lgbt

In one of my classes this week we will be reading selections by the late Melvin Dixon, a gay and African American poet-scholar who died during the nineties. In one of his essays, “I’ll Be Listening for My Name,” he touches upon the kind of doubled death lgbt artists face in the AIDS crisis, as they face racial discrimination in the public sphere that is compounded by the denial of their emotional and sexual lives by families and communities who refuse to recognize gays and lesbians. We have also been reading Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, which is about a teenage boy who is the chosen one, smart and athletic. Also gay, he eventually dies under the burden of homophobia, of being forced to see himself as simultaneously chosen and damned, angel and demon.

Well, this morning I was greeted by a story on crimes against the LGBT community in Newark, NJ, “In a Progressive State, a City Where Gay Life Hangs by a Thread.” The story is by Andrew Jacobs, who’s on the Newark beat at the NYT. It’s not a terrible story, and it does a nice job of outlining a broad picture of options for the lgbt community in lower and working class communities of color in Newark.

The story got me thinking, though, about how difficult it is to talk about sex and race– especially when we barely have language for sussing out race and class. So what happens when, as in most cases, we need to talk about all three at once? Often, it seems, we latch onto the one that best serves our own needs, a need fed by our perceptions “what counts” and “what matters.” But, again, what does this mean for the possibility of
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Following up on “Hey… Shorty,” A link to The Primary Contradiction, via Slant Truth. It concerns action for four young African American lesbians recently sentenced to preposterous jail times for defending themselves against a homophobic and misogynist street attack (3 others took plea deals).

LDNY also has a great post, with info, perspectives, and what seems to be a comment from one of the seven women involved. There is also a link to The Sakia Gunn film Project. (That’s her picture, to the right.) Sakia Gunn is a young lesbian murdered in Newark after rejecting catcalls from a group of men. Read the rest of this entry »

You know, I step away from blogging for a week or so, and the world somehow becomes more ludicrous. John Tomasic over at Pop + Politics has this story about a 1994 US government plan to develop bombs that would drop hormone bombs on enemy soldiers, the contents of which would render combatants gay. (He also Read the rest of this entry »

Chloé A. Hilliard has an interesting article over at the Village Voice, subheaded “Young lesbians in Brooklyn find that a thug’s life gets them more women.”From one woman’s hypermasculine assertion that “all lesbians are sneaky,” to Read the rest of this entry »

I just came across two stories relevant to some stuff that’s come up in girlpower.

The first story, from Grady Hendrix at Slate, is about Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse. Hendrix takes up a simple question: why would anyone bring grindhouse or exploitation films back? The author could use more concise definitions–”grindhouse” and “exploitation” aren’t quite synonyms, but it’s still worth looking at. (And there are some pretty random conjectures in the comments section at the bottom of the article.) This article is interesting for genre/high and low culture questions in general, and also relevant to some of the conversations we had about Doris Wishman’s Bad Girls Go to Hell.

The second story ties to our brief conversation on Thursday about women’s colleges and transgendering questions. This story, by Adrian Brune at the Boston Globe, takes as its example the experiences of a transgendered student at Mt. Holyoke.