HOME | ABOUT | INDEX | NEWS | FACEBOOK | CONTACT

ARTS

Entertainment | Visual | Performing | Music | Dance | Poetry | Comedy

Movies and Film

Television Media

Music|Musicians|Songs

Books, Literature, Libraries

Magazines|Periodicals

Fashion and Design

Theatre|Stage

New Netflix Documentary Tells the History of Queer Stand-Up Comedy
 

Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution features several generations of queer comedy royalty

From Tig Notaro’s legendary album Live to movies like Bottoms, queer and trans people have been dominating the modern comedy landscape. But until relatively recently, that was not the case. A forthcoming documentary from Netflix will explore the history of LGBTQ stand-up comedy, from the days when the phrase “out comedian” was an oxymoron to today’s renaissance.

The documentary, Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, will premiere on the streamer in June 2024. According to an official description, it is the first feature-length documentary to look at the history of queer stand-up as “an instrument for social change over the past five decades.”

Written and directed by Page Hurwitz, who founded a comedy production company with Wanda Sykes in 2013, Outstanding gathers a veritable who’s who of queer comedy to speak to that history. Interviews and clips of Sykes, Suzy Izzard, Hannah Gadsby, Tig Notaro, Rosie O’Donnell, Margaret Cho, Bob the Drag Queen, and Trixie Mattel, among many others, are all featured in the film. The film also taps several historians and journalists for their expertise, including Shar Jossell and Susan Stryker.

Netflix dropped the trailer for Outstanding on YouTube, featuring a blend of archival footage and interviews with some of the aforementioned pioneers of queer comedy. As Guy Branum says in the sneak peek, humor has long served a social function for LGBTQ people beyond just making each other laugh. “Queer people taught America to stop being scared of us by making jokes,” he observes.

In a statement to Variety, Hurwitz asserted that the history of queer stand-up is intertwined with liberation. “We don’t normally think of comedians when we think of social movements but the talented artists in this film helped to shift the culture in significant ways, sometimes having to make great personal sacrifices,” she said. “I hope this film honors and celebrates their contributions to LGBTQ history and to the larger community.”

Outstanding is intended to complement Stand Out, Netflix’s 2022 special featuring sets from several of the comedians featured in the documentary. The streamer also recently released Gender Agenda, hosted by Hannah Gadsby, which highlights the talents of seven trans and genderqueer comedians.

[Source: James Factora, Them, April 2024]

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That
New Netflix Documentary Is Telling the History of Queer Stand-Up Comedy

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women
Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix Special Features Genderqueer Comedians

Stevie Sings “Maybe This Time” - Schitt’s Creek

Meet Comedian Nurse Blake

Vaginal Davis’ Queer Punk Art Is More Relevant than Ever
Braden Summers: LA-Based Gay Photographer Adds Fresh Color to LGBTQ Spectrum

LGBTQ Visual Artists, Painters, Photographers
 

First London Dyke Market in Summer 2024
New Netflix Documentary Is Telling the History of Queer Stand-Up Comedy

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women

Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix Special Features Genderqueer Comedians
Giselle Byrd Is Putting Trans Voices Center Stage
Jazz Musician Dave Koz on Going Silver and Gay Cruising
Barry Humphries, Known for His Drag Persona Dame Edna Everage, Dies

LGBTQ Art Shows That are Spicing Up Global Museums

 

Amrita Sher-Gil (Indian) Vaginal Davis (Germany) Hannah Hoch (Germany) K8 Hardy Felix Gonzalez Torres Ellsworth Kelly David Hockney (England) Adi Nes (Israel) Betty Parsons Zackary Drucker Michael Stokes Meg Allen Dave LaChapelle Vincent Keith Oliver Zeuke Mel Odum

Gilbert & George (England) Touko Laaksonen (Tom of Finland) Catherine Opie Berenice Abbott Isaac Julien (England) Lope Navo Alice Neel (England) David Wojnarowicz Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt Leo Herrera Ron Amato Terry Hastings Steven Menendez Joan E. Biren (JEB) Hinda Schuman Nicole Coenan (Canada)

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything
Gay Photographer George Platt Lynes

Jazz Musician Dave Koz on Going Silver and Gay Cruising

Randy Rainbow: Making a Difference Award Honoree

This Man's Illustrations About Life With His Boyfriend Are Absolutely Adorable
This Artist Is Giving Lesbian Couples The Retro, Pinup Treatment
Pieces from LGBTQ Artists at Superfine Art Fair in New York
Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz
SNL: Ariana DeBose and Kate McKinnon

Dancing with the Stars: JoJo Siwa’s Viennese Waltz

Ellen DeGeneres: Gay Cartoon Characters

Glenn Copeland: Trans Musical Genius

Steven Menendez: Photos Celebrating the Earth and the Male Form
 

Queer Art
 

Queer art, also known as LGBTQ art or queer aesthetics, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer imagery and issues. While by definition there can be no singular "queer art", contemporary artists who identify their practices as queer often call upon “utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships and relationships.” Queer art is also occasionally very much about sex and the embracing of unauthorized desires.

Queer art is highly site-specific, with queer art practices emerging very differently depending on context, the visibility of which possibly ranging from being advocated for, to conversely being met with backlash, censorship, or criminalization. With sex and gender operating differently in various national, religious, and ethnic contexts, queer art necessarily holds varied meanings.

First London Dyke Market in Summer 2024

Beautiful Thing Celebrates 30th Anniversary Through a Black Queer Lens
Minnie Bruce Pratt: Poet, Essayist, Activist, Dead at 76
Standup Comedian Mae Martin Calls Out Dave Chappelle
Dancing with the Stars: JoJo Siwa’s Viennese Waltz
Strictly Come Dancing: LGBTQ Fans Blown Away by Same-Sex Dance

This Photographer Left Her Husband for a Woman and Documented It in Portraits
Vancouver Men's Chorus performs Anthem by Leonard Cohen

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

While historically, the term 'queer' is a homophobic slur from the 1980s AIDS crisis in the United States, it has been since re-appropriated and embraced by queer activists and integrated into many English-speaking contexts, academic or otherwise. International art practices by LGBTQ individuals are thus often placed under the umbrella term of 'queer art' within English-speaking contexts, even though they emerge outside the historical developments of the gender and identity politics of the United States in the 1980s.

'Queer art' has also been used to retroactively refer to the historic work of LGBTQ artists who practiced at a time before present-day terminology of ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘trans’ were recognized, as seen deployed in the 2017 exhibition by Tate, Queer British Art 1861–1967. The term “queer” is situated in the politics of non-normative, gay, lesbian and bisexual communities, though it is not equivalent to such categories, and remains a fluid identity.

Adhering to no particular style or medium, queer art practices may span performance art, video art, installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and mixed media, among many others.

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That

Sculpture Unveiled in NYC Honoring Trans and Nonbinary Communities

Richard Blanco: Inauguration Poem

Queer Composers You Should Know

Autostraddle: Lesbian Photographers You Should Know About

Advocate: Emerging Queer Artists

This Photographer Left Her Husband for a Woman and Documented It in Portraits

Artist Jaime Hayde Illustrates Happiness of Gay Love

NPR: When Art is Queer

Philadelphia: Opera Scene

LGBTQ Theatre Makers to Pay Attention to Right Now

Queer Composers You Should Know

Info: LGBTQ Music and Songs

LGBTQ Short Stories

Alison Bechdel: Winner of McArthur Grant
 

Alison Bechdel, a lesbian artist and writer from Vermont, was the winner of the 2014 Mac Arthur Foundation Fellowship award, commonly referred to as the Genius Grant. She is known for such literary works as Fun Home, Dykes to Watch Out For, and Are You My Mother?  Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and graphic memoirist exploring the complexities of familial relationships in multilayered works that use the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives. Bechdel’s command of sequential narrative and her aesthetic as a visual artist was established in her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), which realistically captured the lives of women in the lesbian community as they influenced and were influenced by the important cultural and political events of the day.

Janelle Monae: Being a Queer Black Artist

Kehinde Wiley: Black Gay Artist

Elska Magazine: Photo Spread of Gorgeous Global Men

Queer Men and Their Tattoos
Gay Comedian Joe Lycett: Live at the Apollo

Tig Notaro Montage

Gay Photographer: Terry Hastings

Poetry Slam: Princess in Distress

LGBTQ Writers Everyone Should Know

Taboo: Musical by Boy George

LGBTQ Musicians and Composers
 

Jazz Musician Dave Koz on Going Silver and Gay Cruising

As he prepares for a return to the Hollywood Bowl and headlining a musical cruise, the out Grammy nominee reflects on his genre and growing older...

LGBTQ musicians are well-represented in dance, pop, and folk, with everyone from Billy Porter to Troye Sivan to Brandi Carlisle finding success and accolades. While jazz is not strongly associated with LGBTQ artists, saxophonist Dave Koz is an outlier. An out gay musician for years, Koz has found success on the charts with 12 number 1 albums on Billboard’s Current Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, nine Grammy nominations, and several performances for presidents.

Following last year's release of his holiday album, Christmas Ballads, Koz is now in the midst of traveling the globe, headlining the Dave Koz & Friends Summer Horns 2023 tour, featuring other sax legends like Candy Dulfer and Eric Darius as well as vocalist Maysa. The tour rolls into the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles Sunday, marking Koz's 10th appearance at the legendary venue. The tour will move to the Mediterranean in the spring, with the (sold-out) Dave Koz and Friends at Sea voyage, traveling around Greece, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt.

What’s special about this venue?

Growing up in Los Angeles, my parents always insisted on taking my brother, sister, and I to the Hollywood Bowl. We saw all different kinds of shows there, and the venue made this profound impact on me from a very young age. And even though we've headlined there a bunch of times now, I still feel this overwhelming privilege taking that stage. It's a place like no other ... almost like the West Coast version of Carnegie Hall or something. Beyond special, every single time.

LGBTQ Artists You Should Know

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

LGBTQ Short Stories

Celebrating 100th Birthday of Tom of Finland

Fire Island Dance Festival 2

Elska Magazine: Photo Spread of Gorgeous Global Men

These Artworks Captured the Aftermath of Stonewall

Photographer Meg Allen: Butch Photo Project

You’re headlining a musical cruise next year in the Mediterranean. It’s not a gay cruise per se, but do you expect to encounter many LGBTQ cruisers?

