Takes on TV’s Treatment
… the aim of Media Queered: Visibility and its Discontents, a new collection of essays that explore the tensions and contradictions of queer people’s changing relationship to mass media and popular culture. …
MoreBrowsing: March-April 2008
March-April 2008
Blog Posts
Darwin and Difference
IT’S TOO BAD that Kenny Fries new book isn’t longer. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory is so lyrical, economically crafted, and engagingly peripatetic that one wants to keep traveling with its author even after he ends his meditation.
MoreSlut for a Soul on Ice
STAND-UP COMEDIANS, because their success usually relies on being able to think in short, epigrammatic bursts, rarely venture into the realm of more extended prose writing. In doing so, Bob Smith has followed the example of comics such as Stephen Fry and Steve Martin by writing a full-length-indeed quite hefty-novel, and a hilarious and smartly crafted one at that.
MoreIslamic War Zones I Have Visited
THE INITIAL IDEA begins with a spark, a curiosity. Sometimes it comes from deep inside, from a secret longing for strange lands I read about as a child in the art and archeology books my parents had stacked in collapsing piles in our living room…
MoreThe Puzzling Return of a Vitriolic Rant
Since Lawrence R. Schehr, the author and editor of this first English translation of The Third Sex, a book published under that penname in 1927, assures us that “one is safe to assume that Willy did not write the book,” …
More
How Pulp Fiction Fueled Gay Rights
… what caught my attention was the cover illustration of a handsome young man, lean, muscular, arms akimbo, staring boldly at the viewer, and not just shirtless but naked, his golden torso daringly visible from his crotch upward. This cover is included in Ian Young’s wonderfully informative Out in Paperback: A Visual History of Gay Pulps. …
MoreSpain’s Prolonged Road to Freedom
… Strict followers of the tenets of Michel Foucault-if fewer and less adamant of late-argue that prior to the articulation of modern notions of homosexuality (one which used contemporary terms such as “the homosexual,” for instance), neither “homosexuality” nor “the [male] homosexual” can be said to have existed. …
MoreDesire Is Back in China
… Rofel sees China moving toward a cosmopolitan consumer culture that mixes various cultural elements both East and West. But along with the desire for goods, other desires begin to find expression in public spaces, including sexual ones. Thus there has been a general loosening of attitudes on sexual activity in general and homosexuality in particular. …
More‘Invertidos’ in Afro-Cuban Religion
… Male homosexuality-which traditionally in Cuba means sexually passive homosexuality-and cross-gender behavior are not only tolerated in santería but form an essential part of its mythology, philosophy, and practice. As paradoxical as it may sound, religion provides a unique space for homosexual identity and expression in a society with no official “gay scene” and with a history of machismo and state-induced homophobia. …
MoreThe Lure of the ‘Sotadic Zone’
The following is excerpted from Gay Tourism: Culture and Context, published by Haworth Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission.
More