When progressive political commentator Keith Edwards recently turned the New York City Pride March into a two-hour livestream of queer joy, he put a name on what he was doing. The GLAAD-backed broadcast was built, in part, for people watching alone in states where Pride can feel dangerous. “One of the most radical things you can do in a moment of extreme fear and a moment of authoritarianism,” he told The Advocate, “is to experience joy and happiness.”

Weeks earlier, RuPaul had posted that the only response to fascism was to party and dance, and was sharply criticized for it. Two moments, weeks apart, but the same uneasy question beneath both of them: Is joy resistance? Or is it what we call avoidance when we want avoidance to sound principled?

In a country where LGBTQ+ people are watching their rights stripped away in statehouses, drag performers turned into political targets and trans people used as campaign-season fuel, “go dance” can sound almost heartless. But queer people have had this argument before.

In a 2013 Washington Blade essay about coming out during the AIDS crisis, Dave Purdy remembered older gay men telling him it was wrong for his generation to dance, party or enjoy themselves while their gay brothers were sick and dying. He and his friends rejected that view. For them, the dance floor was not an affront. It was survival, self-love and something close to church.

During the AIDS crisis, gay nightclubs were not merely places to escape. They were informal mutual-aid networks, grief rooms and information exchanges. They were places where bodies marked by fear could breathe, move, touch and feel alive again. When the state was slow to act, conservative preachers’ sermons were cruel and much of the country looked away, these spaces helped people endure.

I know because, in the early 1990s, I ran one of those clubs on Long Island.

The club was loud, crowded and alive in the way only a queer room can be when the world outside has made everyone inside feel disposable. People arrived carrying the private weight of family rejection, HIV panic, religious shame, police harassment and the everyday terror of being seen too clearly in the wrong place.

Then the bass would start. The lights would move. Someone would laugh loudly near the bar. A drag queen would cut through the room like a flare. For a few hours, fear did not vanish. It changed shape. It became bearable.

To outsiders, nightlife often looks like escape. Sometimes it is. There are worse things than needing to escape a world trying to crush you. But queer clubs were never only about forgetting. They were places where people remembered each other: who was sick, who had disappeared, who had a new doctor, who was pretending to be fine.

I saw that attention at work every night. Power did not only sit in the office or behind the bar. It lived in the queens who could read a face from across the room, the regulars who noticed an absence and the staff who could feel the room change before anyone else did. That was vigilance. Not paranoia. Not panic. A communal intelligence.

The dance floor was not where the crisis disappeared. It was where the living found one another inside it. That is the part America often forgets. Survival is not only the refusal to die. It is the insistence on remaining human while threatened.

Bars hosted fundraisers. Drag performers passed hats. DJs, bartenders, door people, lovers, ex-lovers, activists and friends formed networks that were not always formal but were often lifesaving. In Orlando, the Parliament House Motor Inn, a gay resort and nightclub, became a common site for AIDS fundraisers in the 1980s and 1990s. This detail matters because it collapses the false divide between pleasure and care. A place outsiders might dismiss as decadent was also where money was raised, grief was gathered and a frightened community turned nightlife into a lifeline. Chosen family was not a slogan. It was logistics.

Research has linked synchronized movement with social bonding and increased pain thresholds, while studies of dance and movement therapy have found benefits for depression, anxiety and interpersonal functioning. What outsiders now call resilience was, for us, simply the nightly practice of keeping one another going. 

That is why the word “joy” can be misleading if we make it too soft. Joy in queer nightlife was and is sweaty, sexual, improvised, defiant, sometimes reckless, sometimes holy. It did not erase grief. It gave grief somewhere to go.

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None of this means dancing is enough. A party will not stop authoritarianism. A drag show will not repeal anti-LGBTQ legislation. A nightclub cannot replace courts, organizing, voting, or protest. Joy without vigilance can become anesthesia. Joy without community can become branding. Joy without politics can become escape for those privileged enough to leave others behind.

But the answer is not to dismiss joy. It is to understand what kind of joy has power — a lesson America needs now.

