‘Lavender menace became a magical term.’
The G&LR talks with a veteran of the Stonewall Era
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Angles on the Revolution
AS the FIFTHETH ANNIVERSARY of Stonewall approaches, there are numerous visual arts projects illuminating the legacy of early queer liberationists, particularly subsequent generations of out artists who took up the mantle of social and political change.
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The ‘L’ and the ‘T’
Trans marginalization in post-Trump feminism is embedded in the continued use of gender-essentialist rhetoric and symbols. Slogans such as “Pussy Power,” “Pussy Grabs Back,” and the ubiquitous pink pussy hats worn by a large proportion of women attending the [Women’s March on January 21, 2017] centered genitals as the primary symbol of womanhood.
MoreCan the LGBTQ+ Coalition Survive?
HOW DID the gay liberation movement of the 1970s evolve into the “LGBTQ” lineup of letters that we have today, and what are the implications for building a movement out of such divergent sexual and gender minorities? I offer here a thumbnail history of this accretion process from Stonewall to today.
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‘AIDS activism kept me alive.’
BORN IN 1962, Malcom Gregory Scott, is an American writer, activist, and AIDS survivor. As a young man he joined the U.S. Navy, but in 1987 he was discharged for homosexuality. Upon his release, Scott also learned that he tested positive for HIV. A decade later, his battle with AIDS nearly ended his life. Miraculously, with the emergence of protease inhibitors coupled with medical marijuana, he survived, and he survives today.
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Before Boystown
Jim Elledge’s The Boys of Fairy Town brings to life this world in all its multiracial diversity from Chicago’s 1837 incorporation until the 1940s: sometimes hidden in the shadows, but often all the rage and thriving openly.
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The Enigma of Pierre Loti
PIERRE LOTI was a 19th-century French writer who was admired by writers as various as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, and Marcel Proust, but is now almost totally forgotten.
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‘I just wanted to freeze a moment.’
THE WORLD knows him as Peter Berlin, but his real name is Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Heune. “Peter Berlin” was a stage name that he adopted upon arriving in…More
The Outing of Pop Music, 1907-2018
MARTIN ASTON is the author of the recently published book Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out (Backbeat Books), a 600-page compen-dium of popular music history from 1907 to the present, specifically the presence and influence of LGBT singers, songwriters, producers, and entertainers across this century. The book is organized chronologically and offers a brisk tour of popular music and its gay movers and shakers for each decade starting in the 1920s.
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How to Be a Porn Star
It is impossible to read A Pornographer without being aware of the era in which it
was written: the Me Decade. Gay liberation was underway, there was no such thing as AIDS, and homosexuals in cities like New York were aware that they were creating new forms of affective linkage—couples who allowed each other secondary boyfriends, people who could have sex with strangers with no consequences, having learned famously to separate “sex and sentiment.”