Portrait of a Transgender Marriage
The reunion would also prove a personal moment of truth. At 68, Walters would not be returning to his alma mater as Robert but rather as Robyn Marie Walters, a transsexual woman.
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Last Night at the Web (From the July-August 2013 issue)
LIKE MOST SPIDER WEBS, the bar called The Web, which existed on East 58th Street for decades until it closed the other month, would snare you unprepared. It was as discreet on its glamorous block of Midtown (between Madison and Park) as a cobweb strung in the corner of a room, whose strands glistened only in certain light.
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Blue Moon
For whatever the reason, it’s useful to learn, in a new biography of Lorenz Hart, that a century ago the Broadway musical—which, before rock ’n roll, epitomized American popular music—was equally stuck in the clichés of the European operetta.
MoreRussia: Counterrevolution and Revolt
LAST YEAR will be remembered in contemporary Russian history as the year in which politics returned to the country. For the first time since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, Russia saw large civil protests and political debates both in the parliament and in the media. …
MoreSpain: Bones of Contention
… POET AND PLAYWRIGHT Federico García Lorca was one of the hundreds of thousands of people executed by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. Today he has grabbed such a powerful hold on Spain’s cultural imagination that a photograph of his face is used as the logo for the city of Granada’s tourism industry.. …
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A Cuban Art Exhibit to Remember
ONE OF THE MOST prestigious art galleries in Havana is La Acacia, is placed in a highly touristic zone of the city. An unusual art show took place in that gallery from January 18 to February 28 of this year called Sex in the City, a collective exhibition of homoerotic Cuban art.
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India: Male Privilege Is the Problem
New Delhi witnessed an event last November that’s becoming increasingly commonplace in India. It was the 5th edition of the Delhi Queer Pride Parade. … The first such gay pride parade in India took place in 2003. …
This development in India over the last couple of decades reflects the increasing willingness of gay people to come out into the open. …
However, not all segments of the community have come out to the same extent.
Malawi: Churches Stand in the Way
EARLY IN 2010, a legal trial in Malawi made international news when two individuals were sentenced to fourteen years in prison for holding a traditional engagement ceremony or ‘chinkhoswe.’ The couple were a transgender woman named Tiwonge Chimbalanga and a man named Steven Monjeza, whose act of mutual devotion was deemed an ‘unnatural offense’ under Malawi’s highly ambiguous criminal code …
MoreIsrael: Equal Rights As Workaround
As in the United States, where ten states and the District of Columbia have marriage equality, Israel has marriage equality of an indeterminate nature, but in a different way. Same-sex couples in Israel cannot get married on Israeli soil. But if they travel abroad to marry in jurisdictions that allow them to, the Israeli government will then register their marriages in Israel.
MoreLife Inside
The following article arrived as an unsolicited manuscript from the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where the author is incarcerated. Because I was unable to interact with him in preparing the piece for publication, I decided to run it almost verbatim, making only a few minor corrections. However, the piece was quite long and included a few digressions that I thought detracted from the narrative, so I have taken the liberty of cutting these passages (totaling some 1200 words). These three cuts are marked by an ellipsis in brackets.
– The Editor
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