The mighty Kore Press is a Tucson-based nonprofit independent publishing house and literary justice organization. For 24 years, the press has worked to ensure that marginalized voices: women, people of color, queer and trans folks, have a forum. Founder Lisa Bowden is trying to raise $20,000 for book printing, publishing staff, anthology editorial/artist fees. The Indiegogo campaign has currently raised 13 percent of its goal. Funding for literary endeavors is never easy, and the odds are stacked. Fewer people are reading books for one thing. That, and Bowden and Kore are publishing voices that’d go unheard into the mainstream.

Creating a people-powered publishing house has become the most sustainable route for extending Kore Press. A significant portion of the budget comes from support by the NEA, NEH and associated funding sources. With NEA and NEH funding on the chopping block in Trump’s 2018 budget, here Bowden opens up about what mainstream publishing is missing today and what we can expect for Kore Press' fall season.

Kore Press has been running since 1993. What made you want to create this press?
After graduating from the UA and working in the Tucson literary community, I wondered why we weren't exposed to more women writers in school, especially when Tucson is so rich with talent. After working for five years with another press learning printing and binding, and acquiring my own equipment, Karen Falkenstrom, Kore Press co-founder, and I discovered we both wanted to make a feminist/social justice impact with the literary arts, and so, Kore Press was born.

The way people consume media has largely shifted to an online format. What is it like running Kore Press in 2017? How has it adapted?
We publish online as well as in print, and have been growing our digital presence as reading, activist and communications culture has shifted. Digital printing allows us to keep producing books in much smaller runs of our titles, which is more economically feasible for small presses.

What does Kore Press look for in a prospective author?
We are focusing in recent years on writers who are interested in experimental forms, or content, that have potential for social impact. We have done, and plan to continue doing, community programming around certain artists or works to create larger public conversations which engage folks in innovative ways.

What is mainstream publishing missing? Why aren’t marginalized groups able to tell their stories in that forum?
Mainstream publishing is commercially driven, market-driven, so, it's missing a lot in terms of diversity. That is and has always been the strength of small presses—to take risks, work with all kinds of writers and voices.

With the proliferation of social media and personal technology, we have experienced a democratization of "publishing"—anyone with access can tell their story, can have an audience. Mainstream publishing, like mainstream media of all kinds, is largely governed by corporate forces, so you tend to see the same issues of systemic racism, sexism, capitalism—intersecting oppressions—that we see in large institutions and governments.

On a recent Thursday night on the outdoor patio of H2O, drag queens in stiletto heels towered over showgoers and divas strutted in sequined gowns. LGBTQ and cis-gendered people gathered for Tora Woloshin's opening act. Woloshin hosted an event called Culture Shock to fight against prejudice by showcasing different cultures. The majority of acts were people of color and LGBTQ performers. Woloshin opened and closed the show, singing and dancing some of todays most distinguishable pop songs.


Flight School Acro, was up next. A yoga mat was placed on the ground and the acrobatic duo went straight into their routine. The two transitioned smoothly into difficult acrobatic yoga poses and made handstands and planks look easy, never off balance or struggling to complete their poses.

Seasoned burlesque performer Matt Finish began his act wearing but a shimmering gold robe which eventually came off. Finish's explicit routine was filled with and tease (flashes of his butt cheeks, indeed). The burlesquer taunted audience members in nipple tassels and a shiny banana hammock, and went down to perfect full splits while half naked! He controlled the entire room, kept the crowd on edge and a little uncomfortable.

Lip-sync performer Mama made her entrance emerging from the ladies bathroom covered in toilet paper. Her cheeky performance sort of defined the very idea of a drama queen. MC and lip-sync performer Jenna DuMay heckled the crowd when they were less than thrilled about waiting more than an hour for the show to begin. She called us "emo kids" cause we said "yass queen" with lacking enthusiasm. It was great.

Theaters across the globe are teaming up in response to the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida on June 12. Now, actors and theater goers alike are paying respect to the victims, their families and all those affected that night through live acting.

This summer, a gunman shot and killed 49 club goers at the Pulse Nightclub—a venue known for its LGBTQ+ community. This attack is marked as the worst shooting in modern U.S. history. Authorities later found that the attacker had pledged allegiance to ISIS, a terrorist group based in Iraq and Syria, according to CNN.