The country is confronting a crisis. We are politically exhausted, increasingly isolated, distrustful of institutions and surrounded by reasons to be afraid. More people are discovering that they can follow every headline, understand every threat and still have nowhere to put the fear.

Queer nightlife offered one answer, imperfect but profound: Put the fear in a room. Let it breathe alongside other people’s fear. Let the body remember that it is more than a battleground.

The joy created in queer nightlife was collective. It required a room. It required witnesses. It required people watching the door, watching each other and noticing when the mood shifted before trouble arrived. Pleasure and protection had to coexist.

That was the real survival infrastructure; not joy by itself, but joy attached to community and vigilance.

To survive a hostile world, people need pleasure and community, yes — but they also need history. They need to know what they are up against and what others survived before them. They need to care for each other while they watch the door. They need to build systems that do not depend on the benevolence of institutions that may never come.

The pushback against “party and dance” landed because it sounded like the whole plan. It cannot be the whole plan. But it can be part of one.

We did not dance through the AIDS crisis because things were fine. We danced because everything was not fine, because the body needed proof it still belonged to the living. We danced because grief without community becomes isolation, and isolation is where despair does its best work.

Dancing didn’t solve the crisis, but it helped us survive long enough to keep fighting.

This is not nostalgia. It is instruction.

The post When joy was resistance on the dance floor appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair was widely mocked as a great American flop: overpriced, uncomfortable and, above all, dull.

Well, bad news for fans of fun: Trump’s billionaire buddies, Larry and David Ellison, are about to bring MAGA-ified misery to the rest of entertainment with their proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which will likely make movie theaters, cable TV and other entertainment products a lot more MAGA — and a lot more boring. 

Larry and David Ellison are the father-and-son duo behind Paramount’s attempted purchase of Warner Bros., a move that would consolidate most of Hollywood into a few hands and dramatically reduce free market competition in the entertainment industry. The two often present, especially in court documents, as simple businessmen just trying to make money. But in reality, Larry Ellison was called a “shadow president” by a Trump adviser speaking to Wired last year. The Ellisons aren’t just in this for money. They are in it for power — and their vision of remaking the country and even world in their MAGA-centric image.

Whether they succeed in the long run remains to be seen, but in the process, they are going to make your movie-going and likely TV-viewing experiences more tiresome. Above all, MAGA is bad at culture, too strapped to their narrow interests and bigotries to understand what makes entertainment actually entertaining.

Last week, the attorneys general of a dozen states, along with the Writers Guild of America West and East, filed suit to stop the merger, which has unsurprisingly been approved by Trump’s corrupt Justice Department. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of WGAE.) Labor and economic concerns fuel these lawsuits, but the consumer experience is front and center. On Monday afternoon, the merger was frozen by a federal judge’s temporary restraining order. 

“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference on Wednesday.

On the podcast “The Town with Matthew Belloni,” he argued that the quality of movie theaters themselves will decline even more if the merger goes through. “You won’t have comfortable seating,” Bonta said. “You won’t have the same quality and variety at concession stands.”

Under the Ellisons, the future of the movies stands to echo the Great American State Fair, where consumers had the pleasure of paying $25 for an overcooked drumstick while they stood in an empty plaza on the National Mall in Washington waiting for the elderly Lee Greenwood to sing “God Bless the USA” for the billionth time.

Experts I talked to explained that such decline is the economic result of consolidation, which reduces competition and therefore removes incentives for movie studios to take creative risks. Miranda Banks, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who has conducted extensive research on media mergers, contrasted this low-competition era with the 1970s, when Hollywood was full of “creative workers” and “a lot of independent companies,” which created “an open market of bidding for good quality programming.” Now companies avoid originality in favor of “churning out more films within franchises,” which is cheaper and easier than developing original products with independent creators. 

But it is also about power and political ideology, explained James Schamus, a screenwriter who once ran Focus Features and is now a Columbia University professor. He argued that the Ellisons are building a “techno fascist project” that is far more interested in waging “war on democracy” than old school Hollywood concerns like selling movie tickets. “Short-term profit is happily sacrificed to long-term domination,” Schamus said.

