Bonnie Lucas, Booty, 1985. Assemblage on fabric. ILY2 New York. I discovered Bonnie Lucas’s work in October 2024 while whizzing through the Paris Internationale art fair. I’d been visiting some of my closest friends, who were among the founders of the fair. I didn’t have much time to look at all the galleries, and I wasn’t there to shop. But as I passed a gallery from Portland, Oregon, that I’d never heard of, something caught
Ace Books, 1969, 286 pp. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich Last summer I read a book about a planet called Winter. Last winter I read it again. It was better that way, trooping through ten-degree nights, slipping on poorly salted ice, and imagining myself elsewhere. Winter—that is, the planet—is a foreigner’s colloquialism. Its inhabitants call it Gethen. Ursula K. Le Guin created Gethen
Carmen Winant, The Fall of the Modern Empire, 2023. © Carmen Winant. I first interviewed Leah in a Starbucks in South Carolina in 2010, leaning closely over our drinks—black tea for me, mocha latte for her—so that my recorder would catch our voices over the whir of the coffee grinder. Leah was a young, bubbly white woman who gesticulated with her hands while talking as if overflowing with enthusiasm. Yet, two years earlier, when Leah
New episodes Wednesdays on Apple TV. I am born, and in a jump cut I’m at Barnard College in 1965, and my English teacher turns out to be Kate Millett, who will go on to write Sexual Politics and help launch the women’s movement in the United States and everywhere else on the planet. What do we want? So many things. What is one of the things we don’t shut up about? Being divided into
As someone who devoted her life to mythmaking, Rachel Pollack’s self-transformation carries an appropriate sense of magic. On a frigid winter night in early 1970, the twenty-four-year-old, then newly married and teaching English at a college in upstate New York, was giving a fellow instructor a ride home. The woman dangled an intriguing offer: Shepherd me through the snow, and I’ll give you a tarot reading. Already a fan of The Waste Land, in which
Annabelle Sharp, Portrait of Catharine A. MacKinnon, 2026. Acrylic on board. Note: This short piece is a fragment from a presentation at Oxford University that served as the basis for a broader discussion on November 28, 2022. My interlocutors there, Sandra Fredman, Finn Mackay, and Mischa Shuman greatly enriched it. Many thanks to Max Hantel for his superb technical help, and to the incomparable University of Michigan Law Library, as always, for making my work
Only Witches Fall trees seen by railare shrubs gone wild,the shades of FrenchLieutenant’s Woman.Compassion nowunfashionable.The disability scholar tellsme “Vulnerability ispower,” the medically fragilepossess rooms through pure being.Flash on mother’s infusions,girls ailing in Pediatrics.On the other sideof the river, a passingtrain, discolored carsperfect as a readymade.II.We marched this month:No Kings, Only Witches. Nowthat’s a sign.Women go through somuch and still decideto be kind. We are mysteryanimals that will not scare.We incant hurts and abuses.Burn. Sages recovering,pressing
Several months into Donald Trump’s second term, a friend dragged me to Cabaret. The Broadway revival had begun during the Biden administration, when it felt like, perhaps, the center still might hold. Now the rough beast had returned, like the horror movie villain you think you’ve defeated: ominous music, tiny orange hand catching the door right before you can slam it shut. I was less than eager to spend several hours at a musical about
Left to right: Mo B. DIck, El Daña, and Buck Wylde at the King of Drag premier, 2025. I attended my first drag king show in 2018. Two friends invited me to join them at Spectrum, a queer nightclub in Eugene, Oregon. I’d seen quite a few drag queen shows by then—audiences packed with bachelorette parties and tourists seeking exotic experiences—but the atmosphere at Spectrum was intimate and insurgent. The room pulsed with a collective
On The Way To Folsom St. Fair, 1994. Photo by Chloe Sherman. The Bearded Lady opened in San Francisco on Fourteenth and Guerrero in 1992, born out of the need for a lesbian-centered meeting and performance space. “Our only idea was we were going to have a coffee machine and a wrestling mat,” recalls cofounder Harry Dodge. Cindy Crabb’s manuscript for The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe: An Oral History of the San Francisco Dyke Scene,
