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TO ANY LGBT PERSON who isn’t accepted enough in their formative years, here’s the drill: you simply wait it out, and eventually find some real family—in the community, in the nightlife, or simply in the world of like-minded adults. That’s when you’ll emerge into your complete acceptance, leading to a worry-free rest of your life spent being validated by your loving peers. So says the fairy tale. But what happens when the new family you enter into turns out to be as flawed as your old one?

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AT OUTWRITE 1995, the queer writers’ conference in Boston, an unlikely but lasting friendship was born. Mattilda was a 21-year-old genderblur club kid with a history of radical organizing who felt trapped in Boston except when the Ecstasy hit at 2 a.m. Michael was a 25-year-old former Dartmouth College Woodsmen Team competitor who had recently moved from New Hampshire to Boston, where he edited erotic anthologies to bankroll his attempts to write literary fiction. … After all these years, and despite the continent between them, Mattilda and Michael still love to talk. Recently, Michael set up a Zoom session, which Mattilda called into using a landline, and they chatted about their new projects and a wide range of other topics.

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            Everything in Purdy’s Malcolm may be described as “firmly evasive,” which no doubt enhanced the sexual mysteriousness of the novel for its original readers. Early in the novel, unable to follow Malcolm’s explanation of his relationship with Dr. Cox, Estel replies “Of course” by way of encouraging Malcolm to continue, only to reflect suddenly “that he had said of course to something he had not understood in the least.”

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THE DOCUMENTARY Keith Haring: Street Art Boy, directed by Ben Anthony, takes the formulaic, rags-to-riches narrative and runs with it. Queer sexuality, which was fundamental to Haring’s æsthetic and to his iconographic vocabulary, is completely missing from the film. All phallic imagery—even the mere shadow or hint of it—is erased, even though it was utterly central to his art. There’s no mention or glimpse of his final, major work: a large-scale mural painted in 1989, the year before his death at age 31. Once Upon A Time is a mural across four interior walls above the white porcelain tiles and urinals of the second-floor men’s room in New York City’s LGBT Center.

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Bertram Cope’s Year is clearly indebted to the conventions of romantic comedy and the comedy of manners rather than to the tradition of the bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel.

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “whoops,” with its variant “Whoopsie Daisy!” is the exclamation uttered when a harmless accident occurs. The earliest citation it provides is a 1925 New Yorker caption to a Peter Arno cartoon. Arno’s first collection, Whoops, Dearie, came out two years later, when he created the Whoops Sisters. As described by the revue impresario Leonard Sillman, they were “short, squat, look-alike sisters with huge snub noses and puffy cheeks and the eyes of sad seals. They always dressed in black.” These late Victorian ladies, Pansy Smiff and Mrs Abagail Flusser, antiquated in their muffs and leg-o’-mutton sleeves, would engage in cheeky and inappropriate behavior (Figure 1).

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Similarly, Betancourt, [in Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages,] writes with an authentic engagement in an intersectional analysis of race, sexuality, and gender. With his scholarly and political commitment, Betancourt vividly demonstrates that the richness of Byzantium was not just in its gilded surfaces but also in its gender, racial, and sexual diversity—befitting for this crossroads of two continents and myriad cultures and religions.

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