Once, radical artists and thinkers shook up conservatives. Now, it’s the right gleefully transgressing a “moralizing” left. What happened?
Tag: Queer
When Poetry Summons the Dead
The dead, the disappeared, and the forgotten—these Iberian poems make clear—can never be safely put away.
Twelve Moral Axioms on Ryan Murphy’s Oeuvre
“I don’t quite know what Murphy means by baroque or what he means by camp, but Murphy has never been able to discern tone.”
Long Live the Gay Bar
Many think the loss of discrete queer spaces is bad, even as the loss of the need for them is good. What is the nature of that loss?
Binging the Borderlands
Contemporary TV series that take on Latinx life have increasingly embraced the complexity of their subject matter.
What Is the Genre of Rape?
While some progress has been made, TV is still trying to figure out how to tell the stories of male-identified rape survivors.
Poor Queer Use: Repurposing the Ivory Tower
Outside elite institutions, queer studies has the potential to go hand in hand with broader struggles of racial and economic justice.
Facing Our Demons
I May Destroy You explores how sexual violation is entangled in relations of visuality.
Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
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 ...