… 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.

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.

… 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. …