Ha! No, it's not a gay cruise. I've never taken one, and I'd like to! But I will say that our cruises attract a very diverse group of guests. Our shared love of music is what binds this group together, but we have everyone — young/old, gay/straight, Republicans/Democrats, all races and religions — and for one week, we all get along and support and nurture each other. It's amazing to see. And yes, our gay clientele is actually growing.

How did you get into jazz? And how do you sell it to the unconvinced?

I think the best way to be inspired is to see this music live. It's one thing to listen to a record or a Spotify playlist, and a totally different experience to see a band killing it on stage live. It can be an electrifying experience, even with jazz. We're starting to see a lot of younger people at shows, which is really gratifying. There's a whole new group of young instrumentalists capturing the attention of people in their 20s and 30s. For me, learning to play the saxophone when I was 13 became the natural way for me of exploring jazz. And I've been on that path now for almost 60 years! It never ends. It just gets deeper and more interesting.

You’ve now gone gloriously silver. How does it feel?

Funny. I dyed my hair religiously for like 25 years, petrified of going gray. I already had one coming-out as gay. I fought the next coming-out as gray for a very long time. Then one day in 2017, I just said, "fuck it" and let it go. One of the most freeing things I've ever done, and the unthinkable happened — I got compliments on my gray! I've never looked back since. Being a "silver daddy" has its perks.

[Source: Neal Broverman, Advocate, August 2023]
 

Dr. Cheryl Clarke: Poet and Activist

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

Wendy Carlos: Switched On Bach

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That

Brilliant LGBTQ Opera Stars You Should Know
Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz

How Lauren Ys Channels Queerness Through Their Art

Billy Strayhorn Introduced by Duke Elligton

Artist Jaime Hayde Illustrates Happiness of Gay Love

The Art Story: Queer Art

This Man's Illustrations About Life With His Boyfriend Are Absolutely Adorable

Queer Culture: Spring 2020

Queer Comedians who are Making Sure Stand-Up is Full of the Gay Agenda
Info: LGBTQ Movies and Film

Polari Mag: LGBTQ Arts & Culture

LGBTQ Performing Artists: Opera

Poetry Slam: God is Gay

First London Dyke Market in Summer 2024

Essential Plays, Books, and Movies for Understanding the History of Queer Liberation

Same Sex Relationships Hidden in Classic Literature

Info: LGBTQ Books and Publications

Queer Arts: Queer Culture and Literature List

Fire Island Dance Festival 2

Poetry Foundation: LGBTQ Pride Poems

This Photographer Left Her Husband for a Woman and Documented It in Portraits

Sinners and Saints: Photography of Michael Stokes

LGBTQ Short Stories

Richard Blanco: Gay Latino Poet

In 2013, President Obama selected gay Latino poet Richard Blanco to recite an original poem at the Presidential Inauguration Ceremony. Blanco, who was born in Cuba, was the first LGBTQ person and the first Hispanic-American person to recite a poem at the presidential swearing-in event.  At 44 years old, he was also the youngest.

Richard Blanco: Inauguration Poem

Video & Text: Richard Blanco Reads Inauguration Poem

Pres Obama Selects Richard Blanco to Read at Inauguration Ceremony

Openly Gay Hispanic American Selected as Inaugural Poet

Wash Post: Blanco is First Gay, First Hispanic, Youngest Inaugural Poet

Richard Blanco Marriage Equality Poem: Until We Could

Richard Blanco Book: How to Love a Country

Queer Poets to Read Now and Forever

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

Rainbow Halo

Elżbieta Podlesna, a 51-year-old Polish woman was arrested in May 2019 for blasphemy after she painted the Virgin Mary with a rainbow halo.   Polish interior minister Joachim Brudziński announced the arrest, saying she was detained for “carrying out a profanation of the Virgin Mary of Częstochowa.” The Black Madonna of Częstochowa is a Byzantine icon that is housed in the country’s holiest Catholic shrine.

“Offending religious feeling” is a crime in Poland punishable by up to two years in prison. “Telling stories about freedom and tolerance doesn’t give anyone the right to offend the feelings of believers,” Brudziński said, adding that the paintings are “cultural barbarism.”



The LGBTQ community in Poland has been under increasing attack in recent years as the country’s rightwing government attempts to copy Russian methods of demonizing LGBTQ people to hide their own failings.  “We are dealing with a direct attack on the family and children inspired by the LBGTQ movement,” Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the ruling rightwing Law and Justice party, told supporters. “They actually threaten our identity, our nation, and the Polish state."  
 

Dr. Cheryl Clarke: Poet and Activist

HRW: Arrest in Poland Over Virgin Mary's Rainbow Halo

Artist Arrested for Blasphemy for Painting Virgin May with Rainbow Halo

Art, Religion, and LGBTQ Rights in Poland

Unbreakable LGBTQ Art Installation in Warsaw

Art Exhibition: Gay in Trumpland

LGBTQ Latinix Mural Defaced in San Francisco

Artists Speak Up: LGBTQ People Under Attack in Brazil

Brazilian LGBTQ Art Show Shut Down
Boston Exhibits Artwork by LGBTQ Refugees
Comedian Moms Mabley in 1967

Pride Flag Sewn From Over 3500 Diversity Messages

Tribute to Gay Classical Musicians

Pride in Poetry: LGBTQ Poets

Braden Summers: LA-Based Gay Photographer Adds Fresh Color to LGBTQ Spectrum

3D Artists: Famous LGBTQ Scupltors

Smooth and Wicked: The Art of  Mel Odum

LGBTQ Art History: Art, Sexuality, Culture

Art and sexuality have been synonymous with each other almost as long as the existence of art itself. From Praxiteles’ revolutionary Knidian Aphrodite to Erin M Reily’s tapestries of sexts in 2013’s brazenly modern Nudes, art has frequently been seen as the perfect platform to convey feelings and desires that aren’t always expressible in ordinary life.

With awareness of LGBTQ issues and rights over the past century rapidly increasing, gay artists and their sexuality have been brought to the forefront of contemporary culture. Whilst liberating, being open about their sexuality also runs the risk of being put into a box – gay artists can only paint about sex or queerness, and their work can only be analyzed and appreciated from that viewpoint. This can, and has been, extremely damaging to queer creators.

As Andy Warhol stated when speaking about his work, ‘there’s nothing behind it’. Not every element of his work has to be, or indeed can be, picked apart, and sexuality is only one contributing factor to his impressive oeuvre. However, it is important to recognize the impact his and other gay artists’ work has had on the LGBTQ movement. Both he and David Hockney were key figures in the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, elevating them to the position of gay icons. Think of Hockney’s iconic series ‘Love Painting’ and the detailed drawings of copulating couples from Warhol’s early career for reference of one side of their approach to sexuality.

First London Dyke Market in Summer 2024

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That

Queer Artists Whose Work is Making Us Pay Attention

Hannah Gadsby: All Stars Supershow

List of Queer Poetry

Lion King: London Gay Men's Chorus

Vaginal Davis’ Queer Punk Art Is More Relevant than Ever

Braden Summers: LA-Based Gay Photographer Adds Fresh Color to LGBTQ Spectrum

History of the Queer Art Movement

Gay American Composers

Queer Poets to Read Now and Forever

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

Despite how central queerness was to their artistic identities, these artists didn’t as much create ‘gay art’ as they developed how sexuality was expressed through different medias. It was instead the more implicitly sexualized of their work that became notable. The overt and fluorescent colors of Warhol’s pop art and campy subject choices scooped from pop culture defined camp culture; Hockney’s bright studies of hot summers in 1970’s LA run along a similar vein.

Many women in the art world have utilized, or equally omitted, sexuality in their work to make a statement about the modern world

We mustn’t forget the impact queer female artists have also had on culture, however. Although noticeably (and erroneously) less known than their male counterparts, many women in the art world have utilized, or equally omitted, sexuality in their work to make a statement about the modern world.

Diane Arbus is one great example. An American photographer, excluded not only due to her gender but also because of her bisexuality, her isolation from the wider community likely influenced her interest in outsiders; gritty, monochrome portraits of prostitutes, nudists and street urchins populate her photography and suggest her own fearless outlook on sexuality.

Photographer Meg Allen: Butch Photo Project

Gay Photographers: Vincent Keith and Oliver Zeuke

Poetry Slam: Dear Straight People

Funny That Way: Documentary About Trans Comic Julia Scotti

Fire Island Dance Festival

Advocate: Queer Composers Who Made History

LGBTQ Writers Who Have Won the Pulitzer Prize

Poetry Foundation: LGBTQ Pride Poems

Romaine Brooks could be considered the flipside of this. Rather than portraying sexuality in all its brazen beauty as Arbus does, she instead rebelled through androgyny and reticence. Although she had many relationships with women throughout her life, it was never a fact she wore on her sleeve, even marrying her also closeted male friend for a short period.

Her work instead explores female sexuality not through the male gaze, but in spite of it. Muted portraits of women in heavy, enveloping gowns or suits and top-hats show how the feminine body can be appreciated in many different forms – a far cry from the provocative nudity of other contemporary works like Manet’s Ophelia. Her art was incendiary in an implicit way.

There is the danger that, if artists choose to be open about their sexuality, they will always be marked with the same brush

As a result of the wave of LGBTQ rights and acceptance over recent decades, artists previously not considered to be gay are now having their work looked at through a different lens. A new opera has unveiled intriguing information about Leonardo da Vinci’s relationship with his young assistants, Metzi and Salaí, and the potentially sexual nature of their close bond. Da Vinci lived at a time when sexual liberty, especially for men, was culturally normalized, even if it was decried by the Florentinian state. This revelation provides a new perspective on his intensely detailed and anatomical studies of the male form, shining a whole new light on such works as the Vitruvian Man.

Sculpture Unveiled in NYC Honoring Trans and Nonbinary Communities

Opera: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Without JEB’s Photography, The World Wouldn’t Know Lesbian History

Essential Plays, Books, and Movies for Understanding the History of Queer Liberation

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

Huff Post: 30 LGBTQ Artists You Should Know

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

Pieces from LGBTQ Artists at Superfine Art Fair in New York

Mae Martin: Stand Up Comic

List of Queer Poetry

An artist’s reluctance in revealing their queerness can be both the bain and the blessing of their professional lives; while on one hand they have the freedom to paint, sculpt or photograph as they wish, without receiving the reductive ‘provocative’, ‘liberal’ or ‘licentious’ labels that often emerge when an individual is open about their sexuality, they also have to suffer the anguish of repressing their emotions in art.

