“I’ve never really faced any kind of harassment,” Karma Dupchen, who at 23 is one of the most public LGBT figures in the country, told The Daily Beast. Yet “growing up gay in Bhutan was a very alienating experience for me,” Dupchen said, because in Bhutan, the idea of being gay or transgender is “pretty much unheard of.”
Read MoreThis Gender-Fucking Performance Artist Is Changing The Theater Game
“When was the last time you went to the theater and actually felt something authentic?” Mac asked me rhetorically as we discussed the show. By this, he meant something more than the reflected glow of the emotions of the actors. When was I made to feel something in my body? When was I moved? More than his song and dance on the stage – beautiful though those are – this is his true art: Breaking down the walls that keep us from feeling genuine emotion.
Read MoreSee Roz Joseph’s Lost Photos of the Early San Francisco Drag Scene
For the first time in 40 years, celebrated photographer Roz Joseph’s images of the San Francisco drag scene in the 1970s will go on display this month at the San Francisco GLBT History Museum in "Reigning Queens: The Lost Photos of Roz Joseph."
Read MoreMeet Basil Twist, the 'Genius' Puppet Master Bringing the Inanimate to Life
Like science fiction, puppetry is an art form where the better you are at it, the more people try to call it something else. Puppets, in America, are for children, and children are like small, gullible sociopaths—hardly the folks you'd look to for artistic recommendations. Which begs the question: Why give a "genius" fellowship to someone working in a discipline we barely even recognize as art?
Read MoreHow to Write a Young Adult Novel About a Gay Kid Without It Being a 'Gay Book'
Husky follows the story of Davis, a pre-gay middle-school boy preparing to enter his freshman year. In an unusual twist for a YA novel these days, Davis's sexuality is less ambiguous and not fully formed. He knows he's different, but he doesn't quite know yet that it has to do with sexuality. Or as Kirkus Reviews put it, "This is not at its heart a book about sexuality but about humanity."
Read MoreRemembering A'Lelia Walker, Who Made A Ritzy Space For Harlem's Queer Black Artists
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.
Read MoreMapping 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.
Read More'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.
Read More