Claire Gordon

The group widely known simply as Act Up, rather by than its more formal name AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, celebrated its 25th anniversary in New York with what else? a protest.

Veterans who had not attended the group's regular Monday meetings for a decade returned for Tuesday's

Twenty-three years before the Civil Rights Act, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that banned the federal government, including the armed forces, from discriminating on the basis of race, color, creed, or national origin.

Now advocates are hoping President Obama will do something similarly radical for the lesbian, gay, bisexual...

In the U.S., the commercials produced by the diet company Weight Watchers follow a fairly regular script, encouraging dieters to "conquer" hunger and "show it who's boss." American viewers might be surprised, then, by the company's latest French commercial, which features models with metallic or glitter-encrusted lips gnawing...

If you know single women in, say, Manhattan or Miami, you've probably heard some of them complain about the array of jerks they've dated. They ask, Where are the nice (but not too nice), decent, sensitive men? Where are the guys who are interested in connecting emotionally with a woman,...

Men and women are more alike than different -- that's been the consensus view for many years among the researchers who study personality differences between the sexes. But a new study claims this wisdom is wrong. By correcting for measurement errors, three researchers put forth a study that was published...

In 2005, the documentary "Inside Deep Throat" took a look at the movie that brought skin-flicks into the mainstream. But the film failed to probe one of "Deep Throat"'s most provocative side stories: Linda Lovelace, its star, claimed her on-screen fellatio was in fact real-life rape....

Jews do it on Rosh Hashanah, Hindus do it on Diwali, Muslims do it over Ramadan, and for those of us who live by the Gregorian calendar, we do it every New Year's. Making resolutions is an almost universal act. And through these yearly pledges, people around the world...

In the U.S., when a political wife stands by her disgraced husband, she becomes an object of pity and fascination. What pain teems behind her frozen expression? Or in the case of Larry Craig's wife, very dark sunglasses?

Here, she's a modern age tragic figure. In France,...

From contraceptives to breastfeeding to eating disorders, many women's health issues are controversial. And it seems even breast cancer isn't above all the bickering. On Wednesday a Christian group recalled the pink bible it manufactured and sold for those with breast cancer over concerns that some of the proceeds would...

Anyone who has crafted a message on OkCupid knows that online dating is still a very unnatural act. You scan the stranger's profile, wittily riff off of their listed interests, insert a few choice questions, and acknowledge how weird the whole thing is (using the words "sorry," "apologize,"...

A lot of research has shown how women hide their aggression, lust, and other qualities once considered masculine in order to fulfill the feminine ideal of a chaste and gentle peacemaker. But far less work has been done on whether men conceal their feelings, perhaps because...

At the end of the 2010-2011 school year, Michelle Chapman's 10-year-old daughter started complaining about headaches and fatigue. Her symptoms stopped during the summer, only to return when school started again in the fall. Doctors didn't know what made the girl sick, but Chapman thinks she does: the fluorescent light...

Men's magazines aren't known for representing women well, or accurately. In the universe of Playboy, Maxim and GQ, women eagerly strip off their clothes at any opportunity, pose in lesbian sexy scenes for fun and are easily molded into please-her-man machines. But...

The Long Island SAT cheating ring uncovered last month captured, for many pundits, several dark truths of our times: the crushing competitiveness of college admissions, the moral bankruptcy of the nation's youth and the power of the moneyed to buy their way...

"He could have easily been dead," said a British musician who helped pull one bloody body from the rubble. Of the nine people in the hammock when it collapsed, most were just bruised and shaken, but a few were sirened away to the local hospital. Doctors removed one man's tiger...

There was something very befuddling about the recent campaign by the American Values Network, "Christians Must Choose: Ayn Rand or Jesus." It wasn't that the video bashed big-name conservatives for revering the atheist Ayn Rand, whose tome Atlas Shrugged is Americans' second most influential...

You guys look great. Remember to be fearless and thank mom and dad. Strive, surprise, empathize, fact-check, and chip away at the big problems. Inequality and global warming are particularly good ones.

These are the general themes taken up by every year's crop of commencement speakers -- the...

On March 31, 2011, the Office of Civil Rights announced an investigation of Yale University for possible violation of Title IX. Sixteen Yale students submitted the complaint two weeks before, arguing that Yale is a sexually hostile environment, which prevents women from participating in campus life...

The Internet can be evil. I learned this lesson at college, thanks to JuicyCampus.com, an anonymous gossip portal. When it opened on my campus, all the eternal questions of the post-adolescent mind quickly flooded through its gates, like: What sorority girl puts out the most? And what sorority...

I'm ashamed. Late at night, in bed, with my laptop anchored snugly in my comforter, I watch YouTube clips of conservative pundits, usually ones with "ballistic," "explodes" and "gets served a cold glass of shut up juice" in the title. It's not...