There is the danger that, if artists choose to be open about their sexuality, they will always be marked with the same brush. That’s not to suggest that there is anything wrong with being known as the ‘gay artist’ – many creators have embraced how their work has been accepted by the LGBTQ community. However, it does run the risk of making their art appear one-dimensional, as if everything they produce has to in some way be linked to their sexuality when in fact an artist’s influences are far-ranging and delimited.
 

However, times are changing. Now it has become increasingly important for queerness to be analyzed as one contributing element or influence of an artist’s oeuvre, rather than being the overriding feature that makes appreciating it worth-while. It is perhaps the rebellion that their work represents, in whatever form that takes, that is inspiring to the queer community. As Warhol details in his 1980 book POPISM, “one straight kid said to me, “It’s nice not to be trapped into something, even if that’s what you are”. This freedom is exactly what makes LGBTQ art so rousing – it stands for people that have so long been repressed finally receiving the liberty they have fought for.

[Source: Cerys Turner, February 2020]

Dr. Cheryl Clarke: Poet and Activist

LGBTQ Art Shows That are Spicing Up Global Museums

Joan E. Biren: Portraits of Lesbians

Barry Humphries, Known for His Drag Persona Dame Edna Everage, Dead at 89

Smooth and Wicked: The Art of  Mel Odum

Why Aren't There More Famous Gay Comedians?

3D Artists: Famous LGBTQ Scupltors

Elska Magazine: Photo Spread of Gorgeous Global Men

Voguing with Kia LaBeija: Drafted

Info: LGBTQ Music and Songs

Photographer Ron Amato: Wet Gay Nudes

LGBTQ Designers: Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan

Lion King: London Gay Men's Chorus

Character: Fancy Gay Art Magazine

Queer Poetry
 

Dreams by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams go
Life is a barren field frozen with snow.

A Book by Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot that bears a human soul!

I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
 

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

Queer Arts: List of LGBTQ Artists

Wikipedia: List of LGBTQ Dancers

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

Steven Menendez: Photos Celebrating the Earth and the Male Form

Gay Photographer: Terry Hastings

Origin of Love: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

This Man's Illustrations About Life With His Boyfriend Are Absolutely Adorable

Info: LGBTQ Television and Media

LGBTQ Short Stories

The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes

Bring me all of your dreams, you dreamer,
Bring me all your heart melodies
That I may wrap them in a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers of the world.
 

Footnote to Howl by Allen Ginsberg

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes and drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions!

Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut!

Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion!
 

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre: Full Performance

Photographer Ron Amato: Wet Gay Nudes

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women

LA Gay Men's Chorus: Love On Top

The Prom Broadway Show: You Happened

These Artworks Captured the Aftermath of Stonewall

Kehinde Wiley: Painter of President Obama Official Portrait

Advocate: Queer Composers Who Made History

A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde

And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed
but when we are silent we are still afraid
So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.

My People by Langston Hughes

The night is beautiful, so the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful, so the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
 

Dr. Cheryl Clarke: Poet and Activist

First London Dyke Market in Summer 2024

These Artworks Captured the Aftermath of Stonewall

Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz

Diverse Humanity: LGBTQ-Themed Photo Book Series
30 Different Pride Flags on Display

Ursula K. LeGuin: On Being a Writer and a Man

Braden Summers: LA-Based Gay Photographer Adds Fresh Color to LGBTQ Spectrum

These Artworks Captured the Aftermath of Stonewall

Pride Flag Sewn From Over 3500 Diversity Messages

We Have Not Long to Love by Tennessee Williams

We have not long for love. Light does not stay.

The tender things are those we fold away.

Coarse fabrics are the ones for common wear.

In silence I have watched you comb your hair.

Intimate the silence, dim and warm.

I could, but did not, reach to touch your arm.

I could, but did not, break that which is still.

Almost the faintest whisper would be shrill.

So moments pass as though they wished to stay.

We have not long to love. A night. A day.

Meet the Cast: Eddie Izzard in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

Diverse Humanity: LGBTQ-Themed Photo Book Series

Comedian Moms Mabley in 1967

Walt Whitman: America's Poet as Queer Pioneer

Gay Photographer: Steven Menendez

Queer Poets to Read Now and Forever

Art History Teaching Resources: Queer Art 1960s to Present

Hallelujah: Queer Dance About Love, Hate, and Religion

Slam Poetry: Queer Marriage Poem

History of the Queer Art Movement

Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz

Emerging Queer Culture

Spring 2020 ushered in a variety of new talent in the LGBTQ arts and entertainment community.

She Sings Too - Based on Chelsea Clinton’s (and illustrator Alexandra Boiger’s) bestselling children’s book, She Persisted: The Musical, follows fourth-grader Naomi on a field trip to a women’s history museum that turns into an adventurous and inspiring voyage through time. “With so many kids’ shows based on fairy tales,” said one Broadway insider, “it’s a treat to have one inspired by feminist tales.”

Queering the Classics - New mobile-based media innovators Quibi has given the green light on a modern-day queer romantic comedy inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, written by rising Asian-American comedy star Joel Kim Booster (NBC’s Sunnyside). Trip follows two besties embarking on a wine-filled week on Fire Island during the summer.

We Like Pike - Austin-based duo Patrice Pike and Wayne Sutton (cofounders of formative ‘90s band Sister 7) have released their debut album, Heart Is A Compass, as their newest musical incarnation, Pike & Sutton. Pike, who Rolling Stone called “Tina Turner, Bessie Smith, Janis Jopin, and Robert Plant all rolled up into a tiny but explore package,” has been a longtime visible LGBTQ activist, participating in everything from Stonewall marches to ACT UP protests.

Queer Culture: Spring 2020

Advocate: Emerging Queer Artists

Queer Artists Whose Work is Making Us Pay Attention

Gay Photographer: Terry Hastings

This Photographer Left Her Husband for a Woman and Documented It in Portraits

Without JEB’s Photography, The World Wouldn’t Know Lesbian History

LGBTQ Art Shows That are Spicing Up Global Museums

Funny That Way: Documentary About Trans Comic Julia Scotti

Walt Whitman: America's Poet as Queer Pioneer

Healing Power - Transmasculine Latinx pop artist Jakk Fynn’s EP, Cancelled, features his latest single, “Heal,” an emotional track telling the story of how he rebuilt himself from scratch at the end of an emotionally draining relationship. “Not being true to yourself in a relationship can feel like suffocation, like death,” he said of the song. “‘Heal’ is a chance to do just that by embracing the vulnerabilities that make me who I am.”

Something Witchy - Freeform’s Motherland tells the story of an alternate America where witches ended their persecution over 300 years ago by cutting a deal with the government. The parallels are uncanny.

Thank God for Saint Frances - Saint Frances stars Kelly O’Sullivan as Bridget, the nanny of Frances, the 6-year-old daughter of a same-sex couple. O’Sullivan was inspired to pen the script from her own experiences as a caregiver who decided to end an unwanted pregnancy. With humanity and comedy, she fights stigmas surrounding abortion, post-partum depression, and rainbow families.

Not so GLAAD - GLAAD announced the cancellation of its 31st Annual Media Awards in NYC, joining the growing list of LGBTQ events nixed over concerns of the COVID-19 outbreak. The ceremony was set to be hosted by bisexual comedian Lilly Singh and had planned on honoring Ryan Murphy, Judith Light, Janet Mock, and Taylor Swift, among others. GLAAD stated it was working to ensure that honorees’ “game-changing work is rightfully recognized at another time.”
 

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That

Queer Culture: Spring 2020

Advocate: Emerging Queer Artists

Queer Artists Whose Work is Making Us Pay Attention

Stevie Sings “Maybe This Time” - Schitt’s Creek

Braden Summers: LA-Based Gay Photographer Adds Fresh Color to LGBTQ Spectrum

Gay Photographer: Steven Menendez

Gay American Composers

John Holiday: Black Gay Opera Singer

LGBTQ Anime

Gay Comedian Joe Lycett: Live at the Apollo

Essential Plays, Books, and Movies for Understanding the History of Queer Liberation

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Fire Island Dance Festival

Poetry Slam: Dear Straight People

This Man's Illustrations About Life With His Boyfriend Are Absolutely Adorable

Pride Flag Sewn From Over 3500 Diversity Messages

Io Tillett Wright: Fifty Shades of Gay

Artist iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LBGTQ spectrum and asked many of them: Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are? Most people, it turns out, consider themselves to exist in the gray areas of sexuality, not 100% gay or straight. Which presents a real problem when it comes to discrimination: Where do you draw the line?

Fifty Shades of Gay: iO Tillett Wright's TED Talk

iO Tillett Wright's Bio Notes

Gallery of iO Tillett Wright's Photography

As a child actor, iO Tillett Wright turned her shoes around in the bathroom stall so that people would think she was a boy. As a teenager, she fell in love with both women and men. Her life in the grey areas of gender and sexuality deeply inform her work as an artist.
 

iO Tillett Wright is an artist whose work focuses on the leading margins of contemporary life and culture. Her photography is regularly featured on two blogs at the New York Times: Notes from the Underground and The Lowdown. iO created the Self Evident Truths project, an ongoing document of LGBTQ America, which she continues to work on. She had her first solo show at Fuse gallery in New York City in 2010, and exhibited her latest work at The Hole Gallery in early summer of 2012. She has published three limited edition books of photographs; Lose My Number, KISSER, and Look Ma No Hands. iO has directed several music videos, and worked as a professional film actor for nineteen years, in addition to founding the world’s first nationally distributed street art magazine.

Dr. Cheryl Clarke: Poet and Activist

Before Night: Short Film Tells Queer Stories in New and Authentic Ways

Love is Lifting: LGBTQ Couples in Trick Photo Series

Poetry Foundation: LGBTQ Pride Poems

Queer Arts: LGBTQ Photography

LGBTQ Writers Who Have Won the Pulitzer Prize

Lion King: London Gay Men's Chorus

Comedian Moms Mabley in 1967

Autostraddle: Lesbian Photographers You Should Know About

LGBTQ Theatre Makers to Pay Attention to Right Now

UK Comedian Joe Lycett: Living in Birmingham

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Smooth and Wicked: The Art of  Mel Odum

Brief History of LGBTQ Art and Symbolism

Info: Queer Fashion Design

Summary of Queer Art

Any art that can be considered "queer" refers to the re-appropriation of the term in the 1980s, when it was snatched back from the homophobes and oppressors to become a powerful political and celebratory term to describe the experience of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people. Adhering to no particular style, for over more than a century, Queer Art has used photography, portraiture, abstract painting, sculpture, and collage to explore the varieties and depths of queer identity.

