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Tag: LGBT

Hugh Ryan

Our ideas about sexuality and gender have changed before, and now they’re changing again.

Louise Melling

A sharp uptick in challenges to U.S. antidiscrimination laws threatens decades of progress in extending civil rights to all.

Robin Dembroff, Paisley Currah

Trans-inclusive policies are essential, but efforts to establish them must not lose sight of the structural oppressions that trans people face. 

adrienne maree brown

What would it look like if we put our desires at the center of our politics?

Joshua Gutterman Tranen

Harm reduction strategies, like those pioneered by queer men of color, have the best chance of stopping this disease.

Jack Parlett

Cruising extends the political value of the city as a space that brings us into contact with people who seem unlike us until we realize our shared desires.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

The patchwork of government regulations around sex and gender causes endless misery for transgender people. A new book considers how gender became so integral to bureaucracy.

Jules Joanne Gleeson

A new book offers a compelling, if imperfect, account of the bad feelings with which trans people often struggle.

M. Andler
Apps like Tinder and OkCupid should make an ethical commitment to freeing their services from a gender binary. It would help all users, queer and straight alike.
Joanna Wuest
Companies are unreliable allies in the fight for queer rights and social justice. We must rebuild a working people's movement.
Mary Bernstein

In the fight for LGBTQ equality, the law is often the last thing to change.

Michael Bronski
Challenges to Christian political control are often spun as being threats to child welfare. “Don’t Say Gay” laws are the latest in a long history dating back to medieval attacks on Jews.
Jack Parlett
Leo Bersani was a groundbreaking queer studies scholar who rejected the word “queer.” We can still learn from his contrarian sense of what made homosexuals unique.
Judith Levine

“Don’t Say Gay” laws can be traced to the Reagan-era crusade to put “parents' rights” before the interests of children.

Emil Edenborg
A pervasive ideology of "traditional values" has taken hold in Russia, portraying LGBT rights as existential threats to the nation.
Samuel Clowes Huneke
In the 1970s, gay and lesbian West Germans sought to answer the question of what it meant to forge political solidarity from sexual identity.
Joseph J. Fischel
The Supreme Court recognizes the right of consenting adults to an erotic life free of state control. Given that, it shouldn't matter whether sex is your job.
Mark D. Jordan
Against the philosopher’s dying wish, the final volume of History of Sexuality has now been published. How should we approach it, and what can it teach us about how Christianity shaped the modern self?
Lisa Duggan
The 1980s sex wars are most strongly associated with conflict over pornography. But a central component, often lost in present-day recollections, was a debate over the politics of queer desire.
Joseph J. Fischel
Porn performers have a unique vision for labor justice and erotic fulfillment, but they face draconian regulation and exploitative work conditions.
Andrew Spieldenner

“I was living in fast-forward, trying desperately to have a life before I died.” A veteran AIDS activist recalls living in the Bay Area during the 1990s, the queer people of color usually left out of the epidemic’s history, and how the decade taught him to value endings.

Kathryn Bond Stockton

Gender rarely lives up to our expectations, and a lot of what we think of as gender actually has more to do with race and money.

Joseph J. Fischel
Arguments that kink has no place in a post-#MeToo Pride may appear reasonable, but celebrating public sexuality is an important step toward a future free of racism and homophobia.
Jules Joanne Gleeson

The public’s obsession with why some people are trans burdens an already marginalized community, and it misses an opportunity to ask more interesting questions about identity formation.

Ed Pavlić

Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.

David Grundy

John Wieners was one of the most important gay poets of his generation, but subsequent decades have seen him all but forgotten. A new collection of his letters vividly returns him to readers.

Hugh Ryan
Sarah Schulman’s new history of AIDS activism group ACT UP NY is a definitive and instructive history of how outsiders forced the government to accept that they mattered.
Briana Last, Joanna Wuest
On the surface, Fulton v. Philadelphia poses a question about religious conscience—but its proponents hope it will enable conservatives to pick and choose which laws they have to follow.
Samuel Clowes Huneke

The pandemic may spell the end of many gay bars, but apps and increased acceptance for LGBTQ people meant most were already on the rocks. Should we mourn their passing?

David B. Hobbs
Dennis Cooper became famous in the 1980s for his transgressive fiction about marginalized men. A new biography makes a case for what his works can offer readers now, in our era of deep suffering and infuriating indifference.
Michael McColly
Indifference toward the most vulnerable has driven the death toll of COVID-19, just as it did during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Against this backdrop, even small acts of kindness can make a difference.
Jackson Davidow
The history of 1989’s first annual Day Without Art reveals how museums rose to the challenge of responding to HIV/AIDS, and may offer guidance for how they can do so again in the face of COVID-19.
Alexis L. Boylan
A new memoir by long-time Vogue editor André Leon Talley paints a grim picture of a fashion industry in which people of color have few opportunities beyond serving the ambitions of white designers, editors, and executives.
Joseph J. Fischel, Kevin Henderson
Allegations against Mayor Alex Morse sought to use a moral panic for political gain. Such manipulations of public sentiment not only harm their intended target, though: they can set back decades of progressive politics.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Set against the backdrop of Seattle Pride, a personal meditation on trauma, loneliness, and the paradox that gay community is often both life-giving and terribly disappointing.
Paisley Currah
Gorsuch’s majority opinion tossed out the old common sense about sex, even as its logic buttressed other kinds of state control.
Joseph J. Fischel
Pride festivities attempt every year to reinforce the idea of an LGBT community, but when it comes to views on policing, white gay men and trans women of color often have little in common.
Samuel Clowes Huneke

In 1961 Frank Kameny became the first person to ask the Supreme Court to protect the employment rights of homosexuals. The fact that the Court finally has—sixty years later—points to both the successes and agonies of a legalistic approach to activism.

Mark D. Jordan

Adhering to a particular sexual or gender identity may mean abandoning the things that make us most unique. So why has identity become the default for talking about who we are and what we desire?

John Stoltenberg
On the fifteenth anniversary of Dworkin’s death, her longtime partner observes that she is often invoked to support beliefs she actively repudiated in her work.
Amy Hoffman
During the AIDS crisis, different contingents of the LGBTQ movement set aside their differences to prioritize mutual care. What can we learn from this strategy today? And why is it still so difficult to talk about AIDS?
Michael Bronski
The HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics are very different, but both reveal that the United States has never understood the connection between community and personal well-being.
Marta Figlerowicz

Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness movingly depicts the vulnerabilities of queer desire, but it also continues a long tradition of exoticizing Eastern European sexuality.

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Appeals to the biological facts conceal a deeper contest over political equality—and scientific authority itself.
Britt Rusert

History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted women’s independence and an end to traditional marriage.

Micki McElya
Before allies were included in the LGBT movement, they had never been afforded equal footing within a social justice movement. But is this an effective strategy for building solidarity?
David Ritz
Grammy winner David Ritz, who cowrote Marvin Gaye’s legendary “Sexual Healing,” recalls how the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.

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