Blog Posts View all
A Transgender Kashmiri Artist’s Struggle
By Danish Showkat and Mehendi Mehraj
I grew up learning from an early age that I was not like the others. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I felt it everywhere: in classrooms, on the streets, inside my own home.
Keeping Queer Culture Alive in Wartime Kyiv
By Finbarr Toesland
Members of Kyiv’s queer community are working to keep creativity alive as their city undergoes seismic changes. Queer nightlife and connection are still possible.
Let’s Choose Each Other Again
By Randal C. Smith
No relationship is perfect. No love is untouched by disappointment. No bond survives without negotiation, humility, and repair. What matters isn’t whether love lasts forever.
Here's My Story View all
Botching the Threesome
By Gregory Walters
Before getting into another relationship—if another should come along—I decided I needed to explore my sexuality, learn a few things, gain confidence, and lose the prude aura.
Writing Our Own Happy Endings
By Ash Perez
My name is Ash Perez, 36, male, a TV writer living in LA. If you have no idea who that is, you may remember me from the mid-2010s, when I was Ashly Perez, the “awkward Asian girl” on BuzzFeed.
A Higher Calling for Felipe
By Michael Varga
I met him at a Paris disco in 1986 when I was on leave from my assignment in Dubai. Over the next seven years we didn’t see each other often, but we got together whenever we could.
Book Reviews
While Isherwood Was Off Writing…
DON BACHARDY’S prolific sixty-year career as an artist—his body of work encompasses about 17,000 portraits—would be reason enough for a 400-page book about him.
Life After Bowers
In The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS, author Martin Padgett pays tribute to Hardwick, the plaintiff in the 1986 case. In doing so, …
Short Reviews
Brief reviews of the books: The CBGB Conspiracy; Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950; Maryville; and Caravaggio: 1571-1610; and the film, Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Florence in the Time of Leonardo
Phil Melanson keeps Florenzer engaging by setting this novel about Leonardo da Vinci amid a power struggle between the Pope and the Medici family of Florence.
Friends of Society
Brian T. Blackmore begins To Hear and to Respond, his history of Quaker support of homosexuals, in the years following World War II, when the U.S. was engulfed in a wave of homophobia. Police entrapment of men seeking sex with men filled prisons with convicted sex offenders.
The Music Set Us Free
IN THE WORDS of queer musicologist Philip Brett, “all musicians, we must remember, are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room.” Author Jon Savage seeks to demonstrate this point across almost 800 pages of The Secret Public, tracing the connection between music and queerness from the 1950s to about 1980, but he also goes well beyond.
