Portland LIVE! Grant winners! Ins & Outs! Sunny Zimmerman!

Hey friends,

Hope you’re all hanging in there. It’s a new year, which means that, among other things, I’m entering my eighth year of Gender Revealing! Not to get sentimental on ya, but truly, thank you so much for being here and supporting the work that we’ve been doing all this time. What a joy and a gift to have this as my job! Your support and trust really means the world to me, especially in a world where everyone is perpetually scrambling for money and attention. It’s an honor to make these little projects for you!!!!

Also, thank you so much to everyone who sent holiday mail. I treasure it all, and loved the bonus stickers for my collection :)

Gender Ordeal news:

I am thrilled to say that after 2.5 months of work (emails, emails, showing up in person, emails, etc.), tickets are on sale now for our Portland Gender Ordeal live show! We’ll be at the Alberta Abbey on Tuesday, February 11. Doors at 6, show runs 7-8:30, tickets are only $16! (They tried to talk us into doing tiered seating that cost more but that felt rude so it’s first come, first serve for seats.) It’s a big venue so tell your friends / coworkers / polycule /etc, but also we’ve already sold 69 tickets (nice) since this morning, so maybe buy those tickets soon???

Image: A poster for the 2/11 Gender Ordeal show in Portland

(Okay, full disclosure, I wrote a long paragraph recommending places to drink/chill/eat burritos near the Abbey, but I figured you know them if you live there, and otherwise you don’t care? But if u want my burrito recs lmk lol.)

Meanwhile, we’ve ofc still got tickets available for our Seattle (late show), San Francisco, and Washington DC shows. (San Francisco is going to be mostly standing, so let us know asap if you require a seat, and we’ll make sure you have one! I think this one is gonna sell out.)

The DC show is later this month, which is SOON! The energy is gonna be feral! I thought about seeing if anyone from the audience wanted to do a t-shot onstage, the way that someone would do a free tequila shot or whatever, and then I remembered that that’s EXTREMELY ILLEGAL so we will not be doing that but imagine if we did????

Gender Conceal news:

For our last Gender Conceal ep of 2024, I had the delight of chatting with LA comedian Sunny Zimmerman. Sunny is the creator and star of LBJ the Play, and it was so fun to hear Sunny explain how they accidentally infused a bit of Lyndon B Johnson into their own gender. (Happens to the best of us!)

Image: Sunny performs as LBJ in LBJ the play. 

We also talk about Sunny's collaborator the TikTok Pants Man, their rival nonbinary historical play Oh Mary!, their former political/law ambitions, and also Ronan Farrow’s new pop single for some reason. Oh, also Sunny talks about how “LBJ had a famously huge hog” at some point, which is beautiful.

This month’s Gender Conceal will most likely be a chat amongst Mattie, Calvin and myself. If you have any questions for us to answer on the show, post them in the comments ASAP!

Grant news:

For the last several months, I have been making the same “joke” about how all my jobs are becoming increasingly impossible because nobody is willing to answer an email. And look, I get it! I also do not want to answer an email! But this is the first time that fully three of our grant winners did not respond to our emails. Hopefully we’ll be able to add them in later, but for now, you can check out our list of 13 grant recipients on our website and in our Instagram story collection.

This year’s grant cohort includes three recipients in Nigeria and one each in Peru, the Netherlands, and Cameroon. We also had grant recipients in Texas, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania. Some of our grant recipients don’t have much or any work online to link to, but that does not mean that they aren’t doing really rad work in their communities! If anything, I am impressed with their ability to Log Off and focus on the IRL.

Ins & Outs for 2025:

In
YOLO
Moral ambiguity
Leaving the house
Audiobooks from the library
Buying drugs at the grocery store
Becoming a patron of the arts
Befriending your neighbors
Encrypting texts/emails
Minding yr business
Tipping 25%
Decaf

Out
ASMR
Jealousy
Sea moss
Autofiction*
G-train closures
Posting in all caps
Posting about posting
Up-charging for oat milk
Whatever gay guys are up to over there
Paying for a car when the subway is faster anyway

*This is not shade on any past guests; I simply think people are gonna start doing something else at some point.

And speaking of trends, PLEASE tell me where to buy the big pants!!!!

Okay I actually had loads of Links & Stuff but this is already super long so we’ll keep saving them up for next week. Thanks for reading! Here’s your Weekly Rhubarb.

Image: Ruby sitting on a chair in the yard. She looks mad but I don't think she was actually mad? There are lots of dead leaves on the ground.

Xo,
Yr resident gender detective