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Memoir

Arts in Society, Gender & Sexuality

To Say Goodbye

A veteran AIDS activist recalls living in the Bay Area during the 1990s, the queer people of color usually left out of the epidemic’s history, and how the decade taught him to value endings.

Andrew Spieldenner

Arts in Society

Autofiction’s First Boom Was in Turn-of-the-Century Japan

Newly translated into English, Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem.

Arts in Society

Straight Down to the Bones

In this searching interview, legendary Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez discusses the ancestral influences on her work and how art can give us strength.

Sonia Sanchez, Christina Knight

Arts in Society

The Millions

“Healing never restores us to the way we were before getting hurt.” A trip to Machu Picchu ends up offering surprising insights into what it means to be a survivor of the genocide of Native Americans.

Arts in Society

Caring in Viral Times

Indifference toward the most vulnerable has driven the death toll of COVID-19, just as it did during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Against this backdrop, even small acts of kindness can make a difference.

Michael McColly

Global Justice

Mourning in Tehran

On Ashura, Shi’a Muslims grieve the Prophet’s grandson. But with Iran crippled by COVID-19 and U.S. sanctions, it was also an occasion this year to mourn the country’s deaths from disease and despair.

Gender & Sexuality

Translation

Set against the backdrop of Seattle Pride, a personal meditation on trauma, loneliness, and the paradox that gay community is often both life-giving and terribly disappointing.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Race

Black Bereavement, White Condolences

“This sudden attention to the ongoing grief of black life can also feel like a slap in the face. Didn’t you notice we were dying?”

Marina Magloire

Class & Inequality, Politics

A Politics of the Future

Despite the myth that deaths of the elderly are never untimely, the author mourns a friend, fifty years his senior, who succumbed to COVID-19. She taught him that a moral life entails wanting those rewards not only for yourself but for everyone.

Race

The Privilege of the Ally

Allies can be powerful aides to social justice movements—but it is their responsibility to make sure they don’t become a distraction from the cause.

Rigoberto González

Arts in Society

Mercy Hours

On being awestruck by literature, and the necessary pleasures of intimacy—near and remote—during quarantine.

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?

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