While homosexuality has a long history, the modern sense of the term is relatively new. Since the late 19th century, cultural and legal responses to homosexuality have evolved, but it was only in the second half of the 20th century that many of the laws criminalizing homosexual acts were overturned. It wasn't until the late 20th century that homosexuality was no longer considered a pathology by psychiatrists, and it wasn't until the 21st century that marriage rights were granted to same-sex couples. Throughout all of these circumstances, Queer Art has addressed these issues covertly and overtly, insisting on a voice in the art world that routinely suppressed it.

Because of the early criminalization of homosexual acts and the social stigma connected to homosexuality, much Queer Art employs coded visual language that would not arouse suspicion among the general public but would allow those familiar with the tropes of the subculture to glean the hidden meaning.

With the rise of activism in the wake of the Civil Rights protests and the AIDS epidemic, Queer Art became more frank and political in its subject matter, forcing the viewers to recognize queer culture and to underscore the institutional inequities and hypocrisy that fueled homophobia.

The Identity Politics surrounding Queer Art has sparked much debate, with some artists embracing Identity Politics and other eschewing it as not important for their work. The shifting nature of identities in particular and changing contexts has induced much questioning in queer communities and produced a myriad of answers.

LGBTQ Poets Who Inspire

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women

Diverse Humanity: LGBTQ-Themed Photo Book Series

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Billy Strayhorn Introduced by Duke Elligton

Poetry Foundation: LGBTQ Pride Poems

Lion King: London Gay Men's Chorus

Steven Menendez: Photos Celebrating the Earth and the Male Form

Elska Magazine: Photo Spread of Gorgeous Global Men

NYC Gay Men's Chorus: All I Want for Christmas

 

"I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse."
-Francis Bacon

"There's a certain kind of equality I'm trying to create, which is what I believe American democracy is about."
-Catherine Opie

"Gay men today want to be ordinary. They want to fit in. Well, I didn't care about that. I didn't care about fitting in."
-David Hockney

"Works of art sometimes help us feel less out of place in the world. Alongside queer novels, films, poems and songs, art has played its part in nurturing the self-awareness and confidence of queer people around the world."
-Alex Pilcher

Standup Comedian Mae Martin Calls Out Dave Chappelle

Pride Flag Sewn From Over 3500 Diversity Messages

Joan E. Biren: Portraits of Lesbians

Sculpture Unveiled in NYC Honoring Trans and Nonbinary Communities

Queer Artists Whose Work is Making Us Pay Attention

Poetry Slam: God is Gay

Celebrating 100th Birthday of Tom of Finland

Joe Lycett: Sunday Night at the Palladium

Photographer Ron Amato: Wet Gay Nudes

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

These Men and Their Glitter Beards

Sinners and Saints: Photography of Michael Stokes

Interview with Comedian Hannah Gadsby
Poetry Slam: Dear Straight People

LGBTQ Authors, Poets, and Playwrights

Francis Bacon - English Statesman, Author
TE Lawrence - English Soldier, Author
Lord Byron - English Poet
Walt Whitman - US Poet, Author
Oscar Wilde - Irish Author
Marcel Proust - French Author
Gertrude Stein - US Poet, Author
Alice B. Toklas - US Author
Percy Bysshe Shelley - English Poet
James Baldwin - US Author

Susan Sontag - US Author
Herman Melville - US Author
Jack Kerouac - US Author

Federico Garcia Lorca - Spanish Poet  

   
 

Isaac Julien: Behind the Scenes at MoMA

Lesbian Photographers You Should Know About

Gay Comedian Joe Lycett: Live at the Apollo

I Am What I Am: Song From La Cage Aux Folles  
Only Us: Laura Dreyfus and Ben Platt

Gay Photographer: Steven Menendez

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

GQ Magazine: Keith Haring Blew Up the Art and Fashion World

Essential Plays, Books, and Movies for Understanding the History of Queer Liberation

Pieces from LGBTQ Artists at Superfine Art Fair in New York

Kristin Key: Between a Redneck in Portland

Thomas Love Peacock - English Poet
Willa Cather - US Author
Langston Hughes - US Author
Christina Rossetti - English Poet
EM Forster - English Author
Hans Christian Andersen - Danish Author

Alice Walker - US Author
Ralph Waldo Emerson - US Author
Virginia Woolf - English Author
Tennessee Williams - US Playwright
Rainer Maria Rilke - German Poet
Edward Albee - US Playwright
Lord Alfred Douglas - English Poet

Armistead Maupin - US Writer

Adrienne Rich - US Poet

Carol Ann Duffy - Scottish Poet, playwright

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette - French Author

Edmund White - US Novelist, Memoirist

LGBTQ Writers Who Have Won the Pulitzer Prize

Queer Artists Whose Work is Making Us Pay Attention

Joe Lycett: Sunday Night at the Palladium

Kristin Key: Between a Redneck in Portland

Info: Fashion and Clothing

This Man's Illustrations About Life With His Boyfriend Are Absolutely Adorable

Poetry Slam: Dear Straight People

Funny That Way: Documentary About Trans Comic Julia Scotti

Barry Humphries, Known for His Drag Persona Dame Edna Everage, Dead at 89

Kristin Key: Between a Redneck in Portland

History of the Queer Art Movement

Info: Queer Fashion Design

LGBTQ Anime

Minnie Bruce Pratt - US Poet, Essayist

Pierre Louys - French Poet
William S. Burroughs - US Author
Rita Mae Brown - US Novelist
Algernon Charles Swinburne - English Poet
Mary Oliver - US Poet
Gore Vidal - US Novelist
Antonio Botto - Portuguese Poet
Allen Ginsberg - US Poet
WH Auden - English Poet

Pat Parker - US Poet
Truman Capote - US Author
Frank O'Hara - US Poet

Maurice Sendak - US Author, Illustrator

Carl Phillips - US Poet

Audre Lorde - US Poet

Jonathan Harvey - Playwright (Beautiful Thing )

Elizabeth Gilbert - US Author (Eat Pray Love)

Countee Cullen - US Poet

Oliver Sacks - British Author (Awakenings)

Marijane Meaker - US Author (Lesbian Pulp Fiction)

Amy M. Homes - US Author (Short Stories, Novels)

Dr. Cheryl Clarke - US Poet

 
 

Dr. Cheryl Clarke: Poet and Activist
Art History Teaching Resources: Queer Art 1960s to Present

Gay Culture: Ancient Wonder or Modern Creation

Pride in Poetry: LGBTQ Poets

Barry Humphries, Known for His Drag Persona Dame Edna Everage, Dead at 89

Joe Lycett: Sunday Night at the Palladium

LGBTQ Writers Who Have Won the Pulitzer Prize

Pride Flag Sewn From Over 3500 Diversity Messages

Same Sex Relationships Hidden in Classic Literature

Walt Whitman: America's Poet as Queer Pioneer

Ian McKellan Reading Harvey Milk's Hope Speech

Photographer Ron Amato: Nude Men Among the Dunes

Kehinde Wiley: Black Gay Artist

Maurice Sendak: Author and Illustrator of Children's Books

The beloved children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died in 2012 at age 83. He is best known for his book, Where the Wild Things Are. Winner of countless awards and recognitions, Maurice Sendak is widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche.

Maurice Sendak's NY Times Obituary

Believer: Maurice Sendak Interview

Vanity Fair: Sendak's Last Book



He was born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Polish-Jewish parents. As Maurice Sendak grew up (lower class, Jewish, gay) he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.”  Sendak lived with his partner, psychoanalyst Dr. Eugene Glynn, for 50 years before Glynn's death in May 2007.  
 

Poetry Foundation: LGBTQ Pride Poems

Good Reads: Best Gay Plays

Young LGBTQ Contemporary Artists

This Photographer Left Her Husband for a Woman and Documented It in Portraits

Meet the Creators that Are Proving that Pride Is a State of Mind

Kehinde Wiley: Black Gay Artist

Artist Jaime Hayde Illustrates Happiness of Gay Love

Why Queer People Love Evan Hanson

Queer Artists Whose Work is Making Us Pay Attention

Grant Wood: Rural Painter and Shy Bachelor
 

Grant Wood (1891-1942) was an American painter, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly American Gothic, which has become an iconic example of 20th-century American art. As a gay man in Iowa, he was forced to hide or disguise his same-sex references and representations, but they are there, hiding in plain sight.
 

Wood was married to Sara Sherman Maxon from 1935–38. He was a closeted gay man. There was an attempt on the part of a senior colleague, Lester Longman, to get him fired both on moral grounds and for his advocacy of regionalism. Critic Janet Maslin states that his friends knew him to be "homosexual and a bit facetious in his masquerade as an overall-clad farm boy."

In 1939, the US Post Office refused to distribute a lithograph, declaring its depiction of a nude man bathing by a horse trough “pornographic.” Wood, ever the closeted artist described the work euphemistically as a “shy bachelor,” and was surprised and affronted, and cropped the nude figure out of a painting based on the same image. The idiosyncrasies of his works seem to flow not simply from the fact that Wood was gay, but from a deeper, transformative sense of gender. His America can never be neatly sorted into traditional ideas about masculine and feminine, and that, even more than the nudity of the man depicted in the problematic 1939 lithograph, may have been what unsettled the US Post Office prudes.

In 1930, the same year American Gothic debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago and made Wood an overnight sensation, he painted Arnold Comes of Age, a portrait of his former high school student and assistant Arnold Pyle. In the painting, Wood depicts the 21-year-old Pyle as spindly and dark, mournful against the countryside during the last warm days of autumn, as two skinny-dippers exhaust themselves at the water’s edge. At Pyle’s elbow is a butterfly (a gay symbol at the time) and, like Wood himself, it nearly disappears into its environment.
The day before his 51st birthday, Wood died of pancreatic cancer. His estate went to his sister, Nan Wood Graham, the woman portrayed in American Gothic.

