Blog Posts View all

by Monika Estrella Negra
The Center for Black Equity (CBE) recently released the 2020-21 Black LGBT Community survey, and the results demonstrate the destruction caused by COVID-19…Overall, the survey touches on issues such as Black Lives Matter, income, mainstream LGBT representation and more…

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by Kambiz Shekdar
While the world is racing to inject vaccines to defeat coronavirus, Dr. Fauci has renewed the $200 million call to find a cure for HIV/AIDS…Starting this month the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the division of the NIH directed by Dr. Fauci, has begun accepting proposals from the research community for funding to deliver anti-HIV gene therapies…

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by Raphael Cormack
People in Cairo in the early 20th century could look to a rich queer tradition that was different from Berlin’s. It is a tradition that does not match European ones, with fundamentally different conceptions of sexuality and gender. To understand modern Cairo we must take it on its own terms…

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Here's My Story View all

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By David Pollak

Colored paper sheets were circulated, in the slightly blurred print of a Gestetner copier, bearing our chants, such as: “2, 4, 6, 8, is that copper really straight?”

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By Richard Bagarozy

I only imagined that all boys felt as I did when I experienced the intense and almost unsettling vision of male beauty when I fell in love with my classmate.

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By Ken Harvey

I used to think that romance meant a moment when time stops and all you understand is the emotion of the here and now. But what happens when you have 25 years of shared experience? How do you forget all that time?

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Book Reviews

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.

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.

Short Reviews

Reviews of About Ed by Robert Glück, The Distance Between Us by A. C. Burch, 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World by Sean Hewitt and Luke Edward Hall, The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz, Mourning Light by Richard Goodkin, and Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art by Miriam Kienle.

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.