Blog Posts View all
Manuel Muñoz on the Power of LGBTQ Characters
Focusing on the valley in which he grew up, Manuel Muñoz’s stories address issues he grew up observing intimately: immigration, poverty, farm labor, family ties and their unraveling, and where queer characters fit (or don’t) into that environment.
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Review of the Exhibit, Queer Maximalism
By Mike Dressel
Spread out over two full gallery floors like synthetic blossoms, the exhibit was comprised of over eighty creations built for performance; the costumes displays queered the notion of what theatrical design can be, blending found materials and foundational concepts with a spirit of radical reinvention.
From the Ashes We Rise: Exposing American Censorship of Queer Literature
By Arend Richard
At a time when censorship threatens all, we must uplift independent queer authors to bring much-needed LGBTQ+ representation in young adult literature.
Here's My Story View all
Love and Literature in High School
By Susan Olmi
It was so easy that for a long time I didn’t understand what that sensation of being constantly ecstatic and slightly breathless was. It finally struck me when I realized that I had fallen for a friend of mine.
Thank You, Leonard Whiting
By Rich Nelson
I was sixteen in 1968, when I first saw him. I had remained silent in concealing my emerging and persistent-and terrifying-affection for the male form.
Out In Plain Sight
By Bobbi Scopa
Even though I had a long career as a firefighter, then fire chief, then assistant director, life was difficult. It wasn’t always as it seemed.
Book Reviews
Losing Touch
ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE, Seán Hewitt’s splendid new memoir, is haunted by ghosts. “Everything, once you start to look,” he observes, “is haunted.” There are the ghosts of a Catholic faith he abandoned; the ghost of his dead father; the ghost of the gay Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, his poetic mentor; the ghost of the once grand city of Liverpool, “dragging itself up out of its own grave”; and the ghost of Hewitt’s closeted gay youth. … But most of all, …
Two Victorians Imagine the Future
This novel shows that the struggle to come out, due to the strictures of the dominant society, has always been painful and hard won. We like to think that same-sex love isn’t just defensible but also beautiful, not only in its normalizing Pete Buttigieg version, imitative of heterosexual marriage, but also in its quirkiest manifestations.
Lesbian Identity and Its Discontents
Sullivan stresses throughout the book that one of the failures of lesbian activism was an inability to move beyond a white framework and genuinely build coalitions with communities of color. Today, lesbian bars have adapted and do exist, albeit in much smaller numbers. They are more inclusive, frequented by a mixed clientele that is aware of the bars’ status as safe space and chooses them for that reason.
The Darkness of Narrow Rooms
I could go on. Every page of Narrow Rooms has at least one sentence that stops me cold. As the reviewer of the biography noted, everyone who writes about Purdy winds up urging readers to do themselves the favor of discovering him. I now do the same.
Try Hiding on a Prairie
OVER TWO DECADES AGO, Kathleen Norris published Dakota, a wonderfully poetic and ruminative memoir about life on the Great Plains from a spiritual point of view. Now comes Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, an equally contemplative book, this time attempting to capture the experience of growing up gay in that beautiful but bleak environment.
Read These Drawings Like a Book
Writing a Chrysanthemum teems with intense, mysterious feeling. There’s something unhinged about the work (one of Barton’s benefactors called him “crazy as a bedbug and impossible to cope with”) that is both bizarre and intriguing. It defies the norms we know, as does Barton, who considered himself not an artist but a writer