Yasmin Nair's Living Expenses
Dear friends and supporters,
I'm writing to ask you to support my fundraising campaign to assist with rent and urgent living costs.
Due to several ongoing challenges, including health problems that have compromised my mobility and the state of journalism and the writing world, I've fallen behind many months on my rent. My
very generous and patient landlord has made it clear that I need to start to catch up on my overdue balance by April 1 if I'm to stay on. Meeting my goal
within the next month will help me stay in the apartment and help
provide some stability for the coming year.
Your support will:
- Help me establish much-needed stability as I continue to pursue my writing career. I've consistently produced work that has explored facets and perspectives that very few have explored in public discourse. That has meant taking critical, nuanced, and incisive positions on matters like immigration, sex work, and queer politics. The principles I uphold in my writing are followed through in my activism, which includes serving as the (unpaid) Policy Director of Gender JUST, where I work hard to keep the organisation running after steering it through a challenging rough patch. As a co-founder of Against Equality, I've been part of a collective which challenges the mainstream while pushing for alternatives to marriage, prison, and the military.
- Focus on getting more paid projects. As a journalist, I've covered the Chicago queer scene for Windy City Times and my work has appeared in numerous journals, publications, and anthologies. Besides event-reporting and book reviewing, my series of interviews and hard-hitting analyses of Howard Brown Health Center was the earliest and the most detailed coverage on that institution. This year, I've already been commissioned and/or had interest shown in several projects, including one on queers and sex offender registries and another on immigration. An exciting new series of long interviews with prominent writers and activists is also forthcoming. Unfortunately, the publishing world has lagged in valuing the labour of writers, and I've been amongst those challenging the current model. Some publishers, like Tracy Baim at Windy City Times, are working with innovative funding strategies, but times are still rough. My current appeal is part of this larger context,and I encourage you to consider ways to resist this volatile and often exploitative system.
- Give me some breathing space so that I can finally begin to shop around my book project, Strange Love: Neoliberalism and Affect!
Please donate what you can. I know not everyone can donate money. Above is a wish-list of things you can donate.
Please, also, circulate this amongst your friends: I know many of you have constantly supported me by linking to my pieces - please ask your friends to donate if they can by vouching for me in any way you see fit. EVERY bit counts.
Ours is an unfinished revolution, as this picture of my feline companion shows. This has been a good year, and I'm genuinely excited about the months ahead! Please help me continue my work.
A note about sharing this via FB on this site: Please, if you would, share this on FB by copying this url into your status box: http://www.gofundme.com/Yasmin-Nair, with any short note you'd like to write. Unfortunately, hitting the FB button on the upper right-hand corner above only indicates that you like it, but after a few seconds, no one will actually see this on your timeline to read. That makes all the difference in terms of how many more people might read and donate. My thanks for your extra time!
Please forgive me if you've seen this message more than once.
I'm writing to you with an exciting update, which is not about donating but actually subscribing to my work and making it more sustainable. With your past support, I've managed to make it possible to create enough work in the past months to start a subscription service.
Still looking for a Holiday gift or, two, or more? Would you like to help fund the Revolution AND support genuinely radical writing? Give yourself and/or loved ones a gift in the shape of a subscription to my website, and receive exclusive content.
For January: "Every Time a White Girl Cries, A Unicorn Dies," "Are Academic Writers Scabs?" and more - all for as little as $1 a month. Subscribe for more, and get podcasts, webinars, and archived material every month.
For details, see the link below. For the first month, which will start in January, please just send a one-time amount in the subscription range you prefer, and we will then manually set you up for a recurring subscription. You can find more details here:
http://www.yasminnair.net/content/announcing-strange-love-and-portal-revolution
Here's to completing the Revolution in 2014! And many, many thanks for all your support, which made this possible!
Yours,
Yasmin

The other day I was about about to post on FB asking people who were the best writers/thinkers that they'd never have discovered if not for the Internet. I actually did not post this because I quickly realized that 1) all my young friends would be all "what do you mean 'if not for the Internet'" 2) the writers I was going to name, ESPECIALLY YASMIN, would be writing in actual publications and making a living FROM WRITING "if not for the Internet." So to praise the Internet for allowing me to "discover" writers who are now really suffering from its effects would seem grotesque. At any rate, until we figure out these elusive "alternative business models" for alternative media, readers will have to be more conscious about supporting the writers, and open to doing so in unusual ways. Yasmin's work is terrific -- help her out!
Alternate narratives can't be written without the resources necessary to support those who write them. I actually don't know Yasmin. But I've read her. I often nod my head in agreement, and I'm often challenged to think differently. I actually strongly disagree with a lot too, yet I desperately want her voice to be heard. We need her voice just as we have needed the voices of others who've struggled to speak their mind and make a living--Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde come to mind. Please read and support her work by donating what you can.
Love you, your honesty and perspective
Love you, your honesty and perspective