What a week! (Especially for the straights and the sports gays.) The Super Bowl, a festival of beer-drinking machismo, took place in Los Angeles over the weekend, with the L.A. Rams defeating the Cincinnati Bengals.
Amidst all of the hoopla around commercials, the halftime show and the actual sport, a lot of other things have happened in the LGBTQ2S+ cultural space this week, too. Gay Sim weddings made headlines, metal-country gay music disrupted trucker convoys and, as if he didn’t have enough to do, RuPaul is jumping on the Wordle craze. And that’s in addition to a slew of fantastically queer new albums from the likes of Orville Peck, Tegan and Sara and Kim Petras, among others.
Thankfully, we round it all up in “The Buzz” every week so you don’t have to. Here’s what you missed this week in queer and trans pop culture.
→There will be no big fat gay Sim weddings in Russia.
Electronic Arts announced Wednesday that downloadable wedding pack for The Sims 4, “My Wedding Stories,” will not be sold in Russia due to the country’s blanket ban on “gay propaganda.”
The expansion, which launches in North America on Feb. 17, allows players to organize, plan and execute their dream wedding for the virtual people in the gamespace. Marketing for the product features a Sims lesbian couple, Camille and Dominique, as they plan their nuptials.
And that’s where Russia’s 2013 anti-gay propoganda law comes in. The law bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships among minors,” and has led to the increased criminalization of LGBTQ2S+ people and speech in the country. Because players have always been able to have same-sex Sims live together and raise children, Russia previously put an 18+ rating on the base game in 2014.
In a statement, the game’s developers said they chose not to compromise showcasing a queer story to have the game meet Russia’s strict laws. As a result, the expansion will not be available in Russia.
“Holding back Cam and Dom’s story meant compromising the values we live by,” they wrote. “We are steadfast in upholding that commitment by shining a light on and celebrating stories like Dom and Cam’s, so we have made the decision to forgo the release of ‘My Wedding Stories’ where our storytelling would be subject to changes because of federal laws.”
The Sims has always been a platform for players to explore queer relationships. Since the original’s launch in 2000, players have been able to pursue same-sex partners.
→According to a report in Rolling Stone, gay cowboy metal music is being used to disrupt the anti-vaccine, anti-mandate trucker convoy that’s been a thorn in the side of the city of Ottawa for weeks now.
The original 2012 track “Ram Ranch” from Canadian Grant MacDonald has long been a meme online, with lyrics like “Eighteen naked cowboys wanting to be fucked / Cowboys in the showers at Ram Ranch / On their knees wanting to suck cowboy cocks / Ram Ranch really rocks.”
According to the Rolling Stone report, once activists opposed to the convoy got access to the channels of Zello, a walkie-talkie-style communication system that convoy organizers are using, they decided to annoy the convoy in the best way possible: by taking them to Ram Ranch. Specifically, the metal-country remix of MacDonald’s original song.
“It’s a deeply conservative belief system infiltrating our city,” one of the organizers told Rolling Stone. “And when we played this song to jam their communication, they’d get extremely angry because it’s an explicit and LGBTQ-friendly song.”
MacDonald told Rolling Stone he’s all for it.
“I’m just elated, totally elated that my song could be used to stand up for science,” he said.
The use of the song has spun off into the hashtag #RamRanchResistance. And others have joined the fun by blasting it in-person at convoy events too.
To misquote another Canadian country icon: let’s go, boys!
→RuPaul is hosting a new game show that, depending on how old you are, could either be considered a reboot of LINGO or a TV adaptation of Wordle. I wonder if “FRACKS” will be one of the answers?
→Lesbian icon Billie Jean King threw the coin toss at the Super Bowl, and wore a perfectly practical dyke pantsuit to do it!
→This week, Vulture dropped a massive oral history of Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again, and it is vital to queer culture! Come for discussions of turning Meryl Streep into a ghost, stay for Christine Baranski’s proposed “massive TikTok experience” reunion special.
→Taylor Swift isn’t the only artist jumping on the re-release train. Queer queens Tegan and Sara have released a new version of their breakout 2004 album So Jealous, renamed Still Jealous for 2022. The new release features the sisters singing acoustic covers of each other’s songs from the original album—the perfect nostalgia trip for anyone who grew up listening to the Canadian duo.
→Of course the same music supervisor works on Yellowjackets and Euphoria. Of course!! Jen Malone, who’s behind the absolute bops from both queer shows, told Vogue UK that “only fucking bangers will do” when it comes to curating each episode’s tracks.
→Drag Race contestant Bosco has come out as a trans woman, which means that there are now three openly trans women featured on Season 14.
→Controversial YouTube star Trisha Paytas is pregnant—and you can catch up on exactly why they’re so controversial here.
→Groundbreaking Veneno star Isabel Torres has passed away at the age of 52. Torres was a pioneering trans celebrity, with a career stretching back to the 1990s. In 2005, she was the first trans woman to be nominated for Queen of the Carnival of Las Palmas, the capital of the LGBTQ+ friendly Spanish island Gran Canaria, where she lived at the end of her life. She received critical and fan acclaim for her role in the 2020 HBO Max series Veneno, where she played legendary sex worker and activist Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez.
CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to clarify the nature of Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law.
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