The question for queer Downton Abbey fans, then, is this: Is Thomas an accurate unveiling of historical homosexuality, hidden but fully formed, just waiting for us to notice his existence? Or is he a backward projection of our current idea of what it means to be gay, an anachronism disguised as a revelation?
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History Keeps Me Awake Some Night - David Wojnarowicz
Never Not a Poet
To those who argue that Wojnarowicz wasn’t a poet, I say this: his work is saturated with poetry, and poetry seeps upward through his life, like a water table importunate with spring.
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Marsha P. Johnson at Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1971, by Diana Davies; from Love and Resistance
Voices on the Line
While the 1960s saw mass movements for black power, women’s liberation and gay pride, today we have Black Lives Matter, a resurgent feminism and, in May 2014, Time magazine declaring a “transgender tipping point”, representing the “next civil rights frontier”. (The frontier is a bloody one. Following the murders of two black trans women in Dallas earlier this month, the same magazine described a “disturbing pattern” in the “epidemic of violence against the transgender community”, which “disproportionately affects trans women of color”.) Unsurprisingly, a new generation of historians is now telling the story of Stonewall differently.
Read More26 Amazing Books by LGBTQ+ Authors You Should Add to Your Bookshelf
With the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots coming up on June 28, it seems like the entire country is celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride. But what happens on July 1, when all the rainbow logos and flags get put away for the year? Don't worry—we've got a list of incredible books by LGBTQ+ authors to keep you occupied all year long. Like the queer community itself, this reading list is diverse and exciting, representing a wide variety of genres, time periods, and identities. Here are 26 great books to add to your bookshelf.
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The Queer History of the Women’s House of Detention
From this point on, the prevalence of queer sexuality in the House of Detention would be mentioned by nearly every author who spent time inside the prison, including Angela Davis, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Afeni Shakur, Andrea Dworkin, and Sara Harris, who worked as a social worker in the prison for a year while writing her 1967 tell-all expose, Hellhole: The Shocking Story of the Inmates and Life in the New York City House of Detention for Women.
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Dr. R. W. Shufeldt
How eugenics gave rise to modern homophobia
To Shufeldt, black people represented an external threat to whiteness, and queer people represented an internal one (the existence of black queer people seems never to have entered his mind). These were discrete issues, but they were both, at heart, about promoting white supremacy.
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The Stonewall Riots Weren’t New York City’s Only Queer Uprising
After protesting the prison, the march began to disperse – at which point, activists heard about what was happening at The Haven. Many believed the cops knew that most queer activists would be at the rally in Times Square that night, and had raided The Haven assuming there would be little opposition.
But the cops were wrong.
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Illustration by Nathan Kawanishi.
Crush Notes
I think of Nuwās as the incomparable soloist, the high, clear, castrati soprano rising above an innumerous chorus of Arab poets whose work touches on love or sex between men, dating from the dawn of Islam to the present.
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