Matthew Connor

In this exquisitely-made and highly anticipated new horror film, concepts of witchcraft, black magic and possession are brought together to tell the intimate and riveting story of one family's frightful unraveling.

Writer/director Robert Eggers' debut feature premiered to great acclaim at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Best Director Prize in the U.S. Narrative Competition. The film painstakingly recreates a God-fearing New England decades before the 1692 Salem witch trials, in which religious convictions and pagan folklore famously clashed. Told through the eyes of the adolescent Thomasin (played by newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy) The Witch is being hailed as a groundbreaking new take on the genre.


Synopsis:
Set in New England circa 1630, The Witch follows a farmer who [Continued ...]

thecomedytree:

Reginald! Did you finish your veggies?

The Sound Of Arrows return in October, for a one-off performance of their extraordinary debut album ‘Voyage’.

There’s new music on its way, too.

We thought it would be nice to catch up with Stefan to see exactly what’s happening. And we were right – it was very nice indeed.

Here is our chat.

Hello Stefan. When did you do your last Sound Of Arrows interview?
Hi! Oh, that was probably a few years back. After the album and the following tour we decided to put things on ice for a while as we were doing other things. Let’s see if I’ve lost all my media savvy PR skills…

Was it a difficult decision to put things on ice? Why did you do it?
Frankly we were just exhausted by the whole journey of making that album and needed to take a break and a step back. Time passes by fast and it doesn’t feel like it’s already been four years since we put out the album. And to be honest, I didn’t find that song. I didn’t find the song that would make it worthwhile coming back. We felt that the album was such a nice testament to what we wanted to do with the band that if we didn’t come up with anything we felt was on par we would just leave it.

Did you feel, at that point, that you’d done all you wanted or needed to do with The Sound Of Arrows? The album’s such a self-contained body or work that it feels like it might have been hard to continue it.
Frankly, in the making of that album we probably scrapped two or three albums. So in some ways it feels odd that ‘Voyage’ was actually our debut.

Can you send me the other albums please?
Haha! I’m not sure we’d be doing this interview now if you’d ever heard those albums.

I still have a CD you did for me about eight years ago with loads of your solo demos on. Even though some of those songs are imperfect they’re still very good.
Can I have it? I’m not even sure I’ve got those tracks anymore. There’s some pretty smelly cheese on that CD, but sure, there might be some sweet adolescent charm on there somewhere…

I will swap that CD for some new stuff. One song for one song.
Ha! Trade it is.

It’s getting on for five years since ‘Voyage’ — it’s an album that stood out from everything else at the time, but in the intervening years do you think pop’s got closer to what you were doing, or further away than ever?
It’s four years for God’s sake! Four! It was 2011!

Half a decade sounds like a better excuse for performing it live though, right?
Looking back at it, it really does stand out in a way that didn’t strike us while we were making it. Heaven knows how the hell we managed to get a major label deal with sonics like that. We thought there were hit singles on there while making it but looking back it was definitely a bit odder than we thought it was. As for whether it’s stood the test of time, that’s for others to decide. I was very happy to see and hear that a softer version of club music came into vogue in the following years but I don’t for one moment think that anything on the pop landscape has anything to do with our little cult album.

With hindsight do you think Geffen were right to let you go? I mean if they’d stuck with it I guess they would have squeezed a second album out of you. AND IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN AMAZING.
Well what actually happened was that the label folded so we were lucky enough to avoid that awkward phone call. I’m sure had they still been around we would’ve been dropped harder than a piano from a tall building.

It must have been all that cash they threw at your Tiesto remix.
Let’s just say it was enough sterling to buy a very nice used car. The people there were really great and supportive so had things gone down a different way who knows, maybe the support would’ve spurred us on to work faster. Or we’d be living out of a dumpster now high on crack. You just never know.

You’re performing ‘Voyage’ in its entirety in October. Why are you doing it?
This past year Oskar and I have started working in the studio together again and someone mentioned that we never did play a proper London show after the album’s release. So since ‘Voyage’ is being put out on vinyl around the same time we thought we might as well do a show, plus it’d be nice to see some friendly faces again.

What were you and Oskar working on in the studio?
Well I have just finished this other album I’ve spent way too long making, and then Oskar came round to the studio to help me on some synth parts, and we started jamming together again.

