Hetero Awesome… Hijacked

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I somehow missed this “most punk rock thing ever” moment the other month. If you did too, let me catch you up:

For a weekend in June, in what was clearly designed to act as a protest to Pride month events, human turd/bar owner Mark Fitzpatrick decided to put on a “straight pride” festival in Boise, Idaho. Called “Hetero Awesome Fest”, it was as under-subscribed as perhaps it ought to be (having a similar turnout to the “world’s smallest pride parade”). And that would have made it a non-story, except for the moment when local singer-songwriter Daniel Hamrick got up to perform his set:

I can’t begin to fathom the courage it takes to get on-stage in front of an ultra-conservative crowd (well, barely a crowd…) in a right-leaning US state to protest their event by singing a song about a trans boy. But that’s exactly what Hamrick did. After catching spectators off-guard, perhaps, by taking the perhaps-“masculine-telegraphing” step of drawing attention to part of his army uniform, the singer swiftly switched outfit to show off a “Keep Canyon County Queer” t-shirt, slip on a jacket with various Pride-related patches, and then immediately launched into Boy, a song lamenting the persecution of a trans child by their family and community.

Needless to say, this was the first, last, and only song Daniel Hamrick got to play at Hetero Awesome Fest. But man, what a beautiful protest!

(There are other videos online that aren’t nabbed from the official event feed and so don’t cut-out abruptly.)

Repost #27029

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

I still get that powerful feeling that anything is possible when I open a web browser — it’s not as strong as it was 20 years ago, but it’s still there.

This. This is the optimistic side of the coin represented by the things I’ve been expressing in notes like this, articles like that, and reposts like the other.

As cynical as you can get at the state of the Web right now… as much as it doesn’t command the level of inspirational raw potential of “anything is possible” that it might have once… it’s still pretty damn magical, and we should lean into that.