Chief among these goals is mass surveillance of the population through many means, which includes making sure people can’t watch a movie or TV show without having to hand all their data over to Oracle, the another Larry Ellison-owned company. The elder Ellison isn’t exactly coy about his dystopian scheme: At an Oracle financial analyst meeting in 2024, he promised his company would pave the path to mass social control.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” he said. Unsurprisingly, both Larry and David Ellison are big fans of artificial intelligence, seeing it as a way to streamline their surveillance operations, and for what David Ellison euphemistically calls “cost efficiencies and synergies.” 

That’s just code for “firing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creative people,” Schamus said, and replacing good work with dreck “made for the cheapest price” for the “lowest common denominator.” 

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Anyone who spends time on X or Truth Social knows that, while most Americans loathe empty A.I. slop, there is one audience that eats it up: MAGA folks. Trump himself loves it. He constantly posts A.I. videos that are as tedious as they are uncanny, and his cultural tastes are mirrored by the bulk of right-wing audiences, who artistic discernment is too clouded by bitterness and ideological obsession to engage with the more human emotions that make movies, TV and music engaging to other people. The MAGA capture of Hollywood behemoths like Paramount and Warner Bros. threatens to gut the ability of smart, creative people to make good things, and replace it with mind-numbing rubbish.

“Once upon a time, in Hollywood,” Banks said, movie studios were run by people whose “goal was to get people into the theater.” They were “not good guys or kind guys,” she explained, but ultimately, they saw their job as “making money to make more movies.” However cynical — and largely straight, white and male — some old-school operators were, they helped to build a Hollywood that was centered around giving the people what they wanted. This seems like paradise compared to what the Ellisons and their kind envision.

“For these guys,” Banks said, the goal “is extraction,” and “what they’re extracting is not just our money, but our data.” For years, movie ticket sales have been declining, because of this shift from seeing the consumer not as a customer to please, but a mark to suck dry. In some ways, the Ellisons don’t care that much if you ever go back to the movies.

“They all think they should be the techno-fascist philosopher king at the end of the day,” Schamus said, referring not just to the Ellisons, but also to similar megalomaniacal MAGA billionaires like tech investors Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (who recently lost his trillionaire status). At a certain point, these men have amassed so much money that it’s meaningless. The next hill to conquer is social control.

Making media more MAGA will make it dumber, but that’s by design. Truly creative and inspiring art undermines that goal, because it provokes responses like empathy and critical thinking in audiences — which gets in the way of authoritarian domination.

UPDATE: This article has been updating to reflect a federal judge’s temporary restraining order against the merger on July 20.

The post The MAGA-fication of Hollywood is going to be so boring appeared first on Salon.com.

Earlier this year, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines. He was charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, one of the nine people convicted in the prosecution following last year’s noise demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas in northern Texas. Unlike the others convicted in this case, Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest and maintains he had no role in its planning.

According to prosecutors, Sanchez-Estrada moved the zines at the request of his wife, Maricela Rueda, who attended the demonstration and was sentenced to 70 years in prison after being convicted of rioting, explosive charges and providing material support to terrorists. But no evidence was presented at trial regarding why Sanchez-Estrada moved the publications, which a defense committee has subsequently told Salon “was done entirely of his own accord and for his own reasons.”

The Prairieland case has been widely criticized for its application of terrorism charges against protesters. Sanchez-Estrada’s conviction, in particular, has been criticized for the harsh sentencing applied and his tangential connection to the protest. Ana Bell, the sister of Sanchez-Estrada, spoke with Salon about her brother’s case and what it means for free speech in Trump’s America.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How is your family holding up, and how has the trial and conviction impacted you and your family personally?

My brother Dez was the main caregiver for my parents, with him having the most flexible schedule. He could easily schedule his appointments for whenever my mom didn’t have a doctor’s appointment and stuff like that. We’re not complaining. They’re parents, and we love them. We want to take care of them. It did present a challenge that we weren’t expecting because he was the main person taking care of them.