Tell me about this other album.
Well after the Sound of Arrows I set off to make another, even more cinematic, project. I thought I’d whack out an album quite quickly but it ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. I tried launching it as one of these used-to-be-a-popular-marketing-tool ‘anonymous projects’ but I guess it was fairly obvious where it came from. It’s called Kids Of The Apocalypse and it lands somewhere between Massive Attack, M83 and Gorillaz. Like I said, the album is done, just finishing the first proper video now. I had some major label run-ins with this project so that stalled things for a little bit. It’s got some good tunes on it and I couldn’t be happier. Also there’s a few friends of mine appearing on it and I’m thrilled to share it with you very soon. I’m actually in Barcelona right now doing the post-production on the first proper video.

This sounds amazing. The Kids Of The Apocalypse stuff that was online a year or two back sounded GREAT. Will the video be a typically understated affair?
It will be more overblown than ever before. After that my next album will be recorded on Garageband with all the videos shot on an iPhone. I will never get rich carrying on like I do.

So is the ‘Voyage’ show a farewell show for The Sound Of Arrows?
No, no. I’m hoping it might spur us on to actually finish album number two. It is a re energizer for us to get on with things. We’ve really missed our fans, each other and the music and world we created.

What do you think the second Sound Of Arrows album might be called?
We’ve been thinking ‘Beautiful Life’ but we’ll see where it all lands.

As a percentage, how finished is it?
That answer is as volatile as a Swedish summer… One day it’s 75%, the next it’s 30%. If things go according to plan new things will start appearing before the end of this year.

That’s soon! Shall we just say summer 2016 to avoid disappointment?
Yes, knowing what I’m like let’s just say fall 2016 and any sooner is a happy surprise for our mothers.

 

Tickets for the ‘Voyage’ show went on sale and have sold out. APOLS. Have a listen to ‘Voyage’ on Spotify instead.

The post The Sound Of Arrows interview: “Time passes by fast” appeared first on Popjustice.

RADiUS-TWC, the distributor who brought is acclaimed genre films like It Follows, The One I love and Snowpiercer, is releasing another well loved and creepy as hell flick in September called Goodnight Mommy. The Austrian thriller directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz is about a famous television actress (Susanne Wuest) who returns home after a stay in the hospital for cosmetic surgery — and her twin 9-year-old sons (Elias Schwarz and Lukas Schwarz) believe that she is an impostor and plan on doing something about it.

Goodnight Mommy which opens on Sept. 11 h [Continued ...]

The media loves Donald Trump. And who can blame them? In an era when political candidates present the blandest, safest, focus-grouped versions of themselves to the public, Trump's brash antics -- "pure political id," as my colleague Chris Cillizza says -- guarantee, if nothing else, an interesting read.

But because Trump is such a larger-than-life character, we tend to overlook the most interesting part of his candidacy -- the millions of Republican primary voters with whom his message resonates so strongly. The rise of Trump isn't really about Trump, but rather the political moment we find ourselves in, where a foul-mouthed businessman and reality TV star with no political experience is a front-runner for the highest office in the land.

This weekend a fascinating reddit thread opened a window into the minds of a certain type of Trump supporter. In the popular AskReddit section of the site, a Redditor asked Trump supporters to explain what they saw in the guy. And they did -- the thread has generated nearly 13,000 comments so far. Here's what some of them said.

For many Trump supporters, it's refreshing to have a candidate who says what he wants and worries about the consequences later.

They see Trump's tendency toward impolitic speech as a sign of a fundamental honesty that other candidates lack.

Many respondents voiced frustration over "political correctness."

The following comment is the top-voted response so far.

Another highly-rated comment decries the role of money in politics, and the professionalization of the political class.

Many expressed frustration and downright disgust with the state of the political system.

It's generally accepted wisdom that Trump soared to the top of the GOP polls on account of his comments about immigrants during his announcement. But just a handful of replies to the reddit thread referenced immigration specifically.

One supporter called for a return to nationalism, led by Trump.

Some say that illegal immigration is "out of control."

A few Trump supporters gave voice to positions that may give Democrats some pause. One redditor supports Bernie Sanders, but says that if Sanders doesn't get the nomination, he'll vote Trump.

Some don't necessarily don't want Trump to win -- but they'll vote for him over Hillary Clinton if they have to.

It's important to remember that these opinions represent a very specific subsection of Trump supporters -- reddit users, who tend to be young, male and white. This isn't a representative sample of Trump support in any way.

