YEARS OLD AND I AM AN UNASHAMED SWIFTIE. I consider myself a socialist, an activist and a feminist, so a lot of my friends are baffled that I adore Taylor Swift. It’s true, Kathleen Hanna she is most definitely not, and I wince at some of Taylor’s choices (like making a music video set in colonial Africa, filled with only white people and animals). However, I see Taylor championing the value of female friendships on stage and in interviews, and supporting her girl fans to have self-worth. I saw her perform in London recently, and she spent practically the entire time between songs addressing her mostly young teenage audience with confidence-boosting messages. In the midst of a consumerist-driven media environment where advertisers are desperate to make women hate each other and themselves, I find this behaviour heartening. But the person I most admire is Taylor Swift the songstress. Since her early teens she’s been writing poetry and music. She has a polished media persona, for sure, but in so much of her song-writing I get a real sense of a soul laid bare. For example, the track Dear John is a defiant but painful recounting of an emotionally abusive relationship. Taylor’s open-heartedness feels genuine to me, and vulnerable, and I find it incredibly brave.
It’s well known that most of Taylor’s tracks are about love: the beginnings, ends, and complex in-betweens. She is slammed and belittled for writing about love all the time. Yet I struggle to see how this is a failing, because love is surely one of the most important topics of the human universe. As someone who spends a lot of time rejoicing, wallowing or being obsessively anxious about my own relationships, I totally welcome Taylor’s wholehearted and insightful exploration of its terrain. Also FYI, Bob Dylan wrote loads of songs about breakups, too, and no-one pans him for whining about his ex-girlfriends. See: patriarchy. Taylor Swift writes an excellent pop tune. She is also a brilliant poet, a hopeless romantic, and for all that I can tell, she seems like a kind person. For me this is enough to make Taylor a woman I look up to. Go, Tay Tay! Words by Chloe Cheeseman Illustration by Danielle Butterflies
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We asked Rosie Crabbe of Tea & Cake Bakehouse to tell us about pursuing her dream to become a baker. Rosie baked a beautiful birthday cake for us back in March, as well as some amazing vegan mermaid cupcakes. We haven’t stopped thinking about them. My name’s Rosie, I live in Glasgow, and I run my own baking business, Tea & Cake Bakehouse. I’ve liked baking since I was a child, at the feet of my Nan, Grandma and Mum. I started again in my early twenties, starting with chocolate krispie cakes and continuing until I eventually left my job in a bookshop to pursue baking full time. I currently work for a deli in Glasgow, baking bread and cakes, so Tea & Cake Bakehouse is definitely a side project at the moment, but I have big plans for a cafe/bakery in the future, and feel very committed to making my dreams a reality. Working full time whilst trying to start a small business is quite tough. I often start work at 6am, it’s quite physical, and not very well paid, so giving up my weekends and small amount of spare money to bake yet more cakes can really feel a drag at times. But when I get some great feedback from a customer, or something on my stall sells out, it’s so satisfying it makes up for all the hard work. I’m going to do some research and development over the winter to improve some of my recipes, with a view to start doing wholesale to cafes in the New Year. Glasgow has a fantastic foodie scene, with some amazing bakeries, but I’m trying to not let competition intimidate me. You’ve got to reach for your dreams, even if it’s hard work at times! Hopefully I can host some amazing events for my friends in Fan Club at my cafe in the future. teaandcakebakehouse.co.uk
I’m still not entirely sure what my thought process was when I decided to study English Literature and Japanese at University. Aged 15, a school exchange programme took me to Osaka to do a ‘homestay’. After having no clue what was going on for two weeks, I quickly decided Japan was essentially The Coolest Place on Earth. Three years later I remember my mum looking at my UCAS form and saying with some concern “... You know Japanese is going to be really hard, right?” I told her it was going to be GREAT. You heard it here first- I was an optimistic 18 year old with no idea what I was getting myself into. Fast forward, I’m at University and I’m sinking. My flat mates are boozy, missing lectures and making bongs from leftover plastic bottles. I’m labelling everything in Japanese- from apples in the kitchen, to toothbrushes and the toilet- with sticky notes, a desperate attempt to help the foreign vocabulary stay in my brain. I’m studying harder than I ever have before, and I am bottom of the class. I overheard a classmate sneer, “I just don’t understand how she can be so stupid”. I scraped the year with the lowest grade possible. My personal tutor called me into her office and asked me to think very hard about whether Japanese was really for me; she strongly advised me to quit whilst I was ahead, as I had seen so many of classmates do over the last year. I decided I had got this far, and I would go on the year abroad to a Japanese university. I lived with a host family for six months, and I breathed, slept and ate Japanese. Alongside that, I got drunk in karaoke bars, learnt how to ride my bike whilst carrying an umbrella, and explored all over Japan. The only downside was a big exam at the other end of the year abroad. Guess what? I failed! After a year immersed in the language, I still somehow sucked. After another difficult few years, I passed the degree. It felt like a lifetime. I went back to Japan after graduating and spent a year teaching English in Nagasaki, South Japan. When the teenagers I taught would shake their heads and tell me English was simply too difficult, I could certainly understand where they were coming from. The best advice I could offer was to just keep trying - it would get easier. After teaching, I returned to London and worked for a Japanese company, but after two years I was itching for Japan. I decided
to move to Tokyo and try to find an engaging job. With protests from friends and worried frowns from my parents, I quit my job. I moved out of my East London house share, got a working holiday visa, and moved my worldly belongings to Tokyo in a suitcase. After a pretty rough few months, I managed to secure a job and have been living and working in Tokyo for the last year and a half, using Japanese in my work. I often think back to the choices that brought me here and how I got to where I wanted to be through scraping, fighting and sacrifice. Over the ten years since my first visit to Japan, there were so many opportunities to turn around or give up. I was often frustrated, feeling dumb and questioning why I couldn’t just GET Japanese. Over the years, I’ve realised where I don’t excel at Japanese language, I have many other skills which I’ve utilised in order to succeed. There’s no shame in something not coming naturally and having to work hard at it. It just makes it even more worthwhile. Sometimes someone will say to me “you live in Tokyo? You are so lucky!” and I could almost choke. There wasn’t any luck involved; it was choosing a direction and refusing to give up.
Words by Rebecca Edwards Illustration by Catherine Johnson
“To all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me: I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion. Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday someone will — and hopefully sooner than we might think right now. And to all of the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams�. - Hillary Clinton 2016
hillary clinton Illustration by Julie Gough