… Male homosexuality-which traditionally in Cuba means sexually passive homosexuality-and cross-gender behavior are not only tolerated in santería but form an essential part of its mythology, philosophy, and practice. As paradoxical as it may sound, religion provides a unique space for homosexual identity and expression in a society with no official “gay scene” and with a history of machismo and state-induced homophobia. …

… Strict followers of the tenets of Michel Foucault-if fewer and less adamant of late-argue that prior to the articulation of modern notions of homosexuality (one which used contemporary terms such as “the homosexual,” for instance), neither “homosexuality” nor “the [male] homosexual” can be said to have existed. …

The comments made in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, about the “innate inability” of women to do math, aroused a firestorm among female scientists. As a lesbian, I feel the same way about the increasing number of publications contrasting the “homosexual” brain with the “heterosexual” brain.

“We are a Separate People, with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality.”

Harry Hay, 1983

THE “NATURE-NURTURE” DEBATE has always been more about politics than about science. Notwithstanding the appealing alliteration, the two terms of this opposition go back to an ancient debate between biology and social learning. When applied to the problem of the etiology of homosexuality, the debate as it’s carried on today easily morphs into a conflict between genes and “choice,” …

THE SO-CALLED “HOMINTERN” was an imagined conspiracy of mid- to late-20th-century gay artists whose works and influence served to destabilize Cold War America-or so it was argued by reactionary pundits. …

IN MAY OF 1928, Christopher Isherwood made his first trip to Germany. He went as a tourist on a brief visit to the port city of Bremen. Though unremarkable in many respects, this trip would prove to be amazingly generative. For the reading public, the visit was a catalyst that would eventually result in some of the most entertaining writing to come out of the 1930’s.

Despite how trapped I was by the various ideologies of the academy, I was also claiming my gay identity for the first time, and I began to see that I could think for myself, if only a little. I started to feel that Mary Shelley’s epic possessed a better-and by far a gayer-grasp on the supernatural than that of her “superiors.”