Gay and Lesbian

Read an Excerpt from “Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront”

April 6, 2021
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Polymath artist David Wojnarowicz blazed a singular trail through the New York avant-garde from the 1970s until his untimely death in 1992. His incendiary and deeply personal work—often physically and spiritually rooted in the desolation of the Manhattan waterfront—roamed freely between painting, photography, film, and music to confront mainstream inaction on the AIDS epidemic. With the new documentary Wojnarowicz screening now in virtual cinemas, it’s the perfect time to revisit Fiona Anderson’s Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront, which Attitude Magazine called “a fascinating journey in cruising, sex, and the art scene of Manhattan’s dilapidated waterfront in the 1970s and 1980s.” Detailed descriptions of sex at the West Side piers appear in David Wojnarowicz’s personal journals from the summer of 1977. Walking “through Soho and over to Christopher Street” that September, he found himself in the dilapidated districts he had spent time in as a hustling teenager, by “the big pier past the old truck lines and the Silver Dollar Café/Restaurant.” There, he wrote, “away from the blatant exhibitionist energies of the NYC music scenes gay scenes,” he felt “uncontrollably sane.” In journal entries, poetry, memoir essays, photographs, short films, and drawings, he depicted the . . .

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Read an Excerpt from “Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey Through the AIDS Crisis”

June 11, 2020
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Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of the AIDS epidemic. Physician Ross Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has. His moving memoir ensures that these dark hours will not be forgotten, and in honor of Pride Month, we’re sharing an excerpt from the opening chapter. In the beginning Tom and I weren’t the only AIDS doctors in town. There were a handful of others, like the two Davids at Illinois Masonic Hospital, Bernie B. at Rush, Tom C. at Northwestern, Michael B. at Weiss Hospital, and a few others who didn’t survive the early days of the epidemic. As gay men, we felt that it was our duty to serve the gay community, which bore the brunt—and continues to bear the brunt—of the AIDS crisis, not only in Chicago but elsewhere in the United States, . . .

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Recommended Readings to Celebrate Pride

June 6, 2019
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Recommended Readings to Celebrate Pride

It’s June and LTBTQ Pride is in the air. Whether you’re waving a rainbow flag parade-side or pausing to honor the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, there is much progress to celebrate. We’ve put together a little summer reading list of books that are out and proud and give a sense of this shared history and the distance yet to go. “An absorbing, funny, and astonishing memoir of a man with many talents and many identities: Samuel Steward, university professor; Phil Sparrow, tattoo artist; Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, writing ground-breaking essays in the first European gay magazines; Phil Andros, explicit novelist; and a man who lived life to its fullest.” 2019 Over the Rainbow Recommended Book List | American Library Association “The Book of Minor Perverts remakes the history of sexuality. Kahan illuminates what is missing: the stories told since the eighteenth century, and peaking during the Modernist period, about how people become homosexual. This is brilliant, upending, field-changing work, which will take its place beside groundbreaking projects from major historians of sexuality such as Michel Foucault and David Halperin, and leading LGBTQ literary critics such as Eve Sedgwick and Valerie Traub.” Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time . . .

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[The] Boystown: Jason Orne’s new ethnography

March 24, 2017
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[The] Boystown: Jason Orne’s new ethnography

Aimee Levitt reviewed Jason’s Orne new ethnography Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago for the Chicago Reader; an excerpt follows below. *** We should be past the need for “gayborhoods,” as Amin Ghaziani argued in his influential 2014 book There Goes the Gayborhood. Don’t areas like Boystown, fun as they are, only remind us of the bad old days? Nope, they’re still necessary, sociologist Jason Orne argues in his new book, also called Boystown, and for one very important reason: sex. What distinguishes Boystown from Wrigleyville or Logan Square or any other gentrifying neighborhood with good nightlife is its sense of what Orne calls “sexy community,” defined as “a network of people, bound together through sexual intimacy.” He believes that open sexuality should be embraced and encouraged: straight people should be adopting queer habits, not the other way around. “By shedding its queer elements,” he writes, “Boystown trades sexuality for normalcy. It trades queer sexual connection for legal equality.” In other words, it would be a damned shame if the men of Boystown stopped hooking up on the dance floor or disappearing into certain basements for sex. And it’s hard to do those things when you’re surrounded by gawking tourists and straight women . . .

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A reading list for marriage equality

March 28, 2013
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A reading list for marriage equality

To better understand the shift in activist politics and policy—from rejection of marriage as an institution to lobbying for same-sex couples’ right to marry—by gay and lesbian rights organizations, read The Nuptial Deal: Same-Sex Marriage and Neo-Liberal Governance by Jay Cee Whitehead. Whitehead’s argument parallels the transformation that occurred in the minds of activists and ordinary citizens with the rise of neo-liberalism, ultimately arguing that the federal government’s resistance to same-sex marriage stems not from “traditional values” but from fear of exposing marriage as a form of governance rather than a natural expression of human intimacy.       To better grasp the pattern of waxing and waning same-sex marriage has faced in terms of public visibility—and to comprehend how policy cycles and political opportunity have characterized debates since the 1996 passing of the Defense of Marriage Act—read The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, edited by Craig A. Rimmerman and Clyde Wilcox. The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage brings together an esteemed list of scholars who consider how court rulings and local legislatures have kept the issue alive in the political sphere, and conservatives and gay rights advocates have made the issue a key battlefield in the culture wars.       . . .

