… Andrew Holleran has been a regular writer for this magazine since this piece in the first issue, and his contribution to its survival and success are immeasurable. His novels include Dancer from the Dance, The Beauty of Men, and Grief.
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Editor’s Note: One of this magazine’s stated missions is to preserve our history, especially the early history of the gay and lesbian movement. In this respect, the following piece has a double significance: first, because here Harry Hay is recounting the early years of the “homophile” movement and how the Mattachine Society got started; and second, because Harry Hay is himself a figure of historical importance, and this essay from one of our movement’s founders has, I think, acquired a significance of its own in the annals of GLBT letters. …
More… Del Martin (1921-2008) and Phyllis Lyon (b. 1924) were the first same-sex couple to be married in the state of California, the second time officially, on June 16 (Bloomsday), 2008, during the brief window of marriage equality there before the passage of Proposition 8.
MoreEditor’s Note: A controversy that was raging in the 90’s came to be called the “lesbian sex wars,” and this piece is an entry into that debate. Two (non-gay) female writers, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had separately staked out a position that pornography was inherently exploitative of and even violent toward women, and they called for its censorship-allying themselves with leaders on the religious Right who were no friends of GLBT equality or, to say the least, sexual liberation. Here is Laura Anoniou’s response to these feminists, including her take on the newly published book by Nadine Strossen titled Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (1995). This piece was published in the Summer 1995 issue of The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. …
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Editor’s Note: Following is an edited transcript of a speech that Edmund White delivered at the OutWrite conference in Boston on February 23, 1996. For most of the years through the 1990’s, OutWrite was an annual, weekend-long event held in Boston, usually in the dead of winter. This was a great stroke of luck for the editors of the HGLR, which is published in Boston, as it provided a means for them to meet and schmooze with GLBT writers and introduce them to the magazine.
Of the many memorable keynote speeches that emerged from these conferences, this one by Edmund White stands out, …
More… This article, which appeared in the Fall 1997 issue, reminds us that once there was a time when not everyone in the GLBT movement was on board with the idea that same-sex marriage should be at the top of our agenda. Ettelbrick opposed this objective on feminist grounds, and it’s interesting to note that her main argument against same-sex marriage is that it will only strengthen a bad institution-the exact antithesis of the conservative claim that letting gay people get married will fatally harm the institution of marriage itself.
More… When this piece was published in the Summer 1998 issue of the HGLR, Kamani was teaching at Mills College in Oakland, California, and had recently published a book of short stores called Junglee Girl. She currently does development work in the Dominican Republic.
More… This piece is from the Spring 1998 issue of the HGLR. Browning would go on to have a distinguished career as a journalist in the Paris bureau of National Public Radio.
MoreEditor’s Note: The term “homosexual” was a medical diagnosis before it was a sexual orientation, first defined as an anatomical abnormality and then, starting in the early 20th century, as a psychological disorder subject to treatment and cure. This designation held until the pyschiatric establishment finally abandoned it in the 1970’s. Much has been written about this long and torturous history, starting with the work of Michel Foucault; but this important article by Vernon Rosario, a psychiatrist and a frequent contributor to these pages over the years, stands as a singularly succinct history of the medical model. This article appeared in the HGLR’s Fall 1999 issue.
More… This piece can be seen as a special case of what Evans saw as the central tendency of Western philosophy since the Greeks, the elevation of formal logic to the stature of Truth and the identification of this method with the masculine, thereby establishing an “objective” basis for male dominance and homophobia. What’s more, this form of “patriarchal reason” was boosted in the 20th century by two closeted gay philosophers, Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.Â
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