It’s Black History Month! Here’s Five Of My Favorite LGBTQ Black Women
A history lesson, a poetry lesson, and a some famous queer black ladies.
Jeanne Baret Did It Like a Dude
Laura’s Team Pick: How the first woman to sail around the world did it as a man.
Building the Master’s House: How the Construction of Heterosexuality Happened
“Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn’t mean that it’s not enormously meaningful. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t built a whole damn civilization on it.”
The Loving Story: New Look at Couple Who Challenged Law Against Interracial Marriage, Won
Photographs from a new exhibition on Mildred and Richard Loving, who fought for their right to live as a married couple in Virginia despite being of different races and henceforth changed the whole world forever.
Ad History: Douching With Lysol For True Romance
No actually, you really really really shouldn’t.
“Lavender Scare” Exposes The US Government’s Cold War Era Gay Witch Hunt
Maybe you’ve heard about the McCarthy-era Red Scare. But how about The Lavender Scare, “a vicious and vehement purge of homosexuals which lasted longer and ruined many more lives”?
The Queer Zine Archive Project: If You Don’t Know, Now You Know
Rachel’s Team Pick: Queer zines on the internet!
20 Years Ago Today in Gay History: The AB101 Veto Riots Would’ve Blown Your Mind
Twenty years ago today, the queers of San Francisco set fires, broke windows and got arrested, and they did it for you.
Happy Presidents Day! Here’s the Women Who Did All The Work.
The Top Ten bestest first ladies of all time, including the semi-lezzer and a Michelle Obama appreciation collage.
Judith Butler 101: One Is Not Born a Queer Theorist, One Becomes One
Did you wake up today feeling a little too sure that you understood the relationship between sex and gender? No fear, Autostraddle is here! Guest writer Julia is here to learn you all about Judith Butler, and to make you feel smarter than you have all day.
Female Friends Forever: Looking at Adrienne Rich’s Lesbian Continuum, 30 Years Later
“If we strip lesbian feminism down to its core – to its advocacy of women-oriented female spaces, women-identified women, and an appreciation of the inequalities and violences that still permeate the heterosexual institution – we might find a lot of things worth keeping around.”
Feminist Theologian Mary Daly, Author of Gyn/Ecology, Dies at 81
Lesbian and feminist icon Mary Daly died Sunday at the age of 81. She had a great influence on feminist theology.
The Gay 2000s: Twenty Decade-Defining Lesbian Happenings
Guess what, another decade is over! Here’s a retrospective on the best of times and worst of times in the 00’s for the queers.
The Lesbian Avengers – Time to Seize the Power & Be the Bomb You Throw!
“In my years with the Minneapolis Lesbian Avengers, we defaced anti-choice billboards, participated in visibility actions at schools, constructed a giant paper machè bomb piñata filled with lube and dental dams, helped plan the first of many Dyke Marches, designed and built a boat out of milk cartons for the Aquatennial Milk Carton Boat Race (dubbed The “Lez Boat” and pronounced with a hard “z” – no mystery there) and ate fire on countless occasions.”
The Autostraddle Roundtable: Is there a Lesbian Generation Gap?
“To many young gay people, the passage of Prop 8 was shocking but not alarming,” writes Mark Harris in New York Magazine’s “The Gay Generation Gap,” published two weeks ago in the magazine’s special Pride Week Section. Harris continues: “It has jolted them into action, but one suspects it’s out of a Milk-fed belief that identity-politics activism can be ennobling and cool.” Ouch! One suspects that one is being unfair to us! One suspects that if we’ve managed to make activism “cool,” then that’s a BIG SCORE! — but wait. Before you get too excited (as we did), there’s no need to be offended ’cause this shit ain’t about you, woman! … so we decided to ask ourselves: Is there a Lesbian Generation Gap?” Special roundtable participants include Grace Chu of Grace the Spot, Haviland Stillwell and Riese’s Mom!