THE SUBTITLE of Fierce Desiresannounces an ambitious agenda: “A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” hinting at a challenge to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s influential book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, first published in 1988 (with subsequent editions in 1998 and 2012), which conceptualizes American sexuality as the historical development of privacy, moving from the primacy of the family toward greater individualism.
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IT HAS BEEN SAID that the three stages of sex are feel, squeal, and congeal. All are abundantly present in Edmund White’s new collection of mini-memoirs. The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir rises to the challenge of its subtitle by being both an enjoyable memoir and a lively book about sex, which the author discusses in a clear, open way that’s refreshing, and necessary, in a society as puritanical as our own.
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LOS ANGELES has always been a destination for eccentrics seeking personal transformation. In what other city could a pioneering rocket scientist lead occult rituals, a satanic Hollywood studio secretary publish one of the first lesbian zines, or a communist musicologist forever transform queer identity? A fascinating exhibition, Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation, celebrates these artifacts of L.A.’s weirdness.
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The Institute was Europe’s gathering place for sexual minorities, especially trans people. Some of the first to undergo gender reassignment surgery stayed at the Institute.
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JEFFREY ESCOFFIER [who is interviewed in this issue] is one of the founders of LGBT studies and an early promoter of lesbian and gay writers. His career has spanned diverse fields, from his graduate work in economics in the 1970s when he also became active in gay academics and politics.
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THE CENTRAL THESIS of Public City/Public Sex is an interesting and original one. Andrew Israel Ross argues that the attention to and interdiction of men seeking sex with other men in 19th-century Paris …
MoreLET ME step in as your editor to fill a lacuna that I perceive in an issue devoted to “alternative sexualities,” to wit, something on polyamory, which has been variously described as a sexual orientation, a lifestyle, and a movement.
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Not all straight women who visit same-sex porn sites are feasting their eyes on handsome hunks; sometimes they’re there for woman-on-woman action. Reports journalist Haley Swanson: “According to 2018 user data from Porn Hub, ‘lesbian’ was the number one used search term for female-identifying users.” James Besanvalle writes that a 2014 Pornhub study “found women searched the most for lesbian porn, closely followed by gay male porn.”
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Remember the days when homosexuality was considered abnormal? Now it’s solosexuality that’s challenging what’s normal sexuality for an adult.
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The “physique” periodicals of the 1950s and ’60s were not just a byproduct of the Homophile movement. They were a catalyst for it.
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