The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.

As we’ve seen, bitch has been used against men for almost as long as it’s been used against women. Bitch is still thrown at men and women alike, but it’s used somewhat differently. Bitch can have positive connotations when a woman reclaims it, but when aimed at a man, bitch is rarely a compliment. While a bitch can be a strong woman, it usually means a weak man. But unlike powerful women who are hit with the word, men are targeted with bitch when they are considered to be powerless. Bitch likens a woman to a man, while it likens a man to a woman. It’s an emasculating insult that suggests he’s lacking in courage and strength. Bitch might also accuse him of being effeminate or gay. There are many different versions of the slur for a man – he’s a little bitch, someone’s bitch, a prison bitch, or he’s a son of a bitch.

In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

American scholar and theorist David M. Halperin convincingly reveals the correlations between gay subjectivity and the Broadway musical and shows how the aesthetic form of the genre is in itself prototypically queer. Additionally, musicals can impart a sense of shared identity and cultural connections that ease the coming-out process, and they may confer common bonds within gay communities. Examining key historical eras and significant productions, this chapter builds on the work of D.A. Miller and Halperin and explores the sociological linkages between U. S. gay male culture and the musical, asking how the theatre became associated with male homosexuality. The study analyzes five musicals, Show Boat (1927), West Side Story (1957), La Cage Aux Folles (1983), Fun Home (2013), and A Strange Loop (2019). Each was originally produced in a notable moment in queer history and implicitly or explicitly manifests the tensions of its time. These five musicals reflect distinct ways musicals appeal to gay consumers and suggest opportunities for imagining possibilities of the gay genre as a queer utopia.

This chapter explores male homoerotic desire, whether idealised, romanticised, visualised or physically enacted. Male homoerotic practices and relations have sometimes been structured around notions of difference between two males who were thought to be respectively masculine and feminine, active and passive, free and slave, or older and younger. The last pairing was particularly important in classical European antiquity where it was, typically, regarded as compatible with heterosexual marriage and reproduction. This should alert us to the fact that many societies across the globe have not viewed male homoerotic relations according to the set of sexualised identities that emerged from nineteenth century western medical science, and which have since been contested by gay liberationists and queer activists. Western imperial practice has produced an abundance of evidence concerning the legal and religious regulation of ‘sodomy’. This invites comparison with records from other cultures which have often been, in their various ways, more positive in their attitudes to same-sex desire. The chapter, therefore, includes a consideration of globally diverse patterns of male homoerotic relations that acknowledges the complexity of cultural responses to same-sex desire.

Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure on stage as conductor, composer, pianist, and media persona, and off stage, too, in his physicality, sociality, charisma, and sensuous engagement with the world. His artistic and celebrity status granted wide berth to Bernstein’s ‘bohemian’ sexual and relationship practices, but he was not exempt from contemporary social expectations and anxieties. Indeed, Bernstein’s life and career illustrate the pivotal effects of twentieth-century sociosexual norms and homophobia on US musical modernism. A gay man in a heterosexual marriage, Bernstein was both a victim and beneficiary, and a sometime agent, of homophobia. In Bernstein the forces of twentieth-century homophobia converged with talent, ambition, and repression, yielding momentous results for his family, intimates, colleagues, and rivals, and for US and international arts and culture. Bernstein’s life and career were fatefully shaped by prevailing social forms and mores, and ultimately his social and cultural influence would contribute to their reshaping.

This chapter offers an analysis of Private Romeo, director Alan Brown’s 2012 film production of the play. Set in a boys’ military high school, Private Romeo appropriates Romeo and Juliet to tell the story of two young men falling in love with one another. But, where Romeo and Juliet is a tale of tragedy, Private Romeo is very much a tale of male same-sex love’s triumph. Indeed, the happy ending of Private Romeo can be considered the film’s queerest aspect of all. Hence, as far as queer is understood in its most ‘simplistic’ sense as a challenge to all things heteronormative, Private Romeo shows how Romeo and Juliet can be thoroughly queered as opposed to merely incorporating ‘gay’ elements into otherwise ‘straight’ productions. At the same time, some critics might be troubled by Private Romeo’s representation of queerness because that queerness is wholly inflected by assimilationist capitulations. Its depiction of same-sex marriage as an ideal, inevitable outcome can be interpreted as an imposition of the kind of conformity that merely apes heteronormative conventions. Hence the need to both queer and unqueer Private Romeo.