But it's helpful to keep in mind why Trump is able to garner as much support as he does. As an agent of pure political id, he gives voice to a deep undercurrent of frustration and resentment that many Americans feel toward the political system. Other politicians -- and the media who cover them -- could learn a lot from listening to them.

The post V V – ‘Shift’ appeared first on Popjustice.

The post Kylie Minogue – ‘Absolutely Anything And Anything At All’ appeared first on Popjustice.

Do you remember Vanessa Brown? She was good. Do you remember V V Brown? She was really good. How about this new artist ‘V V’, though? Well the thing is, readers, they are all actually the same person, but it doesn’t really matter what name’s on the jpg because as you will hear below the music remains top notch.

This new single – the first from V V’s forthcoming third album – was created alongside some chap V V found on SoundCloud. Stylistically it follows on rather nicely from 2013’s extraordinary ‘Samson & Delilah’ album but if you combine ‘Shift’ with that ‘Instincts’ teaser from last month it feels like there are even more ideas and even more ambition this time round. At the same time you feel an even greater sense that V V is finally completely comfortable with who, what and where she is as an artist.

So that’s nice.

The single’s out to buy and stream this Friday; if you’d like to hear V V’s new album sooner rather than later you might like to consider chucking some cash at her PledgeMusic page. (She will write a song about you for £500, which has to be the bargain of the century.)

The post V V – ‘Shift’ appeared first on Popjustice.

It could almost be the soundtrack to a cold medicine overdose or the after effect of watching too many foreign language cartoons while recovering from dental surgery and extremely strong coffee.

Vancouver based sound designer and producer Flatland Sound Studio, aka Max Greening, drops Maximum Vacation Plus, an impressive debut album full of ingredients including but not limited to: colorful melodies, top notch sound design, vintage samples, field recorded textures, hard glitch and more.

It could almost be the soundtrack to a cold medicine overdose or the after effect of watching too many foreign language cartoons while recovering from dental surgery and extremely strong coffee. Beats burble and squirt around your headspace while tiny incidental scratches and scrapes come and go. Cut-up samples and vocals provide a sort of narrative but only until the next one comes along and throws your frame of reference out into the trash.

The drums in “Fanfare” sound not unlike those of a Funkstorung track. But the flute-like lead is reminiscent of late period Japan (the band not the nation). Elements of chiptune interjected along with quick cut glitch bits make it a strong opener.

“Colour Beat” hits hard with fast drums and lo-bit stabs before a chorus of demented children’s voices roll in with a chant you’ll be repeating in your dreams.

“Windy Day” uses samples from what could be a school film about meteorology as the lyrical focus over fast-panned drums and simple melody portraying a disorienting day by the sea.

“Trail Mix” sounds like a bizarre hike in the woods with psychedelic animals romping alongside detuned synths, burbling pads, slamming four on the floor drums, bird noises and the occasional human narrator anthropomorphizing of a woodland creature. It stands out as one of my favorite tracks on the album. This and others reminds me a great deal of Tim Cosner’s recent cassette release DEADTECH/MODERNHOMES.

“Sasquatch Beat” lopes into view with heavy, thudding drums and an air of menace straight out of the gate. Monster sounds, pitched low and muffled, promote the sense of something big and hairy watching you from the edge of the forest. Squelchy bleeps and chiptune sounds come across like underbrush the creature tears through as it pursues its prey. Which may or may not be you.

“Special Tea” incorporates fragments of a UFO abductee’s account of their story over slamming beats and wobbling keyboards. A flatulent lead line snakes through it as well like the ugly cousin of the trombone voiced teacher from Charlie Brown cartoons. It sounds like Boards of Canada took too much Aderall and couldn’t quite maintain their usual chill stoner vibe. This is quite similar to the demented UFO abductee funk of JVOX’s phenomenal Strange Universe albums on Component Recordings.

The intergalactic Vicodin trip of “Dogfish Fantasies” is carried by more of the wet-whack drums favored by Flatland Sound Studio. The disembodied blips of a male quartet sound like the short guitar strumming one hears in the slow moving sway of lover’s rock and dub reggae.

The overall vibe of Maximum Vacation Plus runs from sweet childhood nostalgia to humorous hooks to noisy mayhem while invoking musical influences such as Herbert, Matmos, Vibert, Prefuse73, Osymyso, to name a few. Recommended.

Maximum Vacation Plus is available on Bedroom Research.

