"Equality Act is creating a historic face-off between religious exemptions and LGBTQ rights"
”As written, the Equality Act would override existing law that says the federal government must show it has a compelling interest before curbing religious rights. Because of that, many longtime watchers of this conflict believe the bill, which passed in the House, in its current form won’t win approval in the Senate and get to President Biden.”
"How Some States Are Moving to Restrict Transgender Women in Sports"
”Mississippi is the second state to bar transgender women from women’s sports. More are expected to follow.”
“Landmark Ruling Cracks Door Open for Same-Sex Marriage in Japan"
”A court found that it was unconstitutional for the country not to recognize the unions. But change would come only if Parliament passes legislation.”
"Vatican Says Priests Can’t Bless Same-Sex Unions"
”The judgment was issued in response to questions from some pastors and parishes that sought to be more welcoming and inclusive of gay couples.”
"Parliament votes to declare entire EU an LGBT ‘freedom zone’"
”The European Parliament has overwhelming adopted a resolution declaring the entire 27-member European Union a “freedom zone” for LGBT people, an effort to push back on rising homophobia in Poland and elsewhere.”
Marie Solis, "How Advocates for Massage and Sex Workers Are Mourning the Atlanta Shooting Victims"
”On Thursday night, Red Canary Song, a grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition, mourned the deaths of the eight people who were killed in Tuesday’s Atlanta spa shootings, particularly the six Asian women. The mourners were rewriting a narrative that had been established by the shooter himself, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, and most of all by police, who took Long’s claim that his crimes were not racially motivated at face value.”
Lawrence D. Mass, "The Cassandra of Revolutionary Feminism: Commentary and an Interview with Martin Duberman"
”An interview with Martin Duberman about his new book, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary.”
Special Issue Spotlight
Gillian Frank, Rachel Kranson, and Jonathan Krasner, “Sexuality in American Jewish History”, American Jewish History, Volume 104, Number 4, October 2020.
The scarcity of critical analyses of Jewishness in the history of sexuality and of sexuality in the histories of American Jews has separated and obscured the ways that these categories have been mutually constituted. Historians of American Jews—who attend to Jewish difference as a matter of course—have produced relatively little scholarship on sex, sexual identity, sex work, and reproduction. When compared to the robust scholarship on these topics within related fields, matters of sexuality remain remarkably underexplored within American Jewish history. But when—like the authors in this special issue—we center sexuality within the study of American Jewish history, we recognize that it speaks directly to the central questions of the field. For scholars who think about the conditions that enabled or inhibited Jewish integration into the American mainstream, examining sexual stereotypes offers insight into how non-Jews conceptualized Jewish difference. The contributors to this special issue take as axiomatic that Jewishness is a difference that makes a difference in the history of sexuality in the United States. Jewish people, institutions, identities, and values shaped—and were shaped by—American conversations about sexual identities, acts, communities, and values.
To read more, click here.
Episode Spotlight
Chances are you’ve never heard of Ruth Wallis, one of the greatest singers, comedians, and performers of sexually suggestive lyrics in the postwar United States. Most of her catalogue remains on vinyl and historians have forgotten her. But from the 1940s until the early 1970s, Ruth Wallis was a bestselling performer and a mainstay at supper clubs and hotels. At a time when it was legally risky for entertainers to sing about sexuality for profit and pleasure, Ruth sold millions of records that used innuendo to playfully hint at a variety of straight and queer sexual pleasures.
For more, listen here.
Books
