IT OFTEN COMES as a bit of a surprise to discover that, before Kinsey or Stonewall, there was any decency shown toward anyone who lived under the LGBT umbrella. But, argues Emily Skidmore in True Sex, some trans men around the turn of the 20th century received surprisingly sympathetic and thoughtful press coverage as well as community support,
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Although Dollimore is usually thought of as gay, his sexuality is more complex, and he is most interesting when he questions the assumptions of the “authentic self” that’s central to most coming-out stories.
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THE NORTH LONDON neighborhood of Finsbury Park is a prominent example of the demographic and cultural shifts that have marked the city’s emergence into the current century.
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Queer Shakespeare: Desire & Sexuality Edited by Goran Stanivukovic Bloomsbury. 402 pages, $80. WAS SHAKESPEARE GAY, or perhaps bisexual? If so, was it in the way that we think of gay…More
Embedded within this narrative of a Congressional career is the tale of the scandal that rocketed Studds to national fame. This involved his tryst with a Congressional page.
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Disturbing Attachments shows how Genet’s troubling racist and non-egalitarian attitudes are matters that queer theory hasn’t fully dealt with. If the central tenet of queer theory is resistance to the normalization of power and the destabilization of categories like sex, gender, and identity, then Genet shows us how queer theory has more work to do.
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Finkelstein also reminds us that the HIV/AIDS crisis is far from over, analyzing the work of a new generation of queer activists and their responses to narratives around the plague.
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The Clothesline Swing is the story of two gay Syrians, lovers and refugees, who flee their war-ravaged country for a new life in Canada. Set in the future, some forty years after they first arrive in Vancouver, the story focuses on the now old couple’s final months together. The narrator’s partner is dying. His only relief comes from the stories that his lover, whom he calls Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic), tells him. “I’m your Scheherazade,” Hakawati tells his sleepless partner. “I offer you souvenirs: my stories, the pieces of my soul, to help you sleep.”
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Jake Shears (real name, Jason Sellards) was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1978, and was shuttled back and forth between there and Seattle during his school years. A showy, bossy gay kid who watched, unimpressed, as baseballs “plunked on the ground yards away from me, like a dead shooting star,” he found himself instead obsessed with David Bowie …
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A Body of Work’s most striking claim, however, is worth repeating. Hallberg praises his first teacher Mr. Han for his very un-American teaching style. Han told it like it was rather than “dousing” his pupils “with positive reinforcement” simply for trying.
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