Is Covid Crushing Queer Culture?
Even before Covid, some venues were already greatly diminished by the predominance of the Internet, but they were still clinging to life, only to now get a huge kick into oblivion by the pandemic.
MoreBrowsing: September-October 2020
September-October 2020
Blog Posts
Dispatches from the Pandemic
The mask can refer to being closeted, disguised behind a false identity. During the Covid pandemic, masks have been politicized, as condoms were by abstinence-only homophobic religious activists during the AIDS plague.
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Books from a More Honest Time
the house had books—books I’d been accumulating and hadn’t looked at in many years. A lot of them were in a bookcase I discovered only when a friend took an old recliner that I’d stashed on the porch long ago to the town dump. The moment he did, I realized it had been hiding a bookcase all these years, and in that bookcase were books I hadn’t looked at in ages. And that was how I began my own experience of the coronavirus lockdown: I read my way through it.
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Klaus Nomi, Countertenor of Glam Rock
While Nomi’s voice was eternally silenced in August 1983, his influence echoed through the ensuing decades. Andrew Horn’s 2004 documentary The Nomi Song brought a new wave of Nomi-mania to the U.S., and a new generation of musicians, like Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius, Heloise Lessiter of Christine and the Queens, and Anohni, have cited him as an influence.
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The Buried Longing in du Maurier’s Rebecca
First published in 1938, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca has never gone out of print. The reason is not hard to understand. In the words of du Maurier’s son Kits Browning: “It’s the old cliché. It’s a bloody good story.” The book has been called a romance, a mystery, and a Gothic novel. It has been adapted multiple times for stage and screen, but far and away the best-known adaptation is the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca, which won the Oscar for Best Picture that year.
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Larry Kramer the Writer: A Personal Reflection
With the publication of Faggots in 1978, Larry Kramer became a proudly, defiantly gay writer, but paradoxically through a sweepingly satirical indictment of early gay liberation. In its palpable anger, it landed better initially with mainstream critics of the gay community than with gay activists.
MoreLetters to the Editor
Thoughts from our readers.
MoreSupreme Court Ruling Is Right for the Times
ON JUNE 15th, in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-to-3 vote that discrimination based upon sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal.
MoreEarly Fall: ‘The Arc of Resistance’
THIS WOULD normally be our quadrennial Election Issue, which in the past (starting in 1996) always led with an essay by former Congressman Barney Frank. Producing this issue was always a challenge, as it goes to press in late July, and a lot can happen in three-plus months even in an ordinary year.
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