The great Czech pianist died today, at the age of eighty-four. I heard him only once in solo recital, at Carnegie in 2001: Janáček's 1.X.1905, Debussy's Estampes and Pour le piano, Chopin's F-minor Ballade and Preludes. I had the sense of being transported many decades back in time, to some small hall in a Central European town between the wars, where composer, performer, and audience all lived in the same world and spoke the same language. It was playing of the utmost naturalness, strewn with unstressed, seemingly off-the-cuff subtleties. I have heard Chopin executed more brilliantly, more spectacularly, but never more persuasively.

Look we’re just about to make dinner so we can’t go into much detail about all the reasons this track (which just premiered on Nylon) is amazing, but what’s the point in writing anything because it’s 2015 and you’ve probably already clicked play and switched to a different browser window anyway.

The post Nervo + Kylie + Jake Shears + Nile Rodgers – ‘The Other Boys’ appeared first on Popjustice.

It pains us to say it given the fact her last album was a triumph, but VV Brown is no more.

RIP VV Brown.

But fear not, because she’s been replaced by VV, who is quite literally the same person, only with a shinier rain coat.

To celebrate her dropping the Brown (!), VV’s just shared a new song/interlude thing called ‘Instincts’, which also has a video.

See:

It’s taken from her forthcoming third album, which the press release tells us will be “released later this year”.

So there we go. Potentially exciting.

The post VV Brown is no more… appeared first on Popjustice.

Donald Trump is now the 2016 GOP frontrunner.

That sentence would have sounded ridiculous a month ago, but here we are. The billionaire real estate mogul and reality star has tough-talked his way to the top of the ticket for 24 percent of Republican voters, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. As The Upshot's Nate Cohn explains, Trump's post-announcement poll bump is of a completely different magnitude than what we're seeing elsewhere in the crowded GOP field.

All of which has observers scratching their heads and asking: what do people see in the guy?

A lot, as it turns out. On a recent trip to rural Upstate New York I was surprised by the intensity of support for Trump among friends and family members I talked to. In many cases, their support for Trump boiled down to a simple fact: they were angry.

Angry at Obama, angry at congressional leaders, and angry at the political establishment as a whole. And they're not alone -- surveys show that anger toward the government, particularly among Republicans, has been rising over the course of Obama's two terms in office. When asked how they felt toward the federal government, 37 percent of Republicans said "angry" in a Washington Post poll from last fall. By contrast, in September 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, only 14 percent of Republicans said they were angry.

Anger toward the establishment is a powerful motivating force. And Donald Trump is currently the candidate in the best position to channel it. All of the other major GOP candidates, from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz, are career politicians, firmly ensconced in the party establishment that so many voters have grown distrustful of. Trump is the only big-name candidate who can truly claim the coveted mantle of the "outsider."

Beyond that, the latest Post-ABC poll showed that the number one quality Republican voters are looking for in a candidate is "a strong leader." Add it all together and for a lot of voters, you come up with a Platonic ideal of a candidate that looks and talks a lot like Donald Trump -- an outsider who can shake things up, who isn't afraid to speak the truth even if it offends, and one who has proven leadership abilities. Throw in an (alleged) $10 billion fortune and you've got a highly potent candidate on your hands, at least for this particular moment.

Whether Trump can sustain this sort of energy all the way through 2016 is a different question entirely. Conventional wisdom has it that Trump will burn up and implode at literally any minute now, and with each "gaffe" and malapropism observers start writing political obituaries. But Trump's resiliency has so far been surprising.

Would Americans actually vote a reality TV billionaire into the White House? It doesn't seem likely. On the other hand, when Terminator 3 came out in July 2003 it didn't seem plausible that the movie's star would win the governor's mansion of one of the nation's largest and most liberal states just four months later, either.

Scott Clement contributed to this report.

 

The composer’s favourite interpreter has provided an online guide to two of Ligeti’s pieces – and it’s something no admirer should miss

Another week, another site that demonstrates a brilliant use of the possibilities of the web to enrich musical experience in hitherto-undreamed-of ways: pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Inside the Score project, on the piano music of György Ligeti. It’s an astonishingly multi-dimensional insight into two short pieces, the 13th of his Etudes for solo piano, L’escalier du Diable, (“The Devil’s Staircase”) and the first movement of the much earlier Musica Ricercata – and as a collaboration with the Ruhr piano festival, it’s completely, absolutely free for anyone to view, and you should.

