If you’re not familiar with the Digital Transgender Archive, it’s a portal to an incredible collection of trans materials from across the world, a great resource for researchers or any queer person who wants to spend an afternoon looking at amazing old photos, journals, flyers, newspaper reports, and more.
Read MoreThese Drag Kids Are Proving It's Never Too Soon To Be Fabulous
Thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race, there’s no question that drag is having a mainstream moment. Their recent VH1 finale had nearly a million viewers, making it their most watched episode ever. From your local library’s reading hour to DragCon to YouTube, there has been a subsequent boom in all-ages spaces where drag is welcome. But as the art form moves out of bars and into living rooms, what does that mean for kids playing dress-up? Or for parents of children entering into what is, at heart, a bar scene built around adult gay men and trans women? And finally, what does it mean for drag itself — which at its best is often subversive, raunchy, and cutting — to suddenly have to cater to families?
Read Morethemstory: Kiyoshi Kuromiya, the AIDS Activist Who Marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The next year, Life Magazine profiled Kuromiya in a piece on young activists, discussing his Civil Rights and anti-War work. But it didn’t talk about his gay rights activism or his close relationship with Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. In 1970, after helping to found the Gay Liberation Front, Kuromiya presented a workshop on gay rights at the Panther’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Read Morethemstory: Claude Cahun Is the Gender-Nonconforming Anti-Fascist Hero We Deserve
The reason I find myself thinking about Claude Cahun today, however, is not their photography, but rather, their resistance to Nazi forces during World War II. During the war, Cahun and their life partner Marcel Moore (who was also Cahun’s step sister), lived on Jersey, one of an archipelago of islands that dot the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. When German forces conquered France and began using the island as a training ground for new recruits, Cahun and Moore waged a secret, two-person campaign of disinformation and morale-destruction, using a weapon the Nazis never expected: Surrealism.
Read MoreThemstory: Mabel Hampton
Mabel began her life on the stage as a dancer and singer with an all-black female ensemble at Coney Island. There, she met an older woman who introduced her to the word “lesbian.” Although she had fooled around with women before, this was the moment when Mabel realized there was a word for her desires, and for people like her. “I said to myself, well, if that’s what it is, I’m already in it!” she told Joan Nestle.
Read MoreJackie Shane, Genderqueer Soul Survivor, Prepares For Her Comeback
At the age of 31, Shane walked away from performing and virtually disappeared; for years, internet forums dedicated to the roots of rock ’n’ roll have trafficked regularly in rumors of her death. Yet now, she’s prepping for the release of Any Other Way, a double album of her material from the 1960s: 12 studio tracks and 13 live ones. From the repressed longing of the title track to the rebellious energy on her version of “Shotgun,” Shane’s voice captures the soul of an entire decade. The record blends or anticipates a half-dozen musical traditions, including Motown, soul, rock, R&B, and funk. It even includes a Shaned-up cover of the folk standard “You Are My Sunshine.”
Read MoreThis Queer Artist Collected 200 Gallons of Urine to Protest Federal Trans Bathroom Guidelines
Consisting of 200 gallons of urine in a modernist glass cube – every drop that Cassils has passed since the day in February when the Trump administration announced the rollback—"#PISSED" is a powerful visualization of the literal burden that this move inflicted (and continues to inflict) on vulnerable trans children. As in much of Cassils work, the accompanying soundscape is particularly moving: a mega cut of the various transphobic arguments used against Gavin Grimm, the Virginia high school student who sued his school to be able to use the appropriate bathroom. The two-hour long audio track follows Grimm’s quest from his local PTA all the way up to the ACLU’s lawsuit on his behalf.
Read MoreWe Talked to Christian Slater About Gay Porn, Man-Crushes, and 'King Cobra'
Despite what some early buzz suggested, director Justin Kelly avoided representing Kocis (Christian Slater) as a one-note sexual predator, and Slater's depiction of him is by far the best part of the film. And Clayton is a serviceable Corrigan, melding his boyish Nickelodeon charm with a hint of more adult mischievousness. Unfortunately, the rest lacks much in the way of nuance, particularly in the scenes between Kerekes (James Franco) and Cuadra (Keegan Allen), which are wooden and a bit boring. It probably isn't a coincidence that in a film featuring no out gay actors, there is an almost palpable lack of passion or sensuality.
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