- Sexual Obituaries 2011 (Cory Silverberg) – People who choose to work around sexuality and gender often don’t get the acknowledgment from the mainstream media or from society as a whole that they would if their work was in another field. Every year, I feel this absence when I read the lists of famous people who died. Since 2006, I’ve tried to change that by sharing some of the sex and gender activists, educators, artists, and outlaws we lost in the year that is ending. Here is a list of sexual losses in 2011.
- Director Dee Rees And Star Adepero Oduye Talk Coming Out & Coming Of Age In ‘Pariah’ | indieWIRE – Pariah is the story of Alike (Oduye), a black lesbian teenager living in Fort Greene and navigating between the aggressive gay nightclub scene preferred by her butch best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) and a closeted life at home, where her tightly wound mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) tries to dress her in pink cardigans and quizzes her about who she’s taking to the school dance.
- Bondage Sex And The Liberation Of Culture – ErosBlog: The Sex Blog – For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape.
- 2011 Top Ten Sex Questions (Cory Silverberg) – I don’t dig into my statistics all that often, but once a year I like to see which questions and answers were the most popular…These ten questions are from the 105 Sex Questions that I’ve answered on the About.com site.
- Navigating Love and Autism – NYTimes.com- Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back. [via Violet Blue]
- When Will a Gay Pro Athlete Finally Come Out? — New York Magazine – “Something has happened in the last year,” says Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports, an advocate for and chronicler of gay sports issues for more than a decade. “It’s almost like homophobia is no longer considered cool in sports.”
- Australian Passport Gender Options: ‘Transgender’ Will Be Included | HuffPo – Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender people, the government said Thursday.
culture
Photo by Joan Marcus
Six years before Tony Kushner grabbed the nation’s attention with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Larry Kramer staged The Normal Heart, about the AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on the gay community. The Normal Heart premiered at New York City’s Public Theater, Off Broadway, in 1985, and finally received its Broadway premiere this year, winning three Tony Awards. Of the two plays, it is more immediate and raw, and maybe angrier. Kramer’s career as a playwright took a back seat to his life as an activist; he cofounded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the more radical group ACT UP.
The action centers on the character of a newspaper writer named Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, and his struggle to respond to the nascent epidemic. But for younger audiences, the AIDS crisis is a generation past, and the disease itself feels remote. Paul VanDeCarr spoke with young people for whom The Normal Heart is not just a tragedy, but a history lesson. Joel Grey, who co-directs the show, says audiences now are shocked by the indifference toward the epidemic in the early 1980s: “The young people are flabbergasted with the information that they hear in that show. … It’s just horrendous, and true.”
Link to audio and pics from the play
Ellen Barkin, John Benjamin Hickey and director George C. Wolfe were on Charlie Rose to talk about the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” about the early days of AIDS. The play’s been nominated for 5 Tony Awards. The site doesn’t allow embedding, so click on the image to be taken to the page with the video.
- My Family Found out I Blog About Sex | BlogHer – “Have you considered changing your name?” the message from my aunt read. “Our name is too obscure and boring, don’t you think? The famous do better with something catchy and bright.”…This wasn’t a compliment. It was a very polite way of saying that what I was doing with my life — writing about sex — was not in keeping with the image my father’s family desires for itself.
- Dissent Magazine – Arguing The World – What Gail Dines Doesn’t Get About SlutWalk – Dines shares more common ground with SlutWalk than she realizes. The organizers are not celebrating the word “slut” or “promoting sluttishness in general.” The SlutWalkers are marching in solidarity with all women who have been dismissed, degraded, or hurt by the label. They are marching against sexual violence and the ugly stereotypes that help to perpetuate it.
- Botox and Better Butts? What Messages Are We Sending to Young Girls? | RH Reality Check -
- Uganda’s LGBT Activists Get a Temporary Victory | violet blue ® :: open source sex – The reprehensible “anti-gay” bill in Uganda has been dealt a blow by that country’s brave LGBT activists and the world human rights community. In a nation where homosexuality was already illegal, and punishable by 14 years in prison, this law would have made things even worse, establishing the death penalty, among other things, for having gay sex while HIV positive.
- Bill Sienkiewicz And Frank Miller’s Wonder Woman: Bondage (Bleeding Cool) – DC Comics never saw this image. Neither Bill Sienkiewicz nor Frank Miller intended it to go public. But when it was sold, despite assurances that it wouldn’t go online, somewghere alon the line, it got sold to someone who didn’t know about that requirement.
- NCSF Wallet Card – A pocket reference for dealing with law enforcement
- ‘Paying For It’ Without Regret: An Intriguing Graphic Memoir Of Prostitution : Monkey See : NPR – It’s not that getting dumped by his girlfriend soured Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown on the notion of romantic love, exactly. Because to sour on something, one would have to, at some point, feel strongly about it. And given the facts on evidence in Brown’s latest autobiographical comic, the guy’s not much for strong emotion. No, the Chester Brown we glimpse through the tiny black and white panels the artist arranges with such exacting precision is a creature of intellect. His approach to sex, in the wake of his girlfriend’s rejection, is one of cool logic, dispassionate conclusions — and some very literal cost-to-benefit ratios.