My younger brother is a teacher, so he’s usually in a classroom. I opened a bookstore a couple of months ago, so I’m trying to run the business and everything. It’s been interesting with all of the things that we have to take care of. We were talking yesterday, I had to figure out how to deal with his taxes. He was detained, I have his power of attorney, and I’m just like, “Okay, so a lot of this stuff that is in the house, what is receipts, what is actually business expenses? Stuff like that is not something that one is expecting to do, and all of a sudden you have to take care of it, and it adds an additional layer of stress that wasn’t there before.

And that’s on top of the emotional roller coaster. You don’t know if this is the last conversation we will have for a while, because he could be moved to a different facility and then we have to figure out how to set up communications, how to set up his commissary. Like, would we be allowed to visit him in person? Is he even at a distance where we can drive to see him?

For example, this weekend, on Saturday, we were able to visit. My mom, dad and his stepdaughter. So he was able to see me and he was so happy that she was there. But then on Sunday, when it was my turn to go visit him, we showed up, and visitations had been canceled, so we didn’t get to see him on Sunday. Now we have to wait until next Saturday or Sunday, and hope that from here until then, he hasn’t been moved to a different facility, and we didn’t miss our chance to see him.

Sometimes he calls and we miss the phone call, or sometimes the number doesn’t work, and like you’re trying to press five to answer the call, and it just hangs up the call instead. It’s an emotionally-charged situation, even though it was just a phone call. It all adds up because right now, everything feels like an open wound that we have been trying to heal, and it’s not closing. Everything is fresh. Everything just gets harder.

Could you talk a little bit about how it feels having people on the internet trading incorrect information about your brother?

I’m not saying that these people have ill intent, but I do believe that words have a lot of power and the words we use to communicate can make a breakthrough.

Someone asked me in a comment if he had just printed the magazines, and someone would come and grab them from that house, and I was just like, “You have completely wrong information.” These were magazines that he bought. They weren’t 10 or 20 copies of the same magazine. They were one like one copy about freedom, one about the environment. They were materials that he read, and he critiqued.

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I think people just need to take a step back before making a statement and actually do a little bit of research because a lot of the information is just one Google away. You can go on the internet right now and look for all the evidence. It’s available. It has been unsealed. Once you have that in your hands, you can see all the information, not just what I say, not just what the government is saying.

I try not to spend a lot of time online doing this because, as I said, I do run a business. I have three kids. I’m a single mom. There is a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of people are just running with it, kind of like a case of broken telephone.

Everything that’s happening right now, it’s very hurtful, very painful for our family. If I don’t check my emotions before I start talking with people, I could make it a bigger issue than it actually needs to be.

For me, it’s very important right now for people to understand that while my brother is the one who is in jail, and the government is not literally stating, “We are coming for your freedom of speech.” That’s exactly what is happening. He is just the vessel right now.

Could you speak a little bit about what it’s been like to witness this campaign from the government to paint your brother in this way? I think the idea that you could be convicted for what amounts to moving a box of your own magazines is a very foreign idea to most Americans.

It is very disturbing. I just opened a bookstore. So what are the odds that I literally have countless works right now in my store of examples of people who fought against fascism? I only sell fiction, but you have Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games,” you have Harry Potter in Hogwarts, you have Thomas in “The Maze Runner.” You have all these characters that are literally standing up to oppression and fascism, and those who are in power and they show an amount of corruption that you think only happens in books.

We felt that the government was trying to make an example out of people who are not content with the current administration. Judge Reed, at my brother’s sentencing, said it. The state is trying to make an example to not encourage people with similar ideologies to follow this path. “The reason why you guys are getting this many years,” and this is me paraphrasing, “It’s because we’re trying to make an example.” He said the quiet part out loud, and it’s on the record.

This is the reason why I encourage people over and over to look at the court transcripts, listen to what the prosecution presented as their case, listen to what the defense attorneys were questioning and asking for and then see who told the truth by looking at the evidence that they’ve presented to you.

In my brother’s case, when you look inside the box, everything was dated prior to COVID. Even if you did not like the political observations of some of those magazines, essays, critiques, poetry or whatever was in ther, these are feelings from the people, and they’re protected under the First Amendment. You are allowed to feel how you want. You are allowed to feel that the current administration is the best one ever, and you’re allowed to tell that to people and not go to jail. But you’re also allowed to do the opposite and it still doesn’t earn you a sentence.

