porters

Until Katie Porter won her congressional seat in 2018, being a Democrat in Orange County was like rooting for the Angels: Someone has to do it, amirite?Republicans had held a majority of my home county’s legislative, congressional and supervisorial seats for decades. They maintained a robust ecosystem of candidates, funneling activists onto school boards and party committees to learn how politics works before moving on to higher offices. The GOP way took Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House, the latter…

Representation can be a double-edged sword. There’s undeniable power in seeing oneself reflected on screen, in normalizing marginalized identities, but an emphasis on visibility alone can reduce complex characters to one identity, one presentation, a checkbox on a list. This is the fine line walked by Anything’s Possible, a coming-of-age rom-com directed by Pose star Billy Porter, and in its smartest moments, the predominant internal dilemma for Kelsa (Eva Reign), a confident yet guarded black, transgender teenager in…

Although official historical narratives remember the Indian soldiers who ‘contributed’ to the First World War by fighting for the British empire, there were more than 550,000 Indian men, who participated in the same war as ‘non-combatants’ whom no one remembers. They were porters, stevedores, construction workers, janitors (sanitation workers who cleaned latrines), washermen, stretcher-bearers, water-carriers, cooks and many other menial job workers. It was through their backbreaking work that the British were able to…