After the shooting, playwrights from across the globe curated a collection of new plays in response to the shooting in conjunction with the Missing Bolts Productions and NoPassport Theatre Alliance & Press, according to Playbill.

Members of the Tucson community are invited to watch the UA graduate and undergraduate students in dramaturgy perform a free, staged reading of the 17 plays curated in the special collection. The reading will be held Monday, Dec. 5 from 7:30-8:30 p.m. in the Harold Dixon Directing Studio, UA Drama Building Room 116, 1025 N. Olive Road.

Playwrights include: E.M. Lewis, Jeff McMahon, Jordan Tannahil, Arturo Soria, Georgina Escobar and many others. Some of these plays involve adult content, profanity and scenes of violence.

Happy Celebrate Bisexuality Day, everybody! Are you celebrating? Gettin' bi alright?

As we detailed in this week's cover story, Tucson Pride is happening next week and you should be there. Spotify has a few pretty spectacular playlists to help you get in a Pride state of mind, but I personally believe you need to start with the video above: "Gettin' Bi" from Crazy Ex Girlfriend.  

The rest of your "Getting Ready For Pride" to do list: Buy a ticket, apply to be a vendor/parade and, of course, read up on the changes from last year. 

IBT's Big Gay Weekend is upon us! Join your local favorites Tempest DuJour and Aija Simone for a fun filled weekend featuring entertainment, giveaways, food and drinks. 

T.G.I.F
The weekend kicks off Friday night with a drag show hosted by Tempest at 9 p.m. with special guests, Shannel from RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, IBT's Drag Race Season 3 Winner Asphyxiasia and the Haus of Kunt. Following the show there will be a thirty minute meet and greet and the Go-Go Boys will be on at 11 p.m. 

WERK!
Saturday night will be an evening filled with comedy and music with the stars of Hey Queen! who will be performing a special show WERK QUEEN at 9 p.m. Following the show there will be a thirty minute meet and greet and the Go-Go Boys will be on at 11 p.m. There will also be surprise performances on the dance floor. 

Sunday Funday
There will a free lunch buffet, drink specials and a drag show hosted by Aija Simone at 2 p.m., which will feature special guests Isis D'Frost, Raul St James and Kiki Vermont. Karaoke will follow from 4 p.m. to 2 p.m. 

For more information visit the event Facebook page. 

Now, I am not a huge fan of cable news, but I have been catching Anderson Cooper on CNN and his coverage of the Orlando mass shooting. He has been tactful. Most importantly, he has not acted the way we are taught in journalism school—cold and emotionless, no matter how horrific the events we're covering are, for the sake of being "neutral." 

After the events at Pulse nightclub, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has promised to go after anyone who causes any harm to the LGBT community. It's ironic and hypocritical—like Cooper so majestically told her during an interview today—because blocking same-sex marriage in Florida has been at the forefront of Bondi's work as attorney general. 
 
"Do you really think you're a champion of gay rights?" Cooper asked. "I've never heard you say anything positive about gays before." Cooper told her off and did not let Bondi speak for at least five minutes.

Anti-LGBT laws are the gateway into normalizing and condoning homophobia and transphobia. From there, it is a very fine line to cross into hate crime massacres like the one at Pulse, where 49 LGBT brothers and sisters died early Sunday morning.

On Monday, there was a moment of silence in Congress to mourn the 49 LGBT young men and women who were killed in the Orlando mass shooting in the early hours of Sunday. At that moment, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives started to repeatedly chant, "Where's the bill?" 

The protest was against House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Republicans who refuse to support gun control legislation. They are guilty of continuing to allow killers, like the one who broke into Pulse nightclub, to purchase AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles and other weapons meant for a war zone. 

According to Mother Jones, Ryan refused to acknowledge the protesters and instead tried to continue business as usual.

He even dismissed Rep. James Clyburn's attempt to speak about the upcoming anniversary of the Charleston mass shooting, in which nine people were killed inside a historic black church on June 17, 2015.

Republicans and the anti-gun control movement, keep your moments of silence to yourselves, keep your "my thoughts are with the victims" to yourselves, keep your "guns don't kill people" bullshit to yourselves. 

