November-December 2008
THE FRAUGHT legal and social history of same-sex male relations in Britain over the last thousand years should naturally be of interest to us. Much of American law and cultural practice derive from the mother country. The Puritanism that crossed the sea from England remains a deeply embedded strain in the American psyche.
MoreTHE RECENT DEATH of Heath Ledger, who made his way into gay cultural history by playing a cowboy with homosexual tendencies in Brokeback Mountain, brings to mind the odd but ongoing presence of the cowboy in gay imagery for more than half a century. The image of the cowboy is a powerful one in American history. Since the emergence of gay magazines in the 1950’s, there has been a brisk use of cowboy imagery in the marketing of their allure.
MoreLetters to the Editor
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Review of Sex Variant Woman
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Review of Isherwood on Writing
MoreAS A BIOLOGIST, I have found the arguments against same-sex marriage
misguided—not because the evidence hints at homosexuality being based,
at least in part, on biological roots, but because the same arguments
that are used to keep same-sex marriage illegal could also be applied
to some ostensibly opposite-sex marriages. It may be shocking for some
people to hear that the sex and gender of every individual in our
population does not fit into a conventionally defined box that can be
labeled “male” or “female.”
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