[Source: Text from White Crane Institute]
 

Queer Composers You Should Know

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Queer Poets to Read Now and Forever

Jazz Musician Dave Koz on Going Silver and Gay Cruising

Essential Plays, Books, and Movies for Understanding the History of Queer Liberation

Pride in Poetry: LGBTQ Poets

The Lesbian Photo Book That Changed Everything

Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz

Info: LGBTQ Books and Publications

Up and Coming LGBTQ Musicians

Poetry Foundation: LGBTQ Pride Poems

3D Artists: Famous LGBTQ Sculptors

Photographer Ron Amato: Nude Men Among the Dunes

Fire Island Dance Festival 2

Frida Kahlo: Queer Mexican Painter

Comedian Moms Mabley in 1967

LGBTQ Visual Artists: Sculptors
 

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Interview with Comedian Hannah Gadsby

Queer Composers You Should Know

Steven Menendez: Photos Celebrating the Earth and the Male Form

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Sculpture Unveiled in NYC Honoring Trans and Nonbinary Communities

Photographer Ron Amato: Nude Men Among the Dunes

Without JEB’s Photography, The World Wouldn’t Know Lesbian History

Polari Mag: LGBTQ Arts & Culture

Voguing with Kia LaBeija: Drafted

History of the Queer Art Movement

How Lauren Ys Channels Queerness Through Their Art

Gay Photographers: Vincent Keith and Oliver Zeuke

Isaac Julien: Behind the Scenes at MoMA

Trans Nonbinary Performer Tackles Greek Tragedy

Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz

Eddie Izzard: One Woman Show

Eddie Izzard One Woman Show "Charles Dickens' Great Expectations" is a big hit.

Eddie Izzard is a Brit stand-up comedian, actor, and activist and something of a slightly manic multi-tasker. When she is performing her stand up routine it is always at wonderful frantic pace that she mumbles her hilarious stories that have the most obscure connections that have her audiences screaming. She has put her political campaign on a temporary hold. Her desire to become a Member Of the UK Parliament for now will take a backseat to bringing her one-woman show to Off-Broadway.

Izzard is genderfluid and calls herself “somewhat boy-ish and somewhat girl-ish.“ She uses the word “transgender’ to describe herself and because she is public about this has become something of a queer idol.

Now she has bought her solo show of Charles Dickens' classic Creat Expectations to off-Broadway. It’s a classic tale of convicts, mystery, friendship, rivalry, unrequited love, revenge, and redemption and in it, Izzard plays a total of 19 characters from scary Miss Haversham to young Pip. The script is written by her brother Mark Izzard and directed by Selina Cadell, and it opened in Dec 2022 at the Greenwich House Theater to some initial excellent reviews

Director Selina Cadell‘s production does not rely on high-tech set and lighting design, quick costume changes and other visual effects. This is theater as storytelling in its most elemental sense, with Izzard herself as the biggest special effect.
 

Hannah Gadsby: Allstars Supershow

Critically Queer: Being a Gay Student in the Humanities

Ethan Smith Poem: Letter to the Girl I Used to Be

GQ Magazine: Keith Haring Blew Up the Art and Fashion World

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Poetry Slam: God is Gay

Autostraddle: Lesbian Photographers You Should Know About

Justin Sayre's Love-In: Music, Laughs, and Hope Through Gay Lens

Brief History of LGBTQ Art and Symbolism

Wikipedia: LGBTQ Related Plays

LGBTQ Comedians

New Netflix Documentary Is Telling the History of Queer Stand-Up Comedy

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women

Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix Special ‘Gender Agenda’ Sets Lineup of Genderqueer Comedians

Meet Comedian Nurse Blake

Kristin Key: Between a Redneck in Portland
Barry Humphries, Known for His Drag Persona Dame Edna Everage, Dead at 89

Standup Comedian Mae Martin Calls Out Dave Chappelle

Info: LGBTQ Humor

Wendy Carlos: Switched On Bach

LGBTQ Art Shows That are Spicing Up Global Museums

Young LGBTQ Contemporary Artists

Darcy & Jer Share Their Love Story, Talk TikTok Fame & Comedy Tour

Poetry Foundation: LGBTQ Pride Poems

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Meet the Young Artists of Provincetown

Voguing with Kia LaBeija: Drafted

Carol Ann Duffy: Britain's Poet Laureate

Dame Carol Ann Duffy DBE FRSL (born 1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. She is the first woman, the first Scot and the first openly LGBTQ person to hold the position.

She was born to a Roman Catholic family in a poor part of Glasgow, the first child of Frank and Mary who went on to have another four children, all boys. The family later moved to England. Duffy was educated in Stafford at Saint Austin's RC Primary School, St. Joseph's Convent School and Stafford Girls' High School. Her literary talent was encouraged by two English teachers, June Scriven and Jim Walker. She was a passionate reader from an early age, always wanted to be a writer, and produced poems from the age of 11.

Her collections include ‘Standing Female Nude’ winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award, ‘Selling Manhattan’ which won a Somerset Maugham Award, ‘Mean Time’ winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award, and ‘Rapture’ which won the TS Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools. She applied to the University of Liverpool and began a philosophy degree there in 1974. She had two plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse, wrote a pamphlet ‘Fifth Last Song’ and received an honors degree in philosophy in 1977.

She worked as poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 to 1989 and was editor of the poetry magazine ‘Ambit’. In 1996 she was appointed as a lecturer in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and later became creative director of its Writing School. In 1999, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
 

She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009 and was featured on the South Bank Show with Melvyn Bragg. Also in 2009 Duffy received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University.

Duffy was in a relationship with Scottish poet Jackie Kay.

LGBTQ Writers Who Have Won the Pulitzer Prize

Autostraddle: Lesbian Photographers You Should Know About

Diverse Humanity: LGBTQ-Themed Photo Book Series

Lion King: London Gay Men's Chorus

Info: Queer Fashion Design

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women

Sculpture Unveiled in NYC Honoring Trans and Nonbinary Communities

Photographer Ron Amato: Wet Gay Nudes

UK Comedian Joe Lycett: Living in Birmingham

Fire Island Dance Festival

Ian McKellan Reading Harvey Milk's Hope Speech

Isaac Julien: Behind the Scenes at MoMA

Pride in Poetry: LGBTQ Poets

Fire Island Dance Festival

Queer Art: 1960s to Present

From ancient Greece to contemporary art, queer art can be taught through many art historical trajectories. This lesson takes a contemporary approach and can be utilized within surveys of modern/contemporary art or in seminars pertaining to “art and identity” topics. This lecture has two key concepts: censorship and visibility. Until very recently it was not socially acceptable to be out as an LGBT or Q person. As such, queer art over the twentieth century has been shaped by, on the one hand—the need to conceal references to queer identity and experiences and, on the other—a desire for visibility: the cultural imperative to create representations of queer identity because none exist.

There’s a Scarcity of Out Ballerinas: Queer the Ballet is Trying to Change That

LGBTQ Art Shows That are Spicing Up Global Museums

Queer Men and Their Tattoos

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Gay Comedian Joe Lycett: Live at the Apollo

Photographer Meg Allen: Butch Photo Project

Art History: Queer Art 1960s to Present

Vaginal Davis’ Queer Punk Art Is More Relevant than Ever

Pieces from LGBTQ Artists at Superfine Art Fair in New York

How Lauren Ys Channels Queerness Through Their Art
Walt Whitman: America's Poet as Queer Pioneer

Scholars, namely Richard Meyer and Jonathan D. Katz, have explored how mid-twentieth century artists (including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin) developed visual codes to signify queerness in clandestine ways. After this period, the Stonewell Riots of 1969 marked a shift towards more visibility. This is an event that is largely defined as the “before/after” moment in LGBTQ history, when patrons (many of them queer and trans people of color) of a mafia-owned gay bar in New York’s West Village fought back against a routine police raid. The confrontation was part of a groundswell of activism tied to the protest spirit of the period, including civil rights and women’s liberation, and it led to a new social movement for lesbian and gay rights.

Unlike previous forms of gay activism, gay liberation promoted visibility by encouraging people to “come out” as LGBTQ, rather than remain closeted and/or assimilate to dominant social norms. This ethos was manifested in art as well as art history: artists became emboldened to make art about their sexual identity, and LGBTQ art historians began to recuperate the work of LGBTQ art that went unnoticed, had been censored, or written out of history books. The desire to document and celebrate depictions of queer identity, life, and history is an example of the politicization of sexuality that emerged during this period.

Queer Artists Whose Work is Making Us Pay Attention

Critically Queer: Being a Gay Student in the Humanities

MOMA: Creating Safe Spaces for Art-Loving LGBTQ Youth

Slam Poetry: Coming Out Straight

Braden Summers: LA-Based Gay Photographer Adds Fresh Color to LGBTQ Spectrum

UK Comedian Joe Lycett: Living in Birmingham

In the 1980s, militant gay activists reclaimed the term “queer” to confront the homophobia unleashed by the HIV/AIDS crisis that emerged in that decade, which disproportionally affected gay men. “Queer” became the preferred label for many people on the LGBT spectrum because of its lack of a fixed meaning and the spirit of social deviance it connotes. Many queer artists embrace marginality as a position from which to create self-empowered narratives that resist dominant understandings of gender, race, class, and sexuality. For others, queer identity has little to do with their art. Queer is a reclaimed pejorative for people who desire someone of the same sex, is pansexual, bisexual, or any other sexuality that is not lesbian or gay, while transgender refers to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender. While queer and trans are often related and overlapping identities, they are distinct and not interchangeable.

[Source: Tara Burk and Amy Raffel, Art History Teaching Resources]

Lion King: London Gay Men's Chorus

Billy Strayhorn Introduced by Duke Elligton

Queer-Inclusive Bluegrass Music

Kristin Key: Between a Redneck in Portland

Info: LGBTQ Books and Publications

History of Gay Art and Symbolism

Queer Tango

Art History: Queer Art 1960s to Present

Funny That Way: Documentary About Trans Comic Julia Scotti

How Lauren Ys Channels Queerness Through Their Art

Fire Island Dance Festival

UK Comedian Joe Lycett: Living in Birmingham

Info: LGBTQ Movies and Film
Meet the Creators that Are Proving that Pride Is a State of Mind

Brief History of LGBTQ Art and Symbolism

LGBTQ Poets

 

Mary Oliver Carol Ann Duffy Richard Blanco Saeed Jones Audre Lorde Frank O'Hara Andrea Gibson Danez Smith Michelle Tea Federico Garcia Lorca Alok Vaid-Menon

Francisco Aragón James Baldwin Elizabeth Bishop John Giorno Kari Edwards Rickey Laurentiis Adrienne Rich Tommy Pico Joshua Jennifer Espinoza Rafael Campo Mark Doty

Lee Mokobe Frank Bidart Pauli Murray Allen Ginsberg Ifti Nasim Melvin Dixon Jack Kerouac Eileen Myles June Jordan Walt Whitman CP Cavafy

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women

Queer Poets to Read Now and Forever

Young LGBTQ Contemporary Artists

Smooth and Wicked: The Art of  Mel Odum

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Info: LGBTQ Music and Musicians
Voguing with Kia LaBeija: Drafted

Joan E. Biren: Portraits of Lesbians

Fire Island Dance Festival 2

LGBTQ Designers: Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan

Poetry Slam: Dear Straight People

Tom of Finland: Homoerotic Artist
 

"My whole life long I have done nothing but interpret my dreams of ultimate masculinity, and draw them.

