South Africa’s Clash of Cultures
Gender fluidity is deeply embedded in African spirituality, which included androgynous and intersex deities.
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Remembering Elena, and Ed White
EDMUND WHITE AND I met at a gay party in Greenwich Village in 1966. Ed had brought his friend Marilyn Schaefer, and I was with my soon-to-be-wife Ann Jones, both of us doing graduate work at Columbia. We exchanged contact info, and within a week Ed and I met again—just me, not Ann. There was a not-too-serious effort at bedding down together, and once that was out of the way, we settled into a nonsexual friendship that lasted (with interruptions) for nearly sixty years.
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Kaomi Moe: Co-ruler to Hawaii’s King
Now more than ever, it is crucial for queer people to see themselves reflected in public spaces as valued members of society—past, present, and future. Equally important is the broader society’s need to understand that gender and sexual diversity are not “woke” concepts but essential parts of our shared history and humanity. I cannot imagine a better teacher than Kaomi Moe to convey these truths.
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The Ascension of the Retail Queen
Store owners often turned to their young clerks to act as sex guides to the back alleys and elegant bordellos of Manhattan. Clerks would trade tips with one another about the best places to engage sex workers, both for themselves and for their out-of-town clients, frequently sharing unnecessarily detailed descriptions of their encounters.
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The Attraction of Confederate Gents
Amid the animosity and violence between North and South, homosocial and even homoerotic elements endured. Confederate Sympathies is the study of these elements in American literature and politics before, during, and after the Civil War. Author Andrew Donnelly finds homoerotic feelings in novels, political cartoons, photographs, and other ephemera throughout this era.
MoreA Romance Almost Lost to History
A few decades ago, researching something else, I stumbled upon a bit of history that had long been silenced, a tale that may be one of the oddest gay American love stories of the early 20th century. In his day, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) was hailed as a popular and prolific novelist as well as a cultural and literary critic. He became one of his era’s most prominent intellectual spokesmen for Jewish and Zionist causes and was a founding faculty member of Brandeis University. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962) gained fame as a poet, memoirist, and editor of a national magazine, with friends including Theodore Roosevelt.
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The French Evolution of Identities
As far as I know, “lesbienne” first appears in print with its current denotation in neurologist Jules Cotard’s Études médicales (1870). He was part of a wave of European neuropsychiatrists obsessed with the “sexual perversions,” including “sexual inversion.” Historian Tamara Chaplin opens Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France with this 19th-century context for the emergence of lesbian identity. However, her rich documentation of Belle-Époque dance halls and women’s cabarets brings to life a world of lesbians who bypassed the shaming pathologization of homosexuality.
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First to Riot: The Girls of Los Guilucos
The Los Guilucos incident came amid a national wave of prison riots. Twenty-five major inmate uprisings had taken place in the previous year at institutions across the nation. After a massive disturbance involving more than 2,000 men incarcerated at the Southern Michigan Prison, Warden Julian Frisbie told the press that homosexuality was responsible for 98 percent of disciplinary problems.
MoreTech v. Hate: Can AI Make Us Safer?
Platforms have already begun implementing AI-driven moderation to curb hate speech and harassment. But questions arise…
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Léon Delafosse of the Belle Époque
THE FRENCH PIANIST Léon Delafosse was an over-achiever in his youth. By age 22 he had won first prize in piano at the Paris Conservatoire (at just thirteen), become…More