Pfluger sat down with SVA Close Up in his Williamsburg Studio to talk about how he made it happen, why he shoots the way he does, and how he works with his subjects to get the intense portraits he creates.
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See Moving Portraits of Same-Sex Couples Both Real and Imaginary
So Ciappa recruited gay couples and families to sit for intimate, black-and-white portraits that he’s been showing around the world, in his native France as well as in Canada, Peru, Slovakia, Germany, and Lebanon. He also invited heterosexual celebrities — like actor Eva Longoria and singer Lara Fabian — to pose as “imaginary couples” (which is where the project got its title).
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My Year of Sarah Schulman
While no one book can contain the revelations of an entire career, The Cosmopolitans is a novel that has deep roots in Schulman’s nonfiction, which I would broadly classify as an attempt to explore, catalog, and explain the queer experience in America today through the specific lens of her own life. A close reading of The Cosmopolitans can reveal the fruits of many of her earlier scholarly endeavors, from the profound commitment to urbanity she espoused in Gentrification of the Mind, to the powerful reflections on trauma at the heart of Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.
Read MoreThe Controversial Chinese Gay Erotic Novel You Can Finally Read in English
On September 22, 1998, the first installment of a gay erotic novel appeared on the now-defunct website Chinese Men's and Boys' Paradise (Zhongguo nanren nanhai tiantang). The book—originally called Dalu gushi (A Story From the Mainland)—quickly gained cult fame in China's gay community. It was one of (if not the) first self-reflexively gay novels to be published in any form in mainland China, as well as the first Chinese novel to be written natively on the Internet. This month, thanks to the Feminist Press, it is about to be published for the first time in English, under the title Beijing Comrades. Yet to this day, the true author—variously referred to as Bei Tong, Miss Wang, Beijing Comrade, Ling-Hui, and Xiao He—remains a mystery.
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The Assemblage of Norman Hasselriis
I first encountered Norman Hasselriis in the summer of 1987. Barely nine years old, I was far too young to understand his work. A child of the suburbs and the city, I found rural life freaky, and didn’t get my parent’s perverse desire to spend our summers traipsing around the Catskill mountains visiting one potential death trap after another. Inevitably, there were no serial killers in the barns we toured or monsters in the campgrounds we slept in, but that always felt like a lucky accident. When we stumbled across Hasselriis’ store in the hamlet of Oak Hill (population 277, as of the 2010 census), I was convinced that we’d finally found our local Ed Gein.
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Meet 'The Tenth,' A Slick New Magazine For Queer Black Men
Where a mainstream fashion magazine might do a special "black issue," like Italian Vogue back in 2008, or a black lifestyle magazine might run a queer feature, the perspective of queer black folks tends to occupy occasional outskirts in fashion and lifestyle glossies, never the mainstay. The Tenth, a new print magazine by and for queer black men, now on its third issue, wants to help change that, at least from the POV of its founders
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Originally published on the Vice blog BROADLY. Read the original here. (Image via the Happy Birthday Marsha IndieGogo page.)
'Happy Birthday Marsha' Shows What the Gay Rights Movement Owes Trans People
So this story seeks to intervene on the idea that we have to be respectable in order to matter. We have to be white, or be outside of prison, or have a certain type of class access. Because we historically have seen, time and time again, that people who are navigating huge forms of violence have been consistently doing powerful acts of self-determination. I think it's really important to remember our history and how the past isn't past: It's actually playing out right now. If we're not talking about people in prison while we're talking about trans people, we're not talking about trans people.
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Photos from MIX, NYC's Premier Queer Film Festival
Enter MIX Festival, New York City's annual queer experimental film festival extravaganza. Now in its 28th incarnation, MIX transformed a raw warehouse space into a 24/7 art and film hub from November 10 to 15, comprising thousands of square feet of installations (including a massive yarn-and-fabric work by Diego Montoya), screening spaces, artists, and activists. Every year, the event is spearheaded by the people it represents, meaning "queer" is standard and "experimental" is always to be expected.
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