Daddy's digital cultural guide includes Leilah Weinraub's strip club documentary, an app for sharing nudes, and a poetry Wheel of Fortune
Hey! I’m Kat Cunning. I’m a nonbinary (they/them preferred) recording artist, actor, and a bunch of other things I’m discovering in isolation (a cook, an objectophiliac, a lush). My groupies call me Dad, and you can too. As ur dad, I’m here to offer you some resources that will keep you sane in this time, on the internet, because we are all cam girls now.
I should preface this list by saying that, as a performer, my work is all output. I depend on the ability to be extroverted; to go out in a full beat, to sweat on my friends on the dance floor, and to take that dreamy UBER home at the end of the night. I am experiencing a lot of withdrawal from the incredible communities in New York, but I am also so grateful for this opportunity to refill my cup.
So, while this is a list of great ways to engage, I would also like to urge you not to fear the empty boredom of quarantine. Be like my cat. Sleep and then jog to the end of the apartment on a whim. Look out the window and sleep again. This is a second chance at daycare. Your only job is to let the day pass you by, to discover what is on the other end of your sweet, precious boredom, and wait for your parents to pick you up.
Yet, like any wild and wonderful kid, you have urges that will break you out of this long meditation.
These are for those.
Leilah Weinraub’s documentary captures Shakedown, a strip club catering to black lesbians in early aughts Los Angeles. It is intimate, glorious and it will have you gagging at the screen. These queens took me to the club and I didn’t know how much I needed it. You can find it on The New York Times and on Pornhub. We stan.
There are a lot of great dance classes and parties out there but my dear friend Ani Taj with the dance cartel snagged the best title for hers, and the party lives up to it. Aside from the warm and fuzzies you will feel when you switch to gallery view on Zoom to see people of all sorts dancing from their homes, this party is a standout for the live DJ on Mixlr who actually kept me super inspired to move. I remember “Cry Me a River” mixed with Bill Withers soon after his passing as a stand out moment. The parties happen regularly and are advertised on Instagram.
House of Yes on IGTV
Best curated homemade content goes to my home base, House of Yes. You may know them as the hottest dance club in NYC but they are also the very community of artists and intellectuals I mentioned in my preface. These people are keeping the weird, sexy, lawless creativity alive with their IGTV episodic HOY TV. It’s literally the performers you would pay to see live giving their strange talents and ideas to you from home. They are also keeping busy with daily events like deep house yoga, twerk lessons with Blaine Petrovia, and fun tutorials on how to pitch your brilliance with Kae Burke. Next week, Nate and Hilla (who are stars) will lead us through Earth Week with Extinction Rebellion, Arcadia Earth, DJ Spooky, and more. If you want to be a good human but also have fun, this is a great resource for you.
Bright Minded with Miley Cyrus
Feels like 10 people go live per minute on Instagram for face-to-face moments we wouldn’t usually see, but my favorite curated talk show is Bright Minded with Miley Cyrus. Her guest lineups started with A-list actors and musicians and she’s now branched out to health experts, poets, and politicians. Her poetry episode with Lily Reinhardt is a fave, because I am a sucker for a sonnet.
Poetry magazine by Poetry Foundation
Call me a masochist but I am leaning into my lonely and horny feels. I have always loved this app because I believe that it is as important to ingest poetry as it is to take your zinc RN. The app has a fun wheel of fortune that will give you a poem based on your mood. I found this spookily apt poem last week:
“At Seventeen” by Elizabeth Alexander
I want to do it, want to snort and root
and forage in your skin and apertures.
It happens fast. It hits a frantic pitch.
I want to touch touch, suck suck, lick lick
like my kin in the animal kingdom.
Suction noises horrify and thrill me,
forensic evidence of what I’m doing
and doing and doing, pants around
my ankles, twigs in my hair. I am
sweaty and dirty, a little bit bloody,
smell of exactly what I have been
up to, sneak home like the criminal I am,
new memory like a seltzer in my crotch.
Lex app
Lastly, if you are a queer person of marginalized gender, Lex is here for you to find a stranger with whom to exchange sentiments, poetry, and nudez. It’s a text-based connection app (unlike Tinder and Instagram which are image-based) and has a nostalgic newspaper aesthetic that will make you feel like you have a pen pal in this pandemic. If you aren’t keen on posting yourself, it might give your blue balls the sympathy they deserve just to read how horny and romantic the rest of the world is, too.
Bonus round!
Catch me in Trinkets on Netflix and The Deuce on HBO, and dance to my latest single “Broken Heart” on TikTok.
Stay safe. Daddy <3s you.
