Really looking forward to the release of this documentary. As a survivor I always experience a great deal of healing when someone breaks the silence. Here’s to ending sexual assault and all the shame that surrounds it.

“Secret Survivors is an interview-based theater project by NYC-based theater company, Ping Chong & Company, featuring adult survivors of child sexual abuse telling their personal stories on stage. To expand the impact of the theater production, we are creating a documentary and toolkit to accompany the live presentation so that we can reach thousands of individuals around the country who are working to end child sexual abuse.”

For more information visit: www.secretsurvivors.org

This week Racialicious posted a piece about a black trans woman who has been arrested and charged with 2nd degree murder after she and her friends were violently attacked by a group of white people who were yelling racist and transphobic epithets. A woman smashed a glass into CeCe’s face and, according to Racialicious,

A fight ensued between the adults and the young people after this initial attack and one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

As if it were not sufficiently tragic that a group of young people were subjected to such severe violence and that Dean Schmitz lost his life, police arriving at the scene arrested CeCe, denied her adequate medical treatment, interrogated her for hours, and placed her in solitary confinement. In the aftermath of being attacked, she was not treated with care, but launched into another nightmare. The only person arrested that night, she has since been charged with two counts of 2nd degree murder. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has the power to drop these charges, a choice he made in multiple other clear instances of self-defense this year, but he has not yet done so.

CeCe’s story is a portrait of the United States Criminal Justice System. Her story is what is meant when we are told that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, experience disproportionate rates of police harassment, profiling, and abuse. She is living one of the stories rolled into statistics like: trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than cisgender (not transgender) people, or nearly half of African American transgender people have spent time in jail or prison.

Please take  a moment to read the full Racialicious article here, and visit http://supportcece.wordpress.com/ to get updates on the case. To tell Michael Freeman you support dropping the charges against CeCe, call 612-348-5561 or email citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us

Yanelli’s case is urgent, we only have until Tuesday to stop her deportation. Yanelli came to the United States all by herself when she was 13, this means that, if deported, she won’t have anyone to support her.

We need your help to get Yanelli out, she needs to be at home with her family receiving treatment.  Things are not looking good  for her, ICE has already moved her to a different location. . . the last stop for detainees before they are deported.  We pretty much have 1 day to stop Yanelli’s deportation.

Please make a phone call to John Morton, Director of ICE :1-800-394-5855 or 202-732-3000 or 1-800-821-9358

Dream Activist has provided a script to use if you need it:

Hello I am calling to ask that Yanelli Hernadez (A# 205 012 525) be allowed to stay in the U.S. where she needs treatment. Yanelli is suffering from depression; she has attempted to take her own life twice and should not be deported. This is wrong.

Reposting this web-gem from here, because we love the way it puts the focus and responsibility for sexual assault back onto perpetrators!  Female-identified people get a lot of messages about what we need to do to keep ourselves safe and minimize our risk of sexual assault (carry our keys in our hands to use as weapons, don’t listen to headphones while out walking alone, and, heck, don’t even walk alone at all!), when in reality, the recent National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey conducted by the CDC found that over half of all reported rapes were committed by a current or former partner, with an additional 40% being committed by an acquaintance known to the survivors.  Only one in seven rapes were committed by strangers.  This list is also great because it  decentralizes the role of the survivor’s gender in sexual assault and intimate partner violence.  As the CDC survey also points out, male-identified folks are also victims of sexual violence, which is sadly under-reported due to stigma.   So with those facts in mind, here are some sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work:

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect the answer the first time, you are commiting a crime- no matter how “into it” others appear to be.

“We are extending the deadline for Issue #6 to FEBRUARY 1st, 2012!

what better new year’s resolution than to submit that comic you’ve been dreamily drawing to Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf?

Submit a comic to Issue #6 of Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf
Sex Education Comic Book Project!

sexedcomicproject.blogspot.com is where you can find guidelines, theme info, updates, and downloadable comics of issues 1-5.

email scanned comics to us at notyourmothersmeatloaf@gmail.com and let us know if you need to snail mail it to us, we will get you an address. If you don’t have access to a copy machine we can scan your originall to you! if your name doesn’t appear on the comic itself, it will be anonymous!”

ANTI-VALENTINES DAY RIOT GRRRL COVER BAND SHOW – February 14th
@ Death By Audio (49 S. 2nd St., Brooklyn)
Cover bands playing this year will be Babes in Toyland, Hole, X, Discount, Spitboy, Mika Miko, Heavens to Betsy, and the Frumpies.  Cover charge and time TBA.  Plan on getting there in the early evening as last year’s event sold out!
(Since there was some confusion last year: we are not the organizers of this event. Contact info for the organizers can be found at the link above!)

FEMINIST ZINE FEST- February 25th
1pm – 6pm @ The Brooklyn Commons (388 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn)
A day of feminist zinesters, distros and artists.

BROOKLYN ZINE FEST- April 15
11am – 6pm @ Public Assembly (70 N. 6th St, Brooklyn)
A wider range of zinesters and distros from Brooklyn and beyond.

We’ve been carrying Cindy’s “Support” zine (on preventing sexual assault and supporting survivors) as well as “Learning Good Consent”.  Her well-known autobiographical feminist zine “Doris” is really worth checking out, if you haven’t already.

See below for more info and we hope to see you there!

For The Birds Collective & MFA Collective Works present:
a zine reading w/
Cindy Crabb (Doris and Support zines)
Cynthia Schemmer (Habits of Being)
Max Steele (Scorcher)

Tuesday, December 6
@ The New School – 6 E 16th St, Room 1107
8pm // open to the public

Find out more about the readers after the jump!

Cindy Crabb is the author of the long running, autobiographical feminist zine Doris, Her new book The Encyclopedia of Doris has just been released. She has written for numerous books and magazines, including We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, the Utne Reader,Experiencing Abortion: A Weaving of Women’s Words, A Girls Guide to Taking Over the World: Writing From the Girl Zine Revolution, and is featured in the new academic book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, by Alison Piepmeier. She is the editor of the zines Support, and Learning Good Consent, and is a sexual assault survivor advocate.

Cynthia Ann is a writer and native New Yorker who currently lives in Brooklyn. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a co-founder of the feminist collective For The Birds and has recently released the first issue of an oral history zine called Habits of Being. She has been published in Connotation Press, RE/VISIONIST, Elevate Difference, Drawn and Quarterly, and the For The Birds blog. She has a chapter that she co-wrote on parental loss being published in the forthcoming anthology Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, due out Fall 2012 on PM Press. She currently works on staff as a nonfiction reader for the Brooklyn literary journal Epiphany. She is also a baker, a musician, and biding her time until she can own many gigantic dogs.

Max Steele is a performer and writer. He has presented work at the New Museum, Deitch Projects, Dixon Place, Envoy Enterprises, PPOW Gallery, and the Queens Museum of Art. In addition to writing the psychedelic porno poetry zine Scorcher, his writing has been featured in Dossier Journal, Spank, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Fag School, East Village Boys and Birdsong.

Rich Black. Oakland, CA

Check out some of the posters from the 99%! Occuprint is a poster series with works from around the world, curated by Molly Fair, Jesse Goldstein, Josh MacPhee and John Boy. They provide free online & print posters and are continuing to expand.  Click here to see their website, and if you have the means, you can consider making a donation soon!

Colectivo Cordyceps. Mexico City, Mexico

Cristy C. Road. Brooklyn, NY

Dave Loewenstein. Lawrence, KS

- ACP

P.S. The amount of people that think that Africa is a country is alarming and disturbing.