Project MUSE®: Journal of the History of Sexuality - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of the History of Sexuality.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 10 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of the History of SexualityTWOProject MUSE®Journal of the History of Sexuality1535-36051043-4070Latest articles in Journal of the History of Sexuality. Feed provided by Project MUSE®"Little Richard: Down, Not Out": The Quasar of Rock’s LGBTQ Iconicity and the Historical Reception to His Sexuality and Gender Presentation, 1955–Present
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983814
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Musician Little Richard has been dubbed—by himself and others—as “the Architect” and “the Originator” of rock and roll music, but he also claimed to be a trailblazer in another key cultural arena. “I was a forerunner in homosexuality,” he told the gay-and-lesbian-run IMRU Radio during an August 1981 interview. His voice this time was serious, quiet, and sincere, not the boisterous, exuberant tone with which the singer is typically associated. “I was a pioneer in it,” he continued. “I was one of the first to be out and loud on television like I was.”1 Ironically, the singer was on air not to celebrate his place in queer or music history but to discuss his professed abandonment of both homosexuality and rock and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmall"Little Richard: Down, Not Out": The Quasar of Rock’s LGBTQ Iconicity and the Historical Reception to His Sexuality and Gender Presentation, 1955–Present2026-02-18text/htmlen-US"Little Richard: Down, Not Out": The Quasar of Rock’s LGBTQ Iconicity and the Historical Reception to His Sexuality and Gender Presentation, 1955–Present2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®1286972026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Maricas: Queer Cultures and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942–1982 by Javier Fernández-Galeano (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983815
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Maricas, one of the best histories of the Hispanic world to emerge in the last decade, asks how Spanish and Argentinian men who had sex with men between 1942 and 1982 responded to violently homophobic political regimes, regimes with very similar gender policies and ideologies.Javier Fernández-Galeano argues that the practices, social networks, and communities that arose in response to repression gave shape to new (albeit historically situated) identities for men who had sex with men, notably, the category of maricas. Maricas were Spanish and Argentinean men who refused to act, speak, or present themselves in accordance with the strict local codes of masculinity, sometimes at great cost; they were subject to harsh
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallMaricas: Queer Cultures and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942–1982 by Javier Fernández-Galeano (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USMaricas: Queer Cultures and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942–1982 by Javier Fernández-Galeano (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®72652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Staging a Crusade: Queer Activism and the Lionheart Gay Theater of Chicago
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983816
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On 14 August 1983 the actor Carl Forsberg walked onto the small stage at Company bar in Chicago, Illinois. He sat on the stool that had been placed there for him and took a moment to survey the patrons.1 Then he started talking. “I have acquired a disease that means I am going to die,” he began. Over the next thirty minutes, Forsberg relayed his experience of living with this unnamed disease. He speculated over whom he contracted it from, described the anxiety he felt telling his mother, and reflected on the fear he saw in the eyes of his friends when he walked into a room.2 People in Company that night knew he was talking about acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). What some of them did not realize, at least
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallStaging a Crusade: Queer Activism and the Lionheart Gay Theater of Chicago2026-02-18text/htmlen-USStaging a Crusade: Queer Activism and the Lionheart Gay Theater of Chicago2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®1013252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Premodern Ruling Sexualities: Representation, Identity, and Power edited by Gabrielle Storey and Zita Eva Rohr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983817
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In their introduction, Gabrielle Storey and Zita Eva Rohr note that this collection of essays is as much about the sexualities of rulers as it is about the sexualities that rule the rulers themselves. Always a hot topic in the various medieval courts surveyed, sexuality was braided into regal self-fashioning and frequently into politics. Storey and Rohr position the volume as (1) side-stepping the hoary dichotomy between essentialism (Boswell) and constructivism (Foucault); (2) residing in the areas of “royal studies” and “monarchical studies”; and (3) keeping the term “sexuality” in spite of anachronism and demurring on “queer,” which, they cannily note, is also anachronistic.In the first chapter, “‘And Though She
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallPremodern Ruling Sexualities: Representation, Identity, and Power edited by Gabrielle Storey and Zita Eva Rohr (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USPremodern Ruling Sexualities: Representation, Identity, and Power edited by Gabrielle Storey and Zita Eva Rohr (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®100282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18“I Just Feel Awkward Around Girls”: Youth Sexuality in a Social Science Archive
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983818
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In January 1969 Paul Chin, a Chinese American boy of seventeen, was among fifty-two seniors at his San Francisco high school who agreed to participate in a research study, the Longitudinal Study of Transitions in Four Stages of Life, associated with the Human Development Program at the University of California, San Francisco. Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal, Majda Thurnher, and David Chiriboga, the scholars who headed the project, sought to explore how people living through pretransitional moments reflected on their aspirations and opportunities as they anticipated major life changes. Toward this end, they recruited four research cohorts. Paul’s group included twenty-five boys and twenty-seven girls ages sixteen to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmall“I Just Feel Awkward Around Girls”: Youth Sexuality in a Social Science Archive2026-02-18text/htmlen-US“I Just Feel Awkward Around Girls”: Youth Sexuality in a Social Science Archive2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®304232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Lou Sullivan’s Childhood Diaries and the Dilemmas of Gender and Age in Queer and Trans Youth History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983819
