FOR MOST of the last 4,000 years, all major, long-running imperial regimes from one end of Asia to the other have had one common feature: the presence of eunuchs in management. … Yet the image of an empowered eunuch-a diplomat, a chamberlain, an ambassador-is not the one that most people have of eunuchs today. …
MoreTHE ONE THING that the average, educated Brit tends to know about Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough and ancestor of both Sir Winston Churchill and Princess Diana, is that she had an intimate relationship with Queen Anne, … Therefore, the first question they tend to ask me, as Sarah Churchill’s most recent biographer, is: “Did they or didn’t they?” …
MoreGAY PENITENTS would have found Fra Luigi Sinistrari an understanding confessor, in spite of all that scary talk about torture and flogging and burning at the stake. When you get past the fierce rhetoric of the Inquisition, you find a childlike innocence and the gentle spirit of Saint Francis. It runs contrary to stereotype, but Fra Luigi was a kindly old inquisitor. …
MoreThe “Hawaiian Renaissance” began in the 1970’s as a rediscovery of the Islands’ native cultural heritage and a revival of the Hawaiian language, arts, and hula. And yet, all this revitalization of the past has strangely overlooked one little-known component of Hawaiian culture before European contact: its blatantly bisexual and homosexual social institutions. …
More“The Women’s Movement is a historical and cultural necessity. Homosexuality is a historical and cultural necessity, and homosexuality is an obvious and natural bridge between man and woman.” With this pronouncement in a speech delivered just one century ago, in Germany, Anna Rüling became the first known lesbian activist. …
MoreTHIS FALL, while the Right was still staggering from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, Massachusetts dealt conservatives another body blow when its highest court legalized…More
The possibility that Abraham Lincoln had sexual relations with other men has been broached in the past, and new research is tending to corroborate the thesis that he did. As one might expect, many Lincoln scholars are bitterly opposed to this view, so it is perhaps not surprising that there’s been a recent flurry of interest in Lincoln’s relations with women. Beneath this renewed preoccupation with Abe’s heterosexual dalliances, then, there lurks a subtext that has everything to do with his homosexual ones. – The Editor
MoreThe following article first appeared in The Boston Phoenix, August 22-28, 2003 issue.
MoreIT HAS BEEN a strange life after death, that of Edward of Caernarfon, born in Wales on April 25, 1284, St. Mark’s Day in the Catholic faith. This is…More
FROM ABOUT 1935 until his death in 1989, the Greek artist Yannis Tsarouchis painted and openly exhibited more studies of men in uniform and more male nudes than any…More