Here’s why: in the Etude, Aimard (who was Ligeti’s favourite interpreter of this music) takes you on a revelatory journey into the inner workings of one of Ligeti’s most immediate yet complex, virtuosically dazzling yet emotionally dark pieces. The score scrolls alongside Aimard’s specially recorded performance of L’escalier du Diable, but there’s much more: Aimard tells us about his relationship with the piece, his view on the essential drama of the music (“a struggle that goes nowhere … maybe only to the apocalypse”), and describes his interpretative approach to the difficulties of performing the five-minute-long Etude, technically and poetically. And at every point in the score, you can click an icon to watch a masterclass, from last year’s Aldeburgh festival, in which Aimard takes a pianist through the score’s challenges. There’s also testimony from the scientist who inspired Ligeti’s explorations in fractals and chaos theory at the time he was writing the Etudes, and you can see Ligeti’s own comments on the piece, collated from the available manuscript sources.

Continue reading...

Director Cary Fukunaga ran away from New Line Cinema’s remake of Stephen King’s It back in May after finding out that it was about a scary clown—and also after finding out that New Line’s budget wasn’t going to be as high as he wanted. Now, Variety is reporting that the studio may have found a replacement in Andy Muschietti, the guy who directed 2013’s Mama. That movie, like It, was also about a supernatural figure threatening children, though the scary mom ghost thing in Mama was—arguably—much creepier than even Tim Curry’s clown/shape-shifting creature that predates the universe in It. Maybe that means Muschietti’s version of Pennywise will be so creepy that it becomes the new creepy clown that all other creepy clowns are compared to. We imagine people who are afraid of clowns wouldn’t mind having something new ...

Twitter is such a valuable resource for professionals these days.

While Twitter's 140 character limit makes it hard to have real conversations, it offers plenty of space to fire off non sequiturs that show off your knowledge of esoteric topics. And where else can you get constructive feedback from Internet trolls, have elevated arguments over the pronunciation of the word "gif," or get life advice from trusted animals?

But before you go catapulting yourself to social media stardom, there are few ground rules that you'll want to observe. To succeed in the Twittersvere, you'll need to pick the most appealing photo, maintain a good follow ratio, and craft a jealousy inducing profile description.

Sarah Cooper of The Cooper Review, who has also crafted sage advice for seeming smart in meetings and work e-mails, has you covered. Below are six of her 13 tips for navigating Twitter; for the rest, visit her site.

You might also like:
How to seem smart in meetings without really trying

How to seem smart in work e-mail without really trying

Why your 20s and 30s aren’t so different after all, in five depressingly hilarious cartoons

At least 550 people — many of whom were unarmed and/or mentally ill — have been killed by police in the first six months of the year. A Guardian database, which puts the figure at 545, shows Caucasians have been killed more than any other race or ethnic group this year, but blacks and Latinos have been killed at higher rates. Nearly 120 people were unarmed. And by the Washington Post’s count, 461 people have been shot and killed by an on-duty officer.

In June alone, cops killed 75 people. At least 60 of those people were shot.

The growing count is alarming, yet there’s also been a proliferation of databases tracking lethal police encounters more closely than ever. Law enforcement has been killing people for decades, however a dearth of reliable national data obscured the number deaths caused by police in years past. But with police brutality becoming more visible, thanks to social media and traditional news media, the need to catalog relevant demographic and geographic information about victims has quickly become a national priority.

You can read about some of the more egregious cases in February, March, April, and May, but here are some of the heinous incidents from the past month.

Deng Manyoun; Louisville, KY: One of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” who immigrated to the U.S. to escape a brutal civil war, Manyoun was shot and killed for rushing at an officer with a 7-foot flag pole. The 35-year-old was stumbling on a sidewalk when he was approached by Officer Nathan Blanford, who was driving by in a squad car. Surveillance footage shows the two arguing before Manyoun disappears and returns with the pole. Manyoun then swings the pole at Blanford, who fires his weapon twice. Manyoun died of gunshot wounds, at a local hospital.

Amid public backlash, Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad maintains Blanford’s actions were justified. But protesters argue the officer should have used non-lethal force, especially since Manyoun was visibly intoxicated.

You can watch the video here:

Spencer Lee McCain; Owing Mills, MD: The unarmed black man was shot and killed by three Baltimore County police officers responding to a domestic disturbance call. When they arrived at the home of Shannon Sulton, officers reported they heard screams and forced their way into the house. All three fired, later saying McCain was in a “defensive position” and moving in a way that signaled he had a weapon. Nineteen shell cases were found after the shooting, although no weapon was discovered. Sulton was bruised and cut.

