I quickly discovered two things. First, that Flawless was alive and kicking it on 72nd Street, right off Central Park, where she'd been since the late sixties. And second, that she wended through the last fifty years of American history like a queer Forrest Gump, touching Edie Sedgwick and William Burroughs, Bobby Kennedy and Jackie O., L.A. in the 70s, Paris in the 80s, and New York always and forever. It wasn't she who needed the archive, I realized, but rather, we who needed an archive devoted to her: the poor Jewish kid from "coal dust South Philly" whose legacy was as important as it was invisible.
Read MoreMy grandma loved me as much as anyone ever has or will, but she was raised in rural, religious Ireland, a country so theocratic that she had no birth certificate, just baptismal records. I was her kin, but when I caught her worried glances in the mirror, I knew she was trying to understand the thing that neither of us could say.
Read MoreLast week, however, Erskine and its two gay volleyball players bounced back into the news. On Feb. 20, Erskine issued a “Statement on Human Sexuality” that read, in part: “Sexual relations…between persons of the same sex are spoken of in scripture as sin and contrary to the will of the Creator.” The statement ended ominously: “Members of the Erskine community are expected to follow the teachings of scripture concerning matters of human sexuality and institutional decisions will be made in light of this position.
Read MoreA groundbreaking report released Tuesday documents the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youths in New York City’s commercial sex trade. It delivers a portrait of youth sex work that’s more complicated than the popular narrative of “girls working under pimps.”
Read MoreFrom The Apprentice's Omarosa to Big Brother's Evil Dick, reality TV loves a villain. In fact, the reality villain is now so common it's easy to forget there was a time before this trope took over our televisions. But much like Project Runway taught us about "silhouettes" and Top Chef gave us "flavor profiles," Survivor showed us how to recognize "the villain."
Read MoreUnless you have an erotic fixation with jazz hands, few things are less sexy than the average musical comedy. At first blush, this might make a musical about porn sound like a terrible idea, two great tastes that just don't go well together, like semen and Starbucks.
But if your goal is to examine porn as a business first and a fuck fest second, as The Civilians have done in their new musical Pretty Filthy, then the resolute asexuality of the Great White Way is an asset.
Read MoreIsrael Oka was 22 years old when he started doing sex work—a mixture of professional domination, erotic massage, and escorting. He’d been “working a minimum wage job at a movie theater” at the height of the Great Recession. Eventually, a dominatrix friend inspired him to consider sex work as a way to make ends meet. “It started off as supplementary income,” about a $100 a week, Oka said. Sometimes, this gave him the financial resources to pursue other interests, like political activism. Other times, it was survival sex work, helping him get by when he was homeless.
Read MoreEffective censorship is invisible. Its true power lies not in preventing the audience from seeing a certain work, but rather in preventing the audience from seeing the mechanisms of censorship in action. It is the hole that swallows itself.
Read More
