Reinaldo Arenas wrote five books on toilet paper smuggled out of Castro's prisons, fled in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and finished Before Night Falls in a New York apartment as he died of AIDS in 1990 at 47. Tony Kushner gave the AIDS crisis its most ambitious theatrical engagement in Angels in America (1991). Jewelle Gomez wrote The Gilda Stories (1991) — Black lesbian vampires who refused to be killed politely, because survival in this country has always required speaking the violence aloud before the violence wrote the obituary. The thread is the same: people too small to be expected to matter, who insisted on mattering anyway.
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#QueerHistory #LGBTQHistory #ReinaldoArenas #TonyKushner #JewelleGomez #QueerLit #LiteraryHistory #Queer #Trans #ChosenFamily #QueerWriters #BookCommunity

Watertown, Wisconsin, Tuesday night: a school board voted 7-1 to remove Omar Thomas's "A Mother of a Revolution!" — a 2019 instrumental dedicated to Marsha P. Johnson and the Stonewall Uprising — from the May 18 spring concert. Thirty-two students rehearsed for months. Three opted out. The rest kept playing. The Vice President called a piece with no lyrics "indoctrination" capable of inciting "political violence." Students walked out fourth period Wednesday. Choir student Layla Turner: "Music should not be censored because people don't like what one person has to say." Read the full piece:
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#LGBTQ #Trans #Stonewall #MarshaPJohnson #Wisconsin #Censorship #Queer #Pride #Education #Music #Resistance #QueerHistory

In the second of this two-part special on #AncientRome, Thomas takes us through the current state of research on gender bending in the Ancient Roman world. We then quickly dive into the controversial case of the young Emperor #Elagabalus. What do the primary sources actually say, and what might they actually tell us about Roman attitudes towards gender boundaries and boundary crossers?

Content Warning: this episode mentions castration and human sacrifice.

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Adrienne Rich published "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" in 1980 — naming heterosexuality as an institution, not a default, forty-six years before a pastor tried to call its opposite a pathogen.
W.H. Auden wrote love poems to men when that was criminal in England. He kept writing.
Freddie Mercury — born Farrokh Bulsara, Zanzibar, died London at 45 — filled six continents with the sound of a queer man deciding to occupy every inch of space the world would have him vacate.
In Key West this week, residents painted a fence rainbow after officials removed the Pride crosswalk.
What Rich's precision, Auden's tenderness, and Mercury's thunder share: the refusal to make their existence convenient for people who preferred them silent.
The thread is not a trend. It is a refusal, passed hand to hand.
#AdrienneRich #FreddieMercury #QueerHistory #LGBTQHistory #QueerResistance #PoetryMatters #QueerCulture #Representation #WHAuden #ThistleAndMoss #KeyWest #PrideMattershttps://https://twp.ai/4hrJ92