Just a quick note: I’m publishing my first novel for adults since 2019! Lessons in Magic and Disaster comes out this August — it’s about a young witch who teaches her mom how to do magic. It’s gotten starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal, and I’m so grateful for the love it’s gotten from random readers. You can pre-order it from Green Apple and I’ll sign, personalize and doodle-ize your copy. If you pre-order anywhere and send me a receipt, I’ll send you a PDF of All the Birds in the Sky bonus material including a hefty chunk of the sequel in progress. Details here.

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Laetitia Pilkington Lived By Her Wits. Literally.

I've gotten obsessed with Laetitia Pilkington, and I'm sad that I wasn't able to include more about her in Lessons in Magic and Disaster. While I was researching that book, I got drawn into reading about women writers of the 1730s and 1740s, and was absolutely gobsmacked to discover Pilkington, a renowned poet who survived by doing comedy and also wrote a bestselling (and scandalous) memoir.

The daughter of a Dublin physician, Laetitia came from money. Against her family's wishes, she married a clergyman and aspiring poet named Matthew Pilkington, who lacked her writing talent and was unfortunately aware of this fact. Laetitia and Matthew became part of Jonathan Swift's intimate social circle — Swift seems to have treated them like secretaries and flunkies, and also delighted in making fun of them in front of guests. (They were both very short, Laetitia especially, and Swift liked pushing her head down with his hand to emphasize how much he towered over her, as if she were a Lilliputian. Honestly, Swift was a dick.) Matthew and Laetitia both competed for Swift's approval, and Swift enjoyed playing them off against each other.

Matthew, at a certain point, had struck up an affair with an actress and decided he didn't want to be married to Laetitia anymore. (In her memoirs, Laetitia tells a sad story in which, alone with her husband at home, she pricked her breast and briefly pulled down her dress to see if she was hurt. Matthew, seeing her bare breast, reacted with revulsion instead of interest.)

Matthew couldn't divorce Laetitia unless he caught her in an affair, so he kept trying to get his male friends to sleep with her. At one point, Matthew sent Laetitia for a weekend in Windsor with a lecherous painter, and Laetitia spent a long carriage ride fending off the painter’s advances. After a few horrible attempted seductions, Laetitia finally did get caught in bed with a physician named Robert Adair — she claimed Adair had lent her a book and insisted on sitting with her as she read it, because he wanted his copy back. Matthew showed up with no fewer than twelve night-watchmen as witnesses, to catch her alone with Adair.

Laetitia writes in her memoir about the sexual double standard: "Is it not monstrous that our seducers should become our accusers?"

Laetitia, whose family had given plenty of money to Matthew, found herself disgraced and penniless, without a roof over her head. Swift, meanwhile, denounced her publicly as the worst whore in either Ireland or England.

Somehow she made her way to London, where she managed to rent a room across the window from White's Chocolate Shop, a gentlemen's club where "wits" gathered for clever conversation. Laetitia's lodgings were directly across from the club, and she leaned out the window, telling jokes to the men coming and going. Soon she had a reputation as a great wit herself, and men would pay her to ghostwrite their poems and letters. She gained patrons, including the Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber (who had cut off his own daughter Charlotte Charke, whom we'll talk about another time.) Laetitia also got financial support from Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa. 

I spent way too much on a book of Richardson's correspondence, which includes the letters he received from Laetitia Pilkington. Pretty much every letter is Laetitia begging for more money, and recounting the latest misfortunes she's endured. Her maid robbed her. She started a small business without enough capital, and it failed. Her teenage daughter showed up pregnant at her lodging house, and her landlady kicked both of them out onto the street. She had a horrible fever and felt near to death. It's horrible reading, but it's also a picture of what it was like to be a woman without a husband in Georgian England.

Laetitia Pilkington was always in demand as a poet, ghostwriter, and, essentially, a stand-up comic. She survived in circumstances that would have, and did, ruin plenty of others, but she also endured plenty of hard times.

Eventually, she went back to Ireland — where she published her bestselling, tell-all memoirs. Drawing somewhat on the tradition of "scandal chronicles" by authors like Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she spills all of the tea. She exposes Jonathan Swift as the sadistic piece of shit he was (and apparently, she's the main source for Swift's biographers about what he was like, to this day.) And she spares absolute zero fucks for showing the nastiness of her ex-husband. Her memoirs became a huge sensation, being excerpted in popular magazines and reprinted in several editions. 

The best part? She wrote her memoirs in two volumes, and took up subscriptions for the second volume before it was published. (It was kind of like Kickstarter: you could pay in advance to support the publication of a book, and eventually you’d get a copy, plus other rewards.) A lot of people chose to give her money to support the publication of Volume Two of her memoirs, in return for her not talking about their business. 

