Blog Posts View all
Considering a Place in Fiction for Badly-Behaved Queers
By Brian Alessandro
There is a valid concern that portraying an LGBTQI character as foul in fiction could make our place in the world tenuous.
Henry Scott Tuke: Homoeroticism in a Time of Illegality
By Samuel Muñoz
In the same decade that the trial of Oscar Wilde and the network of male brothels on Cleveland Street swept the headlines and flamed a push for a tougher stand on anti sodomy laws, an English artist thrived by openly celebrating the beauty of the male body.
Beyond Cabaret: Queer Life in Early Twentieth-Century Germany
By Brian Fehler
To Be Seen, Queer Lives: 1900-1950 reveals moments of queer life during the emerging explorations of identity after the turn of the century, including the vibrant years of the Weimar Republic, the years of Nazi persecution, and the early postwar years.
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Love and Regret in Gay Bars
By Les K. Wright
One evening, a guy asked me if I wanted to go to the Central Arms. He explained it was a gay bar, and “with your good looks you’ll be popular.”
The Price of Queer Belonging
By Gregory Walters
While the attraction to live in gay neighborhoods—West Hollywood, the Castro, Boystown, Chelsea—is less than it used to be, LGBTQ people still gravitate to urban areas and states where we can live more and fight less.
On Writing Black Queer Fiction
By Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
As a writer, my characters’ queerness is always as central to their stories as their Blackness, their gender, or their size. For me, this is what it means to create full characters: they have multiple facets, live in multiple worlds, and it’s the precise alchemy of such multiplicity that defines them.
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.