In Justin Torres’s lyrical new novel, “Blackouts,” these two forms — erasure poetry and queer history — collide to create one epic conversation between a pivotal 20th-century queer sexology text and two unreliable queer Puerto Rican narrators (or perhaps three, depending how you read the genre-bending conclusion).
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The Queer History of the Women’s House of Detention
From this point on, the prevalence of queer sexuality in the House of Detention would be mentioned by nearly every author who spent time inside the prison, including Angela Davis, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Afeni Shakur, Andrea Dworkin, and Sara Harris, who worked as a social worker in the prison for a year while writing her 1967 tell-all expose, Hellhole: The Shocking Story of the Inmates and Life in the New York City House of Detention for Women.
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Dr. R. W. Shufeldt
How eugenics gave rise to modern homophobia
To Shufeldt, black people represented an external threat to whiteness, and queer people represented an internal one (the existence of black queer people seems never to have entered his mind). These were discrete issues, but they were both, at heart, about promoting white supremacy.
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Read the original, with more images, here.
Themstory: Susan Sontag Loved Her, Yet Time Has Overlooked This Brilliant Queer Playwright
If a queer Cuban-American woman wrote forty plays, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and won nine Off-Broadway Obie Awards, over a career that spanned some forty years, you’d know her name, wouldn’t you?
Probably not.
What if that woman was also Susan Sontag’s lover, the “most intuitive playwright” Edward Albee had ever met, and the subject of an upcoming documentary premiering at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight Festival today?
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Read the original article here. Photo by Jon Bodsworth, The Egypt Archive
themstory: Ancient Egypt Was Totally Queer
What is definitely known about Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep? They worked as chief manicurists to the Pharaoh in the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. This might sound like the set-up for a terrible gay remake of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but at the time, grooming the Pharoah was revered labor. Though they weren’t themselves nobility, it is clear from their tomb that the two men were of high status. And, curiously enough, they were of equal status, being depicted in complimentary activities without either being shown as smaller, lesser, or subservient to the other.
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Read the original here.
Passion Can't Save Joseph Cassara's Short-Sighted AIDs-Era Novel
Unfortunately, that attention to detail seems lacking when it comes to other parts of his characters’ lives. Cassara was inspired by the subjects of Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. But his knowledge of the ballroom scene begins and ends there; although he tried to contact some vogue insiders via email, he was ultimately unable to speak with anyone in the scene. And because he was writing the book while in graduate school at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he says he was unable to attend any ballroom functions.
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See the original, with an incredible short film by Luce Lincoln and Che Gossett, here.
themstory: 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.
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Power to the People: Exploring Marsha P. Johnson's Queer Liberation
Marsha P. Johnson fought, and perhaps even died, for gay liberation. Although we still witness and experience violence and discrimination today, we live in an America that is vastly safer for gays and lesbians because of the life she lived. Yet the very movement that idolizes her does too little for black transgender women like her.
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