Kirby is gay
It’s only mid-February as this is being written, but there’s no doubt that the album “Blue Raspberry” (Anti-) by out singer/songwriter Katy Kirbywill have a place on my finest of list. Kirby is a distinctive young songwriter, and she performs her songs with a confidence that belies her age. “Blue Raspberry” has been on repeated spins since it arrived, and I’ve been enthusiastically recommending songs including “Drop Dead,” “Table,” “Cubic Zirconia,” “Fences” and “Redemption Arc” to friends and family. Kirby was kind enough to create time for an interview to discuss “Blue Raspberry,” ahead of her upcoming show at Johnny Brenda’s on March 7.
In the “Thank Yous” for “Blue Raspberry,” you mention “the archives of Arthur Russell at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.” Please express a few words about the influence of the late gay songwriter Russell on your work.
I have been a fan of his songwriting for years. I found out through a friend of a friend that the New York Public Library had received his archives recently and had started opening them to the public. My guitar p
&#;Pink is Gay. That&#;s Okay. So Am I&#; An Interview with Forrest Kirby
Forrest Kirby was a fixture of ’s skateboarding, riding for Zoo York at the height of its popularity, starring in Josh Stewart’s original Static video, and even directing his own—F.O.R.E. and Friends. He had a trick for seemingly any detect, as he demonstrated by skating a good majority of the world’s spots in Zoo York’s epic world tour video, City of Killers, and I always saw him as a factual skater’s skater. Modern, solid, and super productive.
[TAKEN FROM ISSUE 3]
He was the skater’s skater, of course, but he was also same-sex attracted. For the wide-ranging majority of his pro career, the former was predicated on no one knowing about the latter. One of Kirby’s fellow Miamians, Birdhouse am Tim Von Werne, who was also homosexual, was pretty much shown the door by pro skateboarding when he talked about it in a never-printed Skateboarder magazine interview. While most women were just straight up excluded from professional skateboarding, gay men were faced with a choice: Move through and go pro, or come out and watch the dream die?
I, for one,
For my part, I'd utter the difficulty in functioning in a more conservative work environment (certainly when compared to e.g. university) has more to carry out with a lack of awareness, manifesting e.g. in occasional inappropriate questions, or just statements that belie a certain cluelessness about how people who aren't cis-straight live their lives. The forms in which this has manifested in my life were mostly benign, if at times a little grating, but it's not hard for me to envisage that other people might uncover that they pose a more serious problem. There was a memorably cringey incident when I was a first-year trainee, involving a couple of physicists asking me which of two pin-up girls I found more attractive, in what I suppose was some sort of misguided attempt to establish a sense of male camaraderie in a tediously "locker-room bravado" macho way. Obviously shockingly unprofessional on many levels, but it didn't seem to occur to them that there could well be an entirely different way in which it was a singularly inappropriate question to ask.
What changes could be made to achieve