SAN FRANCISCO’S CASTRO DISTRICT was the first big-city neighborhood in the United States where openly gay people elected one of their own to represent them in City Hall. Harvey Milk, the man who was elected in this capacity in 1977, soon became nationally prominent as the leading spokesperson for gay and lesbian rights in a bitterly fought contest over a 1978 statewide ballot measure that would have banned homosexuals from serving as schoolteachers.
MoreSIX YEARS AGO, I began working on an anthology entitled Pulp Friction, which started out as a lighthearted look at the pulp novels of the 1950’s and 1960’s. While Pulp Friction was never intended to be a throwaway book, I originally envisioned it as a nostalgic walk through what I imagined to be a world of outdated and-to our eyes now-probably simpleminded, even homophobic fiction.
MoreNOWADAYS young people no doubt search the Web for information about homosexuality, but the first thing I read on the subject appeared on a card in the card catalogue of Widener Library in Cambridge, Mass.: Plato’s Symposium.
More… The more I study Joan’s life, the more I suspect she was a case of complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS). If so, she and her contemporaries-given the state of 15th-century medical knowledge-had no idea that this was the case. …
MoreOUT OF ALL the thousands of films I have watched as a student, critic, or university instructor, undoubtedly one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had was sitting through a 25th anniversary screening of Grey Gardens at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000.
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LESS THAN FIVE PERCENT of Allen Ginsberg’s extant correspondence makes it into a recently published volume of his letters, yet it is more than enough. The Letters will doubtless serve a purpose for the many scholars and students of the Beat generation.
MoreAS A BIOLOGIST, I have found the arguments against same-sex marriage
misguided—not because the evidence hints at homosexuality being based,
at least in part, on biological roots, but because the same arguments
that are used to keep same-sex marriage illegal could also be applied
to some ostensibly opposite-sex marriages. It may be shocking for some
people to hear that the sex and gender of every individual in our
population does not fit into a conventionally defined box that can be
labeled “male” or “female.”
MoreTHE FRAUGHT legal and social history of same-sex male relations in Britain over the last thousand years should naturally be of interest to us. Much of American law and cultural practice derive from the mother country. The Puritanism that crossed the sea from England remains a deeply embedded strain in the American psyche.
MoreAMID THE TURMOIL of the French Revolution, one of the little-noticed legal transformations was the axing of ancien régime laws criminalizing “crimes against nature.” The Constituent Assembly of 1789-1791 dropped longstanding (albeit rarely enforced) laws against “sodomy” and “pederasty” in the course of its broad modernization of the penal code in 1791.
MoreIN PURELY VISUAL TERMS, they appeared to be an odd couple. With his exceptionally handsome face etched deeply with a desirable masculine divinity, and held gracefully atop a tall, impeccably dressed build, Sam Wagstaff exuded sophistication, taste, education, old money, and confidence, while his slim younger partner, dressed rebelliously in denim and silver-studded black leather, seemed vaguely edgy and preoccupied. Robert Mapplethorpe did not appear to fit comfortably among the guests gathered at a cocktail party on Gramercy Park East that early fall evening of 1975, and gave the slightest impression that he’d rather be elsewhere.
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