The ugly return of homophobia

— Bigotry is coming from the progressive establishment

By

As a child of the Eighties and Nineties, I remember well that homosexuals were fair game in the mainstream media. One columnist in The Star railed against “Wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers, lezzies — the perverts whose moral sin is to so abuse the delightful word ‘gay’ as to render it unfit for human consumption”. After the death of Freddie Mercury, sympathy in The Mail on Sunday was limited. “If you treat as a hero a man who died because of his own sordid sexual perversions,” one writer cautioned, “aren’t you infinitely more likely to persuade some of the gullible young to follow in his example?”

It was sadly inevitable that the AIDS crisis would exacerbate this ancient prejudice. A headline in The Sun declared that “perverts are to blame for the killer plague”. And while a writer for the Express held “those who choose unnatural methods of self-gratification” responsible for the disease, letters published in its pages followed suit. One reader called for the incarceration of homosexuals. “Burning is too good for them,” wrote another. “Bury them in a pit and pour on quicklime.” Someone had been reading his Dante.

I happened to come out in a much less hostile climate. In the early 2000s, we were enjoying a kind of Goldilocks moment, neither too hot nor too cold. We weren’t generally on the receiving end of homophobic slurs, but nor were we patronised by well-meaning progressives. My memory of this time was that no one particularly cared, and I was more than happy with that. Being gay for me has never been an identity, it’s simply a fact, as unremarkable as being blue-eyed or right-handed.

And so it has been troubling to see a resurgence in the last few years of the kind of anti-gay rhetoric that was commonplace in my childhood. Of course, it could be argued that the rise of social media has simply exposed sentiments that were previously only expressed in private. As Ricky Gervais has pointed out, before the digital era “we couldn’t read every toilet wall in the world. And now we can.”

Yet the most virulent homophobia appears to be coming from a new source. Whereas we have always been accustomed to this kind of thing from the far-Right — one recalls Nick Griffin’s remark on Question Time about how he finds the sight of two men kissing “really creepy” — but now the most objectionable anti-gay comments arise in online spheres occupied by gender ideologues, from those who claim to be progressive, Left-wing and “on the right side of history”. The significant difference is that the word “cis” has been added to the homophobe’s lexicon. Some examples:

“Cis gay men are a disease.”

“Cis gay men are truly some of the most grotesque creatures to burden this earth.”

“I hate cis gay people with a burning passion.”

“If you’re a cis gay man and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave.”

“Cis gays don’t deserve rights.”

“There’s so many reasons to hate gay people, most specifically white gays, but there’s never a reason to be a transphobe.”

“It’s time to normalise homophobia.”

Of course, any bile can be found on the internet, but these kinds of phrases are remarkably commonplace among certain online communities. Even a cursory search will reveal innumerable examples of gender ideologues casually branding gay men “fags” or “faggots”, praising the murder of gays and lesbians, and claiming that the AIDS epidemic was a positive thing. Many thousands of examples had been collated on Google Photos under the title “Woke homophobia: anti-gay hatred & boxer ceiling abuse from trans activists & gender-identity ideologues”. The site was taken down last year, presumably because it violated Google’s policy on hate speech — or perhaps because it revealed the toxicity of the ideology the company has spent so long promoting.

If such ideas were restricted to the demented world of internet activism, we might be justified in simply ignoring it. But we now know that the overwhelming majority of adolescents referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. Whistleblowers have spoken out about the endemic homophobia, not simply among clinicians but also parents who were keen to “fix” their gay offspring. And of course there was the running joke among staff that soon “there would be no gay people left”.

And now a series of leaked internal messages and videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), has revealed that clinicians in the leading global organisation for transgender healthcare have openly admitted in private that some teenagers mistake being same-sex attracted for gender dysphoria. The result of the “gender-affirming” approach has amounted to what one former Tavistock clinician recently described as “conversion therapy for gay kids”. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s list of psychiatric disorders in 1993, and yet here we are medicalising it all over again.

So how did we reach the point where gay conversion therapy is being practised in plain sight by the NHS? Much of the responsibility has to lie with Stonewall, a group that once promoted equal rights for gay people but now actively works against their interests. It has even gone so far as to redefine “homosexual” on its website and resource materials as “same-gender attracted”. It should go without saying that gay men are not attracted to women who identify as men, any more than lesbians should be denounced for excluding those with penises from their dating pools. What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.

“What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.”

Indeed, activists often claim that “genital preferences are transphobic”, or that sexual orientation based on biological sex is a form of “trauma”. The idea that homosexuality is a sickness was one of the first homophobic tropes I encountered as a child. Now it is being rebranded as progressive.

As for Stonewall, its former CEO Nancy Kelley went so far as to argue that women who exclude trans people as potential partners are analogous to “sexual racists”. She claimed that “if you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions”. It is worth remembering that Stonewall is deeply embedded in many governmental departments and quangos, as well as corporate and civic institutions. Anti-gay propaganda is being reintroduced into society from the very top.

Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service has been meeting with trans lobby groups such as Mermaids and Stonewall to discuss changes to prosecutorial policy in cases of sex by deception. Since these meetings — only revealed after sustained pressure from a feminist campaigner who submitted Freedom of Information requests — the CPS has recommended what Dennis Kavanagh of the Gay Men’s Network has described as “a radical trans activist approach to sex by deception prosecutions that would see them all but vanish”. In trans activist parlance, the barriers to having sex with lesbians and gay men are known as the “cotton ceiling” and “boxer ceiling”. Now it seems the establishment is attempting to support the coercion of gay people into heterosexual activity.

Consider a recent post on X by Stephen Whittle, OBE, a professor of equalities law at Manchester Metropolitan University. In a reply to LGB Alliance’s Bev Jackson, Whittle took issue with the notion that “love is all about genitals” (an argument that Jackson has never made). Having dismissed this straw man as “a very hetero/homo-normative perspective”, Whittle then claimed that “a lot of gay men can’t resist a young furry ftm [female-to-male] cub”.

While it is true that there are some bisexuals who identify as gay, it is simply not the case that homosexual men “can’t resist” certain kinds of women. As Jackson rightly noted in her response, this is rank homophobia, “disturbed and disturbing on every level”. Yet it has been expressed by an individual who has been described as a “hero for LGBTQ+ equality”. With heroes like these, who needs villains?

Another example is Davey Wavey, a popular online influencer, who has encouraged gay men to perform heterosexual acts in a video called “How to Eat Pussy — For Gay Men”. It may as well have been called “Gay Conversion Therapy 2.0”. We are firmly back in the Eighties, where gays are being told that they “just haven’t found the right girl yet” and lesbians are assured that they just “need a good dick”. And yet now these demeaning ideas are being propagated by those who claim to be defending the rights of sexual minorities.

The Government’s recent guidance on how schools are to accommodate trans-identified pupils — in which biological sex will take precedence over identity — has been met with horror from gender ideologues. One of the common refrains one hears from activists is that it represents “this generation’s Section 28”. But this is to get it precisely backwards. Gay rights were secured on the recognition that a minority of the population are same-sex attracted. In dismantling the very notion of sex and substituting it for this nebulous concept of “gender identity”, activists and their disciples in parliament are undoing all of the achievements of previous gay rights movements.

The widespread homophobia of the Eighties, epitomised by Section 28, was based on the notion that homosexuality was unnatural, dangerous and ought to be corrected. Present-day gender identity ideology perceives homosexuality as evidence of misalignment between soul and body. In other words, it seeks to “fix” gay people so that they fit into a heterosexual framework. It is no coincidence that so many detransitioners are gay people who were simply struggling with their sexuality. Gender identity ideology is the true successor to Section 28.

The proponents of this revamped gay conversion therapy dismiss our concerns as “transphobia” and “bigotry”, or as part of a manufactured “culture war”. Worse still, the new homophobia is being cheered on by those it will hurt most. While prominent gay figures continue to feed the beast that wishes to devour them, we are unlikely to see this dire situation improve any time soon. It was bad enough in the Eighties, when gay people were demonised and harassed by the establishment. Who thought we would have to fight these battles all over again?

Complete Article HERE!

Provocative Sex Is Back at the Movies.

But Are We Ready for It?

Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in “Fair Play.”

After an awkward MeToo hiatus, ‘May December’ and other films are showing​ intimacy in messy, complicated ​ways again.

By Alexandra Kleeman

In Todd Haynes’s newest film, “May December,” Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) is a 30-something man in a marriage with an unconventional back story. He met his wife, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), the summer after seventh grade — but she was 36 at the time. She went to prison, but they stayed together, and the two eventually married and had three children. The couple are being shadowed by a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who will be portraying Gracie in a movie about the first years of their relationship. As Elizabeth enmeshes herself in their world, Joe opens himself up to her, and one evening, after she invites him to her hotel room, Elizabeth initiates a tentative kiss. “You’re so young,” she says. “Believe me, you could start over.” The two have sex, and we watch Joe thrusting briefly from a bird’s-eye view — a position of surveillance rather than intimacy.

It’s an explicit sex scene, but it is not wholly sexy. Elizabeth and Joe have two distinct sets of feelings and perspectives, and the film’s visual approach captures this sense of dissonance. There’s something concrete, even thrilling, about the fleshly realism of Joe’s slight paunch and the texture of their labored breathing, something beautiful and tragic about the way their interlocking fantasies converge and decouple. It’s an encounter thick with layers of lust, pleasure, self-deception and disappointment. Though the sex is consensual, the viewer’s experience of it is uneasy. It slips from steamy to disconcerting to alienating in a way that, though not uncommon in lived experience, has become less familiar on the screen. After it’s over, Elizabeth presses him on his relationship with Gracie. Joe draws back, wounded: For him, the sex was a way of regaining some of the agency he lost in entering a relationship with an adult as a child. In his eyes, Elizabeth is suggesting that he has no agency at all. We’re observing the discordant, syncopated elements a single sexual encounter can encompass.

Over the last several years, the matter of onscreen sex in the movies has been a continuing source of anxiety for audiences, critics and filmmakers who feel that desire has been shunted offscreen in favor of more chaste fare. In a 2021 interview, the director Paul Verhoeven lamented “a movement toward Puritanism” in Hollywood. Over the summer, buzz around Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” hinged in part on the fact that it was the director’s first film to feature either sex or nudity. As some on X dissected the extent to which Florence Pugh appeared naked onscreen, a repost of an anti-porn TikToker’s reaction to those scenes (“Have a plan and talk about it before you go,” she advised potential viewers who might feel “triggered”) caused a stir among some commentators, who saw it as proof that viewing audiences were caught up in an anti-sex fervor. Whether or not there has actually been a widespread puritanical shift, the portrayal of sex has certainly been complicated by heightened scrutiny in the wake of the MeToo movement.

That cultural moment inspired films that, today, read as artifacts of their time: stories of girlbossed Fox News personalities standing up to misogynist superiors, tragic narratives of sexual violence and recovery, journalism procedurals about the birth of the movement itself. These films reinforced a newly prevailing narrative that sex and systemic injustice often go hand in hand and promised just resolutions wherein abusers and harassers were exposed and punished. Emerald Fennell’s 2020 directorial debut, “Promising Young Woman,” crystallized both tendencies: After protagonist Cassie’s (Carey Mulligan) friend Nina is sexually assaulted during medical school, leading her to commit suicide, she feigns intoxication in bars so she can ensnare would-be assailants. She graduates to enacting her revenge on those she holds responsible for Nina’s death, but the film glosses over some of her crueler stunts. Things end tidily with Cassie’s engineering her own murder at the hands of Nina’s rapist and his subsequent arrest. The film had a slick social-justice message but elided the complex public discourse around accountability in favor of crowd-pleasing turns.

“May December” is part of a wave of movies and television shows that cut against this impulse to use sex as a warning or a cudgel and attempts to bring back sex as sex — as something titillating, seductive, gratifying, provocative and, at base, erotic. This year there are raucous throwbacks to raunchy comedies like “Bottoms” and “No Hard Feelings,” sexual bildungsromans like “Poor Things” and HBO’s lurid “The Idol” and a film adaptation of “Cat Person,” a New Yorker short story that went viral in the first months of MeToo, to name just a few. These films want to depict sex in a broadly appealing way while retaining an awareness of recent shifts in the cultural conversation.

“Bottoms,” for example, resituates the teenage sex comedy in the world of queer adolescent girls. “The Idol” utilizes the recent cultural redemption of maligned women celebrities like Britney Spears as the staging ground for the comeback of its own troubled pop star. Fennell’s new film, “Saltburn” and Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” serve up salacious scenes alongside social critique, underlining the role of sex in gender- and class-based power struggles. “May December” examines the long aftermath of sexual abuse and the way it can haunt desire decades later.

A movie still of Lily-Rose Depp in a sheer dress in “The Idol.”
Lily-Rose Depp in “The Idol.”

The influence of MeToo, which forced a re-evaluation of sexual mores throughout our culture, is unmistakably present. But these films push beyond, asking what it means to treat sexual relations as a phenomenon that is related to, but distinct from, power. In her book “The Right to Sex,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan asked whether a focus on issues of consent obscured a deeper consideration of the weird forms that sexual desire can take. To Srinivasan, desire itself is shaped by the conditions of power and is potentially complicit in its perpetuation: To prefer thin white bodies over brown or disabled ones, to take one example, can be a matter of intimate personal preference at the same time as it reflects the influence of the societal norms that shape us. Sexual desire encompasses desires for power, belonging, advantage and disruption that we would not typically think of as erotic.

“For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms,” Srinivasan writes. “On its own terms” means sex that matters in multiple senses, that has sensual weight but does not ignore how politics lends it some of that weight. This new crop of movies is wrestling with what that could look like, interrogating inherited desires and struggling to reinvent them for a new moment. They don’t all succeed, but the failures are revealing.

In “Saltburn,” Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a poor Oxford student whose peers make fun of him for his “Oxfam” clothes and awkward affect. When the aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) takes pity on him, Oliver’s fortunes change. Soon he’s spending a summer at Saltburn, the Catton family’s estate. Felix’s sister, Venetia, lusts after him, while his parents approach him as if he is an alien species. Farleigh, Felix’s queer Black American cousin, a fellow dependent, tries unsuccessfully to get Oliver ejected from Saltburn. Oliver has a trump card, though: When he joins the younger family members in a field for nude sunbathing, he reveals his own sizable member, making himself an object of desire and sexual power. The movie brims with erotic excess as Oliver seduces his hosts one by one.

