An essay on the climate of transphobic rhetoric that led to the shootings at Club Q.

June 2023: The Way They Were, discussing Oscar Wilde and Rosie’s breakup. June 2023: Verso Podcast, discussing Bad Gays and the history of sexuality. June 2023: Deutschlandfunk, About Bad Gays and queer history (auf Deutsch.) September 2022: Betwixt the Sheets, discussing the Bad Gay King James I and VI September 2022: TV Ontario, discussing Bad…

The Austrian director Valentin Schwarz is directing a new production of Wagner’s 16-hour “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.

An interview with Barrie Kosky about his tenure at the Komische Oper (which began in 2012 and which is ending this summer with a new production called “Barrie Kosky’s All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue”), the need for more rehearsals in opera, life as a diaspora Jew in Germany, and being attacked by priests at Bayreuth.

“Bad Gays succeeds in its goals in every way, offering an infuriating, thoughtful, deliciously judgmental history of the very worst we had to offer.” – The Washington Post “Fascinating—and very funny—deep dives into the lives of the most dastardly queer people in history…riveting.” – Vogue “A bold and eminently readable counterhistory of homosexuality,,Bad Gays is…

A write-up of an exhibit by Etienne Chambaud at Esther Schipper Berlin (in German, translated by me and Hanno Hauenstein).

A review of Puccini’s Fanciulla Del West at the Berlin State Opera.

I profiled Tommy Kha’s Facades series for Foam Magazine’s 2021 TALENTS issue. An excerpt: Identifying too-precise narratives in Kha’s work would, I think, deny their essence, which is one of refusal: refusal to play a simple representative game in which coherence and digestibility are rewarded. In images that look like family portraits and casual snapshots,…

On Christopher Chitty’s landmark SEXUAL HEGEMONY, the shape of queer histories of queer lives, the forces that produced “gay people,” and how to abolish them.

A conference paper for The Pasts and Futures of Queer German Studies, hosted online by the University of British Columbia in spring 2020. Abstract: Transnational histories of gay and queer identity formation have mostly examined the production of identities under shifting economic conditions on a mass scale. Small-scale studies of transnational individuals and the intellectual…