CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS swept across this country in the mid-20th century, affecting every aspect of American life, including the arts. A new wave of outsider artists underscored the mood of restlessness through powerful photography and filmmaking.
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In pre-Christian Hawaii, Māhū was a category of revered and admired individuals. Māhūs were regarded as the keepers of certain customs, and they played a vital role in passing on their wisdom to the next generations through traditional practices, such as hula and chant. They were what we would term transgender
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Five days later, Russo entered NYU Medical Center for the last time. Five years later, Arnie Kantrowitz donated Russo’s papers to NYPL. Twenty-one years further on, I’m honored to study papers deemed too personal for immediate access. Scandalous they generally aren’t. But they do offer a richer portrait of this passionate, funny, sometimes difficult, always loving activist: America’s fiercest film queen, one whose political legacy reaches far into a century he never knew.
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“WHAT WOULD XENA DO?” The question became a trademark of the syndicated TV series, Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), highlighting the religious references that saturated Xena’s mystical universe.
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WAKEFIELD POOLE (b. 1936) is an artist and innovator whose work deserves to be taken seriously for its contribution to gay culture and to culture in general. Like many creative people, Poole did not stick to just one medium, but because he became known as a maker of gay adult movies, he has been forever pigeonholed as a film pornographer.
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To move back to the “negative space” for GLBT identity, it is in the nature of the Internet to enable the closeted to operate in full stealth mode. The unprecedented success of a mobile geosocial networking application such as Grindr, created by Joel Simkhai in 2009, is testament to the fact that cyberspace has become the new haven for closeted gay men.
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THINGS I WAS surprised to learn in William E. Jones’ biography of the legendary pornographer … Boyd McDonald: first, that he got the idea for his magazine Straight to Hell after reading a passage in Myra Breckinridge lambasting circumcision; second …
MoreON DECEMBER 20, 2013, the Ugandan Parliament passed the long-debated Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Although it originally proposed the death penalty for a variety of homosexual acts, including the dissemination of…More
WHEN I MOVED to New York after college in the summer of 1980 to find a job in publishing, I took regular breaks from my daily search at a…More
SEPTEMBER 1965: a half century on, it’s not easy to follow my movements with perfect accuracy, but here goes. I was staying up in Westchester County with Cheryl R., a…More
