By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
Tag: Queer
Paris Doesn’t Always Have To Be Burning
The documentary "Paris Is Burning" obscured the ordinary lives of queer people of color, but new footage reveals how the film could have been different.
Greenwell’s “Cleanness”: From Debt to Care
Garth Greenwell challenges readers to see how sex—especially for queer people—might be an act of difficult but healing care.
Public Thinker: Jack Halberstam on Wildness, Anarchy, and Growing Up Punk
Defying disciplinary categorization, Halberstam’s work draws on ...
Dancing Queer Children
Fans of Dance Moms and of RuPaul’s Drag Race alike rejoiced when Netflix debuted Dancing Queen this past fall. As Abby Lee Miller—the Dance Moms teacher and queen of my heart—frequently and ...
Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or ...
Passion and Presence: Maria Irene Fornes, 1930–2018
In 1999, in an interview I conducted with Maria Irene Fornes on the eve of a ...
Saboteurs in the Modern Academy
What hope remains for the masses of disillusioned graduate students, unemployed PhDs, and embittered faculty who still, despite everything, believe in ...
The Gay Conversion Therapy Memoir
“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and ...
The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay
The guy behind the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon has regrets. In a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined this term to contextualize ...
“You Could Have Changed Everything”
One may as well begin with George Merrill’s touch to E. M. Forster’s backside (“gently, and just above the buttocks,” Forster recalls). It was 1913 ...
Keep Out, Or Else: Girls’ Diaries in Comics
Comics and the diaries of teenage girls don’t at first glance have that much to do with one another. After all, the latter tend to invoke the pastel ink of pens used to ...
Hollinghurst’s Nighttime Travels
With The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst has established himself as the master of ellipsis, that conceit of novelistic form that leaves a period of time ...
From “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker”
Reading writers’ letters is the best kind of eavesdropping. It brings the rush and ...
Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer ...
The Big Picture: “The Parliament of Bodies”
Since the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, queer communities have fought back against homophobia and transphobia using art and camp cultural production, alongside more conventional forms of political ...
The Fiction of Bohemian NYC
What does New York City have to do with America as a whole? This metropolis, which gave rise to the nation’s current leader and whose worst gilded …