“Saltburn” is a jumbled, cockeyed update of many genres and stories (“The Talented Mr. Ripley” comes readily to mind), but the genre it’s most interested in revising is the 1980s and ’90s erotic thriller. This tendency to adapt older genres is common among this year’s sex-obsessed films — unsurprising, given that genre itself is a way of revisiting and amending inherited ideas. The erotic thriller was practically invented to hold together audiences’s ugly, contradictory feelings about sex, bringing the craving for erotic encounter into conflict with the looming specter of AIDs and the perceived threat of empowered women. This year’s films find their contradictions among contemporary social issues while embracing more inclusive understandings of desire. Thus even though Fennell is again considering sex as domination — this time a queer weapon of class war — she also wants audiences to think of Oliver’s seductions as sexy.

A movie still of Alison Oliver chewing on a pen in “Saltburn.”
Alison Oliver as Venetia in “Saltburn”

“Saltburn” deprioritizes the social message of “Promising Young Woman” in favor of tantalizing images. At one point, Oliver propositions Venetia after catching her beneath his window in a see-through nightgown. She protests on account of her period, but Oliver goes ahead and sticks his head under her gown. “It’s lucky for you I’m a vampire,” he quips. Oliver’s sexual aggression is treated as a tool that breaks down barriers of breeding and wealth, a sign of personal strength and cunning. Venetia’s period and Oliver’s transgression against her demurral (along with, perhaps, the disingenuous nature of that refusal) also accentuates the act’s erotic charge — a familiar formula for titillation. In another scene, Oliver forces himself onto Farleigh, who protests and then accepts his enemy’s advances. It’s sex as a disturbing assertion of power over a foe, but it’s also meant to be thrilling for each of the characters and, we assume, the audience.

Oliver’s sexual coercions clash with the film’s crude attempts to refashion the erotic thriller as queer, feminist and class-conscious. Fennell doesn’t seem interested in whether these acts are morally acceptable. Instead, by depicting Oliver’s victims as privileged brats, she gives us permission to take pleasure in his misdeeds. In place of any serious engagement with the strange ways that class, consent, violation and the erotic are messily entangled, Fennell turns to the thriller as a kind of escape hatch. Oliver’s schemes allow her and her protagonist to indulge in dark seduction while evading its repercussions.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the erotic thriller, which if anything is obsessed with sex’s consequences and how desire and vulnerability go hand in hand. A similar misunderstanding happens in “Fair Play.” Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich star as Emily and Luke, two financial analysts at a hedge fund who are in a relationship they must hide from their colleagues. Their relationship is robust — they have period sex (there it is again!) in a restroom at a wedding before Luke proposes marriage — but things sour when Emily is promoted to a position of authority over Luke, who grows jealous. Their sex life cools. As Emily embraces her male colleagues’ chauvinistic work culture and flaunts her new wealth, Luke takes on beta male tendencies, like spending his time and money on a business self-help course. Emily’s promotion plays on his gender-related insecurities, uncovering the misogynist assumptions lurking below their relationship’s surface. They never have a real conversation about what’s going on. Instead, straddling a reluctant Luke, Emily insists that they need to have sex. The performance of a healthy heterosexual order seems more urgent to these characters than grappling with the dissonances between them or the confusing presence of sexist gender norms within their relationship.

Though the premiere of “Fair Play” at Sundance earlier this year was heralded by some press and critics as a contemporary take on the erotic thriller, the little sex it features illustrates underlying conditions rather than posing questions that need to be negotiated or explored. The first sequence leaps from an interrupted quickie to a marriage proposal to a shot of the postcoital couple — less an erotic encounter than a relationship-goals checklist. The second happens during a nightmarish engagement party thrown by Emily’s oblivious family. After a furious shouting match, Emily and Luke begin to have angry sex, but when she tells him to stop, he doesn’t. Rather than staying with the choice the characters have made and exploring the frustrated intimacy that might have motivated it, Luke rapes Emily because, the film seems to say, violence is the only domain in which men can still have the upper hand. We find ourselves in familiar territory: Sex cannot be separated from the malignancy of the social structures that surround it.

“Fair Play” is capable of striking more provocative notes. After Luke assaults her, Emily finds a morally discordant way to reconcile her trauma with the demands of the workplace. She goes to her boss and disingenuously explains Luke’s disruptive office behavior as the culmination of a long period of stalking. This scene puts questions of gender-based violence in queasy juxtaposition with professional ambition. Rather than resting there, though, the movie ends on a shallow note of empowerment: When Emily returns to her apartment and finds Luke waiting for her, she picks up a knife and forces him to apologize for raping her. The ending frames Emily as a victim, asking the audience to take satisfaction in a ready-made trope when the outcome is much more fraught.

A photo illustration of Julianne Moore and Charles Melton in “May December.”
Julianne Moore and Charles Melton in “May December.”

Fennell and Domont have produced interesting failures that illustrate the inherent difficulty of returning sex to the screen: Older forms can’t always give shape to the strange eddies that sex inserts into the flow of our lives. This problem animates Todd Haynes’s “May December.” Haynes’s approach suggests that rehabbing the erotic will require a formal invention more rigorous — and far weirder — than what Domont and Fennell attempt.

When we meet Joe and Gracie and Elizabeth (the film is set in 2015, a couple years before MeToo), most see Joe as Gracie’s victim, but for her purposes, Elizabeth is more concerned with what motivated Gracie’s choice and how the couple see themselves. Gracie, whose outward presentation of white feminine fragility and naïveté enables the control she exerts over her mixed-race family, fiercely resists Elizabeth’s attempts to understand her. Joe, on the other hand, seems to be an open book. As he re-examines his relationship through an outsider’s gaze, long-suppressed questions and dissatisfactions come to the surface.

Like “Saltburn,” sexual desire saturates “May December,” though not always in the ways we expect. In one scene, we see Gracie teaching Elizabeth how to apply her favorite makeup, patting the lipstick onto Elizabeth’s open mouth with her fingertip while the two discuss their mothers. In another, Joe sits alone in front of the TV at night, watching a videotaped face-wash commercial featuring Elizabeth on a loop. As she splashes water on her face, rivulets drip endlessly from her eyelashes and open mouth. The camera zooms in each time before cutting to Joe’s rapt gaze. The interplay of the two images is like a dialogue between lovers — the formation of a relation, or fantasy of a relation, in real time. We can’t know why Joe has chosen this image at this moment, what is going through his mind, but we feel the emergence of a consequential desire that will encourage him to question all the other desires that his life with Gracie has stunted.

Haynes is interested in the way the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves buckle under the weight of retrospection and how central the erotic is to that process. The title gestures toward one of the grand cultural narratives that Gracie and Joe use to understand their relationship. Seen through the eyes of a public that has rejected that narrative, though, Gracie’s attempts to frame their relationship as a meet-cute story are chilling. “You know Joe’s been with more women than I have men,” she tries to explain to Elizabeth at one point. Joe tries to tell Elizabeth the same story, beginning with how different he was from other kids his age. “She saw me,” he says, insisting, “I wanted it.” But the insistence rings false. He is hunky yet has the hunch of an older man mingled with a boy’s soft, awkward bulk — a body in arrested development indicating a static mind.

The film’s score and script collude to resist psychological revelations about the characters. The score combines original compositions and an adapted score from the 1971 period drama “The Go-Between,” laying melodramatic music over scenes that contradict their emotional sway. As the movie introduces us to Gracie and Joe’s family, we peer in on a seemingly normal family anticipating a celebrity’s arrival. Then Gracie opens the fridge door to retrieve wieners for a barbecue. Ominous chords sound, and the score’s effect is bizarre, almost comic. What does Gracie feel here? What are we meant to feel, and what are these feelings’ objects? It’s a moment of misdirection, an analogue for the complex, prickly reticence of Elizabeth and Gracie, two characters who refuse vulnerability and self-revelation at every step, but also for the way that we, as spectators of the sexual lives of others (and sometimes our own) rely on defunct tropes that have nothing to do with our own direct experience. If, upon opening the fridge door in anticipation of Elizabeth’s invasion, Gracie sees herself as the besieged heroine of a romantic melodrama, the score pushes us into feeling that way as well. Eventually the score comes to seem like a tool of manipulation similar to the ones Gracie wields against Joe and Elizabeth.

Abuse is at the very center of “May December,” but it is not the only force at work: Joe is bound by a genuine love for and attachment to his children and wife, but he grapples with the contradictions of his situation and is not simply their product. Gracie, in turn, is not only an abuser but a complicated, opaque figure of barbed frailty. The film offers up narratives that might unlock her motivations: child sexual abuse and a subsequent early marriage to an older man — but they cannot fully illuminate Gracie’s desire or her behavior. “May December” is more concerned with repercussions, and perhaps its biggest accomplishment is the way it dwells in the afterlife of abuse with keen attention to emotional weather. In one scene, Joe smokes weed with his son — his first time getting high. He gets caught in a spasm of unacknowledged grief. “Bad things, they happen,” he warns. “And we do bad things also. And we have to think about those things. If we try not to think about it, there’s this. …” He trails off.

Where “Saltburn” and “Fair Play” dismiss sex’s complications in spectacular ways, “May December” stays with the difficulty, avoiding the glib treatment of harm as something that can be resolved through either punishment or self-empowerment. For Joe, Gracie and even Elizabeth, desires of the past haunt their presents, trapping them in harmful situations from which they might never recover — the stakes are scarier than anything Fennell and Domont can conceive. But perhaps most important, as we think through what sexual desire means in complicated times, Haynes’s view of sexuality is multidimensional, taking it seriously as a force that unmakes and remakes us. If there is hope for Joe, a chance for him to make a life of his own, then it is due in part to his ability to desire something new, something other than what he has been handed.

Complete Article HERE!

Remember Shere Hite?

— A new documentary jogs our cultural memory of the pioneering sex researcher

This image released by IFC Films shows Shere Hite in a scene from “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.”

The 1976 book “The Hite Report” was a bestseller from the beginning

By LINDSEY BAHR

The 1976 book “The Hite Report” was a bestseller from the beginning. Its intimate anecdotes about love, sex, orgasms and masturbation, drawn from anonymous survey responses from about 3,000 women across the U.S., challenged male assumptions about heterosexual intercourse. And it made its author, Shere Hite, a deeply polarizing public figure.

A glamorous figure who had once paid the bills by modeling, Hite quickly became a fixture on talk shows and news programs in the 1970s and 80s after the publication of her report.

Playboy called it “The Hate Report.” Erica Jong, in The New York Times, wrote that what the women “have to say is utterly fascinating and often surprising” and to read it, “if you want to know how sex really is right now.” Everyone seemed to have something to say about it, and her.

But cultural memory can be short, especially when it comes to pioneering feminists — even ones who have sold 50 million books. When she died in 2020, at age 77, it seemed as though she’d been all but forgotten.

“The Disappearance of Shere Hite,” a new documentary from IFC Films now playing in theaters, takes a holistic look at Hite: her life, her work, her impact and why, after so many books sold and so many feathers ruffled, she faded into the backdrop.

Filmmaker Nicole Newnham (Oscar nominated for “Crip Camp” ) found “The Hite Report” in her mother’s bedside chest when she was 12 not too long after it was published. At the time, she said, it felt like a portal into the inner lives of women. And over the years what those women said stuck with her in a way that so many other books didn’t. When Hite died, Newnham realized how little she really knew about her and started digging around, teaming up with NBC News Studios, which had a similar idea.

And some younger generations were aware of Hite, like actor Dakota Johnson, whose company TeaTime Pictures executive produced the film. “We love Shere Hite!” Newnham recalled Johnson and her producing partner Ro Donnelly responding. Johnson, who is a co-creative director for a sexual wellness company, also gives voice to Hite’s writings in the documentary.

“I thought this was really a way to look at a phenomenon that occurs over and over and over again in our society,” Newnham said. “Women who are iconoclastic and speak out and change culture or have new ideas often do get forgotten.”

Though Hite gave up on the U.S. and decamped to Europe in the early 1990s, she took steps to ensure that anyone who wanted to follow the breadcrumbs of her moment in the spotlight could. She sold her personal archives to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, including personal writings, original survey responses, notes about methodology (which was one of the things she was often pilloried for in the media), and tapes of her television appearances.

“She had a policy of asking for a VHS tape if she agreed to do a television interview,” Newnham said. “The footage you see in the film was material she’d taped, otherwise many of those shows would have been lost to history.”

Many of the clips are uncomfortable, with both men and women challenging and dismissing her work, sometimes without even having read it. Seeing Hite walk out of an interview was not uncommon, especially after the publication of “The Hite Report on Male Sexuality” in 1981, which proved even more divisive. And things only got more difficult for her as the culture entered the “backlash” era.

“She was a complex, volatile personality and we didn’t want to shy away from that,” Newnham said. “She was so viciously pictured as a man-hater. And yet what she really was trying to do is lead an enterprise to free of both men and women from the tyranny of this very specific, rigid, patriarchal way of looking at sexuality.”

Complete Article HERE!

To Understand Sex

— We Need to Ask the Right Questions

The answer to the question of how many sexes exist differs depending on the context

By Charles Roseman, Cara Ocobock

Sex is one of the major cultural and political fault lines of our time. Legislation aimed at regulating who may participate in different arenas of society, including girls’ and women’s sports, is being passed with some regularity. These legislative efforts tend not only to conflate sex and gender but also to jumble up biological traits such as hormone levels with behavioral/performance features such as sprint speed or jump height. Disputes arise in part from confusion and disagreement over what is meant by “sex.”

Within academia, disagreements about sex recently came to a head when the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the world’s largest professional organization for anthropologists, and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) removed a panel discussion entitled “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” from their upcoming annual meeting. The panel was submitted for review and initially accepted in mid-July. It was then removed in late September, following concerns in the anthropological community that the panel conveyed antitransgender sentiment and decrepit ways of thinking about human variation.

Both among the general public and in academia, the core argument boils down to the question of how many sexes exist. The tricky thing is that the answer to this question differs depending on the context. One perfectly accurate response is: “To a first approximation, zero.” The vast majority of life-forms—including bacteria and archaea—do not reproduce sexually. But if the question concerned the number of animal sexes present in a given tide pool or backyard garden, the answer would need to account for organisms that switch sexes, sometimes mate with themselves or switch back and forth between sexual and asexual reproduction. When we ask, “How many sexes are there in humans?” we can confidently answer “two,” right? Many people think sex should be defined by a strict gamete binary in which a person’s sex is determined by whether their body produces or could produce eggs or sperm. But when you are out and about in the human social world, are you checking everyone’s gametes? And what of the substantial number of people who do not produce or carry gametes?

