The House that Hirschfeld Built
The Institute was Europe’s gathering place for sexual minorities, especially trans people. Some of the first to undergo gender reassignment surgery stayed at the Institute.
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How We Joined the Sexual Revolution
JEFFREY ESCOFFIER [who is interviewed in this issue] is one of the founders of LGBT studies and an early promoter of lesbian and gay writers. His career has spanned diverse fields, from his graduate work in economics in the 1970s when he also became active in gay academics and politics.
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The Gentrification of Paris, 1850s Style
THE CENTRAL THESIS of Public City/Public Sex is an interesting and original one. Andrew Israel Ross argues that the attention to and interdiction of men seeking sex with other men in 19th-century Paris …
MorePolyamory: The Next Frontier?
LET ME step in as your editor to fill a lacuna that I perceive in an issue devoted to “alternative sexualities,” to wit, something on polyamory, which has been variously described as a sexual orientation, a lifestyle, and a movement.
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Why Women Watch Gay Porn
Not all straight women who visit same-sex porn sites are feasting their eyes on handsome hunks; sometimes they’re there for woman-on-woman action. Reports journalist Haley Swanson: “According to 2018 user data from Porn Hub, ‘lesbian’ was the number one used search term for female-identifying users.” James Besanvalle writes that a 2014 Pornhub study “found women searched the most for lesbian porn, closely followed by gay male porn.”
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Solo- and Autosexuality 101
Remember the days when homosexuality was considered abnormal? Now it’s solosexuality that’s challenging what’s normal sexuality for an adult.
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The Sexual Economy of Revolution
The “physique” periodicals of the 1950s and ’60s were not just a byproduct of the Homophile movement. They were a catalyst for it.
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The Normalization of Sex Research
The Kinsey Institute: The First Seventy Years by Judith A. Allen, Hallimeda E. Allinson, Andrew Clark-Huckstep, Brandon J. Hill, Stephanie A. Sanders, and Liana Zhou Indiana Univ. Press. 272…More
How to Be a Porn Star
It is impossible to read A Pornographer without being aware of the era in which it
was written: the Me Decade. Gay liberation was underway, there was no such thing as AIDS, and homosexuals in cities like New York were aware that they were creating new forms of affective linkage—couples who allowed each other secondary boyfriends, people who could have sex with strangers with no consequences, having learned famously to separate “sex and sentiment.”
Odd Pocket of Tolerance
IT OFTEN COMES as a bit of a surprise to discover that, before Kinsey or Stonewall, there was any decency shown toward anyone who lived under the LGBT umbrella. But, argues Emily Skidmore in True Sex, some trans men around the turn of the 20th century received surprisingly sympathetic and thoughtful press coverage as well as community support,
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