Blog Posts View all
Like the Rest of Ukraine, the LGBT Community Has Turned Toward the West (A Zoom Interview)
Trebor Healey interviews gay Ukrainian American filmmaker, Yuri Sivo, who has spent much of the last eight years in Kyiv.
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Review: Great Freedom
By Allen Ellenzweig
In this thoughtful double character study, and in the film’s examination of the personal costs of a draconian penal system, Great Freedom delivers not a neat Hollywood ending but a painful reflection on how an unyielding social order thwarts the human spirit.
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My Journey: Crossing the Waters
By James Homan
The Atlantic Ocean was even more beautiful than the Pacific, and warmer, too. The clouds at night remained white during the night as well as the day, and I realized I was lost.
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My Child, Her Gender, and Me
By Jonathan Joly
On a deeper level I also felt that I was fighting for my younger self. I had no champion willing to stand up for me like that when I was a child.
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The ANTIBOY Legacy
By Jane Badler
My son had a vision for the world. He called himself “ANTIBOY”. He was against all labels and yearned for freedom to be whoever he wanted to be, and imagined a world where people were judged on their hearts and minds, not on their gender.
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Book Reviews
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.
Artists as Art Subjects
Miller’s text engages a fair amount of philosophical rumination, but pertinent to the visual examples under review. Her descriptions are usually quite on the mark, and her analyses, however speculative at times, never seem to emerge from left field. Body Language is an absorbing book for those who take photography and queer representation seriously.