Laura Jane Grace Blasts Arcade Fire Over ‘We Exist’ Video
Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace, who is transgender, has criticized Arcade Fire‘s casting choice for their “We Exist” video, a clip that stars The Amazing Spider-Man 2 actor Andrew Garfield dressing like a woman and fighting off violent drunks at a bar. “Dear Arcade Fire, maybe when making a video for a song called ‘We Exist’ you should get an actual ‘trans’ actor instead of Spider-Man?” she tweeted.
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Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler had described the song as being “about a gay kid talking to his dad” and coming out. At Coachella, he introduced the words by saying, “The right to marry anyone you want is a human rights issue.”
Against Me!’s latest album, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, contains many songs about finding one’s gender identity. The anthemic single “True Trans Soul Rebel,” specifically confronts the fears a person feels when wanting to come out as transgender, something Grace did in the pages of Rolling Stone in 2011. “You become more brave about presenting femme, but you’re still closeted, so you have nowhere to go,” Grace told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “You end up in a weird motel in the middle of nowhere, wandering down halls, hoping nobody sees you.”
In other news, Grace will star in a series, So Much More, that documents her transition. The show has not yet announced its premiere date, but will debut on AOL’s On Network.
A new television series called TransAmerica that Tyra Banks is producing will air on VH1 later this year or early next year. It stars transgender advocate Carmen Carrera and four other transgender women living their lives in Chicago. “TransAmerica is a groundbreaking docuseries that will blow the roof off stereotypes and set the record straight as we experience the lives of these fun, stunning women,” Banks said in a statement.