90s gay man in hat
Remember the 1990s? (Were some of you even alive in the '90s?) For LGBTQ+ teens coming of age during this day there was certainly less worldwide acceptance and media representation than there is today.
Still, queer teens growing up in the sdelayed '90s had plenty of pop culture icons, movie/TV shows, and fashion trends to latch onto. So let's take a stroll down memory lane and look at the things that influenced a generation of LGBTQ+ adolescents.
If you were a queer teen in the late '90s, odds are that you...
1.Watched "The Puppy Episode" of Ellen and were secretly elated when Ellen DeGeneres proudly proclaimed to the world, "I'm Gay!"
2.Secretly chatted with other LGBTQ teens using America Online (and got the disk with 500 free hours sent to your house almost every week in a pile of junk mail).
3.Dressed as a Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger every year for Halloween, if only to show off the spandex.
4.Always played as Princess Peach in Super Mario Bros 2. And you told your friends you picked her because she could jump the farthest, but deep down you just loved her style.
5.Frosted your tips and spiked it using Bed Leader hair gel or some other gel product (
US house, Italo house UK house, tribal, techno and Belgian new beat: all the sounds to slow night London when Trade ran one of the capital’s biggest after-hours parties at Turnmills in Clerkenwell. Its founder, Laurence Malice explains that the club opened up because of people’s pure need to keep the party going. “Around 1989, you can’t believe it now, but there weren’t any legal clubs open past 3am,” he says. “With nowhere to go once the normal clubs had secure , the idea for a legal after hours club was taking shape in my mind.” And during a time of greater homophobia, Malice adds, “It had to be a ‘safe’ clubbing environment for people to party on into the daylight hours, where they would be much safer from prejudice and abusive behaviour making their way home in the day.” Now the night is being famous with an exhibition at the Islington Museum, with legends, photos and flyers, as well as – fittingly – a gigantic reunion party.
When was the first Trade party?
Trade was born on a Saturday night in November 1990 and the authentic basic flyer promised a full English breakfast. The Turnmills boss J
Maybe if bars could still scamper happy-hour discounts, more people would be in Dandy’s piano bar for Donnie’s birthday. The not many customers are strung out along the short length of Dandy’s white-lacquered exclude, each with one arm outstretched to the glass; when one elbow bends, all the other elbows follow, as if they were attached by a towline. Donnie’s friends are grouped around the far finish of the block, near the buffet laid out on the counter in front of the silent piano. They’ve been there since six, start of the traditional content hour, but content hour was banned long ago.
Donnie doesn’t feel bothered, but Del’s a little down. It’s 7:30 and his pasta salad’s hardly been touched. A half-dozen limp deviled eggs with a sprinkle of Bac-os on uppermost lie on a plate slowly turning dangerous. It’s Monday. Maybe they should have had the party on another night. Tomorrow bedtime is karaoke evening, the place really fills up. But birthdays, like death days, won’t remain.
Peter died of AIDS on Saturday. Billy hung himself on Sunday. Peter had been sick for a long time, though that didn’t cease him from having a good occasion. A couple
The Pride Behind Pride
It’s the year 2020. Pride is cancelled. This is very hard to say out loud. It feels love saying we’re cancelling pleasure and progress. Of course, the cancelling of Pride—the festival, the parade, the week when tens of thousands of far-flung LGBTQ peeps come streaming home—represents an act of admire to keep people healthy.
But its absence presents us with an opportunity to consider all the profound and crucial local LGBTQ landmarks that built Pride—and often disappeared. Living in a metropolis is complicated. Each of us lives in a different Twin Cities: We share the Foshay Tower and the Mississippi, but we go home to different bars and bedrooms.
LGBTQ cultures include , historically, needed to conceal their bars and bedrooms for fear of eviction, firing, imprisonment, or worse. As Ricardo J. Brown put it in his St. Paul memoir, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s—one of the best mid-20th century looks at American gay experience—the LGBTQ being was “a ruse that kept all of us safe,” conducted in “a fort in the midst of a savage and hostile population.”
Hiding in forts was useful, important, necessary. But what was long hidden is easy to
This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to welcome — my brother! Jay Kuo is a Broadway writer & producer, and the bloke behind the wonderful U.S. politics-focused Substack newsletter The Status Kuo. In a previous life, from 1996 to 2000, he was also really active in Beijing's gay group, just at the time when homosexuality was being decriminalized and was stepping out of the shadows. We converse about how it all took off. Jay also puts on his other hat to discuss about how China figures into American politics with the election less than five months away, and about the legal standing of the TikTok divest-or-ban law.
