"Amid growing hostility, some in Poland’s LGBTQ community make a difficult choice: Leave"
”While gays and lesbians have never had the legal right to marry or to form civil unions in Poland, as is permitted in much of Europe, many felt confident until not long ago that Polish society was becoming more accepting and that those rights would one day come.
They have instead faced a furious backlash from the Roman Catholic Church and the government under the ruling Law and Justice party.”
John D'Emilio, "Capitalism Made Gay Identity Possible. Now We Must Destroy Capitalism."
"Gay identity became possible thanks to capitalism’s emancipatory side: its liberation of the individual from material dependence on the family. But that sexual freedom wasn’t automatic — it required decades of militant struggle. Today, we need more such struggles to combat the oppressive aspects of capitalism, which keep gay and straight people alike from living fully free lives.”
Kate Sosin, “Kamala Harris is a complicated choice for some LGBTQ+ people"
”She is among the earliest prominent politicians to back marriage equality, but Harris' record on trans rights has led some LGBTQ+ voters to pause.”
Vanessa Gera, “Protesters decry government’s anti-LGBT attitudes in Poland"
”Demonstrators turned out in Warsaw and other Polish cities in early August to protest anti-LGBT attitudes promoted by the government as well as the detention of pro-LGBT protesters. The protests come amid an intensifying standoff in Poland between the LGBT rights movement and the conservative government, which has declared it an alien, dangerous “ideology.””
Jeannie Suk Gersen, "Could the Supreme Court’s Landmark L.G.B.T.-Rights Decision Help Lead to the Dismantling of Affirmative Action?"
”The decision protecting gay and transgender individuals from discrimination may have laid the groundwork for a textualist case against race-conscious school-admissions policies.”
Anne Applebaum, “Poland’s Rulers Made Up a ‘Rainbow Plague’"
”The president and his party ginned up fear of LGBTQ people—and rode that strategy to reelection in July.”
Nick Duffy, “Transgender people nearly left out of historic Supreme Court LGBT+ rights ruling, bombshell leak claims.”
”Transgender people were nearly left out of the US Supreme Court ruling in favour of LGBT+ employment protections, according to a bombshell leak.”
Angela Giuffrida, “‘We’re living in fear’: LGBT people in Italy pin hopes on new law”
”Debate on long-awaited bill that would punish discrimination and hate crimes towards LGBT people opened in late July.”
Gabby Orr, “The Wedge Issue That’s Dividing Trumpworld”
”A group of social conservatives wants the president to embrace anti-transgender issues to reverse his sagging poll numbers. Some Trump advisers think it’s political suicide. A cohort of establishment Republicans, social libertarians and new GOP converts oppose the strategy.”
Article Spotlight
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela; “The Siren Song of Yoga”: Sex, Spirituality, and the Limits of American Countercultures. Pacific Historical Review 3 July 2020; 89 (3):379-401. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2020.89.3.379
Yoga writ large helps illuminate the nature and the limits of evolving countercultures. Yoga in the 1960s and 1970s United States operated as a crucial vehicle for expressing critiques of patriarchy and sexual repression. Expressive forms of sexuality became pervasive in yoga culture, symptoms of the increased discursive and physical openness of the sexual revolutions. The broad-ranging spirituality associated with yoga often challenged rigid religiosity, frequently by pitting Eastern against Western belief systems, often oversimplifying this duality. The American encounter with yoga has been a vehicle for the rise of a capacious spirituality, often defined as “New Age” and more recently subsumed within the “spiritual-but-not-religious” movement, which today over 30 percent of Americans reportedly embrace. Yoga has been a crucial vehicle for expressing how Americans see themselves as spiritual, sexual, and physical beings, and the 1960s and 1970s represent a period in which these identities were articulated, if not always enacted, as distinctly countercultural. At the same time, this famously experimental era paradoxically corresponded to the incorporation of yoga into a popular mainstream fitness culture. The mainstreaming of yoga at times sapped this spiritual practice of a significant measure of radicalism and at others merely expressed that radicalism differently.
Episode Spotlight
Straight white men’s sexuality is too often imagined as natural, timeless, and unchanging. In “The Pickup Artist,” we showcase the 1970 bestseller, How to Pick Up Girls, in order to explore the cultural forces that have shaped how white men experienced and publicly expressed their desire for women in increasingly casual and aggressive ways.
How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber was a mass-marketed book that advised men on how to introduce themselves to and seduce women. The book spawned several sequels and countless imitators. But more importantly, How to Pick Up Girls represented the triumph of a male-dominated sexual revolution that allowed men to demand ever-greater access to any woman’s time, body, and attention.
Books
