Sex Panic at the Department Store
Were shopgirls selling more than scents at the perfume counter? Three investigators were determined to find out.
Discovering the “Gay Lifestyle” through 1970s Magazines
The gay men's magazines QQ and Ciao! were unabashedly liberated, but they still catered to an exclusive audience.
How LGBTQ+ Activists Got “Homosexuality” out of the DSM
The first DSM, created in 1952, established a hierarchy of sexual deviancies, vaulting heterosexual behavior to an idealized place in American culture.
How NOW Started Standing Up for Lesbians
If it had been up to national leaders alone, it might have taken much longer.
How Women Lost Status in Saloons
During World War I, anti-vice crusaders marked women who liked the nightlife as shady. You can tell by the way men started talking about them.
Gouverneur Morris’s Secret Sex Diary
The author of the preamble to the Constitution spent years in Europe as a businessman, diplomat, and connoisseur of the pleasures of the flesh.
How Medieval Arabic Literature Viewed Lesbians
As far back as the ninth century, doctors and poets wrote about women who loved women without calling them deviants.
ONE: The First Gay Magazine in the United States
ONE is a vital archive, but its focus on citizenship and “rational acceptance” ultimately blocked it from being the safe home for all that it claimed to be.
In Han Dynasty China, Bisexuality Was the Norm
So tender was Emperor Ai’s love for his "male companion" that, when he had to get up, instead of waking his lover, he cut off the sleeve of his robe.
On the History of the Artificial Womb
Will outside-the-womb gestation, increasingly viable for animal embryos, lead to a feminist utopia? Or to something like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?