Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy, and the poet James Merrill were joined by friendship, craft, and graphomania: the compulsion to write.
Tag: Sex & Sexuality
Can Novels Make Amends?
Novelists from George Eliot to Mary Gordon ask readers to confront our lives as ethical dramas that run only once, and with great consequence.
Leïla Slimani’s Taboos
Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani reveals the dirty underside of bourgeois domesticity. Is her taboo breaking worthy of praise?
Pornography Porn
The explosion of porn signals the widespread uptake of questions of objectification, the politics of looking, and the relation between power and enjoyment.
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
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.
Emily Dickinson, “The Greatest Freak of Them All”?
Does viewing Emily Dickinson as unusual actually help us understand the poet or her work better?
“Euphoric” Heroes
“I know your generation relied on flowers and fathers’ permission,” says Rue, the protagonist of HBO’s Euphoria, “but it’s 2019, and unless you’re Amish, nudes are the currency of love, so stop shaming ...
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 ...
The Bingewatch: Lesbian Drama
Why do I, and so many others, still stan for “The L Word,” despite its failure to enact a perfectly calibrated representation of queer life?
Back to the Women’s Land
How do women gain power in a society economically and politically dominated by men? This question vexed mid-20th-century second-wave feminists. At issue was whether women should occupy male spaces or ...
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 ...
“Test-Tube Babies” @40
Forty years ago, on July 25, 1978, an English baby of ordinary working-class parentage was delivered by caesarian section. At 11:47 p.m., her mother, obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, Cambridge ...
Can Zombies Have It All?
Sheila Hammond (Drew Barrymore) spews gallons of vomit all over the new plush carpeting. She’s a real estate agent in the Desperate Housewives–esque suburbs of Santa Clarita, California, and she’s ...
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 ...
Staging Disability: An Interview with Martyna Majok
Martyna Majok just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her original play Cost of ...