Category: Journalism & Criticism
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Queer Traces (Pelican Bomb)
I talked with Verena Spilker about a Berlin-based project that raises questions about how to create more inclusive archives and how communities can form through art.
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Remembering Harry Hay (Jacobin)
Harry Hay would have been 115 this month. His life and work as a gay man and a Communist helped lay the foundations of the modern LGBTQ movement. The kind folks at Jacobin let me rant about my favorite subject.
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In the Archives | Friedrich Radszuweit and the False Security of Collaboration (OUTHistory)
Accommodation and collaboration are moral and political failures, even on their own terms. There is no sure path to safety except to win the fight for the kind of world we want. On the blog at OUTHistory today discussing gay fascists and collaborationists, past and present.
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Review | The War On Sex (Lambda Literary)
We are living through a little-discussed assault on sexual freedoms that is pioneering new, subtle, and insidious methods of social control: this is the disturbing and difficult-to-refute thesis of The War on Sex, a new collection of essays from Duke University Press edited by David Halperin and Trevor Hoppe. Reviewed this excellent collection of essays…
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Gay Loneliness Is Real—but “Bitchy, Toxic” Culture Isn’t the Full Story (Slate)
For Slate’s Outward vertical, a response to Michael Hobbes’ “The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness:” We cannot think about how we might be better to each other without thinking about who we are, and who we have been, and who we might become. The various epidemics of queer loneliness and drug addiction and suicide will not…
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Timely Tribute: The Rise and Fall of Opera’s Voices (Pelican Bomb)
Thoughts on what an opera singer must give up in order to achieve divadom. An anecdote from Wayne Koestenbaum at soprano Anna Moffo’s wake: “I signed the ‘Relatives and Friends’ book, but didn’t write down my address. I feared that her stepchild or cousin would send me a chiding letter: ‘You had no business attending…
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A Queer Ear: Paul Bowles’ “Music of Morocco” (Pelican Bomb)
How Paul Bowles’ recordings of traditional Moroccan music might have served an agenda of resistance. Three Americans—a woman, her husband, and his friend—sit in a café in Morocco a few years after the end of World War II. The woman, bored, muses on their travels, “The people of each country get more like the people…
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Review of Emmanuel Levy’s “Gay Directors, Gay Films?” (Lambda Literary)
A mostly-salty review of a book with potential that fudged the execution: undertheorized and exclusionary. Click through the quote to read: The notion that there is a distinctly gay gaze and sensibility in the work of openly gay directors “has not been thoroughly explored in the fields of cinema.” This book—which focuses on the careers…
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Review of Michelangelo Signorile’s “It’s Not Over” (Lambda Literary)
My review of Michelangelo Signorile’s It’s Not Over was published today in Lambda Literary, the amazing LGBT book review. Click through the quote to read: In the seminal Queer in America, written in 1990, Signorile laid at least part of the blame for quietude in the face of the devastation of AIDS at the feet…
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Efrain Gonzalez Chronicled NYC’s Seedy, Glorious West Side Nightlife (Gothamist)
New York City photographer Efrain John Gonzalez says he’s “not a professional photographer, just OCD.” He describes his work as telling “a story of people finding the path to their souls, finding their bliss with piercings, branding, cuttings, tattoos, latex, implants, leather, and a whole lot of radical sex and sexuality.” Throughout the 1970s, 1980s,…