269 posts tagged with lesbian.
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Surgeon/activist Dr. Susan Love dies at 75
From the Los Angeles Times: Nearly 300,000 women in the U.S. will receive a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer this year. For many, their first instinct upon hearing the news will be to arm themselves with information, Googling, reading and quizzing their doctors in an effort to understand their illness and the best route to recovery. The fact that there are both a range of treatment options and a wealth of information available to patients with breast cancer is due in part to Dr. Susan Love, the surgeon, researcher, author and activist who died Sunday at home in Los Angeles at the age of 75. The cause was a recurrence of leukemia, with which she was first diagnosed in 2012. [more inside]
“Flowering dogwood trees are bisexual... Like us.”
The “Unhinged Bisexual Woman” Novel is a critical review of the novels Big Swiss and Milk Fed and the hetereo-gaze in certain #sapphicbooks" in the socialist feminist glossy Lux Magazine. Writes Emma Copley Eisenberg: "The queer relationships in these books are plot devices meant not to say anything new about queer love or intimacy but meant rather to pit the bisexual or straight-proximate characters against themselves." Referenced in the article is a more hopeful write-up on the sapphic literature trend in 2022. Eisenberg previously on MeFi.
100+ Years of Yuri
Okazu is the internet's longest-running blog devoted to the study and review of yuri, a genre of manga and anime featuring romances between women and girls. Run by noted yuri expert and historian Erica Friedman, Okazu features loads of reviews ranging from recent series to untranslated classics. There are also essays galore. And if you're new to yuri, you can also find recommendations on where to start.
One night's sleep in pictures
Would you let your dog in your bed? Your children? Your partner? The Guardian set up cameras in nine bedrooms, taking a picture every 30 seconds for 12 hours, to tell the tale of a single night’s sleep. The bedrooms are used by a range of couples and single people, including one couple who sleeps apart and another who share their bed, on occasion, with a third person. Old people, younger parents, children, and pets make an appearance if sometimes briefly.
Australian Prime Minister marches in the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras
Australia's current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, just became the first Australian Prime Minister to march in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. He marched with Rainbow Labor NSW, which is an advocacy group within the Labor party for LGBT equality. Albanese has been marching [as an ally] at Mardi Gras since 1983 (yesterday was the 35th time that he's marched with Mardi Gras), but it is the first time that he has ever done so as Prime Minister.
Signing with pride
Deaf Korean members of the LGBT community are working to change Korean Sign Language. From official signs for "lesbian" and "gay" which evoke sexual acts rather than identities, to the lack of distinction in the vocabulary between HIV and AIDS, to established-but-unofficial negative facial expressions associated with queer vocabulary, KSL has some aspects which are being called out as problematic, and a network of activists has been working since 2019 to build and propose alternative vocabulary. Found via Language Log.
Radical Desire
On Our Backs magazine launched in San Francisco in 1984 promising, per the tagline on the cover, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.”... This exhibition presents original photographs created for On Our Backs during its first decade.
the genderfluid couch looks like the map at the beginning of a fantasy
Autostraddle's team ponders the existential abyss of IKEA's Pride-themed couches. "terrifying bisexual couch aside, I appreciate that the lesbian one looks inspired by flamingos and urine."
Queerantine & Lesbian TikTok
“Once I was in quarantine, I was just stuck in my own head with my own thoughts and I had to face it.” [more inside]
Everybody's Talkin' bout Bugsnax
As Cyberpunk 2077's house of cards glitched into pieces immediately upon release, video game enthusiasts were nevertheless treated to one colorful, diverse, queer as hell videogame about body modification and the ethics of consumerism: and it's Bugsnax. [more inside]
a celluloid talisman against the vampire of lesbian erasure
On Twitter, Mark Miller shares the story and photographs of his great aunt, her lovers, and their son. Threadreader version
Someone will remember us I say …….even in another time
Bostock v. Clayton County
In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Gorsuch [pdf], the United States Supreme Court has held that "In Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964], Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee. We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law." [more inside]
The only thing is to be bold; try the experiment; and find out.
