It's easy to dismiss these events as fluff and folderol. But Walker's parties, both in Irvington and at her Manhattan salon, The Dark Tower, played a crucial, if invisible role in the Harlem Renaissance: They provided a safe, welcoming environment for queer people at a time when there were few other social options available. While she herself was not known to be lesbian or bisexual, Walker's parties were places where anyone could express their sexuality however they pleased.
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Mapping the Family Possible
But if same-sex marriage is the first step on this journey, where are we headed, and how do we go the rest of the way? Two books published this summer — Love’s Promises: How Formal and Informal Contracts Shape All Kinds of Families, by Martha Ertman, and How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, by Bella DePaulo — come at these questions from cockeyed angles, addressing love and life through law and contracts, real estate and urban planning. Though very different in style, tone, and subject, both seek to expand the landscape of accepted family–life configurations available to us.
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'These Schmucks Were Geniuses!': Poet Eileen Myles Remembers Her New York
In her poetry and poetic prose, Eileen Myles has explored the queer, the strange, and the mundane in the East Village for 40 years. Her writing, which includes over 20 volumes of poems, plays, and nonfiction works, is rooted in the many identities she embodies: her femininity and her androgynous queerness; her working-class upbringing; her upbringing in Boston.
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'Closet Monster' Is a Gay Coming-of-Age Tale with a Canadian Sense of Humor
Canadian director Stephen Dunn's feature-length debut, the gay coming-of-age storyCloset Monster, offers a light touch on decidedly heavy topics, including family violence, divorce, gay bashing, and coming out. It's a very Canadian film—with a dry sense of humor that crops up at unexpected moments, Closet Monster manages to be quiet without being somber, serious without ever crossing into melodrama.
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Three's A Crowd?: Finding the Language to Describe My Three-Person Relationship
"Thruple" is a hideous neologism that sounds like wet paper being torn. "Threeway" and "threesome" are great if you're writing copy for a porn site, but not if you're trying to have a polite conversation with your boyfriend's Sunday-school-teacher Southern mother. "Love triangle" comes with too much baggage, while "triad" calls to mind gangsters in Southeast Asia. "Tribunal" is too judicial, "troika" too communist, and "triumvirate" is just too damn long.
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How to Have Gay Sex Without Being Gay
Jane Ward's new book, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, is an investigation into "no homo" culture, which charts the many ways in which straight white men explore, explain, and excuse their sexual behavior with other men. So readily visible are the pieces of evidence she amasses, and so surprising are her conclusions, that reading Not Gay is like doing a Magic Eye puzzle for the mind: All the dots you'd never before put together suddenly snap into place, allowing you to see just how hot for other men some straight men are.
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Why So Many Disney Villains Sound 'Gay'
Quick, name as many gay male Disney characters as you can.
Don't think too hard, because it's a trick question: The answer depends on how you define "gay." If by gay, you mean a guy that is sexually and/or romantically attracted to other guys, then there have been zero gay guys in Disney animated films. (Honorable mention goes to Oaken from Frozen, whose wonderfully nonchalant coming-out scene was so downplayed that many people argue it wasn't real.)
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Anyone in any loving relationship should get the legal benefits of marriage
Formal inequality – the kind that’s written explicitly into law – must obviously be undone. Yet I can’t help but feel that we’ve gotten the right answer to the wrong question. I have no problem with marriage as a religious tradition, or as a non-religious communal expression of love and commitment. Give me a fancy dress, lots of flowers and an excuse to day drink anytime. But it’s poorly designed to be a modern civil institution. Allowing gay people access to it makes it a little more fair, but it doesn’t make it any more just.
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