Browsing: September-October 2020

September-October 2020

Blog Posts

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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.

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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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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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   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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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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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.

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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.

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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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