What gay guy thinks a vingea looks
Capturing the characters of London’s queer nightlife with photographer Roxy Lee
London has been in a crisis of gentrification for a while now. Across the capital, venues created by and for marginalised communities vanish in the dozens every year. Nobody knows this better than Hackney-born-and-bred photographer Roxy Lee, whose photography has effectively become a modern-day archive of contemporary queer nightlife in London. “I first became interested in documenting things photographically as my home borough began to gentrify,” Roxy tells It’s Nice That. “The gentrification process in Hackney and other parts of London made me very aware from a young age that things can just disappear, and it’s completely out of control,” she says. Roxy’s lament for spaces show up and gone is what fuelled her to “take pictures of things and people I love and experience,” she explains, pointing to the queer nightlife. The excitement and delight that permeates her 35mm images of what’s still left across the metropolis is an effective way of recuperating the decline the London queer group have collectively endured over the years.
Being a mainstay in queer London nightlife herself, Roxy’s work fast began to take
I had been in two minds about going to Vinegar Hill for a few weeks. Vinegar Hill, for the uninitiated, is a great big queer camping event that’s held here in New Zealand every year and every year I feel to be competent to come up with an excuse: too far away, too busy, don’t have a tent. It was still 50/50 when I popped into the car in Hamilton to begin the journey down, but just like all journeys, once you get started it’s hard to stop.
It’s a beautiful control down, I particularly like the petty stretch of street between Taihape and Hunterville: long, winding roads between rolling hills, trees planted as grand wind breaks marching off into the distance, the railway line a fine scar through the countryside. I wish I could bring everyone I know on this drive at least once to share it with them.
All too soon I came upon the campsite and apprehension gripped me. I didn’t really expect to realize many people there and I’m not particularly good with strangers. Seeing as I was already all this way I may as well go on.
Now, as you come in the camp grounds the gravel street forks. I took the right because that seemed to be where all the tents were. I didn’t
A Good Sport
From the Archives
Edmund WhiteI’M A RETIRED CLASSICS PROFESSOR seventy-one years old living on Naxos with an English woman friend, a news writer. Every simple statement invariably disguises several messy realities. For instance, you’d deliberate that I must hold been a Hellenist, but in fact in Ann Arbor I did Latin and can barely retain classical Greek, even though I studied Plato with Gerald Else, who tried to convince me to abandon the “stodgy, graceless” language of Rome for the “suave elegance” of the Athenians’ tongue.
But I was a practical farm boy from just outside Holland, Michigan, and I couldn’t see how I could make my mark in such an overplowed field. Anyway, I liked the immoderation, the perversity of Catullus and Ovid’s Amores and, of course, the Satyricon, but finally I specialized in Statius, who was relatively unexplored at the age I was coming up.
Everything was changing in the 1960s, and enrollment in the classics was at an all-time shallow. But the cultural conservatives who wrote budgets and made decisions at Michigan State, where I started off as an assistant professor, were determined that Latin and Greek must still be offered amidst al
I tried 17 rice cookers to detect the best model in the US: here are my favorites
Not a sunlight goes by where I don’t boil and eat rice. I grew up thinking of it as central to every meal. I’m also a former professional chef who, for over seven years, ran a restaurant and meal truck that served Hawaii’s local sustenance – a cuisine that is rice-based. All told I have made tens of thousands of pounds of rice.
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This means that I have purchased dozens of rice cookers of various sizes, both for house kitchens and commercial ones. I even have portable rice cookers for light toting to outdoor cookouts.
My guiding principles in this review are, firstly, that the most vital function of a rice cooker is to make delicious rice. But, secondly, I am fundamentally opposed to appliances that are single-function – rice cookers should be fit to steam vegetables and other foods, too, often while the rice is cooking. Thirdly, I look for rice cookers that are designed to last.
How I tested
I tested 17 rice cookers in what I referred to as the “Rice Cooker Olympics”. I orga