We think the ongoing discussion about sex might benefit from a fundamental change in approach by turning the question around such that we ask, “If ‘sex’ is the answer, what was the question?”

The value of this approach becomes clear when you consider the long-running debate in biology over how to define species. One definition, the biological species concept, posits that species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding organisms capable of producing fertile offspring. It is not universally applicable because, as noted earlier, most organisms do not reproduce sexually. It does, however, provide a framework for asking questions about how sexually reproducing organisms can evolve ways to avoid mating with organisms distinct enough that their offspring’s survivability or fertility would be compromised. This framework has led to a bounty of work demonstrating that speciation in organisms living in the same area is rare and that physical separation among groups appears to be a key component of evolving reproductive barriers.

We can extend this “ask questions first” framework to concepts about sex. When it comes to sexually reproducing organisms, several classes of questions fit nicely into a binary view of sex. Others do not. 

Binaries are indispensable when asking evolutionary questions about many sexually reproducing organisms. Sometimes the questions asked rely on a strict binary because that is the nature of the relevant existing data—for instance, data from historical and contemporary demographic reports. We have to appeal to a multiplicity of binaries, however, because sexual reproduction has evolved many times and in many different ways across the living world. Reproductive capacities in birds and mammals largely involve inheritance of different combinations of sex chromosomes, whereas in many reptiles, sex is determined based on environmental cues such as temperature.

Binaries start to fail us once we move into questions about how organisms live out their lives. This can be seen in the example of transgender athletes. Arguments revolving around including or excluding trans athletes often rest on notions of strict binary differences in hormone type and concentration that associate female individuals with estrogen and male ones with testosterone. This assumes testosterone is at the root of athletic performance. These hormones do not hew to a strict binary, however. Female and male people need both estrogen and testosterone to function, and they overlap in their hormone concentrations. If we are interested in how estrogen and testosterone affect athletic performance, then we need to examine these respective hormone levels and how they correlate with athletic outcomes. We cannot rely on gross average differences between the sexes as evidence for differential athletic success. Adherence to a sex binary can lead us astray in this domain of inquiry.

Further problems arise when we compare humans to other species. Some organisms are incapable of reproducing. Some that are capable may end up not reproducing. Others may alternate between reproducing asexually and sexually, and still others may switch sexes. Such organisms provide fascinating insights into the diversity of life. But when we refer to clown fish changing sex to emphasize the diversity of ways in which sexual beings move through the world, we risk losing sight of the issues of consent, autonomy, well-being and self-determination that form the bedrock of all dimensions of human health, sexual or otherwise.

As scientists who study evolutionary genetics and human physiological responses to extreme environments, we have a strong interest in understanding the varied presentations of features that we think of as being related to sex. The questions we ask about sex in our research are different from those used in a health context, such as practicing gender-affirming care through erectile dysfunction medication or pubertal hormones. Scientists like us would do well to embrace intellectual humility and listen carefully before deciding that any one definition of sex is useful for understanding the living world.

So, if “sex” is the answer, what is the question? This is not so clear, and we have no warrant to make authoritative declarations on this issue from a scientific standpoint that is uninformed by ethical, moral or social considerations. We are in good company here because sex encompasses such a range of questions that we doubt any one medical, scientific or humanistic practitioner would be able to come up with a question that encompasses all of the ways in which humans are affected by sex, however it is construed.

Complete Article HERE!

Curiously, Mammals Keep Evolving Same-Sex Sexual Behavior

A pair of Japanese snow monkeys

By Clare Watson

Sexual behavior between members of the same sex might have evolved multiple times in mammals, according to a new study, adding to numerous examples found across the tree of life.

More than 1,500 species have been known to engage in same-sex sexual behaviors, including bats, beetles, sea stars, snakes, penguins, cows, fish, and worms.

Among mammals, primates are particularly notable, with sexual activity within sexes observed in at least 51 species, from lemurs to apes to, of course, humans.

Once viewed as peculiar outliers, mounting data shows that same-sex behaviors that include courting, mounting, cooing, or copulating are widespread in animals, both male and female, wild or captive.

It’s this data, specifically what’s been published on mammals, that University of Granada ecologist José Gómez and colleagues compiled to test several theories scientists have recently proposed to explain how same-sex behaviors evolved.

“Since it does not contribute directly to reproduction, same-sex sexual behavior is considered an evolutionary conundrum,” Gómez and colleagues write in their published paper. If it doesn’t result in any offspring, why else might it be advantageous?

Most studies have only looked at individual species, though. So Gómez and colleagues used a phylogenetic approach to compare the emergence and prevalence of same-sex sexual behavior among mammals.

If same-sex behaviors evolved to help maintain social relationships, facilitating reconciliation after conflict like what has been observed in female bonobos, or strengthening alliances as seen in male bottlenose dolphins, then those behaviors should be more frequent in social mammal species, Gómez and colleagues reasoned.

Indeed, their analysis (which adjusted for how often a particular species had been the focus of research) found that same-sex behaviors were more prevalent in highly social mammals.

The researchers also found same-sex behaviors to be more common in species that exhibit aggressive and sometimes lethal behaviors. This supports the idea that same-sex interactions may communicate or reinforce social hierarchies, helping to mitigate the risks of violent conflict.

Tracing same-sex behaviors along ancestral lines, Gómez and colleagues’ analysis suggested that same-sex behavior has been “gained and lost multiple times during mammalian evolution”, though it appears to be a recent phenomenon in most mammalian lineages.

Same-sex behaviors aren’t randomly scattered across mammals either; they are more common in some clades and rare in others.

“We fully recognize that these results may change in the future if same-sex sexual behavior is studied more intensively and comes to be detected in many more species,” Gómez and colleagues write.

Before this latest study, researchers had taken issue with similar efforts to explain how same-sex behavior evolved. By presenting same-sex sexual behavior as an ‘evolutionary conundrum’, they say it implies that different-sex sexual behavior is the baseline condition from which same-sex behavior arose.

Rather, in 2019, Ambika Kamath and colleagues suggested a different starting point, one of indiscriminate sexual behavior where ancestral animals mated with individuals of all sexes, perhaps before they evolved recognizable sex-specific traits now used to attract mates.

While Gómez and colleagues’ analysis counters that view for mammals, in that same-sex behaviors don’t appear to be a shared ancestral trait in this group, both groups of researchers caution against transposing theories of animal sexual behavior onto humans, and vice versa.

Same-sex behavior here includes even brief interactions observed between animals, which says nothing of human preferences.

And though we may be related to other mammals, viewing animal behavior through the lens of our own societal norms has long precluded scientists from appreciating the diversity of animal sex.

Complete Article HERE!

A New Way to Prevent S.T.I.s

— A Pill After Sex

By Apoorva Mandavilli

In a bid to stem the resurgence of sexually transmitted infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to recommend doxycycline, a widely used antibiotic, for use after an unprotected sexual encounter.

The antibiotic would be taken only by gay and bisexual men and transgender women who have had an S.T.I. within the previous year or who may be at risk for one. The scientific evidence is too limited to recommend the strategy, called doxy-PEP, to all people who might be exposed to infection-causing bacteria during sex.

The agency released draft guidelines on Monday and plans to finalize them after a 45-day public comment period.

A close-up view of a bottle of the antibiotic doxycycline, held by a hand in a pharmacy.
“We need game-changing innovations to turn the S.T.I. epidemic around, and this is a major step in the right direction,” an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Why It Matters: Rates of S.T.I.s are skyrocketing.

In 2021, there were 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, more than 700,000 cases of gonorrhea and nearly 177,000 cases of syphilis in the United States, together tallying up to $1.1 billion in direct medical costs. (Rates of babies born with syphilis also soared that year, with nearly 3,000 affected.)

All three S.T.I.s are caused by bacteria and are easily treated with antibiotics. But the closure of sexual health clinics across the country and a drop in public awareness has contributed to a sharp rise in infections.

Gonorrhea cases have increased 118 percent since a historical low in 2009, according to the C.D.C. Syphilis was nearly eliminated in the United States about 20 years ago, but cases have risen 74 percent since 2017.

On any given day in 2018, about one in five Americans had an S.T.I., the C.D.C. has estimated.

“We need game-changing innovations to turn the S.T.I. epidemic around, and this is a major step in the right direction,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the agency’s National Center for H.I.V., Viral Hepatitis, S.T.D. and TB Prevention, said in an emailed statement.

The C.D.C.’s guidelines are based on studies that show that a single dose of doxycycline taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex dramatically cuts the risk of the infections.

Evidence from emerging research was compelling enough that clinics in some cities, such as San Francisco, have been offering doxy-PEP to those at high risk of infection for months. Generally, patients are given a supply of pills and told to take one within three days of an encounter during which they might have become infected.

But rates of S.T.I.s are highest among Black people and Native Americans, who are often those with the least access to health care. “No prevention tool — no matter how powerful — will change the S.T.I. epidemic if it doesn’t reach the people who need it most,” Dr. Mermin said.

Doxycycline has been in use for decades, and there are few indications that bacteria have become resistant to it. Syphilis and chlamydia do not often develop resistance, but gonorrhea is another question: Those bacteria have become resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics.

Still, the picture may change depending on how many people take doxy-PEP and how often, some experts cautioned.

“At the population level, that does worry me,” said Antón Castellanos Usigli, a sexual health expert who is an adjunct lecturer at the Columbia Mailman School of Health.

In places like his native Mexico, Dr. Castellanos Usigli said, indiscriminate use of antibiotics has fueled the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, which can alter a person’s gut microbiome.

What Happens Next: The C.D.C. will finalize new guidelines.

Evidence so far supports doxy-PEP’s use only in men who have sex with men and in transgender women. In those groups, the antibiotic cut rates of syphilis and chlamydia by about 90 percent and gonorrhea by about 55 percent.

Men who have sex with men account for nearly half of reported syphilis cases, according to the C.D.C. If studies show the approach to be effective in heterosexual cisgender men and cisgender women, the guidelines may be expanded.

The agency said doctors should prescribe doxy-PEP as part of a comprehensive sexual health program that includes counseling, screening and treatment for the infections and for H.I.V.

“Doxy-PEP will be a good option for some patients,” Dr. Castellanos Usigli said. “But we will have to do a lot of education with medical providers and patients so that we target the best candidates and prevent misuse and overuse.”

Complete Article HERE!

Sex in the lab

— Unravelling the secrets of sex and sexuality the scientific way

Research shows that among bonobo or pygmy chimpanzees, who engage in a great deal of sex, such sexual behaviour helps resolve conflicts, which allows natural resources to be shared more efficiently among them

Leading neuroscientist Simon LeVay’s fascinating new book says sexual orientation could be determined by genes, why lizards get by without sex, and how oxytocin and vasopressin could be key to falling in love

By Jane Borges

Science might not have all the answers, but when it comes to seeking truths about sex, British-American neuroscientist Simon LeVay feels that the “scientific method is the best way forward”. LeVay, who has served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School, Boston and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, California, is best known for his sensational 1991 report that documented a tiny difference in brain structure between homosexual and straight men. His research pointed to how a tiny cell cluster in the brain, known as the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus, or INAH3, which “is deeply involved in regulating male-typical sex behaviour,” was bigger in straight men; the gay men’s cell clusters were in the same size range as women’s. A feature published in the Discover Magazine in 1994, claimed that the study had “catapulted him [LeVay] from his scientific ivory tower into the heated fray of homosexual politics”.

Nearly 32 years later, his fame notwithstanding, LeVay remains just as deeply invested and curious about research around sex and human sexuality. His just-released title Attraction, Love, Sex: The Inside Story (Bloomsbury India) reveals how, world over, scientists like him are unravelling the secrets of sex and sexuality, and in the process, shattering traditional ideas and prejudices. “Much of the research on sexuality is published in academic papers that are difficult for non-scientists to access or understand,” he tells mid-day in an email interview. “Yet buried in this enormous body of research are clues to some important mysteries about sex.” With his new book, LeVay says he wanted to describe the progress that is being made in finding the answers.

The central mystery of sex, says LeVay, is why we reproduce sexually. “To investigate this mystery, I reviewed research that is being done in species ranging from single-celled yeast to vertebrates such as lizards.” Lizards seem to get along fine without sex. “All these lizards are female and they reproduce by virgin birth [asexual reproduction]. In fact, this could be advantageous in evolutionary terms, because it doesn’t require the existence of males. Yet most species do reproduce sexually, either some of the time or [as in our own species] as their only form of reproduction,” he says. Sexual reproduction, he explains, involves the mixing of genes from two parents. “The most likely explanation for the existence of sexual reproduction, in my opinion, is that this mixing allows for the removal of harmful mutations in a species’ genes—mutations that would otherwise accumulate over the generations. Asexual species may crop up now and then and flourish for many generations, but over a long period of time, they are likely to go extinct.”

Simon Levay
Simon Levay

Over the course of evolution, however, some species have developed functions for sex that have no direct reproductive purpose. “For example, our close relatives the bonobos engage in a great deal of sex between females and males. I discuss research indicating that these seemingly useless forms of sexual behaviour are in fact advantageous in evolutionary terms. In bonobos, they appear to help resolve conflicts, which allow resources to be shared more efficiently,” he says.

In the area of sexual orientation research itself, newer and important benchmarks have been set since his own pioneering work. LeVay, who identifies as gay, alludes to the 2019 scientific report by Italian geneticist Andrea Ganna and his colleagues. “Using genetic data from several hundred thousand individuals, Ganna found that genes account for about one-third of the total causation of a person’s sexual orientation. He also identified several locations within the genome where genes influencing sexual orientation [either in males, females, or both sexes] are located. Nevertheless, his work indicates that ‘gay genes’—individual genes that act like switches to determine a person’s sexuality—must be rare if they exist at all. Rather, numerous genes, each having a weak effect, act through complex networks during pre- and postnatal life to establish a person’s orientation.”

LeVay, who has written/co-written over 12 books in the past, also delves into the science behind relationships, arousal, love and attraction. Exploring the latter, he takes us through studies that point to how it is “closely linked to the stomach, odours, and even facial symmetry”. The results, however, are a mixed bag and even LeVay feels should be taken with a pinch of salt.

