"Why the Latest Republican Assault on L.G.B.T.Q. Rights Is Different"
”L.G.B.T.Q. Americans — and particularly transgender and nonbinary people — are not simply living in a state of emergency; we are living in many states of imminent danger. The usual calls to action aren’t enough against these threats; we are now firmly in the territory of needing those in positions of authority to actively defy these laws — especially those enforcement agencies and leaders tasked with carrying out the unconstitutional and un-American assaults on the civil rights of millions of L.G.B.T.Q. people.”
"These Catholic Parishes Welcome New York’s L.G.B.T.Q. Community"
”Many of New York City’s most outwardly gay-friendly parishes “are concentrated in Manhattan, a center of both gay culture and efforts to build a gay-friendly Catholicism.
"How ACT UP Changed America"
”The defiant group of AIDS activists was itself riven by discord. What can the movement’s legacy, of both ferocity and fragility, teach us?”
Stephen Vider and David S. Byers, "A Supreme Court Case Poses a Threat to L.G.B.T.Q. Foster Kids"
”The Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on a case that could upend, in the name of religious freedom, 50 years of progress in the effort to provide better support for L.G.B.T.Q. children in the foster system. Such a decision would be a devastating setback for all children in foster care and set a dangerous precedent that could have broad repercussions.”
Roxane Gay, "Cops Don’t Belong at Pride"
”Modern Pride celebrations began with a rebellion against the police. We have not forgotten that.”
Jules Joanne Gleeson, "How Do Gender Transitions Happen?"
”The public’s obsession with why some people are trans burdens an already marginalized community, and misses the opportunity to ask more interesting questions about identity formation.”
Jules Joanne Gleeson, "How Do Gender Transitions Happen?"
”In recent years, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s idea of intersectionality has become central to left-wing discussions around feminism, race, and other social issues. Intersectionality, as a framework for understanding power, recognises how different aspects of a person’s identity overlap to create modes of privilege or discrimination. Intersectionality offers an invaluable lens through which to make sense of contemporary politics.”
Special Issue Spotlight
René Esparza; “Qué Bonita Mi Tierra”: Latinx AIDS Activism and Decolonial Queer Praxis in 1980s New York and Puerto Rico. Radical History Review, May 2021 (140): 107–141. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-8841706
Employing an anticolonial and anticapitalist approach to HIV/AIDS, the activists of the Latina/o Caucus of ACT UP/NY pushed beyond a biomedical framework of “drugs into bodies” that tended to dominate the larger organization. As US queer racialized/colonial subjects, Latinx AIDS activists enacted a queer and feminist decolonial activism that looked past the continental United States to the global South. In Puerto Rico, Latinx AIDS activists helped establish the first chapter of ACT UP in a Spanish-speaking country. Together, the Latina/o Caucus and ACT UP/Puerto Rico spearheaded a campaign against the colonial policies of the United States, the corporate greed of island-based pharmaceutical firms, and the heteropatriarchal investments of church and commonwealth officials—conditions that exacerbated the disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS among Puerto Rican island and diasporic communities. Through these efforts, Latinx AIDS activists transformed the domestic and global fight against AIDS into a queer, feminist, and decolonial endeavor.
To read more, click here.
Episode Spotlight
In the 1980s and 1990s, the San Francisco Metropolitan Community Church wrestled with profound questions: What does it mean to minister a gay church when so many in the congregation are dying from AIDS-related complications and grieving the recently dead? How do you have faith during an epidemic? And what does it mean to participate in communion in a community ravaged by a plague?
For more, listen here.
Books
Upcoming Events
Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture 2021: Hazel Carby, "Imperial Sexual Economies", 16 June 2021
This year’s Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture will take place online on Wednesday 16 June. Hazel Carby, Charles C. And Dorathea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Yale University, will deliver a lecture on ‘Imperial Sexual Economies’. Drawn from her most recent book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the lecture will examine the workings of patriarchal, racialized and gendered power through the entangled lives of free women of colour and enslaved women on a Jamaican coffee plantation.