-Tom of Finland

"Tom of Finland defied homophobic censorship. He affirmed and glamorized our sexuality; giving hope and confidence to gay men at a time when many had internalized homophobia and sexual guilt. His imagery turned upside down the stereotype that we were weak and disgusting. It portrayed gay men as strong and desirable, which was refreshing and empowering. What Tom of Finland gave us was an antidote to the negative, demeaning heterosexual supremacist representations of homosexuality."

-Peter Tatchell, British LGBTQ Human Rights Activist

"Tom of Finland is one of the five most influential artists of the 20th century. As an artist he was superb, as an influence he was transcendent."

-Harvey Miller, Art Patron

Tom of Finland Exhibit in Los Angeles

Celebrating 100th Birthday of Tom of Finland

David Kordansky Gallery: View the Works of Tom of Finland

Tom of Finland Foundation: Let's Go Camping

Love and Liberation Exhibit

The Darkroom Exhibit

Tom of Finland (1920-1991) was an artist whose sexually charged drawings of musclemen impacted gay culture. He is known as the most influential creator of homoerotic images.

Born Touko Laaksonen in a small Finnish town, he was the son of two school teachers. At 19, Laaksonen moved to Helsinki to study advertising and began drawing erotic images. In 1957, he submitted drawings to Physique Pictorial, an American magazine, under the pseudonym Tom. When his gay-themed illustrations were published, the magazine credited Tom of Finland, a name he assumed for the remainder of his career.

Tom introduced to mainstream culture a stylized masculinity in sharp contrast to the effeminate stereotypes of gay men. His work, which embraced sailors, bikers, lumberjacks and construction workers in leather and jeans, became popular and widely distributed in the gay community.

In the late 1950s, US censorship codes restricted depiction of “overt homosexual acts” and limited the distribution of Tom’s work. In the 1962 case of MANual Enterprises v. Day, the US Supreme Court ruled that nude male photographs were not obscene. As soft-core gay pornography flourished, Tom’s illustrations became more explicit, including exaggerated musculature and genitalia.

By 1973, Tom was publishing erotic comic books and exhibiting his work in the mainstream art world. In 1984, he cofounded the Tom of Finland Foundation, which is dedicated to the preservation of homoerotic artwork. In 1995, the Tom of Finland Clothing Company introduced a fashion line based on his art.

Tom created more than 3,500 illustrations in his four-decade career. Five of Tom of Finland’s drawings are featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

[Source: LGBTQ Nation, Archives, Equality Forum, LGBTQ History Month Profile, October 2013]

Queer Tango

You Tube: Do You Dream in Color?

Funny That Way: Documentary About Trans Comic Julia Scotti

Info: LGBTQ Television and Media

Ellen DeGeneres: Gay Cartoon Characters

List of Gay Men's Choruses

Slam Poetry: Third Gender

This Man's Illustrations About Life With His Boyfriend Are Absolutely Adorable

Info: LGBTQ Magazines and Periodicals

Brief History of LGBTQ Art and Symbolism

Sinners and Saints: Photography of Michael Stokes

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

GQ Magazine: Keith Haring Blew Up the Art and Fashion World

Billy Strayhorn Introduced by Duke Elligton

Queer Composers You Should Know

Joan E. Biren: Portraits of Lesbians

Opera: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

LGBTQ Poets Who Inspire

Audre Lorde was a Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother and justice warrior. Her writing, activism and poetry speak to the struggle often faced by people who have been marginalized by society, including LGBTQ people and people of color. The last four stanzas of one of her most famous poems, “The Black Unicorn,” show that even though progress has been made, more work remains in the fight for full equality for all people: “The black unicorn is restless, the black unicorn is unrelenting, the black unicorn is not free.”

Mary Oliver, an out poet who believed “poetry mustn’t be fancy,” wrote at length about nature and the beauty of the world around us. Inspired by other queer women poets including Edna St. Vincent Millay, she explored the intersection of herself as a queer woman and the world in which she lived, embracing everyday beauty.

 

Andrea Gibson is a poet and activist whose work focuses on gender, politics and the struggles that LGBTQ people still face. Many of their poems are spoken word, a form of poetry and performance art characterized by rhyme, repetition, improvisation and word play that frequently speaks to issues of social justice and community. One of Gibson’s most moving poems is their tribute to the victims of the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in June 2016.

Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, American poet and queer woman. In her debut book of poems, “If They Come For Us,” Asghar focuses on navigating coming of age and questioning her sexuality without guidance from her parents, who passed away when she was young. The book explores what it means to hold an intersectional identity in today’s world, while still remembering the history of those who came before.

Chen Chen is an up-and-coming poet who also explores the intersection of identities in today’s world in his poetry. His poem “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” captures the heart of his work: “To be, in my spare time, / America for my uncle, who wants to be China / for me. … To be a cyclone / of laughter when my parents say / their new coworker is like that, they can tell / because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t, / can’t be one of them. To be the one / my parents raised me to be -- / a season from the planet / of planet-sized storms.”

A.W. is another young poet who is taking up the reins of the next generation of poets advocating for equality. A.W.’s poem “Differences” inspires us to be who we are, treat everyone equally and always stand up for ourselves and our friends: “Treat people well, don’t treat them different because they're different, all people should be able to do what other people can do if it is a good choice.”  

[Source: Human Rights Campaign]
 

LGBTQ Poets Who Inspire

Queer Poets to Read Now and Forever

Poetry Slam: Dear Straight People

Barry Humphries, Known for His Drag Persona Dame Edna Everage, Dead at 89

Sinners and Saints: Photography of Michael Stokes

Walt Whitman: America's Poet as Queer Pioneer

Kehinde Wiley: Painter of President Obama Official Portrait

LGBTQ Writers Who Have Won the Pulitzer Prize

Info: LGBTQ Books and Publications

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Kristin Key: Between a Redneck in Portland

Without JEB’s Photography, The World Wouldn’t Know Lesbian History
 

Opera: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Isaac Julien: Behind the Scenes at MoMA

History of the Queer Art Movement

Polari Mag: LGBTQ Arts & Culture

This Man's Illustrations About Life With His Boyfriend Are Absolutely Adorable

Wendy Carlos: Switched On Bach

Gay Photographers: Vincent Keith and Oliver Zeuke

Brief History of LGBTQ Art and Symbolism

Info: LGBTQ Music and Musicians
Art History Teaching Resources: Queer Art 1960s to Present

History of the Queer Art Movement

Info: LGBTQ Magazines and Periodicals

List of Queer Poetry

Meet the Creators that Are Proving that Pride Is a State of Mind

Fire Island Dance Festival

NPR: When Art is Queer

Laurie Rubin: Blind Jewish Lesbian Opera Singer

Blind since birth, mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin tells her empowering story in memoir Do You Dream in Color? Insights From a Girl Without Sight. Acclaimed mezzo-soprano opera singer Laurie Rubin has been blind since birth, is openly lesbian, and of Jewish background. What better reason to write a memoir? On paper, she was, obviously, not your typical everyday teenager growing up. But with determination and a strong support system, she continually surpassed and redefined others’ expectations, both professionally in the music industry and outside of it.

Washington Post: Laurie Rubin Describes Her World of Color

Out: Opera Singer Inspires With Her Story

Defying the naysayers since childhood, the lively and charismatic Rubin released Do You Dream in Color? Insights From a Girl Without Sight in 2012, recounting her experiences from childhood to full-fledged opera singer. An uplifting story about her journey to follow her dreams, Rubin’s story asks those universal questions (Who am I? and Where do I fit in?) while giving an insight into a musical world you probably know nothing about. Not only does she have a busy concert schedule, Rubin is also in developing a curriculum for Yale music (where she earned her master's degree) that will aim to dispel stereotypes and better the perceived value of people living with disabilities by allowing people of all ages and walks of life to share in the experiences of blindness.  

TED Talk: Hannah Gadsby

Tig Notaro Realizes She is a Role Model for Queer Women

Darcy & Jer Share Their Love Story, Talk TikTok Fame & Comedy Tour
LGBTQ Community Center: Arts and Culture

Blithe House Quarterly: LGBTQ Short Stories

Queer Comedians who are Making Sure Stand-Up is Full of the Gay Agenda
Interview with Comedian Hannah Gadsby

Photographer Ron Amato: Wet Gay Nudes

Poetry Slam: God is Gay

Young LGBTQ Contemporary Artists

Info: LGBTQ Humor

Pride Flag Sewn From Over 3500 Diversity Messages

Queer Arts: List of LGBTQ Organizations

Irrepressible Moms Mabley

The African-American actress and comedienne Jackie "Moms" Mabley was born in 1894 and died in 1975. Though she had four children and five grandchildren, Mabley never married and she lived most of her life as a Lesbian.
 

Although she was not "out" in the modern sense, certainly Moms Mabley did break taboos and challenge assumptions throughout her career with her character of an old woman, who was sexual, savvy, and irrepressible.
 

The girl who survived childhood rape to carve out a successful career in the inhospitable world of show business grew up to be Moms, who described her television appearances by saying, "I looked at the world as my children."

