Queer Life
Many historians are quick to say that men shared beds due to a bed shortage and that surely Lincoln, the savior of the Union, could not have been gay. The impulse to make Lincoln absolutely heterosexual reflects a discernible societal discomfort with the complexities of human sexuality.
In 1999 a handful of transgender people sought to highlight the need for awareness around anti-transgender violence. To that end, we held the first Transgender Day of Remembrance event in the Castro district of San Francisco, holding the names of those we'd lost in silent testimony.
What if I did find my birth family after all these years? And how would they handle meeting a young woman instead of a baby boy who should have grown into manhood? I was left with few ideas to reconcile my concerns.
While it may come as a surprise to learn that Ulysses S. Grant's great-great-grandson, Ulysses Grant Dietz, serves as Chief Curator for New Jersey's Newark Museum, it might come as a bigger surprise that he is also an author, with two gay vampire titles under his belt.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
What bugs me about this story is not right-wing hypocrisy about sex (which is old news) or that sex leads smart people to do dumb things (even older news). It's that, by focusing on D'Souza's timing, commentators are ignoring the main double standard at work here.
For girls, "slut" and its derivatives are among the most common and most feared of possible pejoratives hurled in the high-school social arena, equivalent in regulatory power to the "fag" label for boys. Both "slut" and "fag" tell young people that they are doing their gender "wrong."
Like his willingness to include former prostitutes in his close circle, Jesus' engagement with those whose conduct might offend sexual mores even today is a statement of radical inclusion, and of his own priorities for the spiritual life.