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Announcing the 2012 Guggenheim Fellows

April 13, 2012
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Announcing the 2012 Guggenheim Fellows

  The 2012 class of Guggenheim Fellows was announced this week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, inciting some exuberant responses on the part of several winners (check out Terry Teachout’s Twitter feed). The Guggenheim has long been hailed as the “mid-career award,” honoring scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and writers, who have likely published a book or three, professed a fair amount of research, and are actively engaged in projects of significant scope. The fellowship possesses some tortured origins—(John) Simon Guggenheim, who served as president of the American Smelting and Refining Company and Republican senator from Colorado, seeded the award (1925) following the death of this son John (1922) from mastoiditis (Guggenheim’s second son George later committed suicide, and more infamously his older brother Benjamin went down with the Titanic). Among this year’s crop (we dare say more forward-leaning than previous years?) is a roster of standout “professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the creative arts,” affiliated with the University of Chicago Press: Creative Arts Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and author of three poetry collections, coeditor of The Open Door: . . .

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Jacqueline Rose among the Nations

March 9, 2012
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Jacqueline Rose among the Nations

It’s International Women’s Day, and after embarking on our own etymological lesson on the Middle English plural, we learned about “womyn’s” slip into print, through the works of Scottish writer James Hogg. Though his work was later championed by André Gide, Hogg was a bit of a bumpkin (eulogized by Wordsworth as the “Shepherd-poet,” but with a grain of salt under the tongue—see W.’s notes on “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg” at the University of Virginia Library). The Private Memoirs and Confession of a Justified Sinner is a gothic metafiction at its best—”Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” doing an H.P. Lovecraft short, as told to Umberto Eco, complete with editorial narratives and doubling anti-heroes—and the subject of some powerful thought by the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. So, Hogg gave us “womyn”—and we run with it—but how else to celebrate the day? (Consider working with Kiva to microfinance a variety of projects for/by women across the globe?) Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut, celebrated with excitement about our recently released book by Jacqueline Rose, Proust among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East. Proust . . .

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Free e-book of the month: Freaks Talk Back

June 2, 2010
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Free e-book of the month: Freaks Talk Back

In Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity author Joshua Gamson digs deep into the complex sexual politics of one of the most influential forces in modern American media—daytime TV talkshows. Using extensive interviews, hundreds of transcripts, focus-group discussions with viewers, and his own experiences as an audience member, Gamson argues that talk shows give much-needed, high-impact public visibility to sexual nonconformists while also exacerbating all sorts of political tensions among those becoming visible. With wit and passion, Freaks Talk Back illuminates the joys, dilemmas, and practicalities of media visibility—and for the month of June only, you can download it free from the University of Chicago Press website. Also, read an interview with the author and an excerpt from the book. Check back each month for more free e-books from the University of Chicago Press or for all our currently available e-books, see our complete list of e-books by subject. E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books . . .

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Lambda Literary Awards Nominate Three UCP Books

March 17, 2010
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Lambda Literary Awards Nominate Three UCP Books

The finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrate the best lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans books available in the United States, were announced yesterday, and the University of Chicago Press has three titles among the nominees. The “Lammy” is the most prestigious award given to books of interest to the LGBT community, and we’re honored to have our books recognized. And the nominees are…: For the category of LGBT Studies, we have two contenders: Deborah B. Gould Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more—even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author’s time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. . . .

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Press Release: Heap, Slumming

May 14, 2009
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Press Release: Heap, Slumming

Greenwich Village. Harlem. Bronzeville. Even in this freewheeling, globalized age, the names of these iconic neighborhoods still conjure up an atmosphere of glamour, excitement, and illicit thrills. But long before today’s teens or even yesterday’s beatniks wandered their streets, these neighborhoods exercised a powerful attraction for upright members of the middle class looking for dissipation and disreputable fun. With Slumming, Chad Heap brings these early havens of hip to life, recreating the long-lost nightlife of early twentieth-century New York and Chicago. From jazz clubs and speakeasies to black-and-tan parties and cabarets, Heap packs Slumming with vivid scenes, fascinating characters, and wild anecdotes of a late-night life on the borders of the forbidden. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities. The unforgettable tale of an urban past that continues to resonate in our day, Slumming is a late-night treat for all urbanites and fans of the demi-monde. Read the press release or read the introduction. . . .

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