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My second day of menstruation. I love it! Yesterday, after school, I noticed in the bathroom and practically ran home. Mom and I fixed everything up, so now I’m a young lady…. I really feel like a different person. All grown up. I should be growing, now, in the bust, too. I love being a girl. So delicate. Someday I’ll get myself a boy like Paul and we’ll get married and have some little kids. Mom and Kathy [sister] are both acting nicer to me. I love it!1Penned in 1964, this diary entry celebrated the thirteen-year-old diarist’s entry into what her white, middle-class, Midwestern, Catholic culture represented as the esteemed club of adolescent girlhood, with the promise of future admission to the even more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallLou Sullivan’s Childhood Diaries and the Dilemmas of Gender and Age in Queer and Trans Youth History2026-02-18text/htmlen-USLou Sullivan’s Childhood Diaries and the Dilemmas of Gender and Age in Queer and Trans Youth History2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®244632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Books of Critical Interest
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983820
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Book Review Editor’s Note—The inclusion of a publication in this list neither assumes nor precludes its concurrent or subsequent review in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallBooks of Critical Interest2026-02-18text/htmlen-USBooks of Critical Interest2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®147822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine by Amanda Lock Swarr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983821
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Amanda Swarr has two central aims: to trace the work that intersex science in South Africa has done for our understandings of race, gender, sex, and sexuality and to amplify the voices of contemporary intersex Africans as scholars and theorists of intersex experience, its meanings, and political possibilities. The first two chapters of the book address the first aim. Chapter 1, “Colonial Obsessions and Fallacies: ‘Hermaphroditism’ in Histories of South Africa,” details colonial notions and representations of “hermaphroditism” beginning in the eighteenth century. Swarr describes the colonial obsession with locating difference in African bodies and genitalia. This played out through the spectacularization of Sara
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallEnvisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine by Amanda Lock Swarr (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USEnvisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine by Amanda Lock Swarr (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®102722026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader by Susan Stryker (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983822
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Susan Stryker is widely acknowledged as the impetus behind trans studies as a field in the United States and beyond. The essays in this collection, compiled and edited with an introduction and concluding interview by McKenzie Wark, span over thirty years. They chart the entangled evolution of Stryker’s own sense of gender and sexuality, her relationship to the queer community in San Francisco, and the ideas that have become the cornerstone of trans theory. Wark groups the essays under three parts. Part 1 focuses on Stryker’s more autobiographical writings about queer life in the Bay Area. Part 2 brings together essays in dialogue with feminist scholarship and queer theory. Part 3 begins with one of Stryker’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallWhen Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader by Susan Stryker (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USWhen Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader by Susan Stryker (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®97442026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848–1950 by Caroline Séquin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983823
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In Desiring Whiteness, Caroline Séquin explores the complex power dynamics of selling, buying, and policing commercial sex. Séquin analyzes regulations, practices, and contestations around sexual services in France and Senegal in the late nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century period of French colonial rule. Moving between port cities and military sites in mainly metropolitan France and Senegal, Séquin frames her investigation as a “racial history” of prostitution in the French Empire. Desiring Whiteness focuses on brothels—sites Séquin calls throughout “gatekeepers of whiteness” (9)—and the discourses and policies of municipal, military, and civil authorities that constituted a “regulationist regime” in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallDesiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848–1950 by Caroline Séquin (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USDesiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848–1950 by Caroline Séquin (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®129842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature by Colby Gordon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983824
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This is a brilliant and angry book, and for Colby Gordon, righteous fury fuels keen analytic argument. Driven by the genocidal hostility toward trans people, Gordon’s project argues for the historicity of a trans Renaissance as a counter to present-day politics, which are steeped in the assumption that trans bodies are recent medical/surgical inventions. Gordon takes exception to readings of trans embodiment in the Renaissance as partaking of the universalization of cisnormativity. Instead, Gordon recognizes paths binding Renaissance theological encounters with transness to contemporary (attacks on) trans life as a retort to anti-trans violence.Gordon opens with a passage in Holinshed’s Chronicles to lay out how
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallGlorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature by Colby Gordon (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USGlorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature by Colby Gordon (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®95822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18“I Just Had to Write”: Queer Youth Letters in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983825
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In 1965 the Detroit Free Press ran a series of articles aimed at parents who were “concerned with rearing sons who are manly and daughters who are truly feminine.” Alongside advice from a range of authorities on strategies to ensure children’s proper sexual and gender development, a passing reference suggested just how widespread queer feelings were among midcentury American youth—and provided a tantalizing glimpse of the types of sources historians today might draw on to learn more about queer youth history. According to the article, syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers reported that “70% of the mail which I receive from boys 14 to 19 concerns their homosexual tendencies, begging for help, terrified someone may
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmall“I Just Had to Write”: Queer Youth Letters in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States2026-02-18text/htmlen-US“I Just Had to Write”: Queer Youth Letters in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®326712026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Imperfect Sodomy: The Lisbon Inquisition and the Repression of Heterosexual Anal Intercourse in Portugal, 1580–1800
