Interview by Marc Stein In May 1988, when I was working as the coordinating editor of Gay Community News in Boston, Massachusetts, I interviewed Jeffrey Weeks, the influential British sociologist and historian who had written Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977), Sex, Politics, […]
Tag: history and policy
The Other Half Has Never Been Told: AIDS and African-American History
Dan Royles Black inequality—inaugurated under slavery and maintained by protean forms of white supremacy—has been central to American society, through to the present day. But where does AIDS fit into this story? From the beginning of the recognized epidemic in the United States, communities of color—and African Americans in particular—have […]
Sexual Histories, Scholarly Communities: A Dispatch from the John D’Emilio Symposium
Ian Darnell On September 12, the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) held a symposium to honor the career of Professor Emeritus John D’Emilio. Early in the day, Pippa Holloway—once D’Emilio’s research assistant and student—observed that a hallmark of D’Emilio’s work was that he […]
Before Grindr, or, The Dangers of the "Gay Bachelor"
Justin Bengry In June 1967, opposition Conservative UK parliamentarians encountered a new and threatening queer danger. They feared that the Sexual Offences Bill then before them — a measure that would partially decriminalize male homosexual acts — might appear to sanction, and even promote, homosexual activity. Conservative MP Sir Cyril Osborne therefore proposed an amendment […]
Rethinking Bussing in the 1970s: The Sexual Politics of School Integration in the United States
Gillian Frank In 1972 in the nearly all-white suburbs of Detroit, opponents of bussing used sexual slurs to characterize the federal judge—Stephen Roth—who ordered suburban school districts to integrate with Detroit’s predominantly black schools. Bumper stickers of the 1972 election cycle appended to cars proclaimed, ‘Judge Roth is a child-molester,’ ‘Roth, […]
"Coming Out" in the Classroom: When the Personal is Pedagogical
Justin Bengry I’ve never come out to my students. I’ve never stood at the front of a classroom and told my students that I’m gay, and I’ve never told them witty anecdotes about my husband. That isn’t to say that I’m not completely out both professionally and personally (as google […]
(Sexual) Labour Day
Julia Laite I’ve often said that researching prostitution makes me more of a labour historian than a historian of sexuality. Despite having typically been lumped into the same categories as homosexuality and other perceived sexual deviances, women who sold sex in the past connected their actions not to their sexuality but to […]
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