Folks, Kristen Stewart is gay. Amidst all the goings on in the United States, the former Twilight star announced on Saturday Night Live, “I’m so gay, dude.”
What relevance does this have to anything? To be quite frank, not much. A Hollywood celebrity coming out is cool and all, but it doesn’t do a damn thing to help in the political fight against Trump’s grand brigade of bigots. Stewart’s sexuality is hardly a topic that will be beneficial to the difficulties faced by marginalized communities or millions of people whose lives are being destroyed by the current presidential administration. It’s also something that isn’t particularly surprising, since Stewart has been dating women for a little while now.
Even so, I found this little piece of news that Stewart – my girlhood crush – finally utter the words “I’m so gay” on national television to be an amusing diversion from some of the more horrible things going on in the world. Her takedown of Trump for his obsessive string of tweets about her in 2012 was also quite funny.
Every morning I wake up and find my phone filled with new notifications about some horrendous piece of breaking news in the national news. In the past few days, I’ve seen multiple notifications about the ban enacted on seven majority Muslim countries; a right-wing Christian fundamentalist from my home state was the reason for a historic tie-break in the United States Senate for a presidential cabinet appointment; an alt-right demagogue managed to manipulate his way onto the National Security Council; and a notoriously racist senator from Alabama has been confirmed as the nation’s attorney general. I find myself lying awake at night, anxious that one of these days we’re all going to wake up in some dystopian future. The dystopian genre makes for quality entertainment, but is not so good in terms of an actual living situation.
In these troubling times amidst the struggle against those in society who seek to oppress others, there needs to be some way of maintaining our sanity. We need to find ways to destress from the news feeds that pop up on our phones in the middle of the night to announce that things are falling to pieces faster than we can fight back. Doing this isn’t easy. In fact, for many it can seem downright impossible. But if we don’t find some small things to find solace in, we’ll eventually get consumed by the crap we read on our newsfeeds.
For me, the “announcement” that Stewart was gay is good enough for at least a few minutes.