The Fabulous Forgotten Life of Vita Sackville-West.
Vita was as famous for her affairs as for her writing. [more inside]
Vita was as famous for her affairs as for her writing. [more inside]
Rest in Power, Phyllis Lyon
Civil rights pioneer and face of gay marriage dies, aged 95. Gay rights pioneer Phyllis Lyon led a life characterized by a commitment to activism and legal rights for all. She has died of natural causes at her home in San Francisco at age 95.
Lyon lived life with “joy and wonder,” said Kate Kendell, a friend and former executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. She said Lyon and her wife Del Martin were activists and mentors long before there was a movement or community. [more inside]
strange town where men aren’t wanted
Welcome to Lesbianville, U.S.A.: a breathless 1992 report from Northampton, Mass., the Gen X Sapphic paradise that “10,000 cuddling, kissing lesbians call home sweet home” where “one bookshop sells ‘Just Say No To Men’ buttons” and “even the graffiti is gay.” (From the archives of a highly regarded publication called The National Enquirer) [more inside]
Esther Eng directed the 1st film Bruce Lee was in; he played a baby girl
Esther Eng had a lot more firsts than that though: first woman to direct a Chinese-language film in the US; first woman to direct a film in Hong Kong; first woman to film in color. Unfortunately, all her films are lost, but there is a documentary about her, Golden Gate Girls (review). [more inside]
Fried Queer Tomatoes
Queer, Southern, and In Love: ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ and Quintessential Lesbian Literature [Spectrum South] “For most people, the film remains a story about best friends and resilience. For those of us who have read the book and understand the real story behind it, however, it means so much more. We see our experiences and history being realized, despite the outside world’s attempts to erase or sterilize us. We feel validated in the love we feel for our best friends, friends who also become lovers and who are with us through child rearing and sickness. Like Idgie and Ruth, we know what it means to be queer, southern, and in love.” [YouTube][Trailer] [more inside]
The Historical Significance of Black Queer Films
[These films] centered the experiences of Black queer people not only to communicate how Black LGBT folks endured further marginalization within Black communities because of their queerness but also to interrogate the ways that the conflation of queerness and whiteness attempted to exclude Black queers from the bonds and protection of community. [African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS)] [more inside]
Lesbian Space Crime
NASA is currently looking into what may be the first instance of crime in space. Also of interest: the first protest in space (2017), the first strike in space (1973).
Keep Socialism Queer
“Pointing out hypocrisy or craven motivations seems almost beside the point. Yes, Equinox is showcasing an artform pioneered by poor transwomen of color while gentrifying the very neighborhoods they used to live in by building luxury gyms that charge up to $250 in monthly rates. Yes, Essie is simply trying to maximize its profits by expanding its clientele to people who are not women. Yes, Fossil’s website still divides their products into “men’s” and “women’s” despite allegedly helping a nonbinary customer come to terms with their identity. Who cares? There is an unspoken agreement that even savvy consumers who see through the bullshit will at least appreciate the effort required to produce it.” Raytheon said Gay Rights! ( Outline) “Recent years have also seen a blossoming in the smaller worlds of queer communist and socialist politics. Though the scale of US gay rights organizing has atrophied since the victory of the gay marriage campaign, efforts to organize trans and queer people explicitly against capitalism, to think queer freedom alongside communism, are at their most vibrant since the gay liberation era of the early 1970s.” Fifty Years Of Queer Insurgency (Commune) Barbara Smith: Why I left the mainstream Queer rights movement. (NYT) Keep your politics out of my gay rights! (Liquid Flannel Podcast)
“These People Are Frightened To Death”
A thriving postwar LGBTQ scene in Washington D.C was decimated by paranoia and prosecution over supposed links to queerness and communist subversion : The Lavender Scare (The Nib) “The purge followed an era in which gay people were increasingly finding each other and forming communities in urban America. During World War II, many men and women left behind the restrictions of rural or small-town life for the first time. After the war, young people poured into cities, where density and anonymity made pursuit of same-sex relationships more possible than ever.” Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare (Archives.gov) “Frank Kameny was fired from his federal government job in 1957 because he was gay. He didn’t just go home and pull the covers over his head. He fought a successful eighteen-year-battle with the government to change the law so the same thing didn’t happen to other gay people.” (Making Gay History)
How 'Bout That Jive
Let's listen to Ernestine "Tiny" Davis and the integrated, all women's band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm tear it up with a body-positive love song from 1947, How 'Bout That Jive. [more inside]
Like a black cat sitting on top of her paws
A Perfectly Normal Interview with Carmen Maria Machado Where Everything Is Fine
The connection between narratives of vampires and narratives of women—especially queer women—are almost laughably obvious. Even without Carmilla, they would be linked. The hunger for blood, the presence of monthly blood, the influence and effects of the moon, the moon as a feminine celestial body, the moon as a source of madness, the mad woman, the mad lesbian—it goes on and on. It is somewhat surprising to me that we have ever imagined male vampires at all.