Two children, including a 10-year-old who initially called and alerted his grandmother about the disturbance, were present at the time of the shooting — highlighting another major flaw in modern-day policing. Due to inadequate training, police who confront parents in the presence of their kids wind up traumatizing the children, especially when officers are responding to domestic violence calls. Experts say cops should refrain from drawing their weapons or cuffing suspects in front of children. But officers who do use forceful tactics wind up exacerbating children’s emotional distress, making them “feel helpless” and “blame themselves for not preventing the violence, or for causing it.”

Walter William DeLeon; Los Feliz, CA: An unarmed 48-year-old man was shot in the head and killed by Officer Cairo Palacios because the cop thought a towel wrapped around the victim’s hand was concealing a weapon. Then the man was rolled over and handcuffed. Both the officer involved and his partner allege they were stuck in traffic when DeLeon walked in their direction. His arms were extended and covered by a cloth, and he didn’t obey the officers when they exited their vehicle and commanded him to “drop the gun,” the officers say. Palacios fired when DeLeon continued walking in their direction. DeLeon’s son later explained that his dad usually carried the towel to wipe off sweat. The victim may have been flagging down the officers for help, but the reason for doing so is unclear.

“At first, I thought it was like a random person that did it,” said 18-year-old William DeLeon. “Then I found out it was the cops. I didn’t understand why, because I know my dad wouldn’t do anything to provoke it.”

The post This Is How Many People Police Have Killed So Far This Year appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Little Boots, the singer, has popped a new song online and the title of that song is ‘Get Things Done’.

It’s from her forthcoming album ‘Working Girl’, which you’ll be able to purchase on July 10, ie in nine days’ time.

It’s a nice one.

The post There’s a new Little Boots song on the www appeared first on Popjustice.

Transgressive French director Claire Denis (Trouble Everyday, White Material) is making her English language debut with a space drama that is said to "take place beyond the solar system in a future time that nevertheless feels like the present."

Denise has teamed up with English novelist Zadie Smith and her husband Nick Laird who will write the screenplay for the project that comes from an original idea conceived by Denis and her writing partner Jean-Pol Fargeau.

Hard science fiction nerds will be happy hear that this female power-team has also brought in an interesting group to help on the project including astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau, a specialist in black holes and cosmology, artist Olafur Eliasson and musician Stuart Staples, who wrote tracks for White Ma [Continued ...]

perhaps my all-time favorite meme

On Friday, the Supreme Court made history by ruling that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, bringing marriage equality to the entire United States. Now, gay and lesbian couples can legally wed in every state in the country.

The decision is obviously a huge victory for the LGBT rights movement, representing the culmination of decades of advocacy work to ensure marriage equality for people of all sexual orientations. It also follows a remarkable shift in public opinion on the subject over the past decade, as support for legal same-sex marriage skyrocketed to record highs.

“Today we can say in no uncertain terms that we’ve made our union a little more perfect,” President Obama said in a speech following the the decision, before pointing out that there’s still work left to be done.

Indeed, even as LGBT Americans have made huge progress in securing marriage equality, many other areas of the law lag behind. While same-sex couples will now have many of the legal benefits afforded through marriage, there are still states that don’t protect LGBT individuals from discrimination at their jobs, in their homes, in their schools, or at their doctors’ offices.

“Most states have no nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people,” David Stacy, the government affairs director for the Human Rights Campaign, told NPR this week. “With limited or no federal protections, an LGBT person can get legally married in most states, but then be evicted from an apartment and denied a home loan.”

The Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that maps the state-level policies related to LGBT equality, keeps close tabs on the parts of the country that still lack those laws:

States that don’t protect LGBT people from being unfairly fired, not hired, or discriminated against in the workplace:

States that don’t prevent LGBT people from being unfairly evicted, denied housing, or refused the ability to rent or buy housing:

States that don’t protect LGBT students from being bullied by other students, teachers, and school staff:

States that don’t prevent LGBT people from being unfairly denied health coverage or services in private insurance plans:

Making progress in these areas will involve passing additional protections to bolster the patchwork of existing state laws. Congressional Democrats are reportedly already working on comprehensive legislation to outlaw LGBT discrimination in employment, education, housing, jury service, restaurants, and hotels that’s expected to be introduced next month.

