Jack The Lad Magazine – Issue 29 – Spring-Summer 2022
English | 162 pages | pdf | 111.67 MB
A lot can happen in three months. Never has that seemed more apparent than right now, it having been three months since the last issue of Jack The Lad. Back then, when I was writing this column for issue 28, coronavirus was the story dominating news bulletins around the world. Now, three months later, despite the occasional reminder of which strain of
the virus is currently the more dominant, (anyone still remember the good ol’ days of Omicron?) you’d actually be forgiven for thinking the pandemic ended on Thursday 24th February, the day Russian tanks started rolling into Ukraine, and an even bigger potential threat to life as we know it hit the headlines. At the same time infections, here in the UK at least, continued to rise to their highest rate since the pandemic began.
Clearly I was wrong to have assumed such a global pandemic would be the most difficult circumstances under which I would ever find myself producing a new edition of a queer culture magazine, especially as the cultural world itself had been forced to close it’s doors. Cinema, theatre, gigs and exhibitions all indefinitely postponed. Now, however, instead of celebrating their return quite as loudly as I might have liked, it somehow feels a little redundant, if not actually insulting, to be writing about all the cool creative work being produced post-pandemic when innocent civilians are being bombed in their shelters, and pundits on the radio discuss the possibility of the situation escalating into the next World War.
How can we square the circle of producing this ongoing celebration of up and coming queer talent whilst the cultural heritage of Ukraine is being deliberately burnt to the ground. I sincerely hope that one way is by continuing to tell the stories that authoritarian regimes would silence in a heartbeat.
The freedoms LGBTQ+ people enjoy in many western countries have themselves been hard fought for, and nothing would give the likes of Vladimir Putin more pleasure than to have those freedoms reversed, having already used a recent speech to condemn all those that support such ‘gender freedom’.
Of course, the Kremlin has been using statesponsored homophobia as a part of its strategy to maintain power and influence long before their invasion of Ukraine, but now, as a result of this conflict, LGBTQ+ voices are starting to be silenced in the most brutal of ways, the death of queer law student and defiant activist Elvira Schemur being announced last month, killed by the indiscriminate Russian bombing of Kharkiv. She was probably not the first casualty from the queer community and it’s unlikely she will
be the last, but with respect for her fight for equality, I feel an ongoing duty to continue sharing our stories, in pictures and in words. It may not be political with a capital ‘P’, but it feels as important as it has ever been to stand up, to be seen and to be counted.
Get informed, make a difference, stay safe.
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