E.J. Graff

Do not miss Katha Pollitt’s latest column, which begins: First they came for abortion, but I didn’t care because abortion was for sluts. Then they came for sex ed, but I didn’t care because the kids can learn all they need to know at home. Then they came for birth control, but… Wait a minute! […]

So it appears to be the week for visionaries and pioneers to die. Last night, at age 86, Frank Kameny died at home. Kameny was the genuine article: a trailblazer in gay rights, suing the federal government — in the 1950s — for firing him for being a homosexual, back before we all graduated to […]

Over at The Huffington Post, Soraya Chemaly absolutely nails one of the great injustices of childhood (and adulthood, although it’s less visible by then): the masculinity patrol. She makes a fabulous proposal: National Let Your Boy Be a Girl Day: Because every other day of the year they have to make sure they are NOT […]

Earlier this week I wondered what was up with Brewster County, Texas — waaay down on the Mexican border, which according to the census has 8.2 same-sex couples for every 1,000 households. While that doesn’t approach the numbers you find in some of the more famously gay-friendly regions, that’s almost as high a density as […]

Another reason to grieve (and to read Hopkins): Paula Ettelbrick is dead. She was a fierce and important LGBT advocate, working in the movement for her entire adulthood, in just about every capacity, including Lambda Legal, the Empire State Pride Agenda, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, […]

Today is obit day. The nation lost three visionaries, as you’ve heard by now: Steve Jobs, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and Derrick Bell. Others have said what there is to say, brilliantly. But such a day of losses made me think of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem I try to say to someone every autumn. […]

(Homepage photo credit: Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Line with Black, Blue, and Yellow, 1923. Houston Museum of Fine Arts.) So you’ve been watching those early ’60s nostalgia shows in fascinated horror — oh lord, women really had to live like that — and wondering: How in the world did that world change into this one? Here’s […]

Thanks to the tireless demographer Gary Gates of UCLA’s Williams Institute, NPR has an interactive map of where in the U.S., according to the census, the most same-sex couples live. (Or at least, where you can find same-sex couples who feel safe enough to tell the census that they’re together.) As you’d imagine, every state […]

Over at The Washington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich feels terrible, just terrible about the problems of the super-rich, who can’t dress the way they want to. She describes a New Yorker profile of Daphne Guinness … who is apparently best known for wearing clothes, which she draws from a wardrobe of 2,500 garments, 450 pairs of […]

In response to my article yesterday about offices where sexism is a low-grade fever — and let’s be clear, this definitely happens in progressive and journalistic organizations as well as in finance, manufacturing, and all the rest — Amanda Marcotte tweeted at me that the word “mansplaining” can sometimes help counter the problem. Aha! Yes […]