I was as curious about them as they were about lesbian sex
There’s a new party on the scene, specifically catering to the straight-but-curious woman: Skirt Club, an international circuit of underground parties for “girls who play with girls.” Skirt Club promoters hired me, a queer woman and professional Dominatrix, to attend and bring my submissive, Chloe, who is also my girlfriend. I may be accustomed to doing straight-for-pay sex work, but I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to entertaining women with boyfriends. So, despite the lesbian sex show I was hired to put on for a bunch of straight (or perhaps closeted) women, I was determined to have a good time for myself.
Swahili for "friend"
Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu wanted a hopeful African love story she could adapt into a film. She found what she was looking for in Jambula Tree, a Caine Prize-winning short story by Ugdandan author Monica Arac de Nyeko about the love and courtship of two young women. Kahiu's film is named Rafiki--Swahili for "friend"--which, as Kahiu frequently states in interviews, "is how queer Kenyans need to introduce their partners in a society where it is not yet safe to name their love directly." The film premiered at Cannes in 2018 (trailer here), but the Kenyan Film and Classification Board banned it back home. After suing the government, Kahiu won a 7-day suspension of the ban to allow Rafiki to qualify for the Academy Awards; the theaters were packed, breaking box office records, but the Kenyan Oscars selection committee declined to submit Rafiki for consideration. Africa Is A Country has more on the film, which plays against the backdrop of Kenya's expected February 22nd Constitutional Court ruling on colonial-era laws that criminalize homosexuality.
The Gay History of America’s Classic Children’s Books (NYT)
But it remains the case that the authors of many of the most successful and influential works of children’s literature in the middle years of the last century — works that were formative for baby boomers, Gen-Xers, millennials and beyond — were gay. [more inside]
Queerness in Video Games
Game Studies, Issue 18/03. "The place where queerness meets games is a site of radical potential. This introduction, and this issue, ask how we can push queer game studies beyond desires for inclusion and representation and instead embrace a queer tradition of rejecting the status quo."
"Through knowledge to justice!"
A new episode of the Making Gay History podcast (previously) covers the life and work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneering researcher and gay rights activist who founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897, and whose Institute for Sex Research was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. The episode is accompanied by a full transcript, along with photos and links to resources and related stories. Among these is an account of the final years of Hirschfeld's lover, Li Shiu Tong, in Vancouver, B.C.—and how, in 1993, a Vancouver man discovered Hirschfeld's death mask, papers, and other artifacts in a garbage bin.
2018 Is The Year Of The Queer Woman Pop Star
The days of “fauxmosexual” singers playing gay for the male gaze are (mostly) gone. But as more out queer woman pop stars rise, what kinds of representation do we want from them? [slBuzzfeed Reader] [more inside]
The HAGS are dead. Long live the HAGS.
"It’s unclear if the HAGS understood what a spectacle they were in the queer-dyke landscape of 1990s San Francisco. When they poured into a bar my breath caught in my chest."