“Two groups of researchers did this experiment: They showed outlines of female figures varying in fatness to male college students who were either hungry or who had just eaten. In both studies, the hungry students judged the fatter figures more attractive than did the students who were full,” shares LeVay, adding, “This finding goes along with a large body of evidence that judgments of attractiveness can be modified depending on the circumstances of the person doing the judging. In contrast, some aspects of facial attractiveness, such as symmetry, seem to be fixed. This suggests that symmetrical faces are indicators of healthy development, so that preferring such faces may be adaptive in evolutionary terms.”

According to him, the fact that both research groups got the same result strengthens the believability of the finding. “In other cases, research groups have reported conflicting findings. That’s true for some ‘sweaty T-shirt’ studies: One Swiss research group found that men rate the odour of T-shirts worn by women most attractive if the women differ in certain genes from those of the raters, while another group at the same university failed to find any relationship between attractiveness and genetic similarity. That’s part of the scientific process: One of those studies must be wrong, but we don’t know which, and it will take further studies to resolve the conflict.” He, however, rues the fact that research has paid very little attention to the opposite of sexual attraction, which is sexual aversion or sexual disgust.

Love—“which is not the same thing as sexual attraction”—that emotion that has confounded mankind since eons, also finds room in the science laboratory. “It is a desire for union with another person, and consists of passion, intimacy, and commitment in variable proportions,” LeVay says, adding, “People often use the word ‘chemistry’ to explain what attracts lovers to each other, and the science bears that out: research in prairie voles—small rodents that form lasting pair bonds—has demonstrated a key role for two brain chemicals, oxytocin and vasopressin, in sexual pair-bonding. Another brain chemical, dopamine, also plays an important role. These chemicals are not released at random within the brain but within complex synaptic networks that are currently being deciphered.” Much about love, he says, is still a mystery—but maybe not for much longer.

Complete Article HERE!

It’s Your Birthday. Bring on the Nudes.

— For a certain class of extremely online gay man, explicit photos are the go-to gift for friends and followers.

Selfie

By David Mack

When David Dulin celebrated his 36th birthday in March, he asked his Twitter followers for just two things: cash donations to his online payment account, and pictures of them in their own birthday suits.

“It started as a joke, but it’s just become something that we run with,” said Mr. Dulin, a retail worker in Charlotte, N.C. “Almost every birthday I’ll be like, ‘OK, Cash App and nudes: Drop them!’”

Mr. Dulin began coyly asking for nude photographs via social media on his birthday a few years ago as something of a test after seeing other gay men make similar requests on their own birthdays. He was surprised, he said, when some of his online acquaintances delivered on the invitation, admitting that they had been looking for an opportunity to flirt with him.

In recent years, many queer men have begun sending and receiving nude selfies on social media for their birthdays. Variations on “It’s my birthday, send nudes” have been uttered so frequently online that it has become something of a meme (or, at the very least, a generic way for a gay man to announce his birthday, whether or not he actually expects to receive any explicit images). The practice has become so normalized that the request is sometimes simplified to, “It’s my birthday — you know what to do.”

Brendan Drake, 36, a choreographer in Los Angeles who identifies as genderqueer, said he had made the request so often that this year on his birthday he received nudes from friends without even having to ask. “It’s almost like it was expected,” he said.

The trend of gay men soliciting nudes on their birthday speaks to the unique nature of gay friendships, but also plays into a social media culture that rewards humor, according to Tom Roach, who teaches gender and sexuality studies at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I.

“I think it’s basically a provocation and a challenge, but in a campy way — it has a certain ‘wink, wink, nod, nod’ feel to it,” said Professor Roach, who has written books on queer friendships and digital relationships. “I don’t think people are sincerely, desperately seeking nude pictures of their friends. I think they’re doing it to be provocative, to be like, ‘Look at how shamelessly sex-positive I am!’”

In many parts of the country, it is not uncommon for gay people to have a more relaxed attitude toward sex, including alternatives to monogamy such as open relationships, and many gay friendships begin as casual sex encounters. A 2022 study also found that 85 percent of respondents who were in same-sex relationships had formed romantic partnerships out of friendships, while only 68 percent of all respondents said they had taken the “friends-to-lovers pathway.”

Gay men, of course, are not a monolith. But given the community was born out of a shared sexual attraction to men, Professor Roach said, it doesn’t surprise him that friendships between gay men today “don’t play by the same rules” as others.

In addition to cellphone cameras making it far easier to quickly snap and send a racy photo, social media apps like Instagram and X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — allow users to curate private lists of “close friends.” For many gay men, the feature can be used to ensure that an open call for birthday nudes reaches only a carefully selected audience — one excluding straight friends and colleagues.

Some of these behaviors mimic well-established practices on hookup apps, where the trading of sexually explicit images can be de rigueur. “It’s also importing some of the norms of Grindr into other platforms that don’t necessarily traffic in nudes,” Professor Roach said. “It’s kind of like worlds colliding.”

A birthday can also pose an opportunity for someone ordinarily too shy to solicit nudes to do so in a socially sanctioned way, while the messages themselves can function as an all-purpose declaration of consent for others to shoot their shot in the most risqué way possible.

“It really feels like a way of publicly doing so where the shame will just be slightly less,” said Manuel Betancourt, 38, the author of “The Male Gazed,” a collection of essays on thirst traps and queer longing. “Then, it can be a door, or it can be a window, or it could be sort of an opening into something else.”

The decision to send a birthday nude is often predicated on feelings of attraction, but it’s not always about seeking sex. Jake Niemeyer, a 32-year-old television editor in Los Angeles, said he had sent birthday nudes to online acquaintances as far away as Scotland with no expectations of physical intimacy.

“There’s next to no chance I will ever see this person in-person,” Mr. Niemeyer said. “But still, I find them attractive, they say they find me attractive and that’s kind of a nice feeling. It’s a safe way for both of you to have a micro sexual interaction.”

In a group that often celebrates and rewards idealized muscular bodies, leading some gay men to develop body-image issues, the act of swapping nudes with trusted friends can actually prove to be deeply affirming.

“It’s very body-positive,” said Zachary Zane, 32, a bisexual sex columnist. “You feel sexy, you feel affirmed, you feel validated and loved by your friends. It’s not an invitation to hook up; it’s more so us actually just supporting each other and showing each other love.”

The pandemic isolation of 2020 may have fueled the sharing of nude images among gay men who felt cut off from one another. For Mr. Drake, the choreographer, those fearful months made him worry less about whether his nude images were floating around online. Alone for several months with just his phone for company, he also found important intimacy in trading nudes with friends.

Having an online outlet for sexual expression “was actually a little lifesaving for me,” Mr. Drake said. “A lot of people will call it toxic, but I don’t think it’s toxic. I think it’s really life-affirming.”

Complete Article HERE!

How First US Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill Could Revolutionize Reproductive Health

— “After a year during which there has been very little good news about people’s reproductive health, this is the first solid win in a long time,” says BU gynecologist

The FDA’s approval of Opill for over-the-counter use makes it the first hormonal contraceptive available without a prescription in the United States.

By Molly Callahan

The FDA’s approval of the first over-the-counter birth control pill in the United States could be a revolutionary change in birth control and reproductive health, says Katharine O’Connell White, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

White, who is also vice chair of academics and associate director of the complex family planning fellowship at Boston Medical Center, says she felt “jubilation and glee” at hearing news of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Opill, a hormonal birth control pill, on Thursday.

“After a year during which there has been very little good news about people’s reproductive health, this is the first solid win in a long time,” she says. “And it finally puts the United States on par with most other countries in the world, where people have always had access to pills without a prescription.”

The news was received with support from almost every major reproductive health organization in the country, including the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the North American Society of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

The FDA’s approval comes amid myriad legal battles over reproductive rights—and almost exactly a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, rescinding the right to abortion nationally.

Perrigo Company, which manufactures the pill, says it will likely be available in stores and from online retailers in the United States in early 2024.

BU Today spoke with White about the safety and effectiveness of Opill, as well as questions that still remain about its rollout and accessibility.

Q&A

with Katharine O’Connell White

BU Today: Based on what you’ve seen or read about Opill, how effective is it compared to other, prescription or nonprescription, birth control options?

White: The pill that got approved for over-the-counter use is a progestin-only pill. There are two types of birth control pills: the vast majority of pills—the ones you think about when you hear “The pill”—have estrogen and progesterone in them. But a few varieties are progestin only, for people who can’t or don’t want to take estrogen. So, this pill looks to be like other progestin pills. And all pills have roughly the same effectiveness rate—that they’re about 97 percent effective when taken perfectly, and about 93 percent effective when taken like a typical human being.

So, it’s a very effective method of contraception. And it’s now the most effective birth control that you can buy at the drugstore without a prescription. When you compare it to condoms and spermicides, or Plan B and other emergency contraception, all of those are effective, but they’re not as effective as a daily birth control pill.

BU Today: It sounds like in terms of effectiveness, it’s not necessarily better to get a prescription birth control pill vs this over-the-counter version. Is that correct?

White: So much of it is about access, which sounds like an advocacy talking point. But access has a real impact on people’s lives.

From the medical perspective, there’s no difference between a pill you take by prescription or a pill that you would then get over the counter. But the best birth control method for any given person is the one they’re most likely to take. And to take consistently. And now, we have a method that is not behind the walls of a doctor’s office. You don’t have to go in for a visit or a pap smear or even just get through on a telephone line in order to access this birth control. You can just walk into a place and get it and take it. That, for a lot of people, is going to be the key to feeling in control of their birth control.

BU Today: Do you see this as a step toward equalizing access to birth control or reproductive healthcare?

White: Hopefully—although I’m hesitant.

What’s really great about this is that it’s finally a highly effective method—a hormonal method—of birth control for which you don’t need medical insurance and you don’t need access to a doctor. This is great news for people who work weekdays and can’t get to a doctor’s office because they can’t take the time off of work. It’s great news for people who don’t have health insurance, or who are underinsured, meaning their insurance doesn’t cover a lot, or any, contraceptive methods. If you are new to this country and don’t have health insurance or if you are in a new job and in a new state and don’t yet have access to your insurance, this is going to help.

I’ll also add that this is birth control that you do not need to persuade [a healthcare provider] that you should take or want to take. It is a completely independent decision that you get to make, and that’s important.

The reason I’m hopeful that this will equalize access, but not certain, is because we don’t know how much it’s going to cost. And so it’s only an equity issue if everyone can actually access it. The company says that it’s committed to widespread access for the pill and that it’s going to have some kind of voucher or savings program for people who don’t have insurance coverage. Along with advocacy groups, it is going to push for coverage by insurance companies so that even though it’s over-the-counter, you can still use your insurance card, like you can in many places for emergency contraception, or until recently, COVID tests. But we need to see what the sticker price is.

BU Today: Besides the price, are there other things that you, or your colleagues in the medical community, are waiting to learn?

White: The implementation of something is always important. For example, when emergency contraception first went over-the-counter, it was actually, in a lot of cases, behind-the-counter. You had to ask a pharmacist for it, which meant that not only did you have to have a conversation, and possibly justify why you wanted something, there was a chance they would say no.

I want to see this product on the shelf, next to Plan B, next to KY jelly. I want it to be as easy as just taking it off the shelf, putting it in your cart, and checking out.

I also wonder: is it going to be behind in a clamshell? Are you going to have to get an employee to unlock it for you? Are you still going to have to deal with people’s judgment? Will mom-and-pop pharmacies refuse to stock it? Will Amazon stock it? Will national pharmacy chains make it available online? Because in that case, I can get it with my ibuprofen when I do an Amazon run. All of this remains to be seen. But I’m hopeful.

BU Today: Are there certain populations who might find an over-the-counter hormonal birth control option especially helpful?

White: Adolescents—you might not want to ask your pediatrician, who’s been seeing you since you were a baby, about the fact that maybe you need birth control. Adolescents are also people who maybe haven’t yet figured out how to get to the doctor on their own. Maybe they don’t have a car or don’t have access or even know how to navigate the system to try to get their own gynecologist. Now, they can just take matters into their own hands and get it.

I also think anyone who is on someone else’s insurance, where an explanation of benefits goes home whenever you have a visit with a provider or get a prescription filled. An over-the-counter option leaves less of a record. So if you are in a situation where you are not wanting your parents to know or not wanting your partner to know, this provides another layer of protection.

For people who have medical problems, whose doctors just tell them not to have sex so you don’t get pregnant—which is actually a thing—and don’t know who to turn to for advice, they can now do their own reading, decide this might be right for them, and then access it on their own. People who just changed jobs and whose new insurance hasn’t kicked in, or who have not yet found a new doctor. People who’ve just moved to a new state.

There are also all these situations during which there can be gaps in birth-control use. Let’s say you are a prescription-pill user or a patch or a ring user, but you find yourself in this position where you’re between insurance providers, between doctors, between homes, you then can just go get a pack [of birth control pills] to bridge that gap.

Or people who travel and forget their pack. You’re crazily packing for the airport, and you realize you’ve forgotten your pills. No worries, you can just go get a pack and take those pills for a week and then resume your birth control back at home.

This means that birth control doesn’t have to be this precious, Hope Diamond–like resource. Now, your birth control pills can be available to you whenever you need them, wherever you are. That is revolutionary. No one should have to fight for birth control. And now you have an option where you can just go get it.

BU Today: What about from a safety viewpoint? Is it safe to take these over-the-counter pills?

White: I think there’s a natural hesitancy to embrace something as safe, especially when, for so long, people have been telling you that it’s not. There’s this idea that, ‘Well, we’ve had birth control pills for 50 years, why hasn’t it been available over the counter until now? Is it actually safe?’

It’s so important for people to know that we have reams of good evidence about how safe the pill is. There are very few people who cannot use this pill, and it is very well labeled for who shouldn’t use it.

There’s a very small group of people who can’t, and everybody else can use it safely. People who have breast cancer or certain kinds of liver disease or certain kinds of benign liver tumors, and some people with lupus, should not use this. But people who have the kinds of conditions on this list are people who are already plugged into a healthcare system where they can get access. The vast majority of healthy people who don’t need to see doctors can all take this.

BU Today: What should people who might use this as their first hormonal birth control know?

