The Year The Grammys Honored Disco
In 1980, The Grammys gave disco its own category, but the genre was already receding into invisibility.
Abortion Remedies from a Medieval Catholic Nun(!)
Hildegard von Bingen wrote medical texts describing how to prepare abortifacients.
How Wet-Nursing Stoked Class Tensions
“[N]o man can justly doubt, that a childs mind is answerable to his nurses milk and manners.”
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.