Section
Sex
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“I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS
Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.
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France and the Question of Consent
Two memoirs trenchantly critique the ways in which France has framed sexual consent, legally and culturally, since the 1970s.
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Desire Can Pierce Politics: Amia Srinivasan on Sex, Consent, and Feminism
“Given the long, tainted history of sex under patriarchy, maybe we need reparative norms around sex.”[none-for-homepage]
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What Does Erotica Reveal about Society? Talking with Pernilla Myrne
“I really liked Cardi B’s ‘WAP.’ It reminded me of one of the earliest poems written in history.”[none-for-homepage]
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America Comes Out
Once, “coming out” was something done within gay social worlds. Today, new groups do so to refute stigma, and to reclaim that stigma as pride.
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Paris Doesn’t Always Have To Be Burning
The documentary “Paris Is Burning” obscured the ordinary lives of queer people of color, but new footage reveals how the film could have been different.
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Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen …
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Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the …
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A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with …
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Impossible Belonging
If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than whatever might come after, what else is there to want, in the wake of naming injury, but to fix…
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Dancing Queer Children
Fans of Dance Moms and of RuPaul’s Drag Race alike rejoiced when Netflix debuted Dancing Queen this past fall. As Abby Lee Miller—the Dance Moms teacher and queen of my heart—frequently and …
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Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or early adolescence. When kids embrace models of social identity newly available to their generation, the parents who love and care for them…
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The Gay Conversion Therapy Memoir
“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and …
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“You Could Have Changed Everything”
One may as well begin with George Merrill’s touch to E. M. Forster’s backside (“gently, and just above the buttocks,” Forster recalls). It was 1913 …
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“Test-Tube Babies” @40
Forty years ago, on July 25, 1978, an English baby of ordinary working-class parentage was delivered by caesarian section. At 11:47 p.m., her mother, obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, Cambridge embryologist Robert Edwards, and a large medical team, together with a BBC film crew, had secretly gathered in the operating theater of Oldham Hospital in Manchester. Admitted…
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“A Thousand Years” of Zoe Leonard
Zoe Leonard has a gift for seeing similarities. In every gallery of her Survey at the Whitney, this capacity for sensing, finding, and producing similarities is …
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Queers Growing Old and Young
Do queers ever grow old? Do their ideas stiffen and their sensibilities melt? Do they fret over finances and retirement accounts, the state of their kitchen plumbing …
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Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer representations in India. While the verdict was the result of extended campaigns by the Naz Foundation and others, the euphoria that followed the Delhi High Court’s…
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The World of Gay World Lit
Contemporary gay life is characterized by a curious paradox: visibility and acceptance have made life better for many—especially but not only for white gay men—but at the cost of community and identity. Gay visibility, with its attendant politics of respectability, has occurred at the expense of the gay bar, the bathhouse, the piano bar, and…
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Atlantic Got Your Tongue
Safia Elhillo’s poetry comes to us exactly when we need it, in the era of the travel ban and the border wall. The richness of feeling and formal inventiveness of her work open up an alternative universe from the tweet-shouting of anti-immigrant rhetoric today. Her first collection, The January Children, offers a lyrical vision of…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Future Sex”
On Emily Witt’s smart and sometimes menacing study of 21st-century intimacy.
