LGBTQ+ Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

The Queer Tendency of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

An interview with author Lana Lin on reimagining Gertrude Stein’s modernist landmark

July 14, 2026 • by Lana Lin and Katie Pruden

Upon its publication in 1933, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas launched author Gertrude Stein into commercial success and placed her as a crucial figure of modernism. Under the guise of an "autobiography," Stein wrote about herself and the Paris salon scene through the voice of her lifelong partner, Alice ...

The Queer Tendency of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

Feminism

“Normal” Sex?

An excerpt from The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report

July 1, 2026 • by Rosa Campbell

What do Shere’s correspondents mean when they write, over and over, ‘I feel normal’? The ‘normal’ is a powerful idea. It can seem like it has always been with us, like perhaps there has always been a broad, overarching scheme of normality to compare ourselves to and wonder how we ...

Feminism

Re-Revolutionizing the Female Orgasm

A conversation with Rosa Campbell on Shere Hite’s fight for feminist sexuality

July 1, 2026 • by Rosa Campbell and Rachel Potter

Shere Hite’s goal was to bring feminism to the women in the suburbs she grew up in. To her conservative Christian grandmother who raised her; to her mother who fell pregnant with Hite as a teenager and was forced out of school; and to herself—an aspiring feminist academic who, without ...

Interviews

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

An interview with Carly Thomsen about her forthcoming book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, out this August

June 30, 2026 • by Gil Bittner and Carly Thomsen

In her forthcoming book Reproductive Justice, Queerly (University of California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen, a feminist and queer studies scholar, looks at how language deployed in the name of queerness and reproductive justice can end up reinforcing the very structures it is meant to challenge. She warns of “conservative outcomes” ...

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

Film & Performing Arts

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

What Heated Rivalry tells us about queer acceptability

May 5, 2026 • by Tanmay Pandya

Over a phone call a few weeks ago, a childhood friend told me she had found among her possessions a long-forgotten, black-and-gold diary that had once belonged to me—that had now, so many years later, mysteriously appeared in her custody. Curious to hear its contents, I asked her to recite ...

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

Literature

Did You Raise Something Monstrous?

In Night Night Fawn, Jordy Rosenberg turns a mother’s opioid-fueled narration into a study of gender, nationalism, and ideological inheritance

April 21, 2026 • by Gil Bittner

Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn (One World, 2026), is narrated by Barbara Rosenberg, a dying Manhattan mother delivering a torrent of OxyContin-fueled recollections about her life and her estranged trans child, who now goes by “J.” The names are not subtle. Rosenberg’s second novel is a radical form ...

Music

Hold Onto This

Why young queer artists and music lovers are turning again to physical media like zines and tapes

March 25, 2026 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

For Rox Eckroth and August Simon, the idea of putting together a tape compilation of songs from trans artists came as much from their interest in the history of cassettes as it did from a desire to collate trans art. “You put a tape in the machine, you hit play. It ...

Interviews

The Return of the Oppressed

A conversation with Robert Fieseler on American Scare and the recovery of queer history long obscured by state censorship

March 11, 2026 • by Robert W. Fieseler and Katelyn Kimberlin

“I kept wondering why it felt like we were all living in the United States of Florida,” says Robert W. Fieseler. In his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (Penguin Random House, 2025), Fieseler examines the forces shaping the fastest-growing state in the ...

Sex & Gender

A League of Their Own

From Rio’s local pitches to the Gay Games, queer athletes challenge the presumed heterosexuality of Brazil’s national sport

February 18, 2026 • by C. K. Snyder

One of the teams that created the LiGay [the amateur Brazilian “Gay League”] was the BeesCats Soccer Boys from Rio de Janeiro. Organizers formed the team in 2017 with a triple aim: to demonstrate that gay men are indeed futebolistas, to help players overcome personal trauma, and to assert their ...

Reviews

Untranslating Lemebel

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles refuses to domesticate the Chilean author’s queer vernacular

February 18, 2026 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg

The cover of A Last Supper of Queer Apostles (Penguin Classics, 2024) features a collage centered around an edited photograph of a man dressed as a saint, crowned with a halo of syringes, each one filled with a watery red substance that looks like blood. This punk Virgin Mary impersonator ...

Literature

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

In I Do Know Some Things, the poet proposes an “encyclopedia of self”

February 13, 2026 • by Rayna Salam

“Who you are and who you think you are: They grind against each other, sand in the frosting,” poet and painter Richard Siken writes in his long-awaited third collection. I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) continues his previous exploration of selfhood, but with a harrowing purpose. In ...

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

Europe & Central Asia

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Katherine Kelaidis

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia ...

LGBTQ+

The Queer Tendency of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

An interview with author Lana Lin on reimagining Gertrude Stein’s modernist landmark

“Normal” Sex?

An excerpt from The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report

Re-Revolutionizing the Female Orgasm

A conversation with Rosa Campbell on Shere Hite’s fight for feminist sexuality

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

An interview with Carly Thomsen about her forthcoming book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, out this August

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

What Heated Rivalry tells us about queer acceptability

Did You Raise Something Monstrous?

In Night Night Fawn, Jordy Rosenberg turns a mother’s opioid-fueled narration into a study of gender, nationalism, and ideological inheritance

Hold Onto This

Why young queer artists and music lovers are turning again to physical media like zines and tapes

The Return of the Oppressed

A conversation with Robert Fieseler on American Scare and the recovery of queer history long obscured by state censorship

A League of Their Own

From Rio’s local pitches to the Gay Games, queer athletes challenge the presumed heterosexuality of Brazil’s national sport

Untranslating Lemebel

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles refuses to domesticate the Chilean author’s queer vernacular

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

In I Do Know Some Things, the poet proposes an “encyclopedia of self”

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

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