This is why I write queer history: Because I cannot see the future, but by clearly seeing the past, I know in my soul that the future can be different – will be different, cannot help but be different. There is no historical constant except change.
Read MoreThe Last Free Woman
The first words Nan McTeer ever said to me were, “I’m currently in hospice care. I have lung cancer, it has metastasized to my brain, but my mind is still okay! You’ve got a while to pump me for information.”
Read MoreAt the Women’s House of Detention, the Intersecting Influences of Black and Gay Liberation Movements
Afeni Shakur is today remembered for many things, including her leadership in the Black Panthers…Forgotten, though, is her history as a gay liberation radical, her presence at the Stonewall Riots, and her own bisexuality…
Read MoreThe Dystopia Has Just Arrived
The letter X is the shiftiest minx in the alphabet: a treasure, a cipher, the person we once loved; a porno, a warning, the gender marker beyond F or M; and, now, the title of a queer, near-future noir by Davey Davis. In “X” (the novel), X (the character) is a little of all these things, a “femdom nightmare” and the object of obsession for Davis’s nonbinary narrator (who spends most of the novel nameless).
Read MoreListen to me on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
It’s been a life time goal to be interviewed by Terry Gross, one of the greats of American radio, and a voice I’ve been listening to my entire life. Hear the full conversation!
Read MoreLGBTQ people are disproportionately incarcerated. Here’s why.
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;
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