Photo montage from the New Yorker article
Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s music critc has written a reflection of the gay community’s political progress, and its future:
I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Timecover story dismissed the gay world as a “pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.” David Reuben’s 1969 best-seller, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)”—a book I remember perusing shakily at the library—advised that “if a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.”
…By the mid-eighties, when I was beginning to come to terms with my sexuality, a few gay people held political office, many states had dropped long-standing laws criminalizing sodomy, and sundry celebrities had come out. (The tennis champion Martina Navratilova did so, memorably, in 1981.) But anti-gay crusades on the religious right threatened to roll back this progress. In 1986, the Supreme Court, upholding Georgia’s sodomy law, dismissed the notion of constitutional protection for gay sexuality as “at best, facetious.” AIDS was killing thousands of gay men each year.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/11/12/121112fa_fact_ross#ixzz2BsR8ePj5
Tagged as:
gay,
politics,
same sex marriage
- 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.
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African-American,
culture,
harassment,
health,
history,
lesbian,
movies,
politics,
sex,
sexuality,
sports,
statistics,
transgender,
women
- The Case Against Drop-down Identities | Smarterware – Human beings and their relationships are complex and nuanced, so the software that attempts to describe them must accomodate a wide range of expression.
- Dickinson College students protest school’s handling of sex assaults – Philly.com -
- HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation – HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.
- Planned Parenthood: House Bars Planned Parenthood From Federal Funding – On February 18, 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to bar Planned Parenthood health centers from all federal funding for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other lifesaving care.
- 6 Surprising Bad Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users – UX Movement – When dyslexic users read text, sometimes they can experience visual distortion effects [5]. These effects vary in degree from person to person, but they can make reading text that much harder. Below are six bad practices that are likely to cause these visual distortion effects for dyslexic users. These bad practices can also make reading difficult for non-dyslexic users. But the effect they have on dyslexic users is much worse.
- ACLU intervenes in Gay-Straight Alliance dispute, protest underway – Since Monday’s report, the local newspaper has editorialized that the district has placed themselves in a difficult position and the ACLU has gotten involved on behalf of the student seeking to for the club. More details after the fold…
- Open Marriages – Galleries – The Daily Beast
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reading,
relationships,
security,
sex,
socialmedia,
teen,
usability
- How to: Boost Your Google Rankings With Twitter | oneforty blog – Twitter is a great way to build a relationship with your target audience and influencers in that space. Those people may blog about you and share your content elsewhere. These potential inbound links and the traffic your fans drive to your content are worth the time invested in running a Twitter account.
- How to Write a Letter to the Editor (Natl Coalition for Sexual Freedom) – Letters to the editor are an effective way to convey a positive image of alternate sexual practices such as SM, polyamory and swinging. Letters help to de-stigmatize negative social myths and misconceptions about these types of practices.
- TEDxVienna-Johannes Grenzfurthner-On how to subvert subversion (YouTube) -
- The Siege of Planned Parenthood – NYTimes.com – Planned Parenthood does pay for its own abortion services, though, and that’s what makes them a target. Pence has 154 co-sponsors for his bill. He was helped this week by an anti-abortion group called Live Action, which conducted a sting operation at 12 Planned Parenthood clinics in six states, in an effort to connect the clinic staff to child prostitution.
- Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey | National Gay and Lesbian Task Force – Transgender and gender non-conforming people face rampant discrimination in every area of life: education, employment, family life, public accommodations, housing, health, police and jails, and ID documents. This data is so shocking that it will change the way you think about transgender people and it should change the way you advocate. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey was conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.
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abortion,
Advocacy,
arse+elektronika,
artist,
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TED,
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Twitter
- Prostitution “Experts” Versus Prostitutes: Why Don’t All Sex Workers Deserve a Voice? | Monica Shores |Huff Po – This ugly display of disrespect is unwarranted and near inexplicable. Why would these women be so threatened by sex workers organizing for themselves, gaining national attention, and working to influence public perception? Is the abolitionist narrative or abolitionists’ prominence as experts more important than the people they’re purporting to help? The poor thinking and outright bigotry exhibited by some anti-prostitution figures can no longer go unchallenged. Sex workers of all ages and genders deserve better advocacy than this, and thankfully, as the recent VAMP example proves, their demands for more honest discussion may no longer go unheard.
- How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20 — NCAC – In September 2010, the National Coalition Against Censorship, in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and the BFA Department of Visual & Critical Studies at the School of Visual Arts, held a series of programs to highlight the effects 1990s attacks on culture continue to have on art and society and to reassess the state of art funding, censorship and self-censorship today. The programs included panel discussions, film screenings and event-specific videos.
- PEEP SHOW Interview w/ Tristan Taormino, Part One « FilmSnobbery – Tristan’s written several books, including The Ultimate guide to Anal Sex for Women, and served as an editor for many others. She was a syndicated columnist for the Village Voice for almost ten years and currently writes an advice column for Taboo Magazine. Between her writing, her teaching, and her TV appearances, we feel lucky to have gotten her to answer our Peep Show questions.
- Trve West Coast Fuck-Up Lit: Protection | Danny Wylde – Anyone who’s been a part of the adult industry for any significant amount of time has no doubt heard countless rumors about who’s an intravenous drug user, who escorts (a polite term for an upscale hooker), who has gay sex in their private life, and who has sex with transsexual women. Some of them are baseless, but a portion always turn out to be true. Each of the above stated behaviors could be considered “high risk,” and each are practiced by performers within the straight “side” of the industry. So when going to work, every performer puts themselves at risk. It’s a part of being a sex worker. Surely, no one wants to increase that risk, but finding a scape goat is the worst possible way to address the issue.
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tristantaormino
