Letters to the Editor
Letters to the editor
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Trans-sex and the Facticity of the Flesh
… How does one explicate the tangle of anomalies, abnormalities, and antinomies of double sex? Changing one’s sex has to be one of the all-time most mysterious and daunting of transformations, even exceeding the province of art. …
MoreLet The Gendercator Be Shown
THE SHORT FILM The Gendercator has been pulled from this year’s San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival by the festival producer Frameline at the behest of transgendered people and their supporters. Community organizers declare that the piece by lesbian filmmaker Catherine Crouch is “hateful” and that “there is no space for hatred and transphobia in our community institutions.” It leaves one to wonder how such an opinion can be formed by those who have yet to see the film.
MoreSapphic Subtexts in Ladies’ Magazines
… While images of women in erotically suggestive situations are less widespread than comparable depictions of men in American advertising, women who seem to prefer the company of other women have been goosed and gandered by Madison Avenue from the turn of the 20th century to the mid-1960’s and beyond. Since becoming fascinated by what I perceived as homoerotic imagery in vintage advertising, I’ve collected and studied over 300 such ads.
MoreBuddhism and the Gender Continuum
Due to the impact of the lectures that I gave at Mahachulalongkorn University, Koen Kaen and Roi Et campuses, I was very lucky to be invited to participate in the Fourth Annual International Buddhist Conference, held at the United Nations Conference Centre in Bangkok on May 26-29. Mahachulalongkorn University and the United Nations were the chief sponsors of this conference. With over a thousand people in attendance, there were only six Americans present, and I was honored to be one of those six.
MoreA Picture of Oscar Wilde
ONE HUNDRED YEARS after the death of Oscar Wilde in 1900, all of his known surviving letters-1,562 of them-were published, edited by his grandson, Merlin Holland (with the late Rupert Hart-Davis). Now Holland has edited a selection of those letters …
MoreOf Living Rooms and Liberation Politics
IN 1955, Rose Bamberger, a Filipina lesbian, brought together four couples to form a “secret society of lesbians” in San Francisco. She wanted to be able to dance, drink, and socialize without the fear of harassment or arrest that homosexuals risked at the bars. At the first meeting someone suggested that the group be called the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) (bil-EE-tis).
MoreThe Man from Mattachine
THE 1970’s was the golden age of gay bar guides, those little publications with pictures, personal ads, and, week after week, articles by local activists and commentators. Those articles, now mostly lost, helped form GLBT communities in towns all over America. Jack Nichols wrote hundreds of such pieces.
MoreThe Other Spanish Inquisition
… This case sets the stage for Cristian Berco’s fine study of homosexual sodomy in Spain from the 1500’s to the 1700’s. Working from 500 Inquisition trial proceedings involving homosexual sodomy in Aragon, Spain, Berco situates these court cases within the complexities of the period’s social landscape.
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More People in Trouble
SARAH SCHULMAN’S latest novel, The Child, is a complex story about people who are caught in the clutches of our society’s systems. The novel follows the lives of two characters, Eva and Stew, whose lives intersect briefly. The plot is advanced in vignettes. Multiple viewpoints, from secondary as well as primary characters, create a sense of ironic distance as the reader watches powerlessly while the characters are propelled headlong into disaster.
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