Tag
Queer Theory
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Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
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Safe Space
The geography of gay life has shifted dramatically over the past decades. In 1949, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal described homosexuality as located almost exclusively in spaces of moral depredation—in …
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This is What I Mean When I Tell My Dad He’s Alright
Mattie Wechsler’s essay won the 2014 Katherine Fullerton Gerould Award Prize at Bryn Mawr College. When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by his seat at the table. This way, if there were ever a dispute during dinner about how to pronounce a word correctly, he could…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Orange Is the New Black”
In advance of the second season of Netflix’s original series, Orange Is the New Black, which will be released on Friday, June 6, we asked Public Books contributors to share their views on the show’s representation of race, gender, sexuality, incarceration, and the women-in-prison genre. —Heather Love: Made For TV —Megan Comfort: The Two Pipers…
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Queer Magic
Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Michelle Tea’s Mermaid in Chelsea Creek both use magic to imagine solutions to childhood anxieties: What do you do when your family doesn’t feel like one? What kind of alternate kinship is available to a kid disempowered by age, obedience, and dependence? How might…
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Dream Girls
Hilton Als’s White Girls is a disorienting book. If traditional biography aspires to capture the person behind the scrim of myth, Als prefers to linger on the scrim itself—the fantasy, the persona, the aura of celebrity—the fiction. His essay on Truman Capote focuses on the writer’s public image, beginning with the famous book-jacket photo of…
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After a Queer Fashion
The exhibit currently on view at the Museum at FIT, “A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk,” ends on a note of progressive triumphalism: the final installation is a triptych of gay wedding attire from the past several years. We see, to the right, a pair of entirely conventional white wedding…