In The Believer, Michelle Tea shares the story of a circle of friends who bashed back against homophobia and creepy dudes, and how ultimately addiction and a rare and devastating illness ended some of their lives. [more inside]
In The Believer, Michelle Tea shares the story of a circle of friends who bashed back against homophobia and creepy dudes, and how ultimately addiction and a rare and devastating illness ended some of their lives. [more inside]
He Was A Famous Lesbian Poet
We thought we’d heard it all when it came to imposters. Clearly, we hadn’t met Pierre Louÿs. [Note: artistic nudity.]
Why the imbalance?
Why are there so few queer female coming-of-age movies? [slGuardian] / 14 Feel-Good Summery Lesbian Movies for Summer Lesbianing [slAutostraddle] [more inside]
“It’s not just a game… it’s a Gayme!”
Caper in the Castro was probably the first LGBTQ computer game. The player takes on the “the role of a lesbian private detective, Tracker McDyke, in search of a kidnapped drag queen, Tessy LaFemme.” The adventure mystery game was designed for Apple’s HyperCard, by C. M. Ralph, and released in 1989 as CharityWare, which meant that if people enjoyed playing, they were encouraged to “make a donation to an AIDS Related charity of your choice for whatever amount you feel is appropriate”. Adrienne Shaw of the LGBTQ game archive wrote about the game and interviewed Ralph last year.
Would you consider yourself old?
QUEEROES 2018
When we think of a hero, the image that comes to mind for many people is a straight, cisgender white man in a costume, basking in his importance as he blusters his way into saving the world. We at them. not only believe that queer people are heroes, but that we are heroic precisely because we live in a world that doesn’t consider us valuable, yet still find ways to prosper and care for each other in that world every day.
This month, we decided to honor individuals who not only make our community more visible, but who actively work to help other LGBTQ+ people feel important and supported. Here are our 2018 Queeroes, and the reasons why we cherish them.
Hannah Gadsby "Breaks" Comedy
"There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself," Australian comic Hannah Gadsby says in her new Netflix special. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Will Change The Way You Think About Comedy, says Anna Silman in The Cut, which has MANY SPOILERS. (CW for sexual abuse, rape, assault in Netflix special.) "...Perhaps the power of her performance will open the door for a richer and more humane kind of stand-up – one that sets an example for future young women deciding how they want to tell their stories to the world." [more inside]
You wanna leave a legacy? Get in the way, any way you can.
Cameron Esposito has a new stand-up special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective available to stream for free on her site. Proceeds from donations benefit RAINN, the United States’ largest anti-sexual violence organization. (CW: sexual assault) [more inside]
How queer comics are making their mark in America
Today’s generation of queer comics, having stormed through the doors left ajar by DeLaria and company, are no longer the butt of the joke. And standup comedy, for so long the preserve of straight white men, is being refashioned in their image.
“My generation is the first that’s able to talk about our lives in a way that’s normative but also accessible,” says Cameron Esposito, a standup whose first special, Rape Jokes, debuts later this month. “Ten years ago when I was starting I was always able to be out, but only because a bunch of folks did it before I got there.” [more inside]
Paperback Portals: the Legacy of Lesbian Pulp Fiction
World War II made paperback novels popular in the U.S. thanks to Armed Service Editions, which evolved from earlier failed book drives. G.I.s came back home with their little books, and wanted more. After pulp magazines died off (because of the war efforts), pulp paperbacks flourished, first with hardcover titles repackaged for an audience grown used to portable Army editions, but soon came the "lascivious and streetwise stories that made steady work for a generation of writers," including potboilers and pin-ups that showed gay and bisexual women they were not alone. [more inside]
ITS LESBIAN VISIBILTY DAY!
IT IS LESBIAN VISIBILITY DAY! Read a goddamn book!