This chapter features the contributions of influential and lesser-known essayists who have written persuasively and engagingly on gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Issues of identity and difference have had a profound effect on the writing of our age, and certainly on the essay, the most elusive of genres. This chapter considers the intersections of the essay, gender, and queer studies/consciousness over the last few decades, first in a general sense, and then through the lens of specific essayists who have had the most significant impact on the direction of the essay since 1970 in the United States. Beginning with second-wave feminism, this chapter discusses the work of those essayists in feminist and LGBTQ+ communities whose foundational writing on gender still resonates today. The chapter examines important essays that emerged from third- and fourth-wave feminism and then pursues the stylistic and thematic innovations brought by lesbian, gay, trans, and queer writers who have explored topics such as gender as performance, HIV and AIDS, misogyny and misandry, intersectionality, discrimination, and the medicalization and mediatization of desire.

LGBTQIA+ patients are an important patient population to highlight when discussing urban emergency medicine. There are a multitude of terms regarding gender expression and identity that emergency medicine providers should familiarize themselves with if they plan on taking care of this patient population. Within the LGBTQIA+ population, there are specific medical and psychological issues that are relevant to each subgroup. Providers are not expected to know everything about their patients, but they must remember to remain open-minded and non-judgmental as they take care of everyone with precision and dedication. If a provider feels that the patient needs help in ways they cannot be of service, then the provider should be able to point the patient in the right direction via resources and referrals.

Sex and minority groups such as LGBT, sexual desire and sexual identity as fluid or dimensional phenomena, differences (or lack of differences) in desire in minority groups, special issues in relationships for minority groups such as discrimination, and effects of ageing,

Chapter Two centers on Laurence and Clemence Housman, siblings who spent their entire lives living and working together in a collaborative relationship that more closely resembled a marriage. The two cooperated in the production of suffrage posters and engraved book illustrations, and their early acts of collaboration informed Laurence’s later activism work as he contested war and British imperialism. Laurence and Clemence’s radical mode of familial affiliation became the locus for larger forms of political dissidence. Laurence believed that radical politics might emerge from a radical kinship practice that fostered an ethics of service and care. With this in mind, I tie his early feminist work in collaboration with his sister to his later anticolonial work in the Indian independence movement. I also consider Laurence’s handling of his brother A. E. Housman’s posthumous papers, which revealed Alfred’s unrequited love for his friend Moses Jackson. His role as executor of Alfred’s estate placed Laurence in the practical position of weighing his kinship ties against broader political commitments. The carefulness with which he carried out his responsibilities to his brother and to the greater political good reveal how skilled Laurence was at braiding together kinship ties and wider modes of affiliation.

Within contemporary Western gay communities, Alexander the Great is often championed as a hero and an inspirational figure – the ultimate high-status homosexual. This chapter explores the various ways in which he has been visualised within the gay community and its wider – more closeted – community. The chapter explores his literary image in the novels of Mary Renault, in stage musicals and pornography and in mainstream Hollywood cinema. The darker, anti-gay, reading of Alexander is also explored in the context of right-wing nationalism and the military.

With quotations from Phiip Gossett, Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Tom Christensen, the argument is reiterated for an ‘integrative model for French opera’ that includes opera with spoken dialogue. The importance of the independent, commercial theatre and the cultural value it commanded in Paris are summarised. Knowledge of French popular opera is demonstrable elsewhere, with London the obvious example shown in research by Vanessa Rogers and Erica Levenson. The nature of John Gay’s musical integrations in The Beggar’s Opera is compared with Paris practice and with Brecht’s in Die Dreigroschenoper. Key discoveries in the book are reviewed, especially the ‘new’ manuscript for La Chercheuse d’esprit. Opéra-comique research by Thomas Betzwieser and Ruth Müller is summarised and related to the current project, ending with further quotations from Tom Sutcliffe, Thomas Bauman and Alfred Roller.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex persons are at particular risk of being targeted because of their gender or sexual preference. Discrimination against LGBTI persons may be based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics. The chapter looks first at the right to life of LGBTI persons under global standards. This comprises extrajudicial executions by State agents, the failure to exercise due diligence in protecting LGBTI persons, and the imposition of the death penalty for homosexual activity. In nine States, the penal code prescribes the death penalty as a possible judicial sanction for same-sex sexual activity.