Moms Mabley: Biographical Notes

Comedian Moms Mabley in 1967
Moms Mabley: Legacy Project

LGBTQ Fashion Icons and Designers

Giorgio Armani

Pierre Cardin

Christian Dior

André Leon Talley

Domenico Dolce

Stefano Gabbana

Perry Ellis

Karl Lagerfeld

Halston

Thierry Mugler
Isaac Mizrahi
Yves Saint Laurent

LGBTQ Dancers

Rudolf Nuryev - Russian Ballet Dancer
Tommy Tune - US Tap Dancer, Broadway Star
Josephine Baker - US Dancer
Isadora Duncan - US Dancer

Alvin Ailey - US Dancer, Choreographer
Bronislava Nijinska - Russian Dancer
Vaslav Nijinsky - Russian Dancer

Bill T Jones - US Dancer, Choreographer

Kellen Stancil - US Dancer, Choreographer  
 

Hallelujah: Queer Dance About Love, Hate, and Religion

Slam Poetry: Queer Marriage Poem

MOMA: Creating Safe Spaces for Art-Loving LGBTQ Youth

Vancouver Men's Chorus performs Anthem by Leonard Cohen

Coming Out: Broadway Star Jonathan Burke

Slam Poetry: Coming Out Straight

Sculpture Unveiled in NYC Honoring Trans and Nonbinary Communities

Ethan Smith Poem: Letter to the Girl I Used to Be

Info: LGBTQ Music and Musicians

Young LGBTQ Contemporary Artists

Darcy & Jer Share Their Love Story, Talk TikTok Fame & Comedy Tour

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Dancer Rudolph Nureyev

The heartbreaking letter to dance that Nureyev wrote while dying of AIDS in 1993:

It was the smell of my skin changing, it was getting ready before class, it was running away from school and after working in the fields with my dad because we were ten brothers, walking those two kilometers to dance school.
 

I would never have been a dancer, I couldn't afford this dream, but I was there, with my shoes worn on my feet, with my body opening to music, with the breath making me above the clouds. It was the sense I gave to my being, it was standing there and making my muscles words and poetry, it was the wind in my arms, it was the other guys like me that were there and maybe wouldn't be dancers, but we swapped the sweat, silences, barely. For thirteen years I studied and worked, no auditions, nothing, because I needed my arms to work in the fields.

But I didn't care: I learned to dance and dance because it was impossible for me not to do it, it was impossible for me to think I was elsewhere, not to feel the earth transforming under my feet plants, impossible not to get lost in music, impossible not not to get lost in music using my eyes to look in the mirror, to try new steps. Everyday I woke up thinking about the moment I would put my feet inside my slippers and do everything by tasting that moment. And when I was there, with the smell of camphor, wood, tights, I was an eagle on the rooftop of the world, I was the poet among poets, I was everywhere and I was everything.

Queer Men and Their Tattoos

List of Queer Poetry

LGBTQ Writers Who Have Won the Pulitzer Prize

Joan E. Biren: Portraits of Lesbians

Ethan Smith Poem: Letter to the Girl I Used to Be

The Art Story: Queer Art

Walt Whitman: America's Poet as Queer Pioneer

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Gay Comedian Joe Lycett: Live at the Apollo
LGBTQ Short Stories

I remember a ballerina El èna Vadislowa, rich family, well taken care of, beautiful. She wanted to dance like me, but later I realized it wasn't like that. She danced for all the auditions, for the end of the course show, for the teachers watching her, to pay tribute to her beauty. Two years prepared for the Djenko contest. The expectations were all about her. Two years he sacrificed part of his life. He didn't win the contest. She stopped dancing, forever. He didn't resist. That was the difference between me and her. I used to dance because it was my creed, my need, my words that I didn't speak, my struggle, my poverty, my crying. I used to dance because only there my being broke the limits of my social condition, my shyness, my shame. I used to dance and I was with the universe on my hands, and while I was at school, I was studying, arraising the fields at six am, my mind endured because it was drunk with my body capturing the air.
 

I was poor, and they paraded in front of me guys performing for pageants, they had new clothes, they made trips. I didn't suffer from it, my suffering would have been stopping me from entering the hall and feeling my sweat coming out of the pores of my face. My suffering would have been not being there, not being there, surrounded by that poetry that only the sublimation of art can give. I was a painter, poet, sculptor.

The first dancer of the year-end show got hurt. I was the only one who knew every move because I sucked, quietly every step. They made me wear his new, shiny clothes and dictated me after thirteen years, the responsibility to demonstrate. Nothing was different in those moments I danced on stage, I was like in the hall with my clothes off. I was and I used to perform, but it was dancing that I cared. The applause reached me far away. Behind the scenes, all I wanted was to take off that uncomfortable tights, but everyone's compliments came to me and I had to wait. My sleep wasn't different from other nights. I had danced and whoever was watching me was just a cloud far away on the horizon. From that moment my life changed, but not my passion and need to dance. I kept helping my dad in the fields even though my name was on everyone's mouth. I became one of the brightest stars in dance.

Isaac Julien: Behind the Scenes at MoMA

SF Gay Men's Chorus: Every Sperm is Sacred

Tango: John Whaite and Johannes Radebe
LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Now I know I'm going to die, because this disease doesn't forgive, and my body is trapped in a pram, blood doesn't circulate, I lose weight. But the only thing that goes with me is my dance my freedom to be. I'm here, but I dance with my mind, fly beyond my words and my pain. I dance my being with the wealth I know I have and will follow me everywhere: that I have given myself the chance to exist above effort and have learned that if you experience tiredness and effort dancing, what if you dance sits for effort, if we pity our bleeding feet, if we chase only the aim and don't understand the full and unique pleasure of moving, we don't understand the deep essence of life, where the meaning is in its becoming and not in appearing. Every man should dance, for life. Not being a dancer, but dancing.

Who will never know the pleasure of walking into a hall with wooden bars and mirrors, who stops because they don't get results, who always needs stimulus to love or live, hasn't stepped into the depths of life, and will abandon every time life won't give him what he wants. It's the law of love: you love because you feel the need to do it, not to get something or to be reciprocated, otherwise you're bound to unhappiness. I'm dying, and I thank God for giving me a body to dance so that I wouldn't waste a moment of the wonderful gift of life.

Vancouver Men's Chorus performs Anthem by Leonard Cohen

Info: Fashion and Clothing

Gay Photographer: Terry Hastings

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

Lesbian Stand-Up Comedian: DeAnne Smith

Joe Lycett: Sunday Night at the Palladium

Darcy & Jer Share Their Love Story, Talk TikTok Fame & Comedy Tour

Philadelphia: Opera Scene

Info: LGBTQ Authors and Books

Kelli Dunham: Nun Turned Genderqueer Standup Comic

Willmer Broadnax: Transgender Gospel Singer

Willmer "Little Axe" Broadnax (1916–1992) was a transgender African-American hard gospel quartet singer. A tiny man with glasses and a high powerful tenor voice, he worked and recorded with many of the most famous and influential groups of his day.
 

"Little Axe" was born in Houston, Texas, and after moving to Southern California in the mid-1940s he and his brother, William, joined the ‘Southern Gospel Singers’, a group that performed primarily on weekends. The Broadnax brothers soon formed their own quartet the ‘Golden Echoes’.

"Little Axe" eventually left for Atlanta, where he joined the ‘Five Trumpets’ but Willmer stayed on as lead singer with the ‘Golden Echoes’. In 1949 the group, augmented by future Soul Stirrer Paul Foster, recorded a single of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ for Specialty Records. Label chief Art Rupe decided to drop them before they could record a follow-up, and shortly thereafter the Golden Echoes disbanded.
 

In 1950 "Little Axe" joined the ‘Spirit of Memphis Quartet’ which featured two other leads: Jethro "Jet" Bledsoe, a bluesy crooner, and Silas Steele, an overpowering baritone. This was one of the most impressive line-ups in quartet history.
 

‘The Spirit of Memphis Quartet’ recorded for King Records and "Little Axe" appeared on their releases at least until 1952. However, shortly after that he moved on, working with the ‘Fairfield Four’ and in the beginning of the ‘60s the ‘Five Blind Boys of Mississippi’ as one of the replacements for Archie Brownlee.

Following that, until 1965 he headed a quartet called ‘Little Axe and the Golden Echoes’ which released some singles on Peacock Records. By then quartet singing was fading as a commercial phenomenon, and "Little Axe" retired from touring, though he did record occasionally with the ’Blind Boys’.

Continuing to perform well into his 70s, it wasn't until an autopsy was performed following his death in 1992, that it was revealed Broadnax had been assigned female at birth.

Gay Photographers: Vincent Keith and Oliver Zeuke

Poetry Slam: Dear Straight People

Autostraddle: Lesbian Photographers You Should Know About

Dana Goldberg: Jewish Lesbian Comedian

Out Beat: America's First LGBTQ Jazz Festival

Meet the Creators that Are Proving that Pride Is a State of Mind

Brief History of LGBTQ Art and Symbolism

Info: Queer Fashion Design

Photographer Meg Allen: Butch Photo Project

LGBTQ Designers: Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan

Pride in Poetry: LGBTQ Poets

Without JEB’s Photography, The World Wouldn’t Know Lesbian History

List of Queer Poetry

Brief History of LGBTQ Art and Symbolism

Classical Composers: What's So Gay About American Music?

Musicologists now seem to agree that Handel was gay. So, it is thought, was Schubert. About Tchaikovsky there is no doubt: definitely gay, along with Britten, Copland and many other major composers and musicians. They may not have been gay in the modern sense of the word, as the defining component of their sexual identity. Certainly not Handel, who hid what must have been terrible loneliness under a cloak of irascible heartiness. Nor Schubert, whose relationships with the young men in his circle still elude our understanding. Schubert's devoted friends considered the pudgy, bespectacled and sickly composer a genius in their midst. But who was sleeping with whom? We're not sure.

That we can now flesh out these giants' stories with this crucial missing component of their character is due to the efforts of some pioneering cultural historians and musicologists. Yet, along with the outing of past master composers and musicians there has been a more dubious effort by some to find evidence of a collective gay sensibility in their music. What exactly is a gay sensibility? With today's gay icons ranging from the brainy, unkempt liberal firebrand Congressman Barney Frank to the stylish, flamboyant and cuttingly funny fashion guru Carson Kressley of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, who can say? And if it does exist, just how is a gay sensibility expressed in music? Especially purely instrumental, or "absolute," music?


