Year: 2016

• June 15, 2016

  Article: Post-Orlando Truth For You: Gay Bars Aren’t ‘Safe Spaces’

  This piece was picked up by The Daily Beast, thanks to Melissa Petro of Becoming Writers and including suggestions from TDB editors and several friends. Read it here, or contact me for the archived version. Save Save Save
• June 13, 2016

  Violence at gay bars and the police

  Police actions in the aftermath of the terrorist massacre at Orlando’s Pulse were heroic. This is noteworthy because until recently police were often agents of violence at gay clubs. For most of the 20th century, going to gay bars meant that “you may be placing yourself in a position that you’re not just going to…
• June 13, 2016

  Terrorism and gay bars

  Gay bars have always been sites of danger, Terrorists and gay bashers have long used gay bars to find LGBTQ people- only last weekend, my boyfriend and I had “faggots” shouted at us from a speeding car outside a Columbus, Ohio gay bar. The massacre at Pulse’s nightclub is the worst mass shooting in U.S.…
• April 4, 2016

  Article: Parenting transgender children in PFLAG

  Published with Taylor L. Field in The Journal of GLBT Family Studies. Parents of transgender children (N=14) recounted four ways in which their parenting experiences were more difficult and isolating than those of other parents of a national GLBT support organization: the physical changes their children undergo, the lack of media representations of transgender lives,…
• March 16, 2016

  Gay bars vs. Grindr: Let’s stay on our phones tonight

  Will Grindr Kill Gay Bars? Grindr Founder Responds To Claim That The Hook-Up Is Killing Gay Bars. This week saw a spate of articles about whether Grindr and other geo-enabled smartphone apps are hurting gay bars because of an interview with Grindr CEO Joel Simkhai in Time Out Hong Kong: Many people think apps like…
• March 5, 2016

  Supporting colleagues, repudiating anti-Semitism

  I am writing to show support to my Jewish colleagues in the face of the anti-Semitic speech by one of our colleagues. I appreciate President Krislov’s strong defense of academic freedom, even though it makes me queasy to have it applied in this situation. As someone who conducts research into and teaches about sexuality, I…
• February 15, 2016

  Lesbian bar, queer futurities?

  What if the paucity of lesbian bars represented not a present failure or a return to a bad gay past, but the future of queer sociality for everyone? This was the challenge posed by Lyndsey Beutin when she, Crystal Biruk and I hung out a couple weeks ago. When San Francisco’s Lexington Club closed in…
• February 12, 2016

  Taylor Mac is good for America

  This was the conclusion of Patrick O’Connor, my colleague and companion last Saturday to Taylor Mac‘s Ann Arbor performance of Act II of his virtuosic “24-Decade History of Popular Music.” One hour per decade, three decades per show, our segment was 1956-1986. When I first heard about the show I thought,  “who’s going to sit…
• February 8, 2016

  Page 99 test for my book

  Today I’m the guest blogger for the Page 99 Test, a project by Marshal Zeringue for the Campaign for the American Reader. My page 99 starts with “smash a brothel cartel;” you can see the rest of what I wrote on his blog. Check it out!
• January 18, 2016

  Guest essayist on Policy Trajectories

  Today I’m the featured essayist on Policy Trajectories, the official organ of the Comparative-Historical section of the American Sociological Association. The essay is about how prostitution policy presaged the unraveling of the European Union. Read it out here, and check out the company I’m in! Seriously star-struck.