Some of our older readers may be familiar with the antics of the late spokesnun of the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, Patricia Bartlett. During the seventies and eighties, she terrorised the LGBT and arts communities, descending with holy wrath on censorship tribunals until they developed proper evidence-based criteria that limited the parameters of […]

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Curve, the US lesbian magazine, had a recent set of bios on lesbian academics of note. Thanks to my days in Womens Studies and Sociology at Massey, I recognised quite a few of them.
I suppose it leaves me asking where many of their gay male counterparts are these days. True, some of them are still […]

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Welcome to the 23rd Century. The TFV Radclyffe is about to lift off from Auckland Interstellar Spaceport, on a trade and diplomatic mission with several alien species with their own LGBT members.
It’s odd that science fiction has virtually never explored variant sexualities and gender identities amongst extra-terrestrials. While LGBT SF authors exist, and do brilliant […]

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Sigmund Freud and his followers labelled Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge, as ’schizophrenic’ and a ‘repressed homosexual.’ However, she may have been a pre-surgical transwoman caught in the wrong body, as well as suffering from schizophrenia. And thanks to Douglas Wright’s ponderings about Schreber and his experiences, which inspired this little piece.
Schreber accepted her vocal […]

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Spenser Hughes: The Lambda Conspiracy (1993): Chicago:
Moody Press.
Fortunately, this appalling piece of fundamentalist
antigay conspiratorial fiction isn’t available in any
New Zealand library.However, it does make one thinkabout how the Christian Right scapegoats other marginal
social groups.
In 1992, things were looking up for the US lesbian and
gay communities. Bill Clinton had recently become
President, and there were prospects that […]

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African-American gay SF writer Samuel Delany is one of the great minds of his genre. In this novella, he has some academic amusement with Ancient Roman gay life.
Delany is fairly out, and many of his SF characters are lesbian, gay or transgender. In Triton, Bron Helstrom changes sex on that colonised large Neptunian satellite. In […]

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