OVER TWO DAYS in November 1938, the Nazi Party and its allies orchestrated pogroms, attacking, arresting, and killing Jews; ransacking Jewish-owned stores; and burning synagogues across Germany. Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” is often cited as the beginning of the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews, including almost all my parents’ relatives.
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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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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.
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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.
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Diaghilev’s closest collaborators came from his intimate circle. Dmitry Filosofov (1872–1940), later an influential critic, and Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), the son of a Hermitage Museum curator, were among the most prominent. Their artistic and intellectual influences were diverse. Somov was drawn to the sentimentalism of the 18th century—the world of Antoine Watteau and Jean Louis Prévost—while Filosofov engaged with contemporary Symbolist literature and the mystical philosophical ideas that were circulating in Russian intellectual circles.
MoreAMRITA SHER-GIL’S striking beauty and moody self-portraits have linked her to Frida Kahlo in the popular imagination. Both are examples of flamboyant painters who were fearlessly bisexual and exploited the medium of self-portraiture to tell the story of their turbulent lives in the male-dominated art world of the prewar years.
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THE EMERGENCE of both the lesbian and the woman artist as recognizable demographics in 19th-century Europe and the United States was the product of revolutionary developments in the realms of civil rights and image-making. The ascent of the first feminist movements, the opening of art academies to women, and the democratization of photography converged to create new conditions of possibility.
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Between 1864 and late 1866, Karl Maria Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had a sustained correspondence, which has mostly not survived. It is likely that they used the opportunity to discuss sexuality and activism.
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The Impressionist painter Florence Carlyle (1864–1923) is the first homosexual artist on record in Canadian history. Her œuvre reveals an unrelenting interest in the erotic and emotional lives of women, especially of her lover Judith Hastings. Take, for instance, The Threshold of 1912 (Figure 1), a chef-d’œuvre of Canadian Impressionism.
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Queer artists and writers of period like Yoshiya, Kashō, Otake, and Tadaoto sought to make sense of the enormous changes wrought by the Meiji Restoration and its consequences. In the decades preceding them, Japan had gone from a culture with multiple traditions of male-male love to a deeply heteronormative society.
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