White: One of the common side effects of a progesterone-only pill is irregular bleeding. This might be occasional spotting, it might be bleeding more days than not, though not usually as heavy as a period. If people are not prepared for that, it can be very surprising. I’ve had more than one patient who stopped their birth control pills when they were spotting, because they thought that meant either it was making their body sick or that it wasn’t working. My message is that you may have weird bleeding for three months, possibly even a little longer. And that is normal. Weird is normal when it comes to bleeding on this pill. So don’t be alarmed.

Complete Article HERE!

Queer Reading

— SF State prof sees reasons for rethinking LGBTQ history

San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein holds a copy of his new book, a second edition of “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement.”

by Brian Bromberger

For Marc Stein, professor of history at San Francisco State University, queer history is a calling, realizing he is part of a network and a community of gay intellectuals. Many U.S. college history departments don’t even define queer history as a bona fide field or it’s been ghettoized to a few classes, despite the fact courses in the subject are very popular with students. Even Stein is technically a historian of constitutional law and politics at SF State.

Stein has become an evangelist for the promotion of gay and lesbian history, rooted in his orientation as an activist. His passion for the field is exhibited in his newest book, a totally revised second edition of his 2012 classic, “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement,” (Routledge, $42.95) including a new chapter, “LGBT and Queer Activism Beyond 1990.” When he wrote the first edition his aim was to provide an up-to-date account of the movement that was “national in scope, comprehensive in chronology, and synthetic in ambition,” he noted.

In his book’s introduction, Stein lists the reason why gay and lesbian history needs to be rethought: to help address the widespread lack of knowledge about that history; to serve the needs of today’s gender and sexual dissidents, along with everyone who identifies with the movement’s agendas and aspirations; and to teach people about some of the major political and philosophical questions that have absorbed the U.S., such as what is meant when referring to freedom, liberty, equality, and democracy, especially pertinent in these politically partisan and divisive times.

Stein mentions that studying this history can help readers reflect on why some people become activists, why movements develop when and where they do, why they adopt particular strategies and goals, and why they rise and fall. He notes in the introduction that the book also underscores the historicity and variability of sex, gender, and sexuality, especially how these forces changed the movement and vice versa; shows how people can support those who are working to promote equality, freedom and justice in the 21st century; and finally, to show the interrelationship between political and cultural activism, which has promoted social change.

Stein, 59, discussed the new second edition with the Bay Area Reporter in an email interview, and explained why he decided to add the new chapter.

“As a gay man who was born in the 1960s and came of age in the 1980s, I’ve long been fascinated by the history of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the decades that most directly shaped the world I came to know in the 1980s,” Stein wrote. “I don’t think historians are particularly good at analyzing the present or the very recent past. Other types of scholars, including sociologists and political scientists, tend to focus on the present. But many publishers and many members of the public commonly want historians to include a ‘bring the story up to the present’ chapter or conclusion. I often teach my students that those chapters are commonly the weakest in historical studies. As I say in both editions of my ‘Rethinking’ book, that perspective haunted the writing of the book’s final chapter.

“In any case, I was pleased when Routledge informed me that my volume was one of the most successful in its social movements series and commissioned me to write a second edition. Since the original version was published before the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decisions and before the Trump era, the 2012 edition was outdated,” he added, referring to the high court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.

“I originally was only going to substantially revise the final chapter, but because there’s been such great LGBT history scholarship about the pre-1990 era published in the last decade, I ended up revising the whole book. Because the post-1990 period now includes the Trump era, I was able to strengthen my arguments against historical narratives that assume that progress is linear and inevitable,” Stein stated.

Stein writes that the gay and lesbian movement has been replaced or superseded by LGBTQ and other movements in the post-1990s era. There’s even been controversy in the title of his book.

“My book’s title has been misunderstood as implying that I am anti-queer or that I don’t appreciate the broader coalition that we invoke when we refer to the LGBTQ+ movement,” he wrote in the email. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I helped found an early queer activist group, Queer Action, in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. My first book, published in 2000, offers critically queer perspectives on the history of gay and lesbian politics in Philadelphia. I have commonly used LGBT, LGBTQ, and queer as key terms in other projects. But as a historian, I believe it’s important to be true to the historical evidence of the periods we’re studying.”

Stein doesn’t think there was an LGBTQ+ movement before the 1990s, but rather a gay and lesbian movement.

“For most of the period from 1950 to 1990, the gay and lesbian movement functioned largely as just that; it was commonly anti-bisexual and anti-trans, even as bisexuals and trans people argued for the gay and lesbian movement to change,” Stein explained. “Bisexual and trans people were part of the gay and lesbian movement, but that doesn’t mean the movement prioritized their issues. People with disabilities were part of the movement, but we don’t talk about the [lesbian, gay, disabled] movement because the movement did not organize or understand itself that way.”

Stein stated that a largely autonomous trans movement started in the 1950s and 1960s, which he discusses in the book.

“Starting in the 1970s, there was a largely autonomous bisexual movement and I discuss that,” he stated. “We know of key episodes in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when bisexual and trans activists pushed the gay and lesbian movement to be more inclusive; they commonly failed in those efforts until the 1990s. ‘Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement’ devotes lots of attention to these issues, in some cases more so than other books that purport to cover LGBTQ+ history, but I try to avoid the problem of projecting today’s favored terms and concepts onto historical periods when they don’t work particularly well.”

People filled the Castro to celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision on June 26, 2015.

Political coalitions
Stein is interested in the ways in which political coalitions come together and fall apart.

“I think the LGBTQ+ political coalition is a remarkable achievement; we should pay attention to how, why, and when it happened (and how, why, and when it did not include other groups that might have become part of the coalition but didn’t),” he wrote in the email. “I’m glad that since the 1990s we’ve developed a stronger LGBTQ+ political coalition; I just don’t believe that we should minimize the efforts that it required to make that happen. As for the future, movements come, go, change, adapt, and reconfigure themselves. It would be arrogant for anyone to assume that today’s language and today’s way of thinking will be embraced by future generations; haven’t we learned enough from the past to know better?”

Queer activism today
In characterizing the new queer activism of today, Stein stated that he resists the tendency to consign the pre-1990 movement to the dustbin of history.

“It shows that much of what queer activism values — celebration of gender and sexual dissidence; rejection of gender and sexual privilege; critiques of racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, and ableism; intersectional multiculturalism — existed in nascent form in the pre-1990 era,” Stein stated. “But something happened in the 1990s, when radically queer tendencies within larger LGBTQ+ worlds became more influential and powerful. This had happened before — in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, for example, and in the second half of the 1980s, when radical AIDS activism emerged — but in the early 1990s there was a more sustained transformation, one that was significant enough that we now find it difficult to talk about the ‘gay and lesbian’ movement when we’re talking about post-1990 developments.”

Stein also talked about the gay and lesbian movement’s biggest success and failure.

“If we’re talking about the period from 1950 to 1990, I would say that the movement’s biggest success was changing mainstream and lesbian/gay ideas about lesbian/gay people,” he wrote in the email. “We could talk about concrete policy successes, including the 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness; the decriminalization of sodomy in half of the states in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the passage of sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws in many local and state jurisdictions in the 1970s and 1980s; and the emergence of lesbian/gay people as an important part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition in the same period. But underlying all of those policy successes was lesbian/gay political mobilization, which transformed mainstream and lesbian/gay consciousness about gender and sexuality.

“As for the biggest failure, I think the movement was more successful at combating anti-homosexual bias, discrimination, and prejudice than it was in challenging heteronormative privilege,” Stein stated. “The movement succeeded to some extent at convincing many straight people to adopt ‘live and let live’ philosophies, but not at forcing straight people to renounce their special rights and privileges or encouraging everyone to come out. More concretely, I think the movement of 1950 to 1990 failed at transforming the country’s educational system, which continues to relentlessly reproduce heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and gender normativity.”

Current backlash
Stein was asked how to interpret the rash of anti-trans legislation sweeping across the country and whether it’s a backlash to the queer movement’s successes.

“I think in part we can see the rise of anti-trans legislation as an example of backlash politics, and the particular type of backlash politics that bullies some of the most vulnerable components of a disenfranchised community,” Stein stated. “Without the trans-affirmative reforms that occurred in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, I don’t think we would be seeing the anti-trans backlash that we are seeing in the 2020s. But, there’s also something else going on that relates to the politics of conservatism, populist conservatism, and fascism, in and beyond the United States.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, key conservative leaders in the United States made critical decisions about the future of their electoral coalition,” he explained. “Faced with the prospects of permanent political marginalization, foreign policy and economic conservatives formed coalitions with religious and social conservatives, most notably in the Christian right. By the Trump era, the culturally reactionary tail was wagging the economically conservative dog. Anti-trans politics, like anti-Black and Brown, anti-abortion, and anti-immigrant politics, works by deluding working-class and middle-class white people into thinking that their interests are aligned with corporate America, traditional values, and strong-man authoritarianism rather than with broad-based democratic coalitions of the dispossessed.”

Stein also discussed the current effort on the right to ban books in schools and libraries, including many on LGBTQ topics.

“I think this is all about so-called child protection. For centuries, we’ve seen gender and sexual conservatives weaponize ideas of “child protection” to further their aims,” Stein wrote in the email. “We’ve also seen them instigate ‘moral panics,’ where popular sentiment is mobilized to address problems that are exaggerated far beyond empirically valid foundations.

“In the past, cultural discourses about sexual ‘perverts’ and gender ‘deviants’ played up the innocence of youth, who were seen as vulnerable to enticement, grooming, recruitment, and seduction,” Stein stated. “This led, for example, to the passage of ‘sexual psychopath’ laws in many states in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the 1970s, similar dynamics led to Anita Bryant’s ‘Save Our Children’ campaign against sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws and to California’s Briggs initiative, which targeted LGBT teachers and their allies.”

Stein talked about work he has done.

“In one of my recent research projects, published this spring in the journal Law and Social Inquiry, I showed that in the 1970s, students at 14 U.S. colleges and universities, including two California State Universities, had to go to court when their institutions denied formal recognition to newly established lesbian/gay student groups; one of the common justifications offered by school administrators was that vulnerable young people might be tempted to try out homosexuality if there were officially recognized lesbian/gay student groups,” he explained.

Parallels
Stein sees many parallels between what is occurring today with what happened in the 1970s.

“In both cases, social and cultural conservatives responded to gender and sexual liberalization by attempting to freak people out with moral panics,” he stated. “Unfortunately, many media outlets play into conservative hands by reporting relentlessly on issues that are framed in reactionary terms. Today, for example, we rarely hear about the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public education [including California]; we rarely hear empowering stories about drag queen story hours; we rarely hear about the joys of athletic competition from the perspectives of young trans people and their allies.

“We also don’t hear about the ways in which social and cultural conservatives want our children to be taught rigid and inflexible ways of thinking about gender and sexuality — we don’t hear, for example, about the ways in which traditional educational practices offer up narrow and propagandistic lessons about gender identities and sexual orientation,” he added. “It would be fascinating to see what would happen if the states that are banning public school lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation actually were true to that notion — imagine a future world in which ‘boys’ were not taught to be ‘boys,’ ‘girls’ were not taught to be ‘girls,’ and children were not taught to be straight!

“As for book banning in particular, this arises in all of the contexts I’ve just mentioned, but it also arises in the context of declining support for public education in the United States, attacks on colleges and universities, and anti-intellectualism in public discourse,” Stein stated. “LGBTQ+ liberals and leftists should be mobilizing to support public education, not just to defend LGBTQ+ interests. Beyond that, I would just add that it’s a little bizarre to be focusing on banning books at this particular historical moment, when information is increasingly shared in forms other than books.”

Effort to silence queer history
Stein is concerned about the silencing of queer history in school curriculums.

“First, I would encourage us not to ignore the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public schools. When’s the last time we read a mainstream media report (or even a queer media report) about how that’s going or how things are going in the next set of states that will do likewise?”

Stein mentioned Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which Republican Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed last year that bans discussion of homosexuality or gender identity in schools through the third grade. Recently, DeSantis signed a law extending the ban through eighth grade — and the Florida Board of Education expanded the limiting of classroom instruction through 12th grade.

“As for what’s going on in more conservative states, I wrote a satirical piece recently for the History News Network that praised “R. DeSantis” for banning lessons about gender and sexuality in public schools. I was trying to get at what I hope will prove to be a legal fatal flaw in these policy initiatives,” Stein wrote. “We commonly refer to these laws as ‘don’t say gay,’ but they’re more than that: they ban lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation, which presumably means that public schools should no longer be teaching boys to be boys, girls to be girls, or all people to be straight. Imagine a second grader who asks which bathroom to use; under Florida’s new laws, the teacher should be prohibited from answering. And the laws have to be framed in theoretically neutral ways, or they would be vulnerable to First and 14th Amendment challenges based on free speech and equal protection. If interpreted literally, these laws ban teaching youth about gender and sexual normativity, just as they ban teaching youth about LGBTQ+ identities and orientations.”

Stein stated that as a college professor, the bans don’t really affect him. But he has other concerns.

“As someone who teaches in the post-secondary education sector in California, I’m not concerned about those types of bans,” he stated. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have ongoing concerns about how we teach LGBTQ+ history in colleges and universities. My university seems to be happy to have a set of specialized courses on LGBTQ+ topics. But do colleges and universities have ways to encourage faculty who teach courses on other topics to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ issues? Do my colleagues who teach introductory history courses incorporate LGBTQ+ history into their classes? I honestly don’t know.”

The future
Stein discussed the future of the queer movement.

“I’ll say that asking a historian to talk about the future is like asking a doctor to draw up architectural plans for a new house,” he stated. “I know this: there’s much more work to be done. My book’s new conclusion references a whole series of recent commentators who contend that the LGBTQ+ movement is finished, having succeeded in accomplishing all of its major goals. And these are not comedians. I’d like to see the movement broaden out, forming effective coalitions with other gender and sexual dissidents. I’d like to see the movement more effectively utilize creative direct action protests and mass grassroots mobilization. I’d like to see the movement focus more on education.”

Last year, Stein authored his “Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism” (University of California Press, $29.95). He defines himself as a queer scholarly activist. He explained that role.

“My ‘Queer Public History’ book reprints more than 30 essays that I’ve written for general rather than scholarly audiences, some for LGBTQ+ newspapers such as the B.A.R.,” he stated. “It also reflects on how queer publics nourished LGBTQ+ history projects, long before there was a place for LGBTQ+ history in college and university history departments. I use the notion of scholarly activism in a few different ways. It refers to the use of research for activist purposes; it refers to the activism that was necessary to make a place for LGBTQ+ studies within higher education, academic disciplines, and scholarly associations. I’ve been engaging in that work for decades and I used ‘Queer Public History’ to reflect on that.”

