According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “whoops,” with its variant “Whoopsie Daisy!” is the exclamation uttered when a harmless accident occurs. The earliest citation it provides is a 1925 New Yorker caption to a Peter Arno cartoon. Arno’s first collection, Whoops, Dearie, came out two years later, when he created the Whoops Sisters. As described by the revue impresario Leonard Sillman, they were “short, squat, look-alike sisters with huge snub noses and puffy cheeks and the eyes of sad seals. They always dressed in black.” These late Victorian ladies, Pansy Smiff and Mrs Abagail Flusser, antiquated in their muffs and leg-o’-mutton sleeves, would engage in cheeky and inappropriate behavior (Figure 1).

Similarly, Betancourt, [in Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages,] writes with an authentic engagement in an intersectional analysis of race, sexuality, and gender. With his scholarly and political commitment, Betancourt vividly demonstrates that the richness of Byzantium was not just in its gilded surfaces but also in its gender, racial, and sexual diversity—befitting for this crossroads of two continents and myriad cultures and religions.

OUTRAGES BEGINS in the rare book room of the Morgan Library in New York, where Naomi Wolf has gone to read the manuscript of an unpublished poem that Victorian critic John Addington Symonds wrote at Oxford after falling in love with a classmate—though you might also say that the book began the day Wolf was still a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was handed two volumes of Symonds’ letters by her advisor with the words: “You should read these.” Read them she did, and now, years after publishing such bestsellers as The Beauty Myth and Vagina, Wolf has returned to her doctoral thesis.

When gay literature became popular in the 1970s, the novels were all about urban gays living in the fast lane. Now we have books about gays living in the sticks.