Especially since the onset of the pandemic, the strangers I follow on social media and the online creators whose work I consume have come to feel like part of my (para)social sphere. There’s a reason I’ll sometimes half-jokingly say “I want to see my friends!” when sitting down to watch a beloved TV show, check out a favorite YouTuber’s latest video or pop into an Instagram Live of someone whose life I follow from afar.
So it feels as appropriate as ever this year to highlight some people I think are doing heroic work, whether artistically, ethically, intellectually, politically, or some combination thereof. Here are my 5 picks for the year.
When my spouse and I attended a Pride Week comedy variety show in New York this past June, we were there primarily to see the ever-hilarious Jes Tom and didn’t know many of the other acts – so when the awkward-yet-confident, androgynously-styled Hannah Einbinder strutted onto the stage, we had no idea who she was. All we knew was that we were immediately captivated by her dry wit, zany jokes, and disarming stage presence.
The emcees had mentioned that Hannah was one of the stars of a TV series called Hacks, and when we started watching it, it was hard not to immediately fall in love with Hannah’s character, Ava. Ava is a down-on-her-luck comedy writer who lands a gig ghostwriting jokes for a famous fiftysomething comedienne, Deborah Vance, who’s fallen from her former glory. But what’s most striking to me about Ava – and about Hannah too – is that she’s loudly out about being bisexual, and she’s neither a stereotyped caricature of a bisexual nor a sugarcoated figurehead of “good bisexual representation.” Ava is a flawed, messy person who can be gregarious and generous one minute and anxious and selfish the next, just like a real human – and Hannah plays her with warmth and whimsy.
As a fellow bisexual Jew with a penchant for dark jokes (and messy behavior), I find both Hannah and her character Ava very relatable, and am so glad to see someone like Hannah out in the world making people laugh. She certainly made me laugh a lot this year.
Paul is the author of the books Natural Harvest and Semenology, both cookbooks where cum is the featured ingredient in every recipe.
I have no idea what Paul is up to now, and wish I did. I attempted to get in touch with him for an interview when I wrote a piece about Semenology this year, but he didn’t reply and hasn’t tweeted since 2012. (Hope he’s okay.)
Wherever he may be, his cultural impact is undeniable. Natural Harvest is the second-most mentioned book on all of Reddit, and I’ve yet to find any other works that dive as deeply into cum cuisine as Paul’s do. As I noted in my article, not all of the recipes are winners, and one wonders what menu a professionally trained chef or bartender (of which I gather Paul is neither) would build if given the same prompt – but Paul’s work gave me a lot of delight this year, and I think that’s worth celebrating.
I would be remiss not to mention Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. on this list, because his work had a transformational impact on my life this year.
As I’ve chronicled in a few blog posts, I dug deeply into the therapeutic modality known as Internal Family Systems this year as part of my trauma healing process, and it is one of the only tools I’ve come across in 15+ years of therapy that has actually shifted things for me. I still struggle, for sure, but I’m much stronger and more resilient now than I was at this time last year, in large part because of the techniques and paradigm I’ve learned from Internal Family Systems.
Dr. Schwartz invented IFS by applying to individual therapy similar techniques as those he’d used with couples and families in his practice, under the assumption that each person has different sides of their personality (known as “parts”) which can be in conflict with each other, and that these parts can be soothed and taken care of by the Self in order to relieve them of their difficult emotions. It sounds super “woo” but it’s actually just a useful lens through which to look at the internal tensions between different motivations and trauma responses you may have amassed over the years.
I really feel that Dr. Schwartz’s IFS model helped turn my life around pretty dramatically this year, and I’m so very grateful to him (and to my excellent IFS-practicing therapist) for that.
Happily, there was a lot of fantastic queer media this year. To name just a few faves: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Bros, The L Word: Generation Q, Heartstopper, Tár. A couple other major standouts were Joel Kim Booster’s Netflix stand-up special Psychosexual and (even moreso) the film he wrote and starred in, Fire Island.
Fire Island is a gay rom-com, and the world sorely needs more of those. But beyond that, it’s also just a really fucking good movie. It’s a modern-day, queered adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, set on the titular queer oasis that is Fire Island in the summertime. A gaggle of gay friends shows up for their annual weeklong vacation, and romantic hijinks ensue.
Booster’s sense of humor is sharp and biting, deeply millennial, distinctively queer, and shot through with relatable mental health struggles (he has bipolar disorder). He tackles tough topics like sex, race, and civil rights with ease and style. I think he’s hilarious and brilliant and am excited to see what he does next!
Upon issuing myself a songwriting challenge this year, I started looking into the work of people who had issued themselves similar challenges – and pretty much immediately stumbled across Jonathan Mann’s “Song a Day” project.
As its title suggests, Jonathan writes and records a song every day for this project, which would be amazing enough on its own – but the fact that he’s kept it going for nearly 14 years now is even more mindblowing. That’s over 5,000 songs, and counting.
In addition to this staggering daily achievement, Jonathan also works on other projects, including a podcast about his songwriting process that I really enjoyed. I find him wildly inspirational as a creator. I read an interview with him this year where he said something like, “I decided to do this because I noticed that I felt better on days when I wrote a song than on days when I didn’t, and I wanted to feel that way every day.” I am in total agreement with him, and aspire to commit to a daily practice of creativity the way he has, for reasons that go beyond the practical and ascend into the spiritual, the existential, the universal and the eternal.
Who were your biggest heroes this year?