Tough Guise

A friend just told me about this great video from Media Education Foundation

It relates to the safe teen training I participated in in October.

opening montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmy2IHYq_y8

7 min video summarizing the film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3exzMPT4nGI

Hip Hop finally takes on Homophobia, or more specifically Macklemore does.

Maybe you've already heard this song Same Love, but if not, check it out. I first heard about Macklemore because of his hit "Thrift Store" which is hilarious and totally on point, but has gotten obnoxiously popular of late. Same Love on the other hand just makes me cry every time I watch the video. The extra cool thing is that the other day my dad was listening to this incredibly annoying pop radio station and when I asked him why he said there was this one song he had heard with this amazing soul melody and, more interestingly a message of love and acceptance, something not often heard in hip hop. Intruigued I loked up same love to see if the song that had so impacted me had done the same to him. I was also excited to think that maybe there existed 2 hip hop songs in the universe that promote such things. Nope. I was wrong, but I was pretty happy that my dad and I had this kind of universal consciousness thing going on. Guess I better burn him a copy of the CD (which I bought, minus the swears) so he doesn't have to keep listening to Kit Carson :P

James Chamberlain is a Hero

We had an amazing talk today given by James Chamberlain, the teacher involved in the book ban that happened in the Surrey school board in the 90's. He reccommended a really good resource called GALE (Gay and Lesbian Education)

Sea of Pink

Gosh it can be hard to take a decent photo of oneself. This is a pic of me in a pink dress I wore today, to be honest it was a little awkward. The weather report threatened snow and trying to get the tights to stay up, along with the knee socks, etc etc was trickier than just slipping into some jeans...Aaaanyways, today many of my colleagues and I wore pink as a stand against Bullying. Made me think once again about the symbolism of clothing as visual culture...Probably because I should be writing my artography paper right now instead of blogging, but oh well.

The reason behind all this pink is that back in September 2007 in Cambridge Ontario a boy wore a pink polo shirt to school on the first day and was harassed with homophobic taunting. A couple of grade 12 boys at the school decided to fight back against this kind of bullying. They went to a discount store and bought a bunch of cheap pink t-shirts and emailed their friends to tell them to wear pink as well. The next day it was a "sea of pink" at the school. I am excited about this little bit of home grown activism as well as the anti-homophobia/bullying message that these boys chose to send. A few weeks ago Steve Mulligan the Anti-homophobia and Diversity Consultant for the Social Responsibility and Diversity Team of the Vancouver School Board came to speak to us and he has sent me a couple of lesson plan ideas for pink day. Email me if you would like them. Here is a link to an article by the CBC about the boys in Cambridge.