Radical Optimism
Cuts through the week's noise.
In this week's newsletter: Archie Marks, acting editor of GAY45, cuts through the week's noise exclusively for subscribers, plus our essential recommendations.
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Radical Optimism
By Archie Marks, acting editor
This week, the world was reminded why Pride is a protest. On Saturday evening, twenty-one-year-old Abdul Ballout drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in central Berlin, where the city’s annual Pride celebration was taking place. One woman was killed and twenty-nine were injured, after which the van crashed into a tree and Ballout chased onlookers with a machete, before escaping on foot. The following evening, after a manhunt had been launched, Ballout was shot and killed by police.
The tragic attack put an abrupt end to Berlin’s Christopher Street celebrations, named after the New York street where the Stonewall riots first took place. Aside from the expected condemnation from politicians, the attack drew sympathy and condolences from public figures like Sam Smith, as well as the Berlin Senate’s queer affairs commissioner Alfonso Pantisano, who deemed it a day of “great mourning for the queer community.” On Sunday, a remembrance march took the place of the Pride party, with an estimated turnout of ten thousand. The Pride event became a defiant middle-finger to hatred and bigotry.
Yet dampening of proceedings didn’t always take a tragic tone this week. Many in the film and television industries will have breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced on Friday that Paramount Skydance, who’d planned to merge with Warner Bros Discovery, were pausing its acquisition after twelve US states challenged the deal. Headed by California, the group of states were granted a temporary restraining order that effectively blocked the merger; Paramount must now wait until a ruling on the injunction, which could take months.
The troubling ramifications of the prospective merger are apparent: Paramount’s CEO is David Ellison, a staunch Trump ally who (after Paramount acquired it) reoriented CBS to be more favourable to the US president. Bringing so many names under one thumb, particularly one so ready to cosy up to fascism, is a worrying proposition, as actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Alan Cumming and Benedict Wong outlined in an op-ed for the Guardian: not only are there massive anti-trust alarm bells going off, but having such control over vast swathes of news archives has the potential to alter history. The delay in this merger has given many hope.
Optimism prevailed elsewhere this week, when the elusive singer Carly Simon (known for hits like ‘You’re So Vain’ and her Bond theme ‘Nobody Does It Better’) announced she not only has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but that amidst treatment she’d also undergone surgery for basal cell carcinoma. Simon spun the news into a typically poetic yarn, before revealing that she will release a new album, Comes In Waves, on the fourteenth of August. It will be her first LP of original material in eighteen years.
That optimism shone even on the hellish mound of UK politics is surely something of note. Andy Burnham, in his first week as the UK’s new prime minister, has helped propel Labour in front of Reform UK in voter intention charts – the first time in over a year that Labour have had the advantage. The news followed a string of controversies for Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, including the furore over his undeclared gift that I previously reported on in this newsletter. Despite a poll being just that, a poll, it’s difficult not to feel at least marginally hopeful.
I’m writing this before a fourth (!) heatwave is set to grip Britain, while emergency services in France and Spain race to contain wildfires in what could be a record-breaking year for amount of land burned. In one village near Bordeaux, firefighters were said to be using diggers to uproot trees and manufacture a firebreak. The increased intensity and frequency of such heatwaves in recent years has rightfully prompted many to point the finger at climate change.
Yet it feels like we are reaching a true inflection point. As quickly as AI data centres are cropping up, they are being met with resound opposition from the public (The Odyssey’s Christopher Nolan said AI was being “thoroughly rejected”). While certain governments are advocating for offshore drilling for oil and gas, many more are adopting sustainable energy as the way of the future; last year, renewable energy (wind, solar and hydro) was the world’s leading source of electricity for the first time ever. Though the past is a fixed, toothy beast, there’s a case to be made for making a home in the belly of the beast.
MUST READ OF GAY45
REPORTAGE
From Germany: Terrorist Attack on Berlin Pride
One woman is dead on a footpath in the Tiergarten. Two hundred and fifty-four steel blocks did not stop the car that killed her. Eight weeks before Berlin votes, the story of why is already being written by people who do not yet know it. Abdul Ballout, 21, was shot by the police.
REPORTAGE
From Turkey: Journalist Yıldız Tar arrested in Turkey
A journalist who spent a decade recording Turkey’s war on its queer citizens was detained as a security threat to a NATO summit. In the interrogation room, nobody asked about NATO.
BOOKS
From Italy: 85 Seconds to Midnight
Famous physicist Carlo Rovelli’s case against rearmament is morally clear and politically naïve in just about equal measure. Read at eighty-five seconds to midnight, it’s still the argument queer readers can least afford to scroll past.
AND MORE ON GAY45.eu
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