In her poetry and poetic prose, Eileen Myles has explored the queer, the strange, and the mundane in the East Village for 40 years. Her writing, which includes over 20 volumes of poems, plays, and nonfiction works, is rooted in the many identities she embodies: her femininity and her androgynous queerness; her working-class upbringing; her upbringing in Boston.
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'Closet Monster' Is a Gay Coming-of-Age Tale with a Canadian Sense of Humor
Canadian director Stephen Dunn's feature-length debut, the gay coming-of-age storyCloset Monster, offers a light touch on decidedly heavy topics, including family violence, divorce, gay bashing, and coming out. It's a very Canadian film—with a dry sense of humor that crops up at unexpected moments, Closet Monster manages to be quiet without being somber, serious without ever crossing into melodrama.
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Three's A Crowd?: Finding the Language to Describe My Three-Person Relationship
"Thruple" is a hideous neologism that sounds like wet paper being torn. "Threeway" and "threesome" are great if you're writing copy for a porn site, but not if you're trying to have a polite conversation with your boyfriend's Sunday-school-teacher Southern mother. "Love triangle" comes with too much baggage, while "triad" calls to mind gangsters in Southeast Asia. "Tribunal" is too judicial, "troika" too communist, and "triumvirate" is just too damn long.
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How to Have Gay Sex Without Being Gay
Jane Ward's new book, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, is an investigation into "no homo" culture, which charts the many ways in which straight white men explore, explain, and excuse their sexual behavior with other men. So readily visible are the pieces of evidence she amasses, and so surprising are her conclusions, that reading Not Gay is like doing a Magic Eye puzzle for the mind: All the dots you'd never before put together suddenly snap into place, allowing you to see just how hot for other men some straight men are.
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Why So Many Disney Villains Sound 'Gay'
Quick, name as many gay male Disney characters as you can.
Don't think too hard, because it's a trick question: The answer depends on how you define "gay." If by gay, you mean a guy that is sexually and/or romantically attracted to other guys, then there have been zero gay guys in Disney animated films. (Honorable mention goes to Oaken from Frozen, whose wonderfully nonchalant coming-out scene was so downplayed that many people argue it wasn't real.)
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Anyone in any loving relationship should get the legal benefits of marriage
Formal inequality – the kind that’s written explicitly into law – must obviously be undone. Yet I can’t help but feel that we’ve gotten the right answer to the wrong question. I have no problem with marriage as a religious tradition, or as a non-religious communal expression of love and commitment. Give me a fancy dress, lots of flowers and an excuse to day drink anytime. But it’s poorly designed to be a modern civil institution. Allowing gay people access to it makes it a little more fair, but it doesn’t make it any more just.
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Back in the Day, Lesbian Drag Kings Worked for the Mafia
Although it might sound surprising to hear about out lesbians working with and for the mob, there was a time in New York City when all the gay clubs were Mafia-run. Davis is an expert on those years, and the author of Under the Mink, a mystery set in the world of the lesbians and drag kings working in the mob-run nightclubs that dominated the Greenwich Village gay scene in the 30s and 40s. Davis, as a young lesbian academic in New York in the 60s, befriended many of these women and captured their stories in her novel.
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What Does Liberation Look Like?
Walk along Waverly Place in New York City’s West Village and you’ll hit the narrow end of Christopher Park, a sharp shard of public land inhabited by four lovely but melancholy figures. Covered in white plaster, they are clustered in pairs: two men, standing, and two women, seated. They’re called “Gay Liberation”—but there’s nothing liberatory about them. With their mournful expressions and restrained physical contact, they seem more like a vision of gay tolerance, liberation’s anemic shadow.
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