Ian Simmons launched Kicking the Seat in 2009, one week after seeing Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. His wife proposed blogging as a healthier outlet for his anger than red-faced, twenty-minute tirades (Ian is no longer allowed to drive home from the movies).
The Kicking the Seat Podcast followed three years later and, despite its “undiscovered gem” status, Ian thoroughly enjoys hosting film critic discussions, creating themed shows, and interviewing such luminaries as Gaspar Noé, Rachel Brosnahan, Amy Seimetz, and Richard Dreyfuss.
Ian is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He also has a family, a day job, and conflicted feelings about referring to himself in the third person.
This tension is the deep wound and the deep wisdom of the LGBTQ coalition.
Because every letter in LGBTQ is, in its own way, transgressive. To be gay is to transcend the expectation of reproductive coupling. To be lesbian is to transcend the male gaze. To be bisexual is to transcend the binary of desire. To be queer is to transcend taxonomy itself. The transgender person simply made the metaphor literal. They put flesh on the ghost. And for that, they are feared, loved, exiled, and revered. tube porn xxx shemales
The future of LGBTQ culture is not a smoother rainbow. It is a bridge that remains forever under construction, stretching from the island of “born this way” to the continent of “I will make myself.” On one side, safety in sameness. On the other, freedom in flux. The trans community stands in the middle, handing out bricks. And the only way across is to admit that none of us are as fixed as we pretend to be. This tension is the deep wound and the
In response, a segment of LGBTQ culture has done something both protective and painful: it has created a sub-attic for trans people. We see it in the quiet exclusion from gay bars that become “gender-affirming” only on certain nights. We see it in the acronym bloating to LGBTQIA+—where the plus sign often feels less like a welcome and more like a broom closet. We see it in the LGB Alliance, a heartbreaking schism where some argue that the fight for sexuality is distinct from, and even threatened by, the fight for gender identity. To be lesbian is to transcend the male gaze
The transgender experience is, at its core, a confrontation with . The gay or lesbian narrative often rests on the discovery of a static truth— I have always loved this way. The transgender narrative, by contrast, is one of active becoming— I was seen as one thing, but I am another. I will change to meet myself. This difference in shape creates a beautiful, aching friction.
The trans community has become the conscience of the LGBTQ world. They have taught the alphabet that . They have reminded gay men that body dysphoria is not foreign to them, and lesbians that butch identity has always lived on a transmasculine spectrum. They have forced a reckoning with the word queer , stripping it of its academic chill and returning it to its radical, disruptive heat.