When Bob McIvery reported for his mandatory physical exam to determine if he could be drafted into the Army, the doctor didn’t believe he was gay. Although McIvery, a member of the Gay Liberation Front, had checked the “homosexual tendencies” box on his pre-induction medical form and stated verbally that he was gay, he was… Read more →
Tag: Homosexuality
Notes on Outrages from Reviewer #2
Naomi Wolf’s latest book, Outrages, was supposed to be released in the United States on June 18, 2019. In May 2019, BBC host Matthew Sweet had Wolf on his show and challenged her misinterpretation of a key legal term. One argument in the book is that legislative changes in 1857 institutionalized homophobia in the United… Read more →
Desire Work, Gender, and Sexuality in South African Ex-Gay Ministries: A Conversation with Melissa Hackman
In her new book, Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa, Dr. Melissa Hackman examines the experiences of Pentecostal men in “ex-gay” ministries in post apartheid Cape Town. Published in 2018 by Duke University Press, Desire Work explores the belief systems, daily activities, and complicated processes of transformation that take place at the… Read more →
How to Do It: Sex Education and the “Sex Life”
In 1696, in Somerset county in southwest England, a schoolboy named John Cannon and his friends took their lunchtime break on the banks of a river near their schoolhouse. Unlike other uneventful riverside lunches, though, this day was memorable enough for Cannon to record in his memoirs. An older boy who was “about 17” years… Read more →
The Second Sentence: AIDS in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison
In January 1986, Irish current affairs program Today Tonight reported on a spate of deaths and attempted suicides in Dublin’s Mountjoy prison. These, the reporter intoned, “reveal something seriously wrong in the Irish prison system. A system long-known to be overstretched, antiquated and inadequate has been pushed into the front line of modern Irish society’s… Read more →
Talking Sexing History
Averill Earls: Welcome to the wide and wonderful world of podcasting, Sexing History! Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman: Thanks so much! AE: Long time fan, first time interviewer. You both know I am a big fan of your digital and traditional history work, and I am psyched about your podcast. What inspired you to launch… Read more →
The Same Red Blood?: AIDS, Homophobia, and an American Tradition of Hate
This summer, I embarked on an oral history project about resistance to a 1992 anti-gay ballot initiative in Grand Junction, Colorado. I wanted to bring queer history to the airwaves (albeit the low-power airwaves). I interviewed folks who had lived in Grand Junction between 1992 and 1996 to learn about what it was like to live… Read more →
Crimes Never Committed: Thoughts on The Imitation Game
Spoiler Alert: This isn’t exactly a movie review (if you’d like one, I recommend Alex von Tunzelmann’s review in The Guardian) but it may give away elements of the film. Be forewarned. If you watch The Imitation Game, the Oscar-nominated biopic, you’ll learn that Alan Turing betrayed his country when blackmailed by a Soviet spy… Read more →
Homosexuality the New Norm?
By Sean Cosgrove
Questions in public discourse surrounding the issues of human gender and sexuality seem to revolve around (unchallenged) binaries of female and male, and hetero or homosexual. Now, that they exist in this form currently and shape our lived experience is absolutely true. That they have always existed, however, in the guise(s) that they do now is not, and it can be dangerous to assume the unchanging nature of these constructs when talking, particularly, about social policy.