Guy Branum Profile picture
Talker and Writer
Jul 30 107 tweets 13 min read
White Dudes for Harris is just a YouTube live video. I wanted a BUSY ZOOM that would crash. Straight men know how to make EVERYTHING less fun. I wanted a grid of celebrities of famous people and regular people intermixed. The man on the White Dudes for Kamala "call" 100% has a man bun. Do not doubt.
Jul 27 14 tweets 3 min read
Democracy isn't a movie. Democracy doesn't have a climactic moment where the good guys triumph over the bad guys and Barad Dur crumbles to dust. Democracy is maintaining the hygiene and direction of self government. It requires tedious work. Ending a democracy has a good climax. Democracy is the effort to have an entire nation govern itself through the consent of the governed. If you're looking for total victory, vanquishing your enemies, you're looking for war. In a Democracy, the people who lose still have to feel like they are represented...
Oct 21, 2023 13 tweets 2 min read
It is always strange to me when smug American progressives say the answer to Israel/Palestine is for Israelis to leave the place that they stole when those Americans have no interest or inclination to leave the place we stole. If you are not native and live in America/Canada/Australia, you believe compromise and progress that works from great crimes without wholly erasing them is possible.
Oct 5, 2022 12 tweets 6 min read
In talking about how cruelly @billyeichner, white, cis, rich, hot- or not-hot-enough-to-be-a-movie-star (depending on who's tweeting) demanded the queer community support his movie, a thing that is rarely mentioned is the rest of the cast. When @nicholasstoller and @JuddApatow gave Billy the chance to write and star in a film, they were working from an established game plan Judd had used to help build the careers of @amyschumer @kumailn @Sethrogen and others. In making films like "Trainwreck" or "The Big Sick"...
Jun 17, 2020 14 tweets 3 min read
Hey, in the past couple of years there have been a lot of people talking about Due Process. A lot of people seem to REALLY love due process, but do not seem to particularly know what Due Process is. Let's talk about it! There are actually TWO due process clauses in the constitution. The Fifth Amendment, that repository of a BUNCH of powerful civil liberties says, in part, "No one shall... be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law." This applied only to the Fed govt.
May 26, 2020 5 tweets 1 min read
When we mourn for people whose lives are "destroyed" by a social media kerfuffle around a recorded incident of racism, we often ignore how much the life that they enjoyed was one built around satisfaction of a number of class requirements. You don't lose a job bagging groceries, working in a cafeteria, or doing construction for a racist tweet, and if you did, you could find another without many questions. What people lose are jobs based on class prerogatives: publicist, investment analyst, etc.
Sep 27, 2019 9 tweets 2 min read
Claudia Kincaid from "The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" is an icon of 20th Century queer feminism: A Thread (with thanks to @rakeshsatyal and @ReeseW for bringing this up.) There is no villain in "From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" (hereafter MUF). Other, lesser works give you a great big bad with no moral ambiguity. Voldemort, White Witch, etc. The villain in MUF is existential dread, it's knowing how boring your life will be.
Dec 11, 2018 8 tweets 2 min read
Anthony Avalos, 10, was killed by his father for being gay. nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou… Gabriel Fernandez, 8, was killed by his mom's boyfriend because he suspected Gabriel was gay. nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou…
Oct 18, 2018 8 tweets 3 min read
It's very beautiful to see people in the gay community honoring and remembering Matthew Shepard on the 20th anniversary of his death, but I remember that around the time of his death another gay man, Billy Jack Gaither, was also brutally murdered. Billy Jack was also hanging out at a straight bar in a small rural town, he was also lured away by a couple of guys, he was put in the trunk of a car, driven to a remote location, had his throat cut with an axe, then was burned to death because he was gay.