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.
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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Read the original - with great photos from the archive! - here.
If you’re not familiar with the Digital Transgender Archive, it’s a portal to an incredible collection of trans materials from across the world, a great resource for researchers or any queer person who wants to spend an afternoon looking at amazing old photos, journals, flyers, newspaper reports, and more.
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Read the original here.
By this point, the line between homosexuals and communists had blurred almost to non-existence in the eyes of most Americans. Both were thought to be spies hiding in plain sight, associating in small cells, out to destroy the American way of life. If you were one, you were probably the other.
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Read the original, with more images, here.
If a queer Cuban-American woman wrote forty plays, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and won nine Off-Broadway Obie Awards, over a career that spanned some forty years, you’d know her name, wouldn’t you?
Probably not.
What if that woman was also Susan Sontag’s lover, the “most intuitive playwright” Edward Albee had ever met, and the subject of an upcoming documentary premiering at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight Festival today?
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Read the original article here. Photo by Jon Bodsworth, The Egypt Archive
What is definitely known about Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep? They worked as chief manicurists to the Pharaoh in the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. This might sound like the set-up for a terrible gay remake of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but at the time, grooming the Pharoah was revered labor. Though they weren’t themselves nobility, it is clear from their tomb that the two men were of high status. And, curiously enough, they were of equal status, being depicted in complimentary activities without either being shown as smaller, lesser, or subservient to the other.
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Read the original here. Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Like most people, I came to queer history looking for a sign that I wasn’t alone. I thought that understanding it was like a mechanical exercise in grammar, where I just had to change the tense on the information I already knew — that we are everywhere; we were everywhere; we will be everywhere. I assumed I understood what I was seeing: namely, myself in a cute period outfit. I thought if I looked long enough, I would find gay people just like me throughout recorded history.
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Read the original here.
Unfortunately, that attention to detail seems lacking when it comes to other parts of his characters’ lives. Cassara was inspired by the subjects of Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. But his knowledge of the ballroom scene begins and ends there; although he tried to contact some vogue insiders via email, he was ultimately unable to speak with anyone in the scene. And because he was writing the book while in graduate school at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he says he was unable to attend any ballroom functions.
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