*See the original, with an incredible short film by Luce Lincoln and Che Gossett, here.*

themstory: Kiyoshi Kuromiya, the AIDS Activist Who Marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

February 27, 2018

The next year, Life Magazine profiled Kuromiya in a piece on young activists, discussing his Civil Rights and anti-War work. But it didn’t talk about his gay rights activism or his close relationship with Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. In 1970, after helping to found the Gay Liberation Front, Kuromiya presented a workshop on gay rights at the Panther’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

*Read the original, with more images, here.*

themstory: Claude Cahun Is the Gender-Nonconforming Anti-Fascist Hero We Deserve

February 27, 2018

The reason I find myself thinking about Claude Cahun today, however, is not their photography, but rather, their resistance to Nazi forces during World War II. During the war, Cahun and their life partner Marcel Moore (who was also Cahun’s step sister), lived on Jersey, one of an archipelago of islands that dot the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. When German forces conquered France and began using the island as a training ground for new recruits, Cahun and Moore waged a secret, two-person campaign of disinformation and morale-destruction, using a weapon the Nazis never expected: Surrealism.

*See the original article, with more photos, here.*

Themstory: Mabel Hampton

February 27, 2018

Mabel began her life on the stage as a dancer and singer with an all-black female ensemble at Coney Island. There, she met an older woman who introduced her to the word “lesbian.” Although she had fooled around with women before, this was the moment when Mabel realized there was a word for her desires, and for people like her. “I said to myself, well, if that’s what it is, I’m already in it!” she told Joan Nestle.

Jackie Shane, Genderqueer Soul Survivor, Prepares For Her Comeback

December 3, 2017

At the age of 31, Shane walked away from performing and virtually disappeared; for years, internet forums dedicated to the roots of rock ’n’ roll have trafficked regularly in rumors of her death. Yet now, she’s prepping for the release of Any Other Way, a double album of her material from the 1960s: 12 studio tracks and 13 live ones. From the repressed longing of the title track to the rebellious energy on her version of “Shotgun,” Shane’s voice captures the soul of an entire decade. The record blends or anticipates a half-dozen musical traditions, including Motown, soul, rock, R&B, and funk. It even includes a Shaned-up cover of the folk standard “You Are My Sunshine.”

*Originally published in Out Magazine September 2017*

Power to the People: Exploring Marsha P. Johnson's Queer Liberation

September 7, 2017

Marsha P. Johnson fought, and perhaps even died, for gay liberation. Although we still witness and experience violence and discrimination today, we live in an America that is vastly safer for gays and lesbians because of the life she lived. Yet the very movement that idolizes her does too little for black transgender women like her.

*Originally published in Gotham History on 4/4/2017*

Inventing, and Policing, the Homosexual in Early 20th c. NYC

September 7, 2017

On January 14th, 1916, when Antonio Bellavicini went to his job as a bartender at 32 Sands Street (near the Brooklyn Navy Yard), he had no way of knowing that before the evening was out, he would be caught up in New York City’s early, inchoate attempts at policing homosexuality. At that time, the Navy Yard area was renowned for its lawlessness and – to those in the know – for its gay cruising. Sands Street, in particular, was so infamous that in 1932, when Charles Demuth painted an image of a john trying to pick up two sailors there, he simply titled it “On ‘That’ Street.”

Review of Brian Donovan's Respectability on Trial: Sex Crimes in NYC, 1900-18

September 7, 2017

As a queer historian, a frustrating amount of my research comes from records of arrests. Sodomy, prostitution, disorderly conduct, masquerading, vagrancy, the crime against nature, solicitation – the list of laws that have been used in New York City to criminalize queer lives is long, varied, and stretches all the way back to 1634, when a Dutch colonial anti-sodomy law was used to prosecute a settler named Harmen van den Bogaert and an enslaved African man called Tobias.

I say frustrating because these arrests rarely say much to the historian interested in queer life: a name, a date, a charge; perhaps if you’re lucky you can find a newspaper squib that gives a line or two of context.

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