Afeni Shakur is today remembered for many things, including her leadership in the Black Panthers…Forgotten, though, is her history as a gay liberation radical, her presence at the Stonewall Riots, and her own bisexuality…
Read MoreThe Dystopia Has Just Arrived
The letter X is the shiftiest minx in the alphabet: a treasure, a cipher, the person we once loved; a porno, a warning, the gender marker beyond F or M; and, now, the title of a queer, near-future noir by Davey Davis. In “X” (the novel), X (the character) is a little of all these things, a “femdom nightmare” and the object of obsession for Davis’s nonbinary narrator (who spends most of the novel nameless).
Read MoreListen to me on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
It’s been a life time goal to be interviewed by Terry Gross, one of the greats of American radio, and a voice I’ve been listening to my entire life. Hear the full conversation!
Read MoreLGBTQ people are disproportionately incarcerated. Here’s why.
At least 40 percent of people incarcerated in American women’s prisons identify somewhere under the broad lesbian-bisexual-trans-queer umbrella — a shocking statistic that holds true when looking at detention centers for youths as well. Why?
Read MoreRea
BOMB Magazine has been a bucket-list, dream publication of mine since I went to grad school. Now, thanks to Mattilda B. Sycamore’s new collection, BETWEEN CERTAIN DEATH AND A POSSIBLE FUTURE, they’ve published my essay “Rea,” about getting tested for HIV in the 1990s!
Read MoreA Memoir About Queer Identity, Told One Gay Bar at a Time
History, as it is taught, is a straight line of dominoes falling — the relentless clack of fact hitting fact, an orderly queue of causality stretching on forever. History, as it is lived, is a reeling spiral of flight and return; the iterative reawakening of new selves in familiar places;
Read MoreWHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER Wins the 2019-2020 NYC Book Award
I am delighted to announce that WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER is a winner of the 2019-2020 New York City Book Awards, given out by the New York Society Library.
Read MoreHugh Ryan & Avram Finkelstein Win the 2019 Allan Berube Prize
On the (Queer) Waterfront, the first comprehensive historical exhibition on LGBTQ life in Brooklyn, elegantly recasts the history of New York’s most populous borough as a site of long-standing and diverse LGBTQ communities. Meticulously researched and sophisticated in its approach to how gender and sexuality have changed over time as well as why they matter to urban history, it serves as a model for LGBTQ public history in the twenty-first century.
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