The Women Who Took On the APA
… Today, [Kay Tobin] Lahusen continues the work, putting together a photographic history of the early days of gay activism for the New York Public Library. The APA continues to evolve. …
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Blog Posts
Lincoln vs. Douglas: Who Was Gayer?
THE POLITICS OF ILLINOIS from the 1830’s to 1850’s can provide a good case study of attitudes toward gays-partly because the region was then a part of the American West, where political discussion was almost unrestrained, and partly because participants included some of the most famous characters in American history.
Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s famous political adversary and debating opponent, could be quite uninhibited in public in his physical contact with men. …
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Short reviews
Reviews of Great Speeches on Gay Rights, Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, and Shades of Love.
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Men under Arms with Bonaparte
THE FIRST THING I liked about this book was its interpretative honesty. It is a work of solid historiography and level-headed literary analysis.
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A Cause for Living
IN A SAVING REMNANT, historian Martin Duberman offers a fascinating dual biography of two left-wing activists and writers, Barbara Deming and David McReynolds.
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How the West Won
THIS EXTENDED ESSAY explores the competing visions of Socrates and Jesus, demonstrating how their debate, continued by their philosophical ancestors over two millennia, helped shape Western culture into the uniquely argumentative, individualistic force it would become by the time of the Enlightenment.
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Oscar Wilde’s Excellent Adventure
“I HAVE NOTHING to declare—except my genius,” he pronounced famously on arriving in the U.S. Or did he? There’s no sign of Oscar Wilde’s notorious response to a routine Customs inquiry in any of these 48 interviews with the Irish playwright, who was then known only for his poetry, and scarcely for that. The 26-year old standard-bearer of the Aestheticist creed undertook perhaps twice that many interviews on American soil in the course of his 1882 lecture tour. The editors of this volume have collated the most significant, presenting each in its entirety, replete with fulsome notes.
MoreThe Gay McCarthyites
ONE OF THE LOW POINTS in American history was in the early 1950’s when Senator Joseph McCarthy successfully fueled and exploited Americans’ fear and paranoia about secret governmental conspiracies, launching witch hunts to expose allegedly subversive infiltrators and Communists within the U.S. government. A lesser known part of the story is the critical role that a same-sex male relationship, almost certainly a sexual one, played in bringing the crisis of McCarthyism to a head and, in the end, silencing the senator. As it happens, the gay couple involved cannot exactly be considered the “good guys” in the drama.
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The Gay Man Who Saved Ford’s Life
ON SEPTEMBER 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Gerald Ford. It was not Ford’s life that changed that day; he would go on, only a few minutes off schedule, back to Washington. It was the man standing next to Moore, Oliver Sipple, an overweight, 33-year-old gay man, who would be changed forever by the assassination attempt.
MoreThe ‘Lincoln Debate’ Revisited (again)
The Case Is Far from Closed HISTORIANS Bill Percy and Lewis Gannett had an article called “Lincoln, Sex, and the Scholars” in The Gay & Lesbian Review last year [March-April…More