Read the original - with great photos from the archive! - here.
If you’re not familiar with the Digital Transgender Archive, it’s a portal to an incredible collection of trans materials from across the world, a great resource for researchers or any queer person who wants to spend an afternoon looking at amazing old photos, journals, flyers, newspaper reports, and more.
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By this point, the line between homosexuals and communists had blurred almost to non-existence in the eyes of most Americans. Both were thought to be spies hiding in plain sight, associating in small cells, out to destroy the American way of life. If you were one, you were probably the other.
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If a queer Cuban-American woman wrote forty plays, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and won nine Off-Broadway Obie Awards, over a career that spanned some forty years, you’d know her name, wouldn’t you?
Probably not.
What if that woman was also Susan Sontag’s lover, the “most intuitive playwright” Edward Albee had ever met, and the subject of an upcoming documentary premiering at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight Festival today?
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Read the original article here. Photo by Jon Bodsworth, The Egypt Archive
What is definitely known about Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep? They worked as chief manicurists to the Pharaoh in the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. This might sound like the set-up for a terrible gay remake of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but at the time, grooming the Pharoah was revered labor. Though they weren’t themselves nobility, it is clear from their tomb that the two men were of high status. And, curiously enough, they were of equal status, being depicted in complimentary activities without either being shown as smaller, lesser, or subservient to the other.
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Read the original here. Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Like most people, I came to queer history looking for a sign that I wasn’t alone. I thought that understanding it was like a mechanical exercise in grammar, where I just had to change the tense on the information I already knew — that we are everywhere; we were everywhere; we will be everywhere. I assumed I understood what I was seeing: namely, myself in a cute period outfit. I thought if I looked long enough, I would find gay people just like me throughout recorded history.
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Unfortunately, that attention to detail seems lacking when it comes to other parts of his characters’ lives. Cassara was inspired by the subjects of Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. But his knowledge of the ballroom scene begins and ends there; although he tried to contact some vogue insiders via email, he was ultimately unable to speak with anyone in the scene. And because he was writing the book while in graduate school at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he says he was unable to attend any ballroom functions.
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See the original article here. Photo of Desmond Is Amazing copyright M. Sharkey.
Thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race, there’s no question that drag is having a mainstream moment. Their recent VH1 finale had nearly a million viewers, making it their most watched episode ever. From your local library’s reading hour to DragCon to YouTube, there has been a subsequent boom in all-ages spaces where drag is welcome. But as the art form moves out of bars and into living rooms, what does that mean for kids playing dress-up? Or for parents of children entering into what is, at heart, a bar scene built around adult gay men and trans women? And finally, what does it mean for drag itself — which at its best is often subversive, raunchy, and cutting — to suddenly have to cater to families?
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See the original, with more images, here.
Indeed, if you’ve never visited Wellesley College, simply imagine the platonic ideal of a small, beautiful, northeastern liberal arts school, and you’ll probably be pretty close. Squint hard, and it might seem like nothing has changed since the school was founded as a women’s college in 1870. But look closer, and you’ll see that the school is grappling with a question that is both bigger than the college and fundamental to its existence: What does it mean to be a women’s school at a time when what it means to be a woman is being redefined?
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