100 Best Lesbian Fiction & Memoir Books Of All Time from Autostraddle.
11 Books Every Queer Woman Should Read To See All Different Versions Of The Female-Identified Queer Experience from Bustle
100 Must-Read Bisexual And Lesbian Books from BookRiot
10 Best Lesbian Books from The Lesbian Review
15 Books Every Young Gay Woman Should Read from Buzzfeed Genre recommendations inside... [more inside]
100 Best Lesbian Fiction & Memoir Books Of All Time from Autostraddle.
11 Books Every Queer Woman Should Read To See All Different Versions Of The Female-Identified Queer Experience from Bustle
100 Must-Read Bisexual And Lesbian Books from BookRiot
10 Best Lesbian Books from The Lesbian Review
15 Books Every Young Gay Woman Should Read from Buzzfeed Genre recommendations inside... [more inside]
“Homosexuality is Stalin’s Atom Bomb To Destory America”
“Information has come to our attention that you are homosexual. What comment do you care to make?” During the Lavender Scare, LGBTQ+ military and government personnel were targeted en masse — especially women, Airman Second Class Helen James was one of them. Navy recruit and Drag King Rusty Brown gives an oral history of the panic and paranoia at the time. (PDF) MAKING GAY HISTORY podcast and transcript on the founders of Daughters of Bilitis, the first advocacy organization for lesbians in 1955. [more inside]
LGBTQ activism in the New East
Being LGBTQ is a new series from Calvert Journal that includes Live by night: An evening with Maydana, Ukrainian drag queen and asylum seeker, No Silence:
Growing up LGBTQ in the forgotten world of Transnistria, Secret histories:
LGBTQ life in pre-revolutionary Russia, Horoom Nights: Inside the secretive queer night at Tbilisi’s world-famous Bassiani club, and more... [more inside]
"A magazine for lesbian and gay liberation"
"The Body Politic was conceived in a basement (not the last it would know), born in an Annex apartment, named in a downtown Victorian flat (possibly; accounts vary), and raised for a time in a backyard shed." Published from 1971 until 1987, it was "Canada's first significant gay publication." Now, every issue of the magazine is hosted by the Canadian Human Rights Museum in an online collection. [more inside]
“It is unafraid to be corny, unafraid to be purple,”
‘It was an electric time to be gay’: Sarah Waters on 20 years of Tipping the Velvet [The Guardian] “What’s it about?” people sometimes asked me, when they had heard I’d written a novel – and I always had to brace myself, slightly, to answer. There was the awkwardness of explaining the rather risque title. There was the fact that I outed myself the moment I began to reveal the plot. And then there was the plot itself – because, oh dear, how lurid it sounded, how improbable, above all how niche, the tale of a Victorian oyster girl who loses her heart to a male impersonator, becomes her partner in bed and on the music hall stage, and then, cruelly abandoned, has a spell as a cross-dressed Piccadilly prostitute and the sexual plaything of a rich older woman before finding true love and redemption with an East End socialist.”
The urgent mission of “Making Gay History”
In the late 1980s, author Eric Marcus set out to record the oral history of the gay civil rights movement in America. “I felt such responsibility to these people, most of whom had never had their stories told, or they had been long forgotten.” [more inside]
"To the victims of the purge...
...who were surveilled, interrogated, and abused; who were forced to turn on their friends and colleagues; who lost wages and lost health and lost loved ones - we betrayed you. And we are so sorry." Today, Canada's prime minister delivered an apology to LGBTQ2 members of the Canadian civil service and military whom the government attempted to purge between the 1950s and 1990s and to people who were criminally convicted for same-sex acts in the years when they were illegal. This included introducing legislation to expunge their criminal records. In addition to the apology, a settlement with the victims of the purge was also announced today. [more inside]
Mean Girls: The Forbidden Lesbian Romance
"Please Listen with an Open Heart"
Queery is a hour-long weekly (or biweekly or...) podcast where standup comedian Cameron Esposito talks about queer life with a guest, usually someone from the entertainment industry. [more inside]
Federal Appeals Court Rules In Favor Of Job Protections For Gay Workers
Today, the Seventh Circuit (en banc) ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers employees based on their sexual orientation. Both the 11th and 2nd Circuits have recently ruled that Title VII does not cover LGBT rights at work, possibly setting up for an eventual SCOTUS showdown. [more inside]