The post Marriage Equality Is The Law Of The Land. Now What? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

An undocumented transgender activist was escorted out of the White House Wednesday night after she called on the president to release LGBTQ immigrants in detention centers.

“President Obama, release all LGBTQ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations,” activist Jennicet Gutiérrez shouted, interrupting the beginning of President Obama’s speech during a LGBT Pride Month Reception.

Attendees drowned out her pleas with chants of “Obama! Obama! Obama!” One attendee shouted at Gutiérrez, “Enough! Enough. This is not for you. This is for all of us.” Another attendee shouted, “Shame on you” — words Obama then echoed, as he called for Gutiérrez’s removal from the reception.

“Last night I spoke out to demand respect and acknowledgement of our gender expression and the release of the estimated 75 transgender immigrants in detention right now,” Gutiérrez wrote in a Washington Blade op-ed. Gutiérrez is a founding member of FAMILIA TQLM, an LGBTQ immigrant advocacy group. “There is no pride in how LGBTQ immigrants are treated in this country and there can be no celebration with an administration that has the ability to keep us detained and in danger or release us to freedom.”

Various publications including Mother Jones, US Magazine, CNN, and Market Watch described the president as “shutting down” Gutiérrez. But the message she was trying to convey speaks to larger issues faced by the LGBTQ community.

Indeed, LGBTQ immigrant detainees are uniquely vulnerable to abuse, including sexual assault, while in custody. Between October 2009 and March 2013, 40 percent of sexual assault allegations went unreported by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in detention centers, a Government Accountability Office report found. In prison settings, nonhetereosexual prison inmates report sexual assault at higher rates than heterosexual inmates, a finding backed up by the Bureau of Justice Statistics which found that almost 40 percent of transgender inmates in prisons are sexually assaulted. And it took nine years after the implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act for guidelines to include LGBT immigrant detainees protections, such as detaining individuals according to their gender identity.

Some facilities place LGBT immigrants in administrative segregation, or solitary confinement, in an attempt to protect them from the general population, a 2013 Center for American Progress report stated. There are also cases where transgender women are housed in men’s detention facilities. In one high-profile case, Marichuy Leal Gamino spoke out about how she was subjected to “bullying, lewd comments, and threats of rape” and, even after she was raped, detention officers reportedly told her to “deal with it.” Meanwhile, Nicoll Hernández-Polanco, a transgender woman from Guatemala, was forced to shower with other detainees and was also sexually assaulted, Tucson Weekly reported.

LGBT and HIV-positive detainees also receive inadequate medicare care in immigration detention facilities. In 2007, an HIV-positive female transgender Mexican immigrant “died while shackled to a bed” after officials refused to give her medical attention and her medication, the Washington Post reported at the time. Transgender detainees have also noted that they are sometimes denied hormone treatment, in violation of the Eight Amendment’s requirement that they receive “adequate medicare care” in detention.

And even before they wind up in custody, the ICE agency consistently discriminates against LGBT individuals during detention decisions. A Center for American Progress Freedom of Information Act report found that in 70 percent of cases, LGBT individuals were recommended release or provided release as an option. But because ICE officers have the final say, they choose to detain LGBT people more than two-thirds of the time in cases where the recommended guidelines were for release. The CAP report also found that ICE overrode recommendations for release in “7.6 percent of cases for the general population. The rate for LGBT detainees was more than twice this, at 19 percent.”

One LGBT asylum seeker commented that he had “the most traumatic experience” inside an immigrant detention center. “I came here to beg you for my safety,” Khayal said after he fled a former Soviet Union country that criminalizes being LGBT. “When you put me in jail and keep me when I didn’t do anything, when I didn’t commit any crime, when you put me in jail and keep me in a freezing room like a refrigerator. You don’t expect that from this. I kind of expect that from Azerbaijan police.”

Earlier this week, Reps. Mike Honda (D-CA), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), and about 28 other members of Congress sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Tuesday asking his department to release LGTBQ detainees and to consider alternatives to detention or use parole.

“It is heartbreaking to see how raising these issues were received by the president and by those in attendance,” Gutiérrez said. “In the tradition of how Pride started, I interrupted his speech because it is time for our issues and struggles to be heard. I stood for what is right. Instead of silencing our voices, President Obama can also stand and do the right thing for our immigrant LGBTQ community.”

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