And a long overdue update on this newsletter

Firstly: Kadyx (Kadyx/Divine/ẹmi), the filmmaker who created and starred in the short film Pink & Blue that I featured in the early weeks of this newsletter, is unfortunately in need of emergency support for Divine’s survival. More about Kadyx:

Kaydx (Kaydx/Divine/ẹmi) is a liberationist in the Black radical struggle, a humxnist, truth-teller, cultural & militant care worker n krip doula n illder and practitioner of collaborative solidarity & transformative + healing + disability justice who founded Dagbasi Productions on Juneteenth 2020 to actualize stories that inspire empathy and challenge social consciousness. 

Kaydx is a proud Disabled/krip & Chronically Ill, Neuroexpansive, MAD Black & First-Generation Igbo & Yorùbá (Nigerian), Trans & Mulitgender SpiritOracle n SoloPolyAm Lesbian, Survivor, Relationship Anarchist, bisexual bad bitch queer dyke, trap feminist, leather zaddie-hoe, empath, Spiritual Warrior of femme ministry, blood child of genocide-surviving immigrants & a COVID-conscious, Pro-Black n afrofuturist multimedia Storyteller from da sweet Souf.

ẹmi has recently had to close Kadyx’s production company, Dagbasi Productions, which is a huge loss for the queer short film community, but Divine needs to focus on Divine’s survival instead.

Please consider supporting Kadyx by subscribing to ẹmi’s new Substack, Letters from the Deep, and/or through Patreon, CashApp, GoFundMe, Venmo.

My review of Pink & Blue is also at the bottom of this post if you’d like to revisit it.

Secondly, an update on this newsletter! Don’t worry, queer short cuts isn’t going anywhere, but I do want to apologize for my long hiatus. As I mentioned in my last post, I got COVID for the second time in December (on top of Long COVID that I’ve had since June 2022). Recovery from the second bout was already going poorly, but then I got COVID for a third time in February! In case you needed a reminder that immunity to COVID after being infected is becoming less and less secure as we deal with so many variants of the disease…

Horrifyingly, despite the months since my last post, the Israel’s genocide and ongoing nakba of Palestine has only gotten worse. The full death toll is increasingly unclear as reporting breaks down from Gaza’s hospitals, which are themselves under attack, but some estimate it could be as high as 200,000. Israel continues to face little-to-know consequences for its genocide, and both the United States and the United Nations offer only “tone shifts” and toothless resolutions that do not call for a permanent ceasefire nor an end to Israel’s occupation. This, despite the report from the UN Human Rights Commission Special Rapporteur on the Palestine that there are reasonable grounds that Israel’s actions are genocide, that this is “the worst of what humanity is capable of”, and that “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians”.

Please, please keep fighting for Palestine’s freedom and an end to Israel’s settler colonialism. In my next real post – which I hope to have up in the coming weeks, and ideally, will return to a regular posting schedule after that – I will offer more actions you can take for Palestine, but in the meantime, feel free to refer to my last post on the topic.

“I want to raise this baby gender-free.”

Pink & Blue, written by Kadyx and directed by Carmen LoBue, tells the story of Crea (Kadyx) and Armani (Jojo Brown), a Black and Filipinx trans couple who have an unexpected first-time pregnancy, and decide to raise their baby in the gender-free home that they wish to live in. Breaking free of societal expectations and constructs is not always easy, but their love for each other and their future child keep them moving forward together.

The film’s vision is one that the filmmakers locate historically and culturally, as a way to look to a decolonized future. “When we look at the past, we realize how gender-expansive we were before colonization, before imperialism,” said LoBue in the Fox Soul’s Screening Room interview. “Our future is gender-expansive, and our future is a place where hopefully community and chosen family are something that everyone can achieve for themselves.”

Pink & Blue