Soap Operas and Social Change
THE SOAP OPERA, that quintessentially American genre, has been a fixture of popular culture since the early days of radio. As such, the soaps have played an important role…More
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Diary of a Kinsey 6+
Jeremy Mulderig claims in his introduction that The Lost Autobiography is one of the great queer diaries of the 20th century (one wonders how many of these there actually are; still, the claim does not seem wildly off base). Here is a witness to some of that century’s great personalities, living defiantly through the strictures imposed by society during those times, and asserting at every turn that he had as much right to be happy as anyone else.
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Oscar in Blackface
ust when you thought you knew everything about the life of Oscar Wilde, there’s more. Making Oscar Wilde turns out to be not just about Wilde, however; it’s about the U.S. at a time when when P. T. Barnum was drawing them in with exhibits like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” minstrel shows were exceedingly popular, and Darwin’s idea that we are descended from apes was on everyone’s mind.
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Between the Greeks and Stonewall
TO BEGIN somewhere in the middle of this stretch of time, in medieval England, we home in on an icon of heroic manhood, King Richard the Lionheart. Long before he gained this epithet, Richard was the intimate boyhood friend of Prince Philip II of France, and their special fondness for each other carried over into adulthood.
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Bronze Age Buddies
FOR THOSE INTERESTED in tracing the origins of homosexual relations in history, or in the literary history of the West, it is customary to begin with the ancient Athenians…More
Drag Kings in the Music Halls
Gillian Rodger’s Just One of the Boys is a welcome and fascinating addition to the history of cross-dressed performance and 19th-century Anglo-American theater more generally.
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Around the World in Eight Years
Global Gay is the result of eight years Martel spent on “a long field survey conducted in more than 50 countries” spanning, in alphabetical order, Algeria to Vietnam.
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Russia and the Art of Survival
THE YEAR WAS 1928. The Russian poet and diarist Mikhail Kuzmin had just performed his final public reading. He had been invited by a group of students whose enthusiasm…More
Did the Nazis Enact a ‘Gay Genocide’?
IS IT POSSIBLE, is it legitimate, to speak of a “gay genocide” under the Nazis before and during World War II? There’s no debating that the Nazis rounded up…More
Homonegativity in Eastern Europe
IN THE LAST TWO DECADES, Western European nations have enjoyed mostly steady progress toward the acceptance of homosexuality. For their Eastern European counterparts, however, negative attitudes and intolerance toward…More