Get pie'd and f*ck productivity: Rebel Yell Creative newsletter (Jan 23, 2026)
- Amy Lee Lillard
- Jan 23
- 3 min read
Absurd, funny, and powerful
As I watch ridicule and absurdity show up to resist ICE in Minnesota, I loved rediscovering this bit from queer history.
In 1977, Anita Bryant, a trailblazer of homophobic hate who ran a national campaign to allow sexuality discrimination, got a pie in the face at a press conference. It's no small point of pride that it happened in my hometown, Des Moines, IA, just months after I was born 🔥
The pie-ing was a tactic used increasingly by gay activists and others to publicly humiliate the assholes, just as they were trying to shame and humiliate gay folks. Weird, funny, artistic, and embarrassing: a key mix to take down the self-assured and ego-driven.
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F*ck being productive
So here's the thing. I think we feel powerless a lot of the time. We can't control much in our society, especially right now.
And when we can't control the outside, we turn inward. We become obsessed with our bodies and how they look and operate. Obsessed with new ways of understanding ourselves, like astrology, enneagram, and everything about identity. Obsessed with finding the key to money, and therefore happiness.
Productivity, then, feels like power when we otherwise feel powerless. If we just work hard enough, productivity says, we'll find success. We'll look good and feel right and have enough money to feel safe.
But productivity ignores reality. Our culture of work work work skips over rigged systems that reward already-moneyed folks and punishes everyone else. Productivity says we alone are responsible for our success or failure, and not systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, etc etc.
When it comes down to it, productivity is a tool that keeps us distracted and feeling small, while keeping the assholes in power.
Art, though. Art is different. Art is about building something strange. Maybe beautiful, maybe ugly. Shocking. That strange and shocking work could be relatively simple, like telling a love story in our seemingly shitty loveless world. It can be fantastical, or dark, or any matter of thing. But it tells a truth, one that people want and need to hear.
Art has the power of speaking things unsaid, of calling out the fuckery, of showing the ways we could be.
So how can we be artists in a productivity-obsessed world?
BANNED: The Devil comes to Moscow
This is a preview of a new bonus series for paid subscribers of the Rebel Yell Creative newsletter. In this bonus series, we look at extra Art of Resistance stories: lesser-known banned books, hidden methods of censorship, the wild world of manifestos, and more powerful ways of using art as resistance. This week: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, banned in the Soviet Union.
Satan comes to Moscow with a bigass talking cat by his side? Sold.
But the book featuring this wild tale wasn't published in the 1930s, when it was written. Instead, the author wrote it for the drawer, knowing it could never be published in Soviet Russia.
Long after his death, the story was published to international acclaim (and Russian censorship). And today, the story still excites and stings, as does the story of how it came into readers' hands.
How did The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov become one of the most scandalous, biting, jaw-droppingly weird books to ever escape repression and become a banned phenomenon? And why does it still hit today?
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