Accolades
Stein recently has received two accolades recognizing his role and contribution to both academic and public history.

“In January, gay public historian Jonathan Ned Katz selected me to replace him as the director of the OutHistory website,” he stated. “One of my first major exhibits on OutHistory, since becoming its director, is a study I completed with my students that documents more than 600 LGBT direct action protests from 1965 to 1973; we’re now working on expanding the study to cover 1974-76.”

The B.A.R. reported on the direct action history study when it was released in March.

“Then in April, the Organization of American Historians, which represents thousands of U.S. historians, nominated me to become its president in several years,” Stein stated. “If elected this fall (and I’m the only candidate, so I’ll be very embarrassed if I lose!), I’ll be the first president whose work has focused primarily on LGBTQ+ history and the first to come from the California State University system. I see the nomination as a statement about an entire generation of us who succeeded in using scholarly activism to make a place for LGBTQ+ history in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education.”

Ultimately, Stein believes that rethinking the history of the U.S. gay and lesbian and LGBTQ movements should lead to a more general rethinking of U.S. history.

“This will likely only occur if more students, teachers, and scholars engage in political activism to change the ways in which history is learned and taught in primary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions,” Stein stated. “It might mean trying to convince LGBT, queer, gender, and sexuality studies programs to make the history of political activism more central in their courses and curricula. And it might mean developing new ways to promote critical thinking about LGBT and queer history outside the classroom: in libraries and museums, on television and the internet, in film and video, and in various other venues. In other words, we need a new movement to rethink history.”

Complete Article HERE!

How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity

— The pioneering gay writer and editor Michael Denneny, who died on April 12, learned from his teacher Arendt that an individual can be free only as part of a free community

Arendt’s life had for so many years been lived for the Jewish people that she could not look on “them” as something separate from “herself.”’

by Blake Smith

Hannah Arendt left behind little in the way of an obvious institutional or intellectual legacy during her brief years at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought during the 1960s. The student who best understood her ideas—and the example of her life—as a summons to action in the world, was Michael Denneny, who died recently, shortly after the publication of a memoir-anthology, On Christopher Street. The book records how his teacher inspired him to abandon his Ph.D., follow her to New York, and found what would become America’s most important magazine for gay men—Christopher Street, along with its associated publishing line, Stonewall Inn Editions—in the late 1970s and 1980s, those pivotal years that saw first the emergence of a distinct gay male urban culture and then its near-annihilation from AIDS.

Arendt would not seem to be an obvious inspiration for a gay men’s magazine. Even if there is a certain chain-smoking archness in her 1964 interview for the German television show Zur Person, she is not among the straight women whom gay men single out for a typically ambivalent yet ardent brand of admiration, in what is usually a perverse sort of drag-performance-by-proxy. Arendt’s political philosophy, organized around claims about human nature supported by examples taken from ancient Athens (while engaged in a covert but insistent critique of her own former mentor, Martin Heidegger, who had awakened her to philosophy before covering himself with shame as a proud member of the Nazi Party), can seem both frustratingly distant from the historical present and icily indifferent to the problems of minorities. Denneny’s insight, however, is to have grasped how the apparently abstract universals of Arendt’s teaching grew out of her urgent engagement on behalf of the Jewish people in the 1930s and 40s.

Reading Arendt’s philosophical writing in light of her Zionist activism from that era, Denneny saw how central concepts of her later work made what can be easily dismissed as “lifestyle politics”—the publishing of magazines and novels; the demand for a space of cultural distinction—not a distraction from “real” politics, but an urgent task that makes politics, in Arendt’s special and widely misunderstood meaning, possible. Arendt, Denneny continually reminds readers in On Christopher Street, held that a person can be connected to humanity in general, to his own uniqueness, and indeed to the possibility of transforming himself, only insofar as he is a member of a free community—of a group that possesses the power to build and maintain what Arendt called a “world,” a domain in which members of a group can appear to each other, revealing, remaking, and remembering themselves.

Today, Arendt has many admirers in American academia, and a wide midwit readership that consults her writings for political and moral apothegems applicable to our ongoing crisis, whose origins they imagine as coming from the right and never from inside their own intellectual homes. Every university of any repute has on staff some left-liberal scholar who mistakenly sees in Arendt an ancestor of her own utterly conventional politics while doing her best to ignore the difficult, apparently reactionary positions Arendt took on everything from racial integration to immigration and the welfare state. If Arendt had been a man, she would have been, if not “cancelled,” then consigned by right-thinking scholars (and therefore cherished by right-wing cranks) among such other Teutonic anachronisms as Oswald Spenger and Eric Voegelin. Arendt is spared this fate at the price of being misunderstood.

Homosexuality is perhaps only a little less ancient than Adam and Eve, but, like Zionism, gay male life is a much more recent creation, one elaborated by activists who tried to transform themselves into something like a people.

She gets no better treatment from her centrist humanist admirers, who transform her into a defender of the warmed-over nineteenth-century liberalism that passes among them for “free thinking.” Her work—with its horror of cliché and mental conformity, its appreciation for the exchange of diverse perspectives, and its appeal to the fragile vitality of independent thought (its reminder, indeed, that these two words form a pleonasm) —is one of the fragments that hold-outs within the academy shore up against their ruin. To find a prestigious ally (a woman! a refugee!) in their resistance to the identitarian posturing that has become essential to elite self-performance, they make of Arendt a liberal individualist, an understanding to which Arendt would surely have responded with a Germanic feminine version of the genteel revulsion that Marshall McLuhan summons for the movie-goers in “Annie Hall.”

Arendt’s famous 1963 letter to Gershon Scholem, who had reproached his old friend in the aftermath of her reporting on the Eichmann trial for her apparent lack of love of the Jewish people, seems, but only seems, to confirm the cosmopolitan tote bag re-imagination of the philosopher. Her famous statement, “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective… I indeed love ‘only’ my friends,” seems to find Arendt a kindred spirit of those who wish to thwart our hastening spiral of mutually antagonizing collective narcissisms by insisting—in an apparently more humane version of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum—that there is no such thing as society, only individuals. But, as Arendt continued in her letter, if she could not “love” the Jewish people it was because “I cannot love myself.” Her response should be read not as a declaration of independence from the demands of the collective, but as a political equivalent of Cordelia’s speech to Lear.

Arendt did not remind Scholem that from 1933 to 1949 she had abandoned scholarship for Zionist activism, sometimes at personal risk, engaging in everything from the practical organizing of relief efforts to writing essays for German and English-language magazines like Aufbau and Menorah Journal—in which she called, with urgent anger sharper and hotter than any merely speakable “love,” for a Jewish army and a new Jewish self-consciousness. Arendt’s life had for so many years been lived for the Jewish people, she implied, that she could not look on “them” as something separate from “herself.” She was not proclaiming the sovereignty of the individual, but rather the non-existence of the latter in isolation from the group that provides its stage of action and frame of meaning—what Arendt called its “world.”

Arendt’s Zionism was as idiosyncratic—and to many, as frustratingly perplexing—as her view of a person’s constitutive mix of personal uniqueness and un-withdrawable membership in a human community into which we find ourselves thrown. She called for Jewish unity while acerbically critiquing every Jewish political institution, tradition and perspective, from Europe to the United States to Palestine—advocating an implausible post-war order in which a Jewish homeland would be secured as part of a vast post-Ottoman federation of nationalities extending from Europe to the Middle East.

Her disappointed hopes, her years of struggle alongside and against other activists, and, as she reminded Scholem, her sense of propriety—her inner alertness that to speak of such things would be an obscene self-sundering, bringing to light feelings that have their authentic life only in intimate darkness—perhaps explain why in her later reflections on politics, such as The Human Condition (1958)and On Revolution (1963), Arendt wrote as if she had not spent a decade and a half as a Jewish activist. Some would say, hardly as if she were a Jew. But the political experience she did not acknowledge having was specifically Jewish, and the path to the rediscovery of what she often called the hidden treasures of ancient Greek thought went directly through Zionism.

Indeed, many of the claims Arendt makes in her work after the 1940s should be understood as translations into universalistic terms of lessons she derived from her reflections on the world-historical emergency of European Jewry. What she described in later years as the problems of modernity—the end of authoritative traditions for orienting moral and political thought and action, the dangerous seductions of Marxism and ethno-nationalist fascism, and the stupidity of self-satisfied liberal elites unable to recognize these desperate conditions—were a cosmopolitanized version of the story she had told in her Zionist writings about, and to, Jews. She saw the latter as unable to return to traditional religion (cut off from it forever by the failure of Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism and the transformations of the Jewish Enlightenment and Reform movement) and faced with the task—from which Communism and Revisionist Zionism threatened to divert it—of building a specifically secular Jewish “world” anchored by, although by no means taking place only in, its historic homeland.

So what about Arendt’s vision appealed to Michael Denneny, a young man from a working-class Irish Catholic background? In part, simply the brilliance of the teacher. As a friend of his told me after his death, Denneny had met Arendt while working as a busboy in the faculty dining room. He would talk with her as he cleaned tables; gradually, she began timing her meals to coincide with his shifts. Arendt convinced Denneny, then an undergraduate with dreams of serving in the newly founded Peace Corps, to stay on at the university for doctoral study under her supervision. When she left Chicago in 1967 for the New School in New York, he followed her, continuing to sit in on her seminars even as he left academia for publishing.

In an essay written during these years about her own teacher, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” Arendt recalled that he had made her believe that “thinking can be learned.” That is—and rather contrary to the solitary vision of thinking Heidegger provides in much of his written work—thinking, however much it happens only within an isolated person, is a relation between people. Arendt, too, taught thinking; and, in a manner surpassing her teacher, taught how thinking is an uncanniness that connects and recombines us.

Michael Denneny
Michael Denneny

Arendt taught thinking—and she taught that thinking requires what she called a “world.” Just as the student needs a teacher, the thinker, in order to think at all, needs a community whose members she can address and argue with. It is not a question, of course, of creating a community out of thin air, or of taking an abstract, universal humanity as one’s audience. Rather the task, which is explicit in Arendt’s Zionist writing but only implicit in her later work, is one of more fully and expansively elaborating the world we already share with those with whom we are by virtue of historical circumstance, but perhaps not yet by virtue of our own conscious concern, in community.

Denneny saw Christopher Street magazine, which he helped found in 1976, and its associated publishing line Stonewall Inn Editions at St. Martin’s Press, as instruments for building a gay male world. In Arendt’s theory, a world is sustained by, and maintains the possibility of the exchange of, different perspectives on what interlocutors understand as being—albeit in a not yet fully agreed-upon way—the same object. In her later work, this is usually presented as a problem of “judgment” in which people have diverse points of view about some third thing—whether they are making aesthetic judgments about, say, a painting, or ethical judgments about an action. But in the case that most compelled her early thought, as in the case that preoccupied Denneny, the “object” at stake was the supposedly common identity that did not quite unite those who debated its meaning.

For it was not at all obvious how different sorts of Jewish people from across the globe constituted a single Jewish “world” as a stage for debate about so-called Jewish politics. Indeed, Arendt in her Zionist writing insisted that this world and this politics would have to be created through exchanges of judgments, and through appeals to a community that as yet existed more in the eyes of its enemies than in the hearts of potential future members.

Homosexuality is perhaps only a little less ancient than Adam and Eve, but, like Zionism, gay male life is a much more recent creation, one elaborated by activists who tried to transform themselves into something like a people. In its cultural politics of building a gay male world, Christopher Street featured poetry and short stories, helping launch the careers of the major gay writers of the late 20th century, such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. It also ran many essays that contributed to an emerging awareness that there was a gay male canon in American letters, running from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to John Ashbery and James Merrill.

Christopher Street was by no means the only venue for the construction of a gay world, but Denneny and his colleagues were perhaps the sharpest-minded defenders of its specificity—their demand that it be a world for gay men. In a debate that has now been largely forgotten, but which dominated gay intellectual life in the 1970s, Denneny’s Arendtian perspective, with its debts to Zionism, was ranged against a vision of politics in which gay men were to be a kind of shock force for a broader sexual-cum-socialist revolution.

Christopher Street’s main rival for the minds of gay male intellectual readers was the Boston-based Fag Rag, a self-proclaimed “radical” left newspaper. Fag Rag’s writership did not see gay men as a distinct group that needed to build a world of their own. Rather, it saw them as one of a number of oppressed groups with a common interest in overthrowing heterosexual, patriarchal, white, Christian, etc., power. Its pages gave equal space to women and men (Christopher Street, after a few experimental power-sharing issues with lesbians, booted them from the magazine). It featured gay men who made feminist-inspired critiques of masculinity, pornography, and leather, while promoting a supposedly sex-positive, gender-bending neo-paganism. They were the eunuch vanguard of the post-male alphabet soup left.

In the years before the AIDS crisis (1976-1981) Christopher Street did not have an obvious line on “sexual liberation” countering that of Fag Rag. While some of its articles cheekily investigated the history of gloryholes where anonymous oral sex was on offer, many others lamented what was already seen by many gay intellectuals as the excessive hedonism of the era immediately before AIDS. One March 1980 essay critiqued the “Tyranny of the Penis”—a title that could have been taken from an issue of Fag Rag. But promiscuity tended to be seen as problematic because it might undermine the possibility of forming stable couples among gay men, rather than because it epitomized the patriarchal power of the phallus (Christopher Street’s contributors did not evince any great opposition to the latter). They tended to be sympathetic observers or active participants in the shift over the course of the late 70s towards a more masculine gay male style of dress and comportment, featuring denim, cowboy boots, and other items of masculine accessorizing.

The lack of agreement, however, was the point—Christopher Street was meant to be a space in which gay men could disagree with each other about what gay men should do (what they should wear, read, and suck), and even about what it meant to be a gay man, provided they agreed that there are, and should be, gay men. Christopher Street did grant occasional room for feminist perspectives, from an interview with Gloria Steinem to a short story by Andrea Dworkin, and to representatives of the Marxist left like Jean-Paul Sartre. But these were presented as glimpses on something of potential interest to an imagined gay community, not as voices that must be, as we say today, “centered”—as a moral-political teaching to which gay men should conform.

