Unlocking the Red Closet is, like other books on this subject, a mix of sociological analysis and transcripts of the subjects’ interviews. There is mercifully little jargon, and the monologs are highly theatrical. And they are what make the book.
MoreDiscrimination against Dalit trans people dates back to the colonial era, when the Raj criminalized gender-nonconforming people from marginalized castes.
MoreGender fluidity is deeply embedded in African spirituality, which included androgynous and intersex deities.
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PART MEMOIR, part travelog, and part journalistic inquiry, Gaar Adams’ Guest Privileges embraces multiple genres.
MoreIN THE BUSTLING Kathmandu Valley, nestled among ancient shrines and crumbling stupas, lie quiet but potent testaments to a forgotten truth. Long before the rise of Western gender vocabularies or activist hashtags, Nepal recognized not two, but six—or even seven—distinct gender identities.
MoreInspired by Demaría’s research into this erased history, in 2019 the photographer Claudio Larrea produced a series that speculatively recreated Ballvé Piñero’s homoerotic snapshots of the early 1940s (Figure 2). Los cuerpos del delito, a double entendre referring to “bodies of the crime” and “bodies of evidence,” insists on the ways that masculine subjects and a desiring gaze, here filtered through the camera’s lens, have been bound up in processes of surveillance and persecution.
MoreThe only thing we can hope for is that the media don’t make too many stupid mistakes, and that the work of Putin’s propaganda machine doesn’t hurt too many innocent people. Fortunately, the times we live in still give LGBT people in Russia access to alternative online media and to very important information that cannot be found in the vacuum inside the country.
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Peter Tatchell is the doyen of the LGBT rights movement in the UK. Since his arrival in England (from Australia) in 1971, he has been instrumental in founding and energizing a number of key organizations, including Britain’s Gay Liberation Front and OutRage!
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As the Empire swelled and the enthusiasm for sports and bodybuilding spread, military and athletic prowess gained ground.
MoreIN 1929 Egyptian journalist Karim Thabet toured Berlin’s decadent nightlife. He sent back a report to a magazine in Cairo about the famous Eldorado nightclub with its nightly performances that we might today describe as drag. Thabet found the performers, in their high heels and low-cut dresses, strange but impressive; he even republished the souvenir photo he had taken home from the club of a dancer sitting with a small black dog.
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