 

Comedian Moms Mabley in 1967

Superstar Tenor Russell Thomas on Being a Black Queer Man in Opera

Wendy Carlos: Switched On Bach

History of the Queer Art Movement

Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz

Fire Island Artists Registry

GQ Magazine: Keith Haring Blew Up the Art and Fashion World

Art Scene Today: LGBTQ Artists

Queer Arts: List of LGBTQ Museums and Galleries
Essential Plays, Books, and Movies for Understanding the History of Queer Liberation

The latest to enter the discussion is Nadine Hubbs, a professor of music and women's studies at the University of Michigan, whose new book, The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music and National Identity, has just been released by University of California Press. This is an ambitious, provocative and impressively documented work, with more than 70 pages of detailed footnotes for a 178-page text. It tries to prove that what has come to be considered the distinctive American sound in mid-20th-century American music (that Coplandesque tableau of widely spaced harmonies and melancholic tunes run through with elements of elegiac folk music and spiked with jerky American dance rhythms) was essentially invented by a group of Manhattan-based gay composers: Copland, of course, and Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem.
 

Ms. Hubbs's treatise, which focuses mostly on Copland and Thomson, is enriched by her keen sensitivity to traces of coded gay sexuality, veiled homophobia and cultural anxieties in American music and life during the early decades of the 20th century. The book will rightly provoke heated discussion in musicological and queer-history circles. My gay brothers and sisters should welcome Ms. Hubbs's account of the pivotal role played by gay composers in the development of a musical idiom that as the book argues, still signifies "America," not just in the concert hall but also in movies, television and commercial culture.

Yet, I suspect that many musicians, however fascinated by Ms. Hubbs's treatise, will share my discomfort over the notion of trying to identify anything as elusive as a gay sensibility in music. It's significant, I think, that most of the advance praise for the book ("a landmark study," "breathtakingly original history") comes from cultural historians, not musicians. My aim here is not to review the book but to raise the stakes for the debate Ms. Hubbs's work is sure to provoke.
 

One admiring blurb on the dust jacket comes from a well-known musicologist, Susan McClary, winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, whose contentious 1991 article Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music became a manifesto for a number of queer theorists. Ms. McClary tried to identify homosexual qualities in the slow movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Her notion that Schubert was inviting listeners to "forgo the security of a centered, stable tonality" and "experience (even enjoy) a flexible sense of self," has always struck me as a convoluted way to account for perfectly explicable disruptions of key.

But Ms. McClary's lead was followed by smart critics like K. Robert Schwarz, long a contributor to The New York Times, who died in 1999. Schwarz wrote impassioned liner notes for a shamelessly commercial though perfectly harmless 1995 recording, Out Classics: Seductive Classics by the World's Greatest Gay Composers.

Before long, Schwarz speculated, "we may possess the analytic tools to decode a gay aesthetic in music." As I suggested at the time, I cannot imagine how this would work. Will theorists check chord components against a table of telltale interval combinations? Will we someday speak not only of tonic and dominant chords but also of butch and femme chords? Is Ms. Hubbs heading down that path? She is least convincing when discussing the particulars of the music in question. What she does brilliantly is amass evidence of the pervasive influence Copland and his gay composer colleagues had on the formation of the American national identity.  


 

Info: LGBTQ Television and Media

Sinners and Saints: Photography of Michael Stokes

LGBTQ Artists in Bay Area
Voguing with Kia LaBeija: Drafted

Fire Island Dance Festival

Billy Strayhorn Introduced by Duke Elligton

Info: LGBTQ Magazines and Periodicals

Gay Photographer: Terry Hastings

UK Comedian Joe Lycett: Living in Birmingham

Joan E. Biren: Portraits of Lesbians

In her introduction Ms. Hubbs points out that no less an authority than the United States Army confirms Copland's status as "America's most prominent composer." This claim comes from an essay accompanying a pair of recordings of Copland's music by the Army Field Band and Soldiers' Chorus, released in 2000 to celebrate the centennial of his birth. Moreover, the essay points to Copland's life and career as a quintessentially American story and talks glowingly of his Jewish heritage, his Russian immigrant parents, his sensitivity to racial prejudice and admirable collaborations with black artists. But never hinted at is Copland's homosexuality, which of course would have branded him as unfit for service in the military.

So how did Copland's music, with its "sonic representation of American vastness and rugged, simple beauty," as Ms. Hubbs puts it, come to be the most potent cultural emblem of Americanness? How did Copland and the gay composers in his circle come to write music the way they did? Though often too sweeping and sometimes laden with jargon (one subchapter is titled Music as Sex as Identity and as Identity Solvent), the book sheds more light on these questions than any study to date. Take Ms. Hubbs's comments on the aggressively homophobic Charles Ives in the subchapter Ives, American Music and Mutating Manliness. Ives came of age at a time when American music was obsequiously beholden, Ives believed, to European late Romanticism. Ives considered American composers sissified. He wanted them to shape up, get some spine and invent a radically new American sound that embraced vernacular American music. He wanted the audience to stop whining and take its dissonance like a man.


 

TED Talk: Hannah Gadsby

Queer Comedians who are Making Sure Stand-Up is Full of the Gay Agenda
Walt Whitman: America's Poet as Queer Pioneer

The Art Story: Queer Art

Feed The Id: Live On The Lake with Cory Wong and Dave Koz

Stevie Sings “Maybe This Time” - Schitt’s Creek

3D Artists: Famous LGBTQ Sculptors

Photographer Meg Allen: Butch Photo Project

Gay Photographer: Steven Menendez

LGBTQ Designers: Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan

Billy Strayhorn Introduced by Duke Elligton

Young LGBTQ Contemporary Artists

Ms. Hubbs places Ives's diatribes in the context of the genuine crisis of confidence in American music at the time. The composer appears "less as an eccentric crank with personal issues concerning women, queers and music," she writes, "than as a stentorian mouthpiece for interlinked cultural anxieties around gender, sexuality, musicality and national identity that significantly shaped 20th-century American music."

Paradoxically, it was Copland and his gay composer colleagues who answered Ives's call, steered American music through those anxieties and found the new American voice. They were bound together by codes of secrecy, and with good reason. To understand the social climate they faced, consider that in 1942, while he was the powerful chief music critic of The New York Herald Tribune, Thomson was arrested in a raid on a private house in Brooklyn where gay professionals socialized with young men, including sailors from the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard. After he spent a night in jail, the charges against Thomson were dropped, and the incident was hushed up, though a veiled reference to his disgrace turned up in a Walter Winchell gossip column.

Perhaps a sense of separateness emboldened this circle of gay composers, who shared an affinity for French culture and aesthetics, to distance themselves from the domineering, aggressive (meaning rigorously German) brand of 1920's modernism. Copland first turned to jazz as a vehicle to break free. Jazz was by far the most original American music. But eventually he found it hard to incorporate this improvised art into formal concert works. Thomson impishly called Copland's short-lived venture writing jazz-infused concert works his "one wild oat."


 

Lesbian Photographers You Should Know About

Janelle Monae: Being a Queer Black Artist

Pieces from LGBTQ Artists at Superfine Art Fair in New York

Isaac Julien: Behind the Scenes at MoMA

LGBTQ Art Shows: Now Showing at Museums From Boston to Berlin

How Lauren Ys Channels Queerness Through Their Art

Sinners and Saints: Photography of Michael Stokes

Braden Summers: LA-Based Gay Photographer Adds Fresh Color to LGBTQ Spectrum

Kristin Key: Between a Redneck in Portland

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

In later life Thomson claimed (fairly, most historians agree) that he provided the impetus for Copland's invention of the quintessential American sound through the example of his own simplified musical style. The late 1920's was a time of growing musical complexity and "100 percent dissonance saturation," as Thomson put it. Thinking this direction a dead end, he chose to simplify his language radically. The Thomson work in this vein that most impressed Copland was the Symphony on a Hymn Tune, which used hymns familiar to Thomson from his Kansas City, Mo., youth as thematic materials for a genre-busting, unconventional cut-and-paste symphony.

By the late 1930's, Copland, with his language now simplified as well, was writing the works that would make him famous, especially the ballet scores Billy the Kid and Rodeo. Still, what is so gay about a symphony that uses hymns as thematic fodder, or a ballet score run through with cowboy tunes and Old West dance rhythms? What is the gay sensibility of Copland's 1939 Quiet City or the vibrant 1943 Violin Sonata?

Words have meanings, of course, as does all music with words. Even if you did not know that Britten was gay, you might guess as much from the content of his operas. Some deal with thwarted or idealized homoerotic yearning (Billy Budd, Death in Venice). Others are moral parables about sensitive, volatile and ostracized souls (Peter Grimes, even the comedy Albert Herring). But is there anything gay about Britten's instrumental work, like the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, an ingenious, exciting and deeply moving work?

Ms. Hubbs offers a provocative subchapter, Complexity Music and the American Way, on the challenge posed by the American composers who championed 12-tone techniques starting in the 1950's, and an apt analysis of "Frenchness as Queer Americanness." But the gender identity questions she raises cannot be answered. How do you explain the crucial presence of thoroughly heterosexual composers like Roy Harris and Walter Piston in the "commando squad," as Thomson called the circle of composers who set out to establish American music in the mid-20th century? How do you explain that after branding 12-tone music as elitist, arid and Germanic (meaning bad) in the 1940's, Copland took up the technique in the 50's and 60's? To me, his inexplicably neglected 12-tone works still have that clarion, widely spaced harmonic vigor that characterized his influential music in the much-beloved "American" style. Ms. Hubbs takes on this question but leaves it as one of many loose ends.

Ultimately, what we may most value about music is that it moves us in powerful but indistinct ways. It's the one thing that cannot be analyzed or deconstructed for its expressive content, and thank goodness for that.

[Source: Anthony Tommasini, New York Times]
 

Queer Composers You Should Know

Gay Comedian Sampson McCormick

Kehinde Wiley: Painter of President Obama Official Portrait

Opera: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

UK Comedian Joe Lycett: Living in Birmingham

List of LGBTQ Fashion Designers

Info: LGBTQ Motion Pictures and Film

Fire Island Dance Festival 2

Joe Lycett: Sunday Night at the Palladium

Ian McKellan Reading Harvey Milk's Hope Speech

30 Different Pride Flags on Display

Slam Poetry: The Straight Gay

LGBTQ Composers

Poetry Slam: God is Gay

Bisexual Poets You Should Be Reading

Lesbian Literature

Ballet 22: Challenging Gender Norms

Sinners and Saints: Photography of Michael Stokes

Washington DC Gay Men's Chorus: I Am What I Am

Great Gay Moments in 20th Century Dance

LGBTQ Short Stories  

HOME

QUEER CAFE │ LGBTQ Information Network │ Established 2017