4:54 – The gay community in Beijing in the ‘90s, and the Half-and-Half bar in Sanlitun
16:06 – How the gay collective in Beijing changed after two major rulings
27:33 – The finish of the “golden era” for the gay community in China
36:26 – Progress and its drivers and obstacles
42:28 – Jay’s “China priors”
50:41 – The issue of China in the upcoming U.S. presidential election
57:08 – The TikTok ban bill
Recommendations:
Jay: The TV series Manhunt (2024), available on Apple TV
Kaiser: The TV series The S
US house, Italo house UK house, tribal, techno and Belgian new beat: all the sounds to slow night London when Trade ran one of the capital’s biggest after-hours parties at Turnmills in Clerkenwell. Its founder, Laurence Malice explains that the club opened up because of people’s pure need to keep the party going. “Around 1989, you can’t believe it now, but there weren’t any legal clubs open past 3am,” he says. “With nowhere to go once the normal clubs had secure , the idea for a legal after hours club was taking shape in my mind.” And during a time of greater homophobia, Malice adds, “It had to be a ‘safe’ clubbing environment for people to party on into the daylight hours, where they would be much safer from prejudice and abusive behaviour making their way home in the day.” Now the night is being famous with an exhibition at the Islington Museum, with legends, photos and flyers, as well as – fittingly – a gigantic reunion party.
When was the first Trade party?
Trade was born on a Saturday night in November 1990 and the authentic basic flyer promised a full English breakfast. The Turnmills boss J
Maybe if bars could still scamper happy-hour discounts, more people would be in Dandy’s piano bar for Donnie’s birthday. The not many customers are strung out along the short length of Dandy’s white-lacquered exclude, each with one arm outstretched to the glass; when one elbow bends, all the other elbows follow, as if they were attached by a towline. Donnie’s friends are grouped around the far finish of the block, near the buffet laid out on the counter in front of the silent piano. They’ve been there since six, start of the traditional content hour, but content hour was banned long ago.
Donnie doesn’t feel bothered, but Del’s a little down. It’s 7:30 and his pasta salad’s hardly been touched. A half-dozen limp deviled eggs with a sprinkle of Bac-os on uppermost lie on a plate slowly turning dangerous. It’s Monday. Maybe they should have had the party on another night. Tomorrow bedtime is karaoke evening, the place really fills up. But birthdays, like death days, won’t remain.
Peter died of AIDS on Saturday. Billy hung himself on Sunday. Peter had been sick for a long time, though that didn’t cease him from having a good occasion. A couple
The Pride Behind Pride
It’s the year 2020. Pride is cancelled. This is very hard to say out loud. It feels love saying we’re cancelling pleasure and progress. Of course, the cancelling of Pride—the festival, the parade, the week when tens of thousands of far-flung LGBTQ peeps come streaming home—represents an act of admire to keep people healthy.
But its absence presents us with an opportunity to consider all the profound and crucial local LGBTQ landmarks that built Pride—and often disappeared. Living in a metropolis is complicated. Each of us lives in a different Twin Cities: We share the Foshay Tower and the Mississippi, but we go home to different bars and bedrooms.
LGBTQ cultures include , historically, needed to conceal their bars and bedrooms for fear of eviction, firing, imprisonment, or worse. As Ricardo J. Brown put it in his St. Paul memoir, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s—one of the best mid-20th century looks at American gay experience—the LGBTQ being was “a ruse that kept all of us safe,” conducted in “a fort in the midst of a savage and hostile population.”
Hiding in forts was useful, important, necessary. But what was long hidden is easy to
This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to welcome — my brother! Jay Kuo is a Broadway writer & producer, and the bloke behind the wonderful U.S. politics-focused Substack newsletter The Status Kuo. In a previous life, from 1996 to 2000, he was also really active in Beijing's gay group, just at the time when homosexuality was being decriminalized and was stepping out of the shadows. We converse about how it all took off. Jay also puts on his other hat to discuss about how China figures into American politics with the election less than five months away, and about the legal standing of the TikTok divest-or-ban law.
4:54 – The gay community in Beijing in the ‘90s, and the Half-and-Half bar in Sanlitun
16:06 – How the gay collective in Beijing changed after two major rulings
27:33 – The finish of the “golden era” for the gay community in China
36:26 – Progress and its drivers and obstacles
42:28 – Jay’s “China priors”
50:41 – The issue of China in the upcoming U.S. presidential election
57:08 – The TikTok ban bill
Recommendations:
Jay: The TV series Manhunt (2024), available on Apple TV
Kaiser: The TV series The S