Chris Johnson, "LGBTQ Trump supporters tiptoe away from president after U.S. Capitol attack"
”In the aftermath of the assault on the U.S. Capitol instigated by President Trump, his one-time LGBTQ supporters are now distancing themselves from him without outright renouncing their previous support.”
Chris Johnson, "Dems win in Georgia, oust Republican who introduced anti-trans bill"
”Democrats, seizing on momentum after President Trump’s shocking phone call urging Georgia state officials to “find” votes for him to reverse his election loss, scored a win in a run-off election in Georgia for two U.S. Senate seats, disrupting the narrative Democrats are unable to win in the Deep South.”
Suyin Haynes, “LGBTQ and Women’s Rights Activists in Europe Hope a Biden Administration Will Make the U.S. an Ally Again"
”LGBTQ North Carolinians in unmarried, dating relationships must have the same access to domestic violence protections as people in heterosexual relationships, according to a recent North Carolina Court of Appeals ruling.”
Jo Yurcaba, "LGBTQ people now eligible for domestic violence protections in all 50 states"
”With President-elect Joe Biden quickly filling out his Cabinet, fewer opportunities remain for him to make history by nominating the first openly LGBTQ person to a Cabinet-level role for Senate confirmation. Some LGBTQ leaders are quietly expressing frustration that the movement hasn’t pushed more aggressively for representation in Biden’s Cabinet.”
Suyin Haynes, “After a 'Rainbow Wave' in 2020's Elections, Here's What the New Class of LGBTQ Lawmakers Expect From a Biden Presidency"
”On the heels of the past four years, in which LGBTQ advocates argue the Trump Administration has attempted to sow divisions among the queer community by remaining silent on LGBTQ issues and presiding over a rollback of rights targeting transgender people, the “rainbow wave” of new elected officials indicates a broader reflection in America’s changing demographics, and increasing acceptance of queer communities.”
Will Doran, "LGBTQ people can finally get domestic violence protections in NC, court rules"
”LGBTQ people in North Carolina can no longer be prevented from getting domestic violence protective orders, the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled in late December. North Carolina had been the only state in the country to withhold emergency protections from people seeking protection from abuse by a same-sex partner”
Grace Lavery, "A High Court Decision in Britain Puts Trans People Everywhere at Risk"
”The decision is an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K., in which the British state has asserted a right to enforce unwanted puberty—and to arrest transitions that are already in progress—on the slimmest of pretexts. It also reflects a disturbing escalation of anti-transgender policy across the United Kingdom..”
Blair McClendon, "Lost Lost Causes"
”“This is not America.” That strange, contradictory phrase seems to descend like fog every time a legible and precedented event occurs in the United States. If it wasn’t America, it wouldn’t need to be said.”
Article Spotlight
Elizabeth Evens, "Plainclothes Policewomen on the Trail: NYPD Undercover Investigations of Abortionists and Queer Women, 1913–1926", Modern American History (2020), 1-18. doi:10.1017/mah.2020.22.
In early twentieth-century New York City, policewomen went undercover to investigate abortion and queer women. These early female entrants to the New York Police Department were not the middle class reformers typically associated with Progressive Era vice reform; they tended to be working class white widows who carved out a gendered expertise that relied upon their unique capacity and willingness to extend surveillance over the female, immigrant spaces that eluded their male counterparts. The NYPD instrumentalized policewomen’s bodies; investigations of criminalized female sexuality required policewomen participate in intimate encounters, exposing their own precarity in the masculine world of policing. But plainclothes work also furnished policewomen with a rare route to professional renown and social mobility, “success” they won at the expense of more marginalized women. Their work reveals that the early twentieth-century state was more innovative and invested in methods to police “disorderly” female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood.
To read more, click here.
Episode Spotlight
How do you come out in a religious community that loves you conditionally? What do you tell yourself about your faith and your desires when your Church views your sexuality as disordered? In this episode of Sexing History, we focus on the experiences of three gay men who were priests or seminarians in the St. Louis diocese beginning in the 1990s. Their overlapping stories, their friendships, their faith, and the ways in which they came out to themselves and each other within Catholic institutions, speak to the intertwined histories of desire and devotion.
For more, listen here.
Books
