Martyna Majok just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her original play Cost of ...
Tag: Sex & Sexuality
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 ...
Queers Growing Old and Young
Do queers ever grow old? Do their ideas stiffen and their sensibilities melt? Do they fret over finances and retirement accounts, the state of their kitchen plumbing ...
The Sisters Grimm
Can a centuries-old literary tradition tell us anything useful about modern life? The continuing vitality of the fairy tale in contemporary culture would suggest an emphatic yes. And the vast ...
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 World of Gay World Lit
Contemporary gay life is characterized by a curious paradox: visibility and acceptance have made life better for many—especially but not only for white gay men—but at the cost of community and ...
Disability and the Romance Novel
In the world of romance, love can and does heal all wounds. The scars of loss or romantic betrayal, the traumatic aftereffects of abuse or neglect ...
The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
Carolee Schneemann’s Unforgivable Art
There’s this old joke. The set-up is always the same: two guys walk into an exhibition catalog. Here’s one version, as told by Carolee Schneemann to Kenneth White in spring of last year, about ...
Antiheroic Feminism: An Interview with “UnREAL” Co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is a difficult person to pin down. With the second season premiere of UnREAL—the Peabody-award-winning series for which she not only writes and produces, but now also ...
“Bright Lines”: a Discussion Guide
The First Lady of New York City recently gave local booklovers something to celebrate. Over the next year, Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, will open its doors to several lucky residents for a ...
Prince’s Erotic Democracy
In the 1980s, in the shadow of AIDS, Prince (along with Madonna) brought post-disco polymorphous perversity to the mainstream. As Richard Kim beautifully put it in The Nation last week, “If you were ...
Chick Lit Meets the Avant-Garde
Ask the average critic, professor, or reader to name an experimental novelist and they will more likely name a man—Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace—than a woman—Tillman, Winterson, Lessing. Ask them ...
Taking a Nine-Year-Old to See “The Danish Girl”
I decided about a year ago, when my younger child turned eight, that Pixar and I were calling it quits. Don’t get me wrong, Up and Toy Story were great, but given the choice between a real movie and ...
Virtual Roundtable on Women Directors
It’s no secret that Hollywood has a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring directors ...
Primal Scenes
This past year, Yoplait began airing a commercial, entitled “Mmm,” which features a family—a man, woman, and two children—eating yogurt, producing a chorus of “Mmms” as they ingest. The mother emits ...
Remembering Florence King: A Tribute to Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
Novelist, essayist, and self-proclaimed misanthrope Florence King died recently, on January 6, at age 80. When I read the news on Facebook, I was surprised by the potency of my reaction. King’s ...
A Lesbian “Carol” for Christmas
As we approach the crest of film awards season frenzy, Carol, Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, still in limited release, has captured the imagination of ...
The Female Body of Punk
A decade after the Sex Pistols were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the once marginal and vilified punk movement has, for better and worse, been thoroughly assimilated as a major ...
Ferrante, in History
What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) Now that the Neapolitan ...