Michel Foucault—whose thinking in his last years was deeply informed by his encounter with the emerging American gay culture presented in its pages (and thus, in a strange roundabout way, to Hannah Arendt)—explained in an interview with Christopher Street that he was excited to see that gay men were, thanks to its efforts, at last able to imagine themselves as political agents in their own right without recourse to feminism, Marxism, and other rhetorics of the left. Foucault had perhaps read Denneny’s 1981 “manifesto,” published in Christopher Street, consisting of sixteen “propositions” for gay politics. The central proposition, number eight, began with a quote from Arendt, in which she claimed that “a man can live as a man,” that is as an individual (although perhaps with a special unintended resonance in its new context as a call for gay male specificity), only “within the framework of a people.” The word “framework” is deliberate and significant. “A people” is something made—to be sure, out of existing materials. Culture—the exchange of perspectives in philosophy, fiction, criticism—creates the framework within which we can act together. Denneny concludes, “a gay culture is a political necessity for our survival.” The point of gay politics, Denneny insisted, was not to make gay men’s discontent a kind of lever for the overthrow of our regime, but to build “power” so that gay men could invent forms of life together, creating the cultural resources by which they could pursue their necessarily mutual happiness.

Many readers took issue with Denneny’s propositions, and particularly with his ninth, which rejected the Fag Rag line that gay politics was just one iteration of a broader “social question.” In a response to discontented readers’ letters, charging Denneny of decoupling gay liberation from its alliance with the left, he answered that “genuflecting before the icon of socialism,” as he, in passing, charged his long-time collaborator Ed White of doing, “is an act of cultural piety, not political insight… a very weak basis on which to build a new politics.” (When I emailed White to ask about Denneny and his Arendtian view of politics, White replied tersely that he had never known Denneny to speak of her—a statement that contrasts with the memories of others in their circle).

The first issue of Christopher Street Magazine, 1976
The first issue of Christopher Street Magazine, 1976

Denneny countered that a “radical gay politics” was one reflecting and contributing to the creation of the forms of gay male life that were developing in the present—“not to the century-old theoretical tradition of the left, which strikes me as intellectually conservative, even old-fashioned.” That tradition subsumed supposedly local and contingent struggles in an over-arching agenda intended to bring about a new social order. It had a place for gay men qua gay men (or for Jews qua Jews, women qua women, etc.) only to the extent that their social movements could be interpreted as vehicles for progress towards a universal egalitarian horizon in which antagonisms would, at last, be dissolved.

Although many activists and academics try to prove the contrary, the left’s grand horizons have have often disappointed gay men. For much of the twentieth century, their primary manifestation was Marxism, which saw male homosexuality either as a revolting bourgeois (even fascist) practice—or as one of the many sites for political combat to be redirected towards the Revolution. Gay men who desired the freedom to create a specifically gay male culture were at best nuisances and at worst enemies.

The New Left of the 60s and 70s was only apparently more open to sexual minorities. If it promoted “sexual liberation,” it was in order to use gay men as a battering ram against traditional morality—not least masculinity. That gay men remain men—that their stubborn inassimilable particularity consists in nothing less than their attachment to masculinity, even if it might strike Judith Butler as ‘parodic’—made them permanently suspect allies of the post-Marxist cultural left that saw men (white men anyhow) as the oppressor class. Attachment to masculinity, however much attenuated today, makes gays equally unreliable members of the coalition of supposedly marginalized groups imagined to constitute the “progressive” or “woke” left, or whatever it is one might call the current ruling ideology of the Democratic Party and its associated elites in corporate life, media and academia.

Arendt was a critical reference point not only for Denneny but a number of other contributors to Christopher Street, who often compared the gay male experience in the 1970s with the historical experience of Jews in Europe and the United States. Some of the appeal of such parallels, doubtless, was that so many writers and subscribers were New Yorkers, whether Jewish or not, who were living in a milieu where debates about Jewish identity, culture and politics were commonplace. Moreover Jews—like gays and unlike most women, black people, prisoners or the other oppressed groups whose troubles were given much place in Fag Rag—had to think about their relationship to the non-Jewish world with some connection to the problem of “passing,” of having it within their power, to an extent that was always uncertain, shifting, and never total, to hide or reveal their “identity.”

It was no accident that the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had made Jewishness (in the 1944 essay “Antisemite and Jew”) and homosexuality (in his 1952 book Saint Genet) special topics of analysis; they illustrate, with particular clarity, what he understood as the complex union of determination and freedom that makes up every human life. We are born with certain traits, and involuntarily acquire others in the course of living. We are said by others to be such-and-such kinds of people on the basis of these traits, and are treated accordingly. Thrust by our bodies, desires, environments, families, cultures into roles, we are free within them, to a degree we can perhaps never rightly know, to act them out in various ways, including, sometimes, to deny them and “pass” as something else.

If Arendt had been a man, she would have been, if not ‘cancelled,’ then consigned by right-thinking scholars among such other Teutonic anachronisms as Oswald Spenger and Eric Voegelin.

Gay men and Jews—that is, those homosexuals who choose to live a distinctly modern “gay” life and those Jews who, with whatever relation they bear towards their religious traditions, live in a secular society—have seemed at times to instantiate the problem all modern people face of having to invent a life for themselves out of materials we have not chosen, to wrest, in some measure, autobiography out of biography. For the contributors of Christopher Street, Arendt’s ideas could be a call to resoluteness in addressing this challenge—or the grounds for a condemnation of what seemed to be the sterility of gay and Jewish life in America.

In a 1981 essay, “The New York GayCult, the Jewish Question… and Me,” journalist Neil Alan Marks used Arendt’s writing on political theory and Zionism to critique the “bourgeois” gay male scene that had emerged in New York, San Francisco and, to varying intensities, other major American cities. Gay and Jews in the United States, he argued, were still at the level of what Arendt had described as the “parvenu” Jews of pre-war Western Europe. These parvenus were often more “European” in taste and consciousness than the gentile elites they thought they were imitating. But, as Arendt saw it, they lacked both religious and political virtues. They had lost the faith of their ancestors but had not become true secular elites; they merely play-acted as wealthy Frenchmen, Germans, etc., and as beneficent leaders of charity organizations that cared for their ostensibly less fortunate brethren in the same manner that animal-rights activists care for animals: as ignorant recipients of benevolence.

Instead of building a modern, secular, Jewish world, Arendt implied, parvenu elites kept playing to a gentile audience that regarded them with condescension or hatred. Their charity to poor and foreign Jews was not an attempt to create a world in common with them by recognizing them as both an audience and actors on Judaism’s stage. It was because they were alienated from the very possibility of, or desire for, such a world, that parvenu Jewish leaders were so unable to respond to the steadily worsening challenge of antisemitism in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Marks drew parallels between what he saw as the American Jewish parvenu experience and that of the emerging gay culture. American Jews with a “traditional humanist middle-class” sensibility hoped they, or at any rate their children, could succeed at “making it”—that combination of economic success and social climbing—“without taking advantage of anyone along the way.” Likewise, gays had hoped for a kind of “sexual liberation” that would free them from legal repression and moral stigma while also giving freer rein to the “universal desire to be sexually exploiting and exploited.” Both groups wielded progressive slogans appealing to the possibility of a gentler, less discriminatory America, while organizing their personal lives around competition for status—which is indeed another name for the American dream.

Denneny’s account in On Christopher Street, understandably but regrettably, writes out voices of despair likes Marks’, which reveal how, even on the verge of the AIDS crisis, some who shared his intellectual debts to Arendt saw a much bleaker picture than he did. Denneny likewise wrote out of his story how Charles Ortleb, for many years Christopher Street’s editor-in-chief, drew on Arendt in a hyper-ventilating 1979 essay that treated the release of William Friedkin’s film Cruising, set in the gay S&M subculture, as a prelude to anti-gay hatred that could culminate in something like the Holocaust. In a grim irony, as AIDS devastated the world of Christopher Street in the following years, Ortleb frequently denied, in print, any connection between the disease and sex, making himself responsible for innumerable deaths (having survived the crisis, Ortleb now devotes himself to COVID denialism—battling in both struggles the same foe, Dr. Fauci).

Invoking the ideas of Arendt—and using them to build a shared world in which ideas can be exchanged among members of a group to enlarge their inseparably collective and individual freedom—offers no guarantees of decent outcomes, anymore than it did for Arendt herself, whose campaign for a particular, perhaps impossible, kind of Zionism linked to a peaceful, federal solution in Palestine, ended in a failure on which she rarely reflected in public. But Arendt’s legacy still challenges us, as she put it in The Human Condition, to consider “that the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse… action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness.” In this breathtaking departure from all conventional standards, in her declaring the building of a world for magnificent action and thoughts to be as much beyond good and evil as it is beyond prudent and foolish, Arendt shows herself to be, no less than Foucault and more than her despisers like Costin Alamariu, a radical heir to Nietzsche whom we have only begun to understand.

Denneny’s 1979 essay, “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” is the only scholarly paper in which he addresses the work of his mentor. It begins where Arendt ended, with the opening sentence: “After Hannah Arendt’s death in December 1975, friends found in her typewriter the title page, with two epigrams, of her projected work on Judging.” It then brilliantly retraces the problem of judgment throughout Arendt’s work, showing how the thread linking her otherwise confounding redefinitions of terms like “world” and “politics” is the exchange of different perspectives on a common object or problem, within a community of interlocutors whose points of view vary but who remain committed to communication and to the sense that what they are disagreeing about is in some not-yet-defined way the same thing.

For the next four decades, Denneny pursued what he called, in an email to me, “Arendtian praxis, putting many of her ideas into practice in a concrete way” by building a world of gay letters in which the pursuit of individual excellence within a community of competitors, admirers, peers and fellow strivers was directed towards an open-ended freedom to invent new forms of life. When I emailed him earlier this spring, for an essay on their relationship that has suddenly become an obituary, he was reading again through her complete works. A few days before his death, he told me that he had not read his 1979 essay since it had been published, and, looking back over it, in what he did not know were some of his last hours, he was relieved to find that he and Arendt had been struggling with the same problems. To continue that struggle is to continue their world.

Complete Article HERE!

Sex? Sexual intercourse? Neither?

— Teens weigh in on evolving definitions — and habits

By JOCELYN GECKER

Situationships. “Sneaky links.” The “talking stage,” the flirtatious getting-to-know-you phase — typically done via text — that can lead to a hookup.

High school students are having less sexual intercourse. That’s what the studies say. But that doesn’t mean they’re having less sex.

The language of young love and lust, and the actions behind it, are evolving. And the shift is not being adequately captured in national studies, experts say.

For years, studies have shown a decline in the rates of American high school students having sex. That trend continued, not surprisingly, in the first years of the pandemic, according to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study found that 30% of teens in 2021 said they had ever had sex, down from 38% in 2019 and a huge drop from three decades ago, when more than half of teens reported having sex.

The Associated Press took the findings to teenagers and experts around the country to ask for their interpretation. Parents: Some of the answers may surprise you.

THE MEANING OF SEX: DEPENDS WHO YOU ASK

For starters, what is the definition of sex?

“Hmm. That’s a good question,” says Rose, 17, a junior at a New England high school.

She thought about it for 20 seconds, then listed a range of possibilities for heterosexual sex, oral sex and relations between same-sex or LGBTQ partners. On her campus, short-term hookups — known as “situationships” — are typically low commitment and high risk from both health and emotional perspectives.

There are also “sneaky links” — when you hook up in secret and don’t tell your friends. “I have a feeling a lot more people are quote unquote having sex — just not necessarily between a man and a woman.”

For teens today, the conversation about sexuality is moving from a binary situation to a spectrum and so are the kinds of sex people are having. And while the vocabulary around sex is shifting, the main question on the CDC survey has been worded the same way since the government agency began its biannual study in 1991: Have you “ever had sexual intercourse?”

“Honestly, that question is a little laughable,” says Kay, 18, who identifies as queer and attends a public high school near Lansing, Michigan. “There’s probably a lot of teenagers who are like, ‘No, I’ve never had sexual intercourse, but I’ve had other kinds of sex.’”

The AP agreed to use teenagers’ first or middle names for this article because of a common concern they expressed about backlash at school, at home and on social media for speaking about their peers’ sex lives and LGBTQ+ relations.

SEXUAL IDENTITY IS EVOLVING

Several experts say the CDC findings could signal a shift in how teen sexuality is evolving, with gender fluidity becoming more common along with a decrease in stigma about identifying as not heterosexual.

They point to another finding in this year’s study that found the proportion of high school kids who identify as heterosexual dropped to about 75%, down from about 89% in 2015, when the CDC began asking about sexual orientation. Meanwhile, the share who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual rose to 15%, up from 8% in 2015.

“I just wonder, if youth were in the room when the questions were being created, how they would be worded differently,” said Taryn Gal, executive director of the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health.

Sex is just one of the topics covered by the CDC study, called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. One of the main sources of national data about high school students on a range of behaviors, it is conducted every two years and asks about 100 questions on topics including smoking, drinking, drug use, bullying, carrying guns and sex. More than 17,000 students at 152 public and private high schools across the country responded to the 2021 survey.

“It’s a fine line we have to try to walk,” says Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which leads the study.

From a methodological standpoint, changing a question would make it harder to compare trends over time. The goal is to take a national snapshot of teenage behavior, with the understanding that questions might not capture all the nuance. “It doesn’t allow us to go as in depth in some areas as we would like,” Ethier says.

The national survey, for example, does not ask about oral sex, which carries the risk of spreading sexually transmitted infections. As for “sexual intercourse,” Ethier says, “We try to use a term that we know young people understand, realizing that it may not encompass all the ways young people would define sex.”

IS LESS TEEN SEX GOOD NEWS?

Beyond semantics, there are a multitude of theories on why the reported rates of high school sex have steadily declined — and what it might say about American society.

“I imagine some parents are rejoicing and some are concerned, and I think there is probably good cause for both,” says Sharon Hoover, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland. Health officials like to see trends that result in fewer teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

“But what we don’t know is what this means for the trajectory of young people,” Hoover says.

This year’s decrease, the sharpest drop ever recorded, clearly had a lot to do with the pandemic, which kept kids isolated, cut off from friends and immersed in social media. Even when life started returning to normal, many kids felt uncomfortable with face-to-face interaction and found their skills in verbal communication had declined, Hoover said.

The survey was conducted in the fall of 2021, just as many K-12 students returned to in-person classrooms after a year of online school.

