Browsing: Cultural History

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FOR LESBIANS of a certain age, reading June Thomas’ A Place of Our Own may bring on a wave of nostalgia, especially the parts about the 1970s and ’80s. Thomas has written a breezy yet substantial history of six types of spaces that have been important to our culture: lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, the softball diamond, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy stores, and vacation destinations. Each sort of space has its own unique vibe, but they all share a history of lesbians trying, and often failing, to make it in a heteronormative capitalistic society while prioritizing lesbian feminist ideals. The efforts were often heroic and the results transformative in the lives of the women who spent time in these spaces.

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In 1973, a major change took place in the lives of LGBT+ San Antonians with the opening of SA Country. … The bar was raided almost immediately.

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            The accounts in Queer Newark were made possible in large part by the creation of the Queer Newark Oral History Project in 2011. Scores of interviews have been collected, some recounting events going back to the World War II era and the 1950s. They make the essays come alive with deeply personal accounts of individual lives across three-quarters of a century.

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IN THEIR INTRODUCTION to Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, authors Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller illustrate one of their central arguments with a trenchant contrast. Oscar Wilde has emerged as one of the key figures of the contemporary LGBT rights movement, they point out, as he “was one of the first men in British society to give a creative form to a sexuality that barely yet understood itself,” and they agree that he earned this place.

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The editors of OutWrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Julie Enszer and Elena Gross, focus mostly on reprinting the keynote speeches, but the book also includes other material, notably a history of OutWrite, a brief rundown of the political in-fighting that plagued OutWrite’s various factions over its decade-long run …

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STORIES ABOUT GAY history often begin with a bar: the Black Cat in Los Angeles, Stonewall in New York. Equally important, our personal gay stories often begin with the gay bars of our youth. Yet these establishments are vanishing across the country for a variety of reasons, most prominently the rise of hookup apps like Grindr and skyrocketing rents for brick-and-mortar venues.

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What my colleagues and I are addressing in our research and practice are what can be seen as alternative sexualities that go beyond the standard monosexualities of homo- and heterosexual, i.e., the romantic and/or sexual attraction to one sex or gender. These alternative categories can include behaviors, identities, and communities that stand in contrast to, or even in opposition to, socially and culturally dominant sexual orientations.

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Neopronouns are new coinages that were created as an alternative to “they.” Some of them go back further than you might guess, and new ones have cropped up over the years.

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Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, was the author and illustrator of a hundred-odd darkly droll little picture books with titles like The Fatal Lozenge, The Deranged Cousins, and The Blue Aspic. Although he grew up in Depression-era Chicago and lived most of his life in Manhattan, first-time readers often assume he was a denizen of gas-lit London.

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