Newsflash: Red-state America is crawling with queer people. Those polite kids handing over your order at the Interstate exit drive-thru […]
Whence Liberty? The Retirement of Anthony Kennedy
On June 27, 2018, at the end of Pride month, I was visiting my family in my childhood home. My […]
Deconstructing the Stonewall Myth (Brick by Brick)
If you’ve been on social media at all during the month of June, you’ve probably seen Marsha P. Johnson’s name […]
Not Going Back: Queer American Families and the Value Voters Summit
On October 12, 2017, the day after National Coming Out Day, I received an email from the Southern Poverty Law […]
Queering History: Back to School Edition
In his second inaugural address in 2013, President Barack Obama stated that [gblockquote]We, the people, declare today that the most […]
Pink Triangle Legacies: Holocaust Memory and International Gay Rights Activism
In the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine a social movement without hashtags. Social media has influenced issues ranging from […]
From “Sip-in” to the Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World, Protests Can Work
Do protests work? Certainly they can make the participants feel that rather than passively accepting injustice they are doing something […]
Blood and Tears in Orlando
On June 12 of this year, a lone gunman entered Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, and carried out […]
The Slippery Slopes of Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby
by Andrea Milne
Everybody and their sister is blogging about the Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby ruling, so I’ll spare you all the gory details, if for no other reason than to preserve my sanity. Here, in my (admittedly biased) opinion, are the most important things you need to know:
Sex as Construct, Rape as Reality, and Consent as Healing
By Jenna Tucker
I grew up in a culture obsessed with sexual ethics. As part of a group of Christian teenagers in the Midwest in the 1990’s, one thing we all knew, for certain, was that our religious and moral identities were directly linked to our relationships to sex. It was the culture that birthed virginity pledges and organized for abstinence-only sex education. I remember going to one of those Protestant mega-gatherings with youth groups from all over the country. The speaker gave us two messages that I carry with me to this day. The first was that we had to stop relying on our parents’ beliefs and develop our own relationship to God. The second was that we should not have sex and that anything that gave us sexual pleasure was sex. He was trying to head off our questions. Sex was bad, but what was sex? Could we have sex that didn’t risk pregnancy? Could we masturbate? What if we were engaged?
