Blog Posts View all
Review of Nelly & Nadine
By Cassandra Langer
Danish filmmaker Magnus Gertten’s documentary Nelly & Nadine tells the incredible story of two women who fell in love in Ravensbrück on Christmas Eve, 1944.
War Against the LGBTQ Community in Kenya
By Daniel Kipchumba
The onslaught of political attacks on the LGBTQ community in Kenya is taking a new turn, after a group of traditionalists climbed Mount Kenya, removed the LGBTQ flag, set it on fire at the foot of the Mountain, and threw the ashes to the river.
Review of Of An Age
By John Burbidge
While Of An Age doesn’t quite compare to Holding The Man and other Australian LGBTQ+ movies, it does have moments that draw you in and help you remember, “I’ve been there” or “I wish I‘d been there.”
Here's My Story View all
Gay Pride: Body, Mind, and Spirit
By Anne Ierardi
A year later, psychologist and grandmother Buffy Dunker spoke at Gay Pride from the same stage, exhorting us to leave the moth balls behind and come out. She wowed those of us in the closet that day. If she could come out at age seventy, I could do it too!
Pride and Acceptance in San Francisco
By Matthew Bamberg
San Francisco’s epidemic tidal wave began just a few short years after Dianne Feinstein heard gunshots in San Francisco’s City Hall, and then found Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk with a spatter of gunshot wounds that killed them both. It was time for my coming out.
Teaching History and Being Part of It
By Chay Lemoine
He asked, “what’s Stonewall?” and I realized that was a teaching moment.
Book Reviews
How ‘Gender’ Became a Scare Word
WHO’S AFRAID OF GENDER? by Judith Butler Farrar, Straus and Giroux 320 pages, $30. IN THE INTRODUCTION to her new book, Judith Butler recalls an encounter with a woman she met after giving a talk in Switzerland. The woman approached Butler and told her that she “prays for her.” Butler is in needMore
A Power Couple in a Time of War
At fewer than ninety pages, Rowe’s Liberated merely scratches the surface of Cahun’s life and art. But perhaps that’s appropriate as Cahun’s art often dealt with surfaces: poses, masks, assumed or discarded identities. The book pays tribute to Cahun’s Surrealistic photography and æsthetics, her aggressive anti-fascism, and her enduring, indestructible love for Marcel Moore.
The Suits in Garbo’s Closet
A new biography, Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta GarboI, by feminist historian Lois Banner—who’s the cofounder of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians—presents Greta Louisa Gustafson (1905–1990) as Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. So much has been written about the actress that the Hollywood dream factory exploited as a marketable commodity during the 1920s and ’30s, when Garbo was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” that it’s a challenge to say something new. Banner’s book offers a feminist rehash of Garbo’s childhood and reprises the well-known struggles on her quest for cinematic fame and financial freedom.
Deep History of the Culture Wars
IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, I gave birth to two beautiful drag babies on Pier 54 in Manhattan. We were at Wigstock, the raucous drag festival. Like many mothers, I neglected their development, but they have since grown into upstanding, fierce queens. Hundreds of drag mamas, whom Elyssa Maxx Goodman lovingly documents in Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, were far more committed to their drag careers and to nurturing newcomers to the culture of drag than was I.
A Poet of the Dying Years
Saint was a founding member of the Blackheart Collective, and published numerous collections of his own poetry, editing two anthologies, notably The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets (1991). Sacred Spells is a collection of exemplary poems, essays, stories, plays, and even some performance pieces.
With Opera, Look for the ‘Sexual Complexity’
The moral became that “homoerotic attachments are acceptable, provided they manifest within the boundaries of socially appropriate behaviour,” states Andrew Sutherland in Queer Opera, his survey of homoerotic elements in the history of opera.