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COMPOSED PRIMARILY of African-American and Latino people, many or most of them transgendered, the House and Ball community is a system of “houses” that participate in competitive drag balls. Centered in New York City, the houses have names like Xtravaganza, Ninja, LaBeija, the Garavani, and so on, and are organized as “drag families” headed by a “house mother.” It’s a community that’s as amorphous, inclusive, and diverse as any other GLBT (or lgbtq, etc.) universe.

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DECLARING that she must distance herself “from this complicity with racism,” Judith Butler publicly rejected the 2010 Civil Courage Award at Berlin’s Gay Pride Celebrations, known in Germany as Christopher Street Day or CSD. This decision by one of today’s preeminent intellectuals provoked a scandal, but two factors prevented her statement from having its full effect: a reference to commercialism that sidetracked the mainstream press reception; and an insufficient explanation for the charge of racism.

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IN JUNE 2010, the GLBT community is observing its 40th year of Pride. The first annual celebration of Gay Pride took place in New York a year after the Stonewall Riots of June 1969. Movement pioneer Craig Rodwell, who founded the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, took the lead in organizing the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee (csldc) to commemorate the first anniversary of Stonewall. The celebration centered on the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, held in New York on June 28, 1970. Although they could not have known it at the time, the 1970 march would give rise to “GLBT Pride” worldwide, which millions celebrate each year.

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Historical and sociological work on GLBT people has also focused on cities, not just because of the demographic concentration but also because queer scholars prefer to live in urban centers with their intellectual, political, and archival wealth. Even anthropologist Mary Gray chose to live in Louisville, Kentucky, while doing research for Out in the Country and to have an academic home in the Women’s Studies Department.

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IN HIS LETTER to the editor in the January-February 2010 issue of this magazine, Richard Lottridge asked if anything had been written about the role of Merton L. Bird in the founding of the mid-century gay Los Angeles group known as Knights of the Clock. My interest was piqued, and what follows is a brief overview in which I’ve tried to assemble some (often contradictory) fragments of history.

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Franklin Kameny is an activist who helped initiate gay militancy in the early 60’s. He coined the slogan “Gay is Good” in 1968 and is widely regarded as one of the “founding fathers” of the GLBT rights movement.

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Is homosexuality a choice or a biological imperative? The debate rages as science looks for an explanation, and many gay people applaud each new study that points to a biological cause. But it shouldn’t matter.

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Matthew could have included the story of the centurion and his pais simply to illustrate that Jesus reached out to “outsiders.” Jews of first-century Palestine would have considered the centurion a detestable foreigner, regardless of his relationship with the pais. But the contextual and linguistic factors present the possibility of an intimate physical and emotional relationship between this Roman soldier and his “servant.”

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Despite the high praise that he garnered and his place as a giant in the history of drag, Julian Eltinge is not well known anymore. At his height, he was one of the most famous and popular actors in America, performing to sellout crowds from Boston to Los Angeles.

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