If you’re not getting excited for Capital Pride, you must not have read this week’s Metro Weekly, which includes a cover interview with Icona Pop. The Swedish duo of redhead Caroline Hjelt and black-haired Aino Jawo will no doubt fire up the crowd performing current Billboard Top 10 hit “I Love It.” As discussed in the feature, the song has become a sensation in large part because of a pivotal scene in the HBO series Girls.
Certainly, there will be more love on hand than the duo got on a recent trip to the land of amore. “We went to Italy a couple of months ago, just for fun,” Hjelt shares. “We were just walking around with all of our ‘Icona Pop’ bags. People thought we were pretty cocky and weird.” No wonder: “Icona Pop” means “pop icon” in Italian. During a 30-minute interview the ladies came across as both sweet and smart, and also confident and ambitious — but those are hardly the same things as cocky and weird.
Among Icona Pop’s ambitions, or at least dreams, expressed to Metro Weekly: Collaborations with Prince, Tina Turner, Patti Smith and Asap Rocky. None of those artists, as far as we know, will appear on the duo’s debut album, due out later this year. “We can’t really tell you which people we’re [working with now]. We don’t want to jinx it,” says Jawo. “But we have some tricks up our sleeves.”
More immediately, Hjelt and Jawo are looking forward to a late summer headlining tourthrough North America — though no date in D.C., at least not yet — during which they’ll be able to play longer sets than on previous gigs opening for Marina and the Diamonds and Passion Pit.
But first up, after a performance at Governors Ball this Saturday, June 8, in New York, is the Capital Pride Festival. Hjelt says, “we’re very honored.”
“We’re expecting a lot of dancing, good movements,” adds Jawo. “And love.”
New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is facing backlash after a photo resurfaced showing him alongside a Ugandan politician described as the "architect" of that country's law criminalizing homosexuality.
Mamdani, who defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by more than 12 points in the final round of ranked-choice primary voting in June, now leads a three-way race against Cuomo, running as an independent, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, the citizen patrol group once famous for policing New York's subways.
Thanks to my dad's career, the Army was a huge part of my upbringing. When I was little, vaccinations, swimming lessons, and commissary shopping meant a trip to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. My elder brother followed in our father's Army footsteps, becoming an Army helicopter pilot. My stepfather was in the Navy during World War II, serving on a submarine in the Pacific.
When I hit 18, when I was most likely to consider joining the military myself, even "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was a few years away. If you were found to be gay, out you went. Poring over reams of court documents, during a college internship, regarding the murder of Naval officer Allen R. Schindler Jr., assured me that I was better off as a civilian. Schindler, who was gay and born the same year as me, was beaten to death by two shipmates during shore leave in Japan.
Matthew López felt detached. While reading E. M. Forster's classic novel, Howard's End, in New York's Central Park several years ago, the Tony award-winning playwright was inspired to write his own version of the twentieth-century tale of three British social classes intertwining during Europe's Edwardian era.
Using the essence of Forster's famous mandate from the novel, "Only connect!" López would set his version, The Inheritance in contemporary metropolitan life, replete with themes of young love, politics, sexual escapades, friendship, substance abuse, redemption, and haunting memories of the AIDS epidemic, all of which would be discussed between various generations of gay men.
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