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.
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Hugh 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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Downton Abbey's Thomas Barrow and the Future of the Gay Past
The question for queer Downton Abbey fans, then, is this: Is Thomas an accurate unveiling of historical homosexuality, hidden but fully formed, just waiting for us to notice his existence? Or is he a backward projection of our current idea of what it means to be gay, an anachronism disguised as a revelation?
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History Keeps Me Awake Some Night - David Wojnarowicz
Never Not a Poet
To those who argue that Wojnarowicz wasn’t a poet, I say this: his work is saturated with poetry, and poetry seeps upward through his life, like a water table importunate with spring.
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Marsha P. Johnson at Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1971, by Diana Davies; from Love and Resistance
Voices on the Line
While the 1960s saw mass movements for black power, women’s liberation and gay pride, today we have Black Lives Matter, a resurgent feminism and, in May 2014, Time magazine declaring a “transgender tipping point”, representing the “next civil rights frontier”. (The frontier is a bloody one. Following the murders of two black trans women in Dallas earlier this month, the same magazine described a “disturbing pattern” in the “epidemic of violence against the transgender community”, which “disproportionately affects trans women of color”.) Unsurprisingly, a new generation of historians is now telling the story of Stonewall differently.
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