ODESSA, IN WEST TEXAS, feels like the remote edge of something in the way you might imagine Vladivostok: far from anywhere, exotic, but not the kind of exotic that attracts tourists. It’s an oil town, mainly. Buildings are tacky, functional. The land is flat, dry, barren, with a local culture to match: the big deal in Odessa is, famously, high school football. West Odessa, bleaker still, is the scrubby outskirts where they put the “adult” stuff that Odessa doesn’t want.

The following is excerpted and adapted from an article that first appeared in the Journal of Homosexuality, Volume 49, Number 1, 2005.

This article was excerpted and adapted from one that first appeared in Sexuality Research & Social Policy: Journal of National Sexuality Resource Center, an on-line academic journal. Copyright ©…More

The following is the Preface from the recently published book by C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Free Press, 2005).

ANTI-GAY ACTIVISTS frequently claim that equal rights for gay and lesbian people are a threat to the civil rights of groups they deem “legitimate minorities,” including African-Americans. For example,…More

The following is excerpted from the introduction to Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex, which will be published by Cleis Press this July.

THE DAY AFTER I gave this talk to the Harvard gay and lesbian alumni/æ group, I was taken to lunch in Dunster House by some undergraduates. After filling our…More