Staging back-alley drag balls was one thing; performing for Astors and Vanderbilts was quite another. What’s more, slummers didn’t just indulge in voyeuristic pleasures; they sampled the seafood, so to speak—a metaphor on full display in periodicals like Broadway Brevities, one of several mainstream publications covering the Pansy Craze.
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KNOWN for her large-scale collage portraits of Black women, the critically acclaimed artist Mickalene Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971. Introduced to art as a child by her mother, fashion model Sandra Bush, she earned her BFA from New York’s Pratt Institute and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has accepted various artist residences and received numerous prizes. She now lives and works in Brooklyn with her partner and frequent model Racquel Chevremont.
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Unsuitable is likely to surprise and enlighten even readers with an extensive knowledge of the history of women-loving women. It would make a great basis for a documentary film.
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Esther Pressoir is both an engrossing biography, with its roots in serious research, and a beautifully illustrated art book. It showcases the many modes in which Pressoir worked: lithography, etchings, linocuts, scratchboard, watercolors, oils, and more.
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Earlier this year, I conducted a Zoom interview with Judy Grahn on the occasion of the republication of her 1984 classic The Highest Apple. This interview was originally aired on May 7, 2024, on the Vermont-based cable-access show All Things LGBTQ. The following is a short excerpt.
MoreJENNA ORTEGA kisses Sabrina Carpenter in Sabrina’s new music video, and we swoon. “It’s a lesbian renaissance!” declares an influencer on the Internet. Chappell Roan is at the height of the music industry after coming out as a lesbian, as are Billie Eilish and Renée Rapp.
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A pivotal moment in her personal and professional life occurred in 1935, when Gisèle Freund met the feminist writer and publisher Adrienne Monnier at her renowned bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres.
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Conversations with Sarah Schulman offers a wide range of opinions and biographical details. The writer discloses important biographical material about the current state of her health and about the influence of such literary legends as Audre Lorde and Grace Paley.
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FOR LESBIANS of a certain age, reading June Thomas’ A Place of Our Own may bring on a wave of nostalgia, especially the parts about the 1970s and ’80s. Thomas has written a breezy yet substantial history of six types of spaces that have been important to our culture: lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, the softball diamond, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy stores, and vacation destinations. Each sort of space has its own unique vibe, but they all share a history of lesbians trying, and often failing, to make it in a heteronormative capitalistic society while prioritizing lesbian feminist ideals. The efforts were often heroic and the results transformative in the lives of the women who spent time in these spaces.
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SET IN 1953 and published ten years later, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a female coming-of-age story like J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher…More
