Blog Posts View all
We Are Kind Of More: Gen Z Reframes Gender and Sexuality
By Adam Kocurek
We Are Kind Of More is in many ways a genuine reflection of New York City, capturing the essence of the CUNY’s working class, intrepid LGBTQ+ youth, and is a wonderful case study of how enduringly passionate and resilient the community continues to be.
MoreRemembering Soap Star, Lisa Brown
By Aubrey Baden III
Brown, through her performance of Nola, reflected the struggles of members of the LGBTQ community to live fully authentic lives.
MoreTurn the Tables
By Bruce Skeiff
Let’s not leave out our ability to reach out to the authors. It can broaden and build our personal community in a time of social isolation – even without a pandemic.
MoreHere's My Story View all
A Misfit Looking For a Fit
By Richard Lewallen
There were lots of hugs, laughter and tears. Then I knew that I was okay and would be okay. I would be okay with myself and with God. And I knew things were changing for the better—a big step in the search for my true self.
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Fluffy Dice
By LIsa Salmon
When his name is read out, I whisper a prayer for my friend: “You matter. We all matter.”
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How Noël Coward and I Came Out of the Closet Together
By Craig Archibald
As I entered the restaurant, surrounded by these brave and talented gay pioneers, I caught my reflection in a window. Still so very gay, now completely out, and neither pathetic nor a fallacy.
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.