Several teens interviewed said that when schools reopened, they returned with intense social anxiety compounded by fears of catching COVID. That added a new layer to pre-pandemic concerns about sexual relations like getting pregnant or catching STIs.

“I remember thinking, ‘What if I get sick? What if I get a disease? What if I don’t have the people skills for this?’” said Kay, the 18-year-old from Michigan. “All those ‘what ifs’ definitely affected my personal relationships, and how I interacted with strangers or personal partners.”

Another fear is the prying eyes of parents, says college student Abby Tow, who wonders if helicopter parenting has played a role in what she calls the “baby-fication of our generation.” A senior at the University of Oklahoma, Tow knows students in college whose parents monitor their whereabouts using tracking apps.

“Parents would get push notifications when their students left dorms and returned home to dorms,” says Tow, 22, majoring in social work and gender studies.

Tow also notices a “general sense of disillusionment” in her generation. She cites statistics that fewer teenagers today are getting driver’s licenses. “I think,” she says, “there is a correlation between students being able to drive and students having sex.”

Another cause for declining sex rates could be easy access to online porn, experts say. By the age of 17, three-quarters of teenagers have viewed pornography online, with the average age of first exposure at 12, according to a report earlier this year by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit child advocacy group.

“Porn is becoming sex ed for young people,” says Justine Fonte, a New York-based sex education teacher. She says pornography shapes and skews adolescent ideas about sexual acts, power and intimacy. “You can rewind, fast forward, play as much as you want. It doesn’t require you to think about how the person is feeling.”

IS THERE AN EVOLVING DEFINITION OF CONSENT?

Several experts said they hoped the decline could be partly attributed to a broader understanding of consent and an increase in “comprehensive” sex education being taught in many schools, which has become a target in ongoing culture wars.

Unlike abstinence-only programs, the lessons include discussion on understanding healthy relationships, gender identity, sexual orientation and preventing unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Contrary to what critics think, she said, young people are more likely to delay the onset of sexual activity if they have access to sex education.

Some schools and organizations supplement sex education with peer counseling, where teens are trained to speak to each other about relationships and other topics that young people might feel uncomfortable raising with adults.

Annika, 14, is a peer ambassador trained by Planned Parenthood and a high school freshman in Southern California. She’s offered guidance to friends in toxic relationships and worries about the ubiquity of porn among her peers, especially male friends. It’s clear to her that the pandemic stunted sex lives.

The CDC’s 2023 survey, which is currently underway, will show if the decline was temporary. Annika suspects it will show a spike. In her school, at least, students seem to be making up for lost time.

“People lost those two years so they’re craving it more,” she said. She has often been in a school bathroom where couples in stalls next to her are engaged in sexual activities.

Again, the definition of sex? “Any sexual act,” Annika says. “And sexual intercourse is one type of act.”

To get a truly accurate reading of teen sexuality, the evolution of language needs to be taken into account, says Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University professor who specializes in adolescent sexuality.

“The word intercourse used to have another meaning,” he points out. “Intercourse used to just mean talking.”

Complete Article HERE!

In Indiana, the culture wars aim at Kinsey

— The heart of sex research

Alfred C. Kinsey is questioned by Hazel Markel, left, president of the Women’s National Press Club, and Cornelia Otis Skinner, actress and writer, in Washington on Sept. 2, 1953.

By Justin R. Garcia

At the entrance to the Kinsey Institute, at Indiana University, there’s a plaque with a famous quote from its founder, Alfred C. Kinsey: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts — not the judges of the behaviors we describe.”

That ethos is at the heart of all the institute’s research.

For generations, the Kinsey Institute has shined a light on diverse aspects of sex and sexuality, in pursuit of answers that bring us closer to understanding fundamental questions of human existence. In a time of divisive politics and disinformation, it is more imperative than ever to preserve and defend the right of such academic institutions to illuminate the unfolding frontiers of science — even, and especially, research that might challenge us as it advances our understanding of ourselves.

Thus it is tremendously disappointing that Indiana lawmakers voted late last month to approve a budget that specifically blocks Indiana University from using state funding to support the Kinsey Institute, and that last week Gov. Eric Holcomb signed it into state law. This is an unprecedented action that takes aim at the very foundation of academic freedom.

The Kinsey Institute, where I serve as the executive director and a senior scientist, is the leading sex research institute in the world. We publish dozens of scientific and academic articles each year, across multiple disciplines. Our faculty are internationally renowned biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, health scientists and demographers. We house the world’s largest library and research collection of sexuality-related materials, and scholars from across the globe visit us to study these materials and to train in our research theories and methods.

Our unbiased, apolitical, scientific approach to human sexuality makes the Kinsey Institute unique. It is also what makes the work we do so controversial.

Since its founding in 1947, the institute has been the target of disinformation and attacks. The original “Kinsey reports” (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” in 1948, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953) drew data from the most thorough sexological study ever conducted. Both books were instant bestsellers, and Kinsey went from scientist to celebrity.

Yet the reports were also met with shock and moral panic — especially following the second volume, which documented the real sexual lives of America’s wives, sisters, mothers and daughters. So much controversy ensued that the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its sex research funding for the institute in 1954

In 1950, a U.S. customs officer seized a shipment of sexually explicit images and other materials being mailed to the institute’s research collection on the basis of their being “obscene.” The federal court case that followed, United States v. 31 Photographs, resulted in a historic ruling in favor of the institute’s right to collect materials and data for sex research, which has profoundly shaped our understanding of academic freedom from censorship.

Another wave of attacks came in the 1980s, whipped up by conspiracy theories that Kinsey’s research had unleashed the sexual revolution and, with it, a moral decay on America.

As Kinsey wrote in 1956: “It is incomprehensible that we should know so little about such an important subject as sex, unless you realize the multiplicity of forces which have operated to dissuade the scientist, to intimidate the scientist, and to force him to cease research in these areas.”

Yet, Kinsey and his researchers persisted. And three-quarters of a century after the institute’s founding, the contribution of sex research to our understanding of sexuality, relationships and well-being is clear.

We know that one of the biggest predictors of relationship satisfaction is sexual satisfaction, and that one’s sex life affects the trajectory of relationships and marriages. That comprehensive sex education, including understanding consent and identifying interpersonal abuse, is associated with positive psychological and health outcomes — from prevention of unintended pregnancy to protecting against sexually transmitted infections.

We also know many questions still need to be answered. The complex associations between sexual activity and fertility outcomes. The long-term effects of covid-19 on people’s relationships and sexual lives. How the loneliness epidemic is affecting mental health across demographics. How new social technologies are changing the concept of intimacy and redefining sexual behavior. Why 1 in 4 women in the United States still experience attempted or completed rape.

Given these major unknowns, why do attacks on our research continue? The state representative who first proposed this recent legislation parroted false allegations of sexual predation in the institute’s historical research and ongoing work, which the institute, the university and outside experts have repeatedly refuted. Indiana state Rep. Matt Pierce described these conspiracy theories as “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back.” The legislature still acted on this disturbing, easily debunked misinformation.

Indiana is not alone. Across the country, legislation is being passed that affects millions of lives, restricting reproductive health care, discussions of gender identity and basic sex education. The people passing this legislation are fundamentally failing to leverage scientific evidence as a guide through these complex issues

I am optimistic that this latest culture war will pass. And the Kinsey Institute will carry on. While this recently passed legislation stings, the majority of the institute’s funding comes from outside the university, from research grants and contracts, as well as philanthropic donations. But I worry what the future will look like, for our institute and others — and for the students and researchers who rely on us — should state legislatures continue to act on misinformation around sexuality.

Some years ago, an Indiana University alum shared with me why the Kinsey Institute was so important to him. He was a gay man in his late 60s, and he recalled how as a student in the 1970s he was struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. At times, he felt so confused and isolated, he wasn’t sure he would ever find his way through that dark time. He was too afraid, he told me, to set foot inside the Kinsey Institute back then, but “just knowing it existed, that someone was out there searching for answers, saved my life.”

His words took on new resonance last week. I think about this story often, and I’m reminded what’s at stake when we limit the right to even ask questions.

Complete Article HERE!

Why Are GOP Lawmakers Obsessed about Sex?

— By focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote.

By Robert Reich

The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has become a font of government intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal and family life.

Last Friday, a judge who previously worked for a conservative Republican legal organization and was then nominated to the bench by Trump and pushed through the Senate by Mitch McConnell, invalidated the FDA’s approval of a 23-year-old abortion pill (mifepristone) used in over half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Dobbs case (in which Republican appointees on the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade), Republican states are criminalizing abortion. Some are criminalizing the act of helping women obtain an abortion in another state. Texas gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. Idaho just passed an “abortion trafficking” law that would make helping a minor leave Idaho to get an abortion without parental consent punishable by five years in prison. Tennessee Republicans have made it illegal to mail medical abortion pills. In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers want to make it more difficult for couples to buy contraceptives. Sixteen Republican-dominated state legislatures already bar abortion clinics from receiving public contraception funds.

So far, at least 11 Republican states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, even if parents approve. Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has ordered state child welfare officials to launch child abuse investigations into reports of transgender kids receiving such care. Republican lawmakers are also pushing teachers to refer to students by their gender assigned at birth. Many are restricting which bathrooms trans students can use.

Republican states are also limiting discussions of gender and sexuality in classrooms. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill banning public school teachers in kindergarten through third grade from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, calling it an “anti-grooming bill” and accusing opponents of wanting to groom young children for sexual exploitation.

Republican lawmakers are also putting obstacles in the way of same-sex marriage and are considering appeals to the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Texas’s Republican attorney general says he’d “feel comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy” in the wake of Dobbs.

Oh, and Republicans now routinely accuse political opponents of favoring child pornography. In her confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was barraged with questions from Republican senators about her alleged lenient treatment of child pornographers. (In four days of hearings, the phrase “child porn” or “pornography” or “pornographer” was mentioned 165 times, along with 142 mentions of “sex” or related terms like “sexual abuse” or “sex crimes.”)

Three Reasons Why Republican Lawmakers Are Obsessing about Sex

First, by focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote (with its loony “Pizzagate” conspiracy claim that Democrats are pedophiles).

gop sex obsession

Second, by focusing on sex, Republican lawmakers don’t have to talk nonstop about Trump. They don’t have to discuss his indictment or other pending cases against him. They don’t have to say whether they agree with his vitriolic diatribes against other Republicans (DeSantis, McConnell, and any other Republican who criticizes him). They don’t have to defend his bonkers positions (on Ukraine, NATO, George Soros, immigrants, and all else).

Finally, creating a culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to address the practical problems faced by most Americans — lack of paid sick leave, unaffordable child care and elder care, stagnant wages, and inadequate housing. And by focusing on sex, they believe they can ignore the sources of populist anger — corporate profiteering and price gouging, monopolization, union busting, soaring CEO pay, and billionaires who pay a lower tax rate than the average worker (courtesy, in part, of the 2017 Republican tax cut for the wealthy).

But the Republican obsession about sex is backfiring on them, as we saw in the 2022 midterms and again in last week’s elections in Wisconsin and Chicago. It’s drawing a contrast between the two parties that pits the GOP against the vast majority of voters.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent to Americans that while Democrats want to make life easier for average working people and end corporate abuses of economic power, Republicans want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives.

Complete Article HERE!

“The First Homosexuals”

— A Lesson in Queer History through Art

By Annabel Rocha

“The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930” embarks Wrightwood 659 visitors on a journey through queer history. While same sex desire predates the terms we use today, The First Homosexuals illustrates the evolution of how these relations were depicted in art before and after the word “homosexual” became popularized.

Jonathan D. Katz – art historian, queer activist, and curator of the exhibit – was inspired to study how language affected the perception and understanding of queer identities.

“What happened with the development of homosexual was that it became one side and sexuality became a polarity, and that’s what this exhibition tries to chart,” he explained.

Though gender identity and sexuality have become closely intertwined, Katz says this wasn’t always the case.

“One of the earliest ways that queerness was visually represented was actually not to represent the erotic act but to represent a person who did not fully inhabit one or another gender… ” said Katz. “One of the things that I’m trying to make clear in the show is that we have falsely segregated under the rule of “homosexual”, gender from sexuality and now what queerness really means is the refusal of all those binary terms – homo versus hetero, male versus female.”

This exhibit consists of over 100 works, categorized into nine sections: Before Homosexuality, Couples, Before Genders, Pose, Archetypes, Desire, Colonizing, Public and Private and Past and Future.

Aside from sexual acts and same sex love, this collection also draws on the concept of attraction and how beauty standards have evolved over time. Much of the artwork depicts images of young men and a desire towards adolescent beauty, which is fluid in that clear gender indicators are less prevalent in youth. This was the epitome of male beauty in the late 1800’s. The Archetypes section shows society’s shift towards a more hyper masculine, muscular idealization of male beauty, depicted in works like Sascha Schneider’s Growing Strength oil painting.

Paintings are displayed on the white walls of an art gallery, including through an archway.
From “The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930” at Wrightwood 659.

Katz believes some visitors may be surprised by the amount of works deriving from Asia and how open Chinese and Japanese culture was to same sex desire at a time. He notes an 1850 Japanese scroll that showed the education of a young man and his sexual ventures: seducing women, being anally penetrated by a samurai, sleeping with another woman, and being taken by a monk.

“And there’s just no distinction. Sexuality is sexuality and gender is not an operative category and you can actually see that happening,” said Katz. “As I saw that I thought man, that’s the dream and the paradox is my hope for the future is to return to 1850.”

So what changed?

Katz says colonialism. Europeans coined the term “homosexual” and spread negative associations with the word, bastardizing the concept of same sex relations in the cultures they touched.

A painting is viewed from far away. An inviting wooden bench sits facing three blue walls.
From “The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930,” an exhibit at Wrightwood 659.

“Now there are places in the world like Indonesia, where there’s a strong prejudice and legal sanction for queerness [that is] not indigenous to the culture,” said Katz.

Like race and other binaries that society clings onto, homosexuality as we now understand it in 2023 was a created concept.

“How long until we come to realize that homosexuality is a blip in the historical timeline?” Katz asks.

“The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930” will show at Wrightwood 659 through Jan. 28. Due to the pandemic, the showing was cut into separate showings. The second installment will triple in size – consisting of 300 works and projected to use all three levels of Wrightwood’s exhibit space. It is scheduled to open in 2025. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit their website.

Complete Article HERE!