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LGBT

Ideas Matter

Our Identities, Ourselves?

Adhering to a particular sexual or gender identity may mean abandoning the things that make us most unique. So why has identity become the default for talking about who we are and what we desire?

Mark D. Jordan

Gender & Sexuality

Andrea Dworkin Was a Trans Ally

On the fifteenth anniversary of Dworkin’s death, her longtime partner observes that she is often invoked to support beliefs she actively repudiated in her work.

John Stoltenberg

Gender & Sexuality

Love One Another or Die

During the AIDS crisis, different contingents of the LGBTQ movement set aside their differences to prioritize mutual care. What can we learn from this strategy today? And why is it still so difficult to talk about AIDS?

Amy Hoffman

Gender & Sexuality

Fighting for Public Health

The HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics are very different, but both reveal that the United States has never understood the connection between community and personal well-being.

Michael Bronski

Arts in Society

English as a Sexual Language

Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness movingly depicts the vulnerabilities of queer desire, but it also continues a long tradition of exoticizing Eastern European sexuality.

Marta Figlerowicz

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

Science Won't Settle Trans Rights

Appeals to the biological facts conceal a deeper contest over political equality—and scientific authority itself.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

Race

The Radical Lives of Abolitionists

History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted women’s independence and an end to traditional marriage.

Britt Rusert

Gender & Sexuality

Who Is an Ally?

Before allies were included in the LGBT movement, they had never been afforded equal footing within a social justice movement. But is this an effective strategy for building solidarity?

Micki McElya

Arts in Society

The Origins of Sexual Healing

Grammy winner David Ritz, who cowrote Marvin Gaye’s legendary “Sexual Healing,” recalls how the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.

David Ritz

Gender & Sexuality, Reading Lists

Stonewall At Fifty

A gay liberation reading list. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Gender & Sexuality

What’s Wrong with Queer History?

In our search for a useful past, we need to be careful whom we name as the heroes of queer history.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

Gender & Sexuality

Is Pete Buttigieg the Face of Stonewall?

The press has crowned Buttigieg the inheritor of Stonewall’s legacy, but this doesn’t square with what we know of Stonewall activists and the world they hoped to create.

Micki McElya

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THINKING IN A PANDEMIC

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