As Mother Jones writes, the protest on Monday will very likely fall on deaf ears. 

Here's the video courtesy of CNN:

More than 24 hours after a man broke into an LGBT nightclub in downtown Orlando with an AR-15-like semiautomatic rifle, a handgun and overloads of ammunition, the identities of some of the 49 victims who died are beginning to come afloat.

What's known so far of the Pulse nightclub deadly mass shooting is that most of the victims were gay, Latino men in their 20s and 30s. There were at least five women, also mostly Latinas. Some of the names that have emerged so far: Eric Ivan Ortiz Rivera, 36; Peter O. Gonzales-Cruz, 22; Kimberly Morris, 37; Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30; Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25—all at Pulse for a Saturday night of tireless dancing with friends and other close members of the LGBT community. For many, Pulse wasn't just a nightclub, it was a safe haven for those facing family rejection over their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Fifty-three others are in the hospital for gunshot wounds.

While most international and national media automatically labeled the massacre an act of extreme Islamic terrorism, (as well as Republicans who need a scapegoat for violently fueling anti-LGBT laws and environments) even President Barack Obama said that the country's homophobia and transphobia played a huge, if not a stellar, role, alongside the country's dangerous lack of gun control laws, in the killings. Tucson-based Southern Arizona Gender Alliance also blamed anti-LGBT sentiments. (As this Fuse article bravely discusses, it is simply not safe to be an LGBT person of color in the United States.)

"As we mourn, we stand with a community shaken, and we process countless emotions—sorrow, rage, fear, all of them valid, all of them too common in the lives of the LGBT community. We have witnessed an act of hate whose savagery goes beyond understanding," says a SAGA media statement. "Sadly, this is but an extreme version of the anti-LGBT animosity that is not only common, but entirely too accepted by our society, from state houses to the streets. This is the reality for queer identities, a reality that lads us to mourn today, but will also lead us to stand united, and forever fight to eradicate hate in all its forms."

Last night, hundreds of Tucsonans participated in a candlelight vigil on Fourth Avenue to honor the victims and to protest gun violence, as well as hate crimes against LGBT people.  

Here's a video released by the LA-based Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, for your consideration:

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing one of the biggest health care systems in the U.S. for denying transition-related coverage to transgender employees, according to an ACLU press release.

The federal lawsuit was filed against Dignity Health on behalf of Josef Robinson, a transgender man who works as an operating room nurse at Chandler Regional Medical Center. Dignity refused to cover transition-related treatment—often referred to as gender dysphoria treatment—that was prescribed by Robinson's doctor. According to the ACLU, Robinson had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket. He then filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "which issued a determination finding reasonable cause to believe that the Dignity Health insurance plan discriminates against Robinson on the basis of sex and authorized him to sue the health system," the ACLU says.

The lawsuit argues Dignity Health has a "discriminatory insurance policy" that "contradicts widely accepted medical standards and violates federal law," the press release says. The provider's refusal to cover medically necessary transition care discriminates on the basis of sex, violating even the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, including gender identity, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. 

San Francisco-based Dignity Health operates 39 hospitals and more than 400 care centers in Arizona, California and Nevada. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. 

Keeping all those colored people as slaves simply makes sense. They're not equipped to deal with the responsibility of being free citizens. And then letting them vote on top of giving them their freedom? God no! It's Just Wrong.

Women are fine in their place, but it's the men folks who should be making important decisions. Give women the vote? God no! It's Just Wrong.

They have their schools, we have our schools, and it's working just fine. Integrate the schools? God no! It'll cause chaos. Everyone will suffer. It's Just Wrong.

Interracial marriage? Gay rights? Gay marriage? God no! Wrong, wrong, wrong. It'll destroy the fabric of society.

And so it goes. Now the issue is transgender people using the bathroom of their choice. Somehow we managed to survive all those other changes which granted rights where rights were previously denied—and we've become a better society for it—but this time, apparently, this change is a bridge too far. It's. Just. Wrong.

Arizona has joined with 10 other states to oppose the Obama administration's recent guidance on the way schools should treat their transgender students. It's Attorney General Mark Brnovich's ball game, but Superintendent of Public Instruction has picked up a bat and stepped to the plate as well.