LGBTQ Policy Journal

INTRODUCTION             The proliferation of gay online spaces and the opportunity they present to experiment and explore one’s own sexual identity have made online platforms increasingly significant in the social, romantic, and emotional lives of gay men.[1] For many gay men, online spaces serve as sanctuaries to meet other gay men, experiment with their personal identity construction, and cultivate […]

In 1984, San Francisco effectively shut down gay bathhouses in a desperate attempt to curb HIV transmission, assuming that these venues create what is presently referred to as “super spreader events.” Despite changes in the global understanding of HIV and scientific advances in medication, these cultural centers remained effectively banned for over 36 years.[i] These closures […]

“I do not conceive how someone who loves nothing can be happy.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book IV “Tonight we are just going to have a lesbian night in.”“What makes it a lesbian night in?”“Oh, the fact that it is a night in.”—A.A, personal communication(emphasis added) “Don’t let them inI am too tiredTo hold myself carefullyAnd wink when they circleThe fact […]

Introduction The spread of social media offers insight into how understandings and formations of bodies are created intra-communally in global and pluralistic ways. This gives us an opportunity to see how social bodies are rendered through syntheses of digital narrative that are not only mimetic to a more seemingly natural social body, but indelibly a […]

Religious liberty and LGBTQ civil rights are falsely portrayed as being at opposite ends of the cultural and policy spectrum. We have seen this in cases brought before the Supreme Court involving employment rights, commerce, marriage, and adoption. Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have recently even gone so far as to frame LGBTQ […]

MORGAN BENSON  Thomas, it’s so nice to be speaking with you today. I first came across your books and reporting when I was looking for trans perspectives on masculinity and manhood while going through my own transition, for lack of a better word, a few years ago. You’ve now published two books: Man Alive, which you’ve […]

Introduction  We are APIENC, an organization building power for and by trans, nonbinary, gender expansive, and gender abundant Asians and Pacific Islanders in the Bay Area, and this project is a love letter to our community. We know how hard it can be to be our full selves in this world. We know how hard it […]

When I moved to Seoul in 2019, it marked a twenty-year homecoming. I came back to my father’s homeland not as a Korean but a gyopo, the name for us westernized sojourners, distinctively set apart from locals thanks to our loud tattoos and poor Korean speaking skills. Living in diaspora, you arrive everywhere hollow. Sometimes you […]

Section 1: Introduction[iv] Within this paper, we analyze three African country contexts—Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda—in terms of absolute sovereignty exceptions as well as legal obligations of States to protect the rights of LGBTQI and GDP.  In Africa, membership to the African Union (AU) could be regarded as one way in which states have agreed […]

Lisa, a sixty-four year old, Latina Lesbian, has been an advocate and provider of LatinX services at one of San Diego’s leading LGBT organizations for more than three decades. Until recently, Lisa was able to walk to work in the gayborhood of Hillcrest; however, after twenty-five years, her landlord decided to sell the home Lisa […]

A variety of studies, statistical analyses, and testimonies have linked pornography with violence against women. These have shown everything from increased rates of sexual aggression in men after viewing violent pornography in controlled laboratory experiments to the prevalence of pornography as an inspiration and motivation for domestic violence and sexual abuse of women. The anti-pornography […]

This essay leverages the Anita May Rosenstein Campus—the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s forthcoming cohousing-style complex for both youth and senior members of the LGBTQ+ community—as an example of affordable, intergenerational housing that challenges the nation’s existing federal provisions for senior housing. The need for a broader, more inclusive, even queerer approach to addressing the nation’s […]