She writes toward the end of the first volume of her memoirs:

I cannot, like a certain Female Writer, say, I hope if I have done nothing to please, [at least] I have done nothing to offend; for truly I mean to give both Pleasure and Offence: Lemon and Sugar is very pretty. I should be sorry to write a Satire which did not sting, nor will I ever write a Panegyrick on an Undeserver: If a Rogue should happen to be mine honest Friend, I owe him Silence: but that is the most he can expect.

And then she goes on to say, pretty explicitly, that if you don't want to find your dirty business in volume two, you'd better buy a fucking subscription. (A third volume was also published posthumously, thanks to her son, the opera singer John Carteret Pilkington.)

So yeah, I'm obsessed with Laetitia Pilkington, a woman who fell afoul of the sexual double standard and was forced, literally, to live by her wits. She survived thanks to the generosity of men like Cibber and Richardson — but also by being funnier, cleverer, and a better writer than shitheads like her ex-husband. And by being willing to be shameless in prose, even as she insisted that she'd never been a sinner in other ways.

If you want to know more about Laetitia, I highly recommend the book Queen of the Wits by Norma Clarke — it's a quick read, and highly entertaining. Clarke also writes a lot about her in The Rise and Fall of the Women of Letters, and there's a good section on her in A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789 by Susan Staves. There’s also a book I haven’t read yet called The Scandalous Memoirists by Lynda M. Thompson that deals with her a lot.

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Music I Love Right Now

Back when clipping. had just released its incredible new cyberpunk album Dead Channel Sky, I went to see them in concert. One of their opening acts was a woman named Sharon Udoh who goes by Counterfeit Madison, and she also joined clipping. on stage in the middle of their set. Counterfeit Madison did an incredible set, playing keyboards and singing with no accompaniment, so of course I got everything on her Bandcamp page afterward. And… wow.

Her voice and her keyboard playing are incredible, but I'm also in awe of her songwriting chops. She’s done cover albums of Nina Simone and Sade, who are both clearly influences on her work, but she’s also worked with Tune-Yards, and her music reminds me a lot of Tune-Yards’ impossible-to-categorize blend of experimental music, jazz, pop. I’m still luxuriating in the wealth of material Counterfeit Madison has released (though sadly no new releases since 2019 WTF!) but currently my favorite is her 2017 album Opposable Thumbs, which features her on solo keyboards, but also in a trio like the one you can see in the video above. It’s chock full of soaring melodies and catchy arrangements that catch you off guard with moments of strangeness. Sort of reminds me a bit of This Temporary Ensemble by 9m88, a teeny bit. Anyway, please go check out Counterfeit Madison and give her all your money.

Republican Senator of Utah Mike Lee introduced a bill that would effectively ban porn at the federal level in the United States.

The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), introduced by Lee and Illinois Republican Rep. Mary Miller on Thursday, aims to change the Supreme Court’s 1973 “Miller Test” for determining what qualifies as obscene. “Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” Lee said in a press release. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

The Miller Test is the three-pronged test that followed the famous “I know it when I see it” line from Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 when he grappled with defining obscenity at the time. The three prongs of the Miller Test are: “Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

According to Lee’s press release (the full text of the bill is not yet on Congress’ website as of Monday morning, but Lee gave it to right-wing media outlet The Daily Caller last week), the IODA redefines “obscenity” within the Communications Act of 1934 as “content that taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion” and “depicts, describes or represents actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person,” which “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Most importantly, it completely removes the “intent” requirement from the current law—which currently prohibits the transmission of obscenity “for the purposes of abusing, threatening, or harassing a person.” That would mean anyone sharing or posting content that’s at all sexual or “intended to arouse” could be prosecuted for a federal crime. 

This is Lee’s third attempt at trying to pass the same bill: He tried it in 2022 and again in 2024. But we are in an even more hostile political climate today when it comes to sexual expression, free speech, and porn. Project 2025, the conservative roadmap for the Trump presidency spearheaded by several in the administration, aims to demonize and obliterate pornography altogether—something sex workers have been sounding the alarm about for years.

bad art is so critical for being a healthy human being. you gotta see some awful movies or read some dogshit books or play a horrendous video game every now and then. I'm not talking about "I like it despite its flaws" I mean fuckin bad. just to keep your tastes well-calibrated you know?

 

She turned away from anti-trans activism and leaked a trove of emails that exposed the inner workings of the right-wing network dedicated to rolling back our rights. It was a great gift to the trans community and journalism.