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983826
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On 27 November 1630 a man made his way to the door of the Estaus Palace, the imposing building on the northern side of Rossio Square in Lisbon that served as the seat of the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Having been admitted into the presence of inquisitor Pedro da Silva de Sampaio, the man identified himself as Fray Felipe da Cruz, a Dominican friar and preacher. Father Felipe resided in the nearby convent of São Domingos, located on the northeastern corner of Rossio Square. Having taken an oath on the Gospel to tell only the truth and not to reveal what he was about to say to anyone outside of the Inquisition, Felipe da Cruz confessed that he had committed the “abominable sin” (pecado nefando)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallImperfect Sodomy: The Lisbon Inquisition and the Repression of Heterosexual Anal Intercourse in Portugal, 1580–18002026-02-18text/htmlen-USImperfect Sodomy: The Lisbon Inquisition and the Repression of Heterosexual Anal Intercourse in Portugal, 1580–18002026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®893772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Intergenerational Sex in One Teenager in Ten
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983827
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I stumbled upon One Teenager in Ten: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth (1983), a groundbreaking collection of essays, while researching my book, Queer Survival: Gender, Sexuality and the History of Childhood Sexual Abuse. This project examines the imagined connections between experiencing childhood sexual abuse and gender and sexual nonconformity since the late nineteenth century. In short, I seek to trace the origins and persistence of the idea that childhood sexual abuse causes queerness. In researching this history, I was not wrong to turn to One Teenager in Ten, as I discuss below, but the book opened up questions and interpretive challenges regarding young people’s sexuality that were different from what I had
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallIntergenerational Sex in One Teenager in Ten2026-02-18text/htmlen-USIntergenerational Sex in One Teenager in Ten2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®273462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983828
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Simon Goldhill’s polished gem of a book is not about queer Cambridge at all. It is much smaller and much bigger than that. Smaller because it focuses on a handful of men living principally in sets of rooms off one staircase, H staircase, in the Gibbs Building at King’s College in the University of Cambridge; bigger because of the impact of these men in the world at large. He styles his book an “alternative” history of homosexuality because it takes place in private, away from the public spaces of cities, ports, and resorts that are the stuff of most queer histories; his guiding question is: “How does an institutional framework change the possible narratives of homosexual history?” (16).Goldhill’s cast of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallQueer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USQueer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®87072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18A Forum: Coming of Age in the Age of Coming Out; The Transformation of Queer Youth Experiences in the United States, 1953–1983
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983829
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Profound shifts in identity and self-understanding define adolescence as a life stage, as anyone who has ever been an adolescent—or raised an adolescent—can testify. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, youth whose coming of age involved a growing understanding of their own same-sex desires or gender differences from expected norms underwent these developmental shifts during a period of profound transformations in LGBTQ identity brought about by homophile activism, the gay and trans rights movements, the women’s movement, and the sexual revolution. These cultural shifts resulted in the opening of a surprisingly wide range of possibilities for self-understanding by queer youth between 1953 and 1983, the three decades
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallA Forum: Coming of Age in the Age of Coming Out; The Transformation of Queer Youth Experiences in the United States, 1953–19832026-02-18text/htmlen-USA Forum: Coming of Age in the Age of Coming Out; The Transformation of Queer Youth Experiences in the United States, 1953–19832026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®189612026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life by Regina Kunzel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983830
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Psychiatry’s entanglement with homosexuality and gender variance has a long and, for the most part, dismal history. A number of scholars—among them Jonathan Ned Katz, Ronald Bayer, Kenneth Lewes, Martin Duberman—have documented in vivid detail how psychiatrists and psychoanalysts attempted, over the course of the twentieth century, to establish themselves as arbiters of sexual and gender normality. As they and others have shown, psychiatric authorities routinely pathologized homosexual desire, characterizing gay men and women as mentally ill and subjecting them to a range of treatments, from talk therapy to invasive and inhumane aversion therapies and even lobotomy, in the name of curing them of their sexual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallIn the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life by Regina Kunzel (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USIn the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life by Regina Kunzel (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®98032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18The Masculinists and the Birth of Bisexual Politics in Germany, 1890–1945
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983831
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Bisexuals have existed since at least 1904. Or, at least, that is the year when there are data to indicate as much. By the turn of the twentieth century, many scholars had posed the question of how many “homosexuals” existed, but their answers had been purely speculative. Magnus Hirschfeld, the sexologist, believed that a statistically accurate count would shed light on a range of other questions, such as “whether—as is often claimed—homosexuals counteract overpopulation in a significant way.”1 He distributed what may have been the first social-scientific survey of the “homosexual” among groups of university students and factory workers, who were given a piece of paper that listed two different genders and asked to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/179/image/coversmallThe Masculinists and the Birth of Bisexual Politics in Germany, 1890–19452026-02-18text/htmlen-USThe Masculinists and the Birth of Bisexual Politics in Germany, 1890–19452026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®1164552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18