A still from Alfa, the latest release from Naked Sword Film Works, out today. Photo courtesy Naked Sword

This Gay Porn Company Is Upending the Definition of Porn

September 17, 2016

NSFW may be the most prominent effort by a major gay porn industry player to date to blur the line between art film and pornography. Its productions mix erotic and often hardcore sex with funny, moody, and contemplative moments: Nova Dubai is a 50-minute meditation on gentrification, incest, and suicide in Brazil; Brontez Purnell describes his 100 Boyfriends Mixtape as "one hundred failed relationships condensed down into one;" and Hattie Goes Cruising is a documentary following Hank Major, a 70-year-old black gay man from Philadelphia, as he remembers a life of public sex.

In VICE Tags arts & culture, LGBTQ, Social Justice

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Photography © 2016 Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst. Courtesy of the artists and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

In Relationship, Artists Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst Explore Love in a Time of Transition

September 17, 2016

In Relationship, their new book of photographs, artists Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker document the six-year span of their romantic union—a time period when their careers and lives were undergoing incredible (and parallel) shifts. By 2014, when the book concludes, they’d gone from grad students in the arts to artists featured in the Whitney Biennial (where these photos debuted publicly), and from making films at home on severely limited budgets to working on the blockbuster Amazon show Transparent.

In Slate Tags arts & culture, profiles & interviews, LGBTQ, Social Justice, PHOTOGRAPHY

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Hugh Ryan Named NYPL's 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar

August 14, 2016

I'm delighted to announce that I've been chosen as the 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar by the New York Public Library. I'll be using my three months in residency at the library to research the working-class queer history of the Brooklyn waterfront, which will be the basis for a show I'm curating with Avram Finkelstein and Rachel Mattson at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

In NYPL Tags LGBTQ, Social Justice, arts & culture

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*Originally published on Slate. Read the original* *here .*

Ballroom Culture’s Rich Alternative to the Trans/Cis Model of Gender

August 14, 2016

“Butch queen” and “femme queen” are rooted in these shared experiences of queerness—these shared experiences of queen-ness—that connect both identities. They are terms designed to highlight the conceptual overlap between these categories, and also to celebrate it, turning the derogatory queer into the honorific queen.

In Slate Tags LGBTQ, Social Justice, writing

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Why Everyone Can’t Be Queer

July 17, 2016

. This is the essence of queerness: To be queer is to be judged, and to find community with others who have been judged similarly. This is less a matter of radical “inclusivity” and more a kind of qualifying criteria for entry.

In Slate Tags LGBTQ, Social Justice, writing

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The Orlando Shooter Was Born into America's Culture of Violence

July 12, 2016

hat we do know is that America still has some unsavory attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, even from the state level, and that we live in a very violent society—more than 33,000 Americans were killed in 2013 by guns, and the US leads high-income countries in the world in total firearm death rate. I sat down with Beverly Tillery, the executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP), to discuss how Mateen's acts fit into the broader pattern of anti-queer violence in America.

In VICE Tags LGBTQ, Social Justice, Feminism, race & racism, profiles & interviews

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Flatbush + Main Episode 03: Queering Brooklyn Spaces

July 12, 2016

In episode 03 of Brooklyn Historical Society’s podcast Flatbush + Main, Zaheer and I tackle the history of queer spaces in Brooklyn. We sit down with curator and writer Hugh Ryan, who helps us define “queer” as a historical construct and shares some amazing hidden queer histories that he has uncovered. We also visit Lesbian Herstory Archives in the neighborhood of Park Slope to talk with co-founder Deborah Edel, and listen to the reflections of one Brooklynite who shared his life and experiences in our oral history collections.

In BHS Tags podcast, LGBTQ, history, brooklyn, Social Justice

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'How do you measure a life?' Carrie Mae Weems and SVA Commencement 2016

July 12, 2016

The star commencement speaker of the morning was an artist who has spent her life doing exactly that, photographer and MacArthur Fellow Carrie Mae Weems. In introducing her, Walter Rivera, a member of the SVA Board of Directors, called Weems “truly exceptional” for her willingness to both “speak truth to power” and “teach others to find their voices as well.” Weems has been a dancer, photographer, folklorist, mother, union organizer and—throughout it all—a documenter of what it means (or can mean) to be a black woman artist in America today.

In SVA Tags arts & culture, Social Justice

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