  

by Evan Urquhart

Elisa Rae Shupe was a transfemme veteran, the first American legally recognized as nonbinary, and a whistleblower who exposed the inner machinations of the movement to roll back transgender rights. She took her own life on Jan. 27, her body wrapped in a trans pride flag, outside the Syracuse VA Medical Center.

Although rumors had circulated widely online that Shupe was the one who had died, her identity was not confirmed by any news outlet until today, when syracuse.com published a story connecting her life to the tragedy in the medical center parking lot.

I corresponded with Elisa occasionally by email, starting in 2022. I first reached out after a tipster told me that she had turned away from the anti-trans activism in which she had participated for several years as a prominent detransitioner. Her Wikipedia talk page included messages I later confirmed were from Elisa, asking that her page be updated to reflect that she had retransitioned and had denounced her anti-trans statements. I emailed to ask if she might be willing to tell her story.

Elisa’s first email to me mentioned mental illness. “I realized something … How, myself included, a lot of these [detransitioner] women have serious mental health issues and way too much time on their hands,” she wrote. “They're sitting at home on disability with nothing to do, just like I was and still am, and that plays a role in them getting sucked into the GC movement and subsequently radicalized.”

No story of mine came out of this, but when stories relating to Elisa’s disillusionment with anti-trans activism finally broke they represented some of the most significant journalism on the anti-trans right ever published. 

Madison Pauly, writing for Mother Jones, published an in-depth examination of the inner workings of the “religious-right networks behind transgender health care bans” on March 8, 2023, that relied upon Elisa’s trove of email correspondence with the architects of the anti-trans movement. 

A few days later a profile of Shupe by Jude Doyle appeared on the website Xtra. Doyle’s piece was an intimate portrayal of the way mental illness made Shupe vulnerable to exploitation by people who saw her as a weapon to be used against trans people. Assigned Media’s Trans Data Library project relied heavily on this reporting in many of its entries.

By leaking these emails, Elisa gave a great gift to both the trans community and journalism. The emails, and Elisa’s extensive cooperation with the reporters who wrote about it, epitomized courage, because it necessarily involved Elisa taking full responsibility for her own participation in anti-trans extremism. It also involved exposing her mental health struggles before an American public that heavily stigmatizes mental illness, particularly personality disorders and severe illness that requires hospitalization. 

But Elisa believed that her borderline personality disorder lay at the heart of what made her exploitable by bad-faith actors, and she wanted the world to know it.

Borderline personality disorder may also have made her exploitable by journalists. Or, if you prefer to look at it another way, the restlessness, risk-taking, and self-destructiveness of her BPD is what allowed Elisa to strike one of the most significant blows against the anti-trans movement. 

Perhaps bravery by another name is mental illness. Or, at least, maybe it was like that for Elisa.

Elisa’s death hit me hard. I’m not always good at remaining in touch with former sources (or almost-sources), but I made an effort with Elisa because she was so clearly struggling, and because her history of anti-trans activism made it difficult for trans people to fully support her. I tried to stay in touch, but not as well as I’d like. I mostly wanted her to know, when she experienced dark times, that she would always have my respect and support.

Mental illness is also deeply personal for me. I’ve written occasionally about my struggles with self-harm and disordered eating pre-transition, and very occasionally mentioned that this included inpatient stays. Elisa’s illness held an uncomfortable familiarity, too close for comfort, but so far from where I am now, healthy and whole after transitioning.

Now she is dead. Could I have done more? Yes. Would it have changed things? Probably, no. I know I’m not that powerful. Still, I wish I’d reached out, just to say hello, a bit more often, and tried harder to be a companion in dark places. 

If I had, at least I might have known her better.

I will remember Elisa as a hero and a martyr, a complicated person who I could have known better if I’d only made time to do so. I will miss her occasional emails, and honor her for her contributions to history and to the trans rights movement.

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Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.

 

World where demons are real and around and ontologically evil but with an extremely Christian-fundamentalist definition of "evil". They don't care what sins they facilitate as long as they're sins. Murder is just bad economics: you're getting someone killed who would do sins of their own. Even labor exploitation isn't great, because ideally everyone has free time for the real big-ticket sins like lust and sloth and gluttony.

So of course a bunch of demons end up working as pornographers, musicians, chefs, and so on. But it's also rare to see a queer youth center without at least a few demon volunteers absolutely dead set on helping everyone accept themselves. There are even a few who really play the long game doing labor organizing and base-building so that one day humans will be free from the shackles of capitalism and the sins of idleness will really start rolling in.

Angels exist in this setting too but they're such dour killjoys that barely any humans will tolerate spending time with them and they mostly just live off in their own towns in the middle of otherwise deserted areas.