Blog Posts View all
The Spanish Far Right: A Clear and Present Danger to LGBTQ Rights
By John Boyce
In an increasingly fractured European political landscape, a bigoted minority with the right leverage has the potential to endanger hard won progress on LGBTQ rights, and challenges the long held assumption that, to paraphrase MLK, the arc inevitably bends towards inclusion.
Saleem Kidwai, India’s LGBT Activist
By Lucky Issar
Apart from being a history professor, Saleem was a queer activist, overtly subdued, but emphatically resilient. He eagerly offered his solidarity to a variety of causes, but he did not beat his chest or shout slogans.
Review of “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer” Exhibit
By Denise Noe
Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer is an enthralling art exhibit. .. It brings to light shared histories of misunderstanding, bigotry, persecution, but most importantly, shared histories of resilience.
Here's My Story View all
Am I Gay?
By Melissa Giberson
But my journey to figuring out who I was, looking back from the other side of the threshold I unintentionally breached, officially began with that imposing question. I might as well have asked, “Who am I?” as if in some amnesic state, because suddenly I had no idea.
No Way, They Were Gay?
By Lee Wind
If the people in power can prevent people from feeling empathy for each other, they can keep everyone divided and consolidate their hold on power. By making stories of Queer lives and loves illegal, unspeakable to children, they aim to push Queer people back into the closet.
Why My Father Called Me Son, Daughter, He, She and It
By Rachel Noah Matlow
Although he was technically forgetting who I am, there’s also something affirming about his honest assessment of my gender. It’s as if he’s been studying me each time with fresh eyes and taking me in anew.
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.