None of the stuff that was in there, whether it was for or against the government, was a crime or illegal to have, and it was not used to persecute anybody who took part in the noise demo, which my brother was not an attendee of.

My understanding is that you must commit a crime in order to be punished, right? It’s not because of what you think. It’s not because of what you read. It’s not because of what you have in your house. Even more absurd is that it’s not because of the paper magazines, books or pamphlets that you have in your house. That’s what is so incredibly disturbing to me.

What is your message to other people who might be critical of the current government, to would-be protesters?

If I could just give one word of advice to people, as a person who loves this country but doesn’t love what is happening right now, it would be to study the Constitution and fight for it. Listen to which political candidates right now are talking about freedom of speech or immigration issues. Ask yourself what things seem to be in jeopardy in our Constitution and find a way to make a change for those. I do not believe that staying quiet is the way to go. I also don’t believe violence is the answer. I do believe that we all need to speak up and defend and uphold the Constitution.

Why do you think the government decided to go after your brother? Assuming this conviction stands, there will be potentially profound implications for the First Amendment and who does and does not enjoy freedom of speech in this country.

I actually think that if he had been somebody else, it would have been the same thing. With him, I feel like the main reason why was that his wife was at the noise demonstration. She was arrested on July 4, and the government had a whole day to look into her and see who she was married to. He was arrested on Sunday, and they did a big production. I watched a video of his arrest.

I saw all the units that were surrounding him and asked, “What is this?” They came after him as if he were a terrorist, and all he had with him was a box of zines. At some point, they claimed it was explosives, but when they opened it, it was just paper. In the current political climate, anyone who has brown skin is low-hanging fruit. It’s someone who you expect to get lost in the system.

But the fact is that he’s an immigrant — an immigrant who has legal status in the county but an immigrant regardless. Right now, there is so much hateful and hurtful feelings towards immigrants that I feel he was just the perfect scapegoat. It changed the whole thought process of how they see him. They completely dehumanized him simply because of that.

For me, it just aligns so perfectly with everything that they were looking for in a “terrorist.” Even the beard. Some people were crazy about how he had a beard and said that he was in a sleeper cell and all this stuff. He’s a tattoo artist who loves cats. This is outrageous.

There are some headwinds in that this appeals to the Fifth Circuit and then the Supreme Court, both of which are very closely tied to the current administration and their view of the world. At the same time, these judges who handled the case, they do have a record of going too far, even for the Fifth Circuit, and so I’m wondering how optimistic you are about your brother being able to prevail through the legal system.

I wanted to believe that justice would be served. I wanted to believe that we would be bringing my brother [home], but the moment I heard the sentence for Autumn Hill and the reasons that the judge gave, the judge said that the sentence was not more than he thought was reasonable to give. That changed my perspective on that moment. I lost hope before we got to my brother’s sentencing. I lost hope because it didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any sense from the legal point of view that they would receive this much punishment for something that was so minimal.

I don’t know how to feel. Part of me wishes that I could be hopeful again, because we’re gonna keep fighting regardless. I made the statement before that we’re probably going to spend every last minute of our lives trying to fight for his freedom, and that’s very unfortunate because he’s so young. They’re all so young, but they shouldn’t be behind bars. And I feel that the justice system is failing them, and it’s failing all of us. If the appeal doesn’t work, then it will be just like a failure in the justice system. I want to be hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.

Do you think there is a chance of a potential political solution to this, or is there the political bravery out there to speak to this issue? I’ve spoken with people who have suggested that the next president should consider a pardon if they don’t prevail on appeal.

I don’t think the current administration will do it at all. But I would like to think that we will vote better next time, and that if we have not been successful with the appeal, or we’re still fighting this case, we could ask for a pardon.

So I’m hoping that if we end up having to go that route, we are able to ask for it and that it might be granted. I would like for the judicial system to actually do its part and be just.

The post Her brother was convicted of terrorism over a protest he didn’t even attend appeared first on Salon.com.