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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

“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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.