"Biden Administration Restores Rights for Transgender Patients"
”Officials invited people subject to health care discrimination to file complaints. But formal rule-making will be needed before a Trump-era policy can be fully reversed.”
"White House Reverses Trump Ban on LGBT Health Protections"
”The federal government will begin enforcing protections for LGBT Americans in health care again, reversing a ban put in place by the Trump administration. The decision to do so was made in light of the Supreme Court’s finding in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that LGBT people are protected from discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
“U.S. Lutheran Church Elects Its First Openly Transgender Bishop"
”A pastor in California became the first openly transgender person to be elevated to the role of bishop in a major American Christian denomination when they were elected to lead a synod in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.”
"German Catholic Priests Defy Rome to Offer Blessings to Gay Couples"
”More than 100 Roman Catholic parishes in Germany held services to bless gay couples, in defiance of the Vatican’s refusal to recognize same-sex unions.”
"The U.K. is set to pursue a ban on ‘conversion therapy.’ Here’s where other countries stand on the issue"
”The U.K. government will seek to ban “conversion therapy” aimed at LGBTQ people, Queen Elizabeth II announced in her annual address to the House of Lords. Measures “will be brought forward to address racial and ethnic disparities and ban conversion therapy,” she said in her speech, which is written by the government to set out its agenda.”
Joanna Wuest and Briana Last, "With Gay Adoption Decision, Will the Supreme Court Erode the Regulatory State?"
”On the surface, Fulton v. Philadelphia poses a question about religious conscience—but its proponents hope it will enable conservatives to pick and choose which laws they have to follow.”
Hugh Ryan, "When Queers Fought the State and Won"
”Sarah Schulman’s new history of AIDS activism group ACT UP NY is a definitive and instructive history of how outsiders forced the government to accept that they mattered.”
Special Issue Spotlight
Emily K. Hobson and Dan Royles, “The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over”, Radical History Review, Volume 2021, Issue 140, May 2021.
This issue of Radical History Review traces histories from around the globe and examines how HIV/AIDS has been shaped by the political economies of neoliberalism and state violence. Laura Frances Goffman examines the temporality of AIDS in Kuwait. Joseph E. Hower analyzes how the public sector union AFSCME moved from anti-discrimination to carceral unionism in responding to AIDS. Salonee Bhaman illustrates the contradictions of housing advocacy for people with HIV/AIDS in 1980s New York City. René Esparza shows how Latinx radicals across the Puerto Rican diaspora forged queer and feminist decolonial AIDS activism.
To read more, click here.
Episode Spotlight
Chances are you’ve never heard of Ruth Wallis, one of the greatest singers, comedians, and performers of sexually suggestive lyrics in the postwar United States. Most of her catalogue remains on vinyl and historians have forgotten her. But from the 1940s until the early 1970s, Ruth Wallis was a bestselling performer and a mainstay at supper clubs and hotels. At a time when it was legally risky for entertainers to sing about sexuality for profit and pleasure, Ruth sold millions of records that used innuendo to playfully hint at a variety of straight and queer sexual pleasures.
For more, listen here.
Books
Upcoming Events
Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture 2021: Hazel Carby, "Imperial Sexual Economies", 16 June 2021
This year’s Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture will take place online on Wednesday 16 June. Hazel Carby, Charles C. And Dorathea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Yale University, will deliver a lecture on ‘Imperial Sexual Economies’. Drawn from her most recent book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the lecture will examine the workings of patriarchal, racialized and gendered power through the entangled lives of free women of colour and enslaved women on a Jamaican coffee plantation.
