In 1873, when French poet Arthur Rimbaud was staying in London with his
more famous lover Paul Verlaine, the spark-striking and strategically
untruthful nineteen-year-old added two years to his age so that he
could pass through a set of doors normally closed to minors. …
MoreHarvey Milk was working for an insurance company in New York City
before he became the flamboyant politician portrayed in Gus Van Sant’s
recently released movie, Milk; he lived on the Upper West Side, voted for Goldwater, and loved to go to the opera. …
MoreIn the aftermath of the passage of California’s Proposition 8, a new
generation of activists emerged to protest the loss of the right to
marry one’s same-sex partner. The GLBT media has dubbed this new wave
of activism “Stonewall 2.0.”
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Forster’s legacy and prominence have soared since his death, threatening to eclipse many of his Bloomsbury peers and certainly eclipsing the reputation of Joseph Conrad, say, whom Forster revered as “our greatest living novelist,” or George Bernard Shaw, called by Forster “our greatest living writer” some time later. …
More… An analysis of how the pro-8 forces succeeded reveals a campaign of misinformation and unlikely alliances, one that took years of planning dating back to at least the mid-1990’s. It also reveals a shrewd, media-savvy, and well-funded grassroots organization that understood California’s complex geographic and political landscape.
MoreWhat was particularly striking about the campaign to enact Prop 8 was
the extent to which proponents went out of their way to claim that the
new provision would not take rights away from gay couples.
MoreSAN 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to be a throwaway book, I originally envisioned it as a nostalgic walk through what I imagined to be a world of outdated and-to our eyes now-probably simpleminded, even homophobic fiction.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. …
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