Last month, Botswana’s High Court unanimously struck down key sections of the country’s penal code that punished homosexuality with up to seven years in prison. “Human dignity is harmed when minority groups are marginalized,” Judge Michael Leburu, one of the three ruling judges in the panel, concluded. Human rights activists are celebrating the move as […]
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Douglas Crimp, a groundbreaking art scholar, curator, writer, editor, educator and AIDS activist who challenged the field of art history by insisting on seeing it in a social context, died on July 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 74. Rosalyn Deutsche, an art historian and friend, said the cause was multiple myeloma. In […]
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On a September morning two years ago, Abel Cedeno put on a pink Kylie Minogue shirt, and then tossed his books and inhaler into his backpack. Just before leaving for school that day, he took a switchblade knife he had bought online from the top of his dresser and placed it in his pocket. Within […]
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Last week, Michael L. Johnson, a former college wrestler convicted of failing to disclose to sexual partners that he was H.I.V. positive in a racially charged case that reignited calls to re-examine laws that criminalize H.I.V. exposure, walked out of the Boonville Correctional Center in Missouri 25 years earlier than expected. Mr. Johnson, 27, was […]
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In January, as Congress swore in a record 10 openly L.G.B.T.Q. members, Ritchie J. Torres, a 31-year-old Bronx councilman, recalled how the moment filled him with admiration, but also a sense that the accomplishment was still incomplete. Mr. Torres, who is the first openly gay person to hold elected office in the borough, noted that […]
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JERUSALEM — Israel’s new education minister endorsed so-called conversion therapy for gay youths, which has been widely debunked by the medical establishment — prompting immediate outrage and calls for his dismissal. The minister’s remarks added to the fraught political atmosphere in Israel as it prepares for another election on Sept. 17, just five months after […]
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The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out — all while wondering […]
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Vanessa Dillon, 41, is a bisexual woman marrying Bob Bissonnette, 36, a bisexual man. Each has dated people of more than one gender in the past. Not adhering to monogamy, they might continue to do so after they are married. But at their wedding, to outsiders they appear straight. “If I was marrying a woman, […]
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Abel Cedeno said he never intended to use the knife he brandished in a Bronx high school classroom two years ago. He had been pelted with broken pencils and wads of paper, and the knife “was only meant to deter — to scare people away,” he said on the witness stand on Thursday while defending […]
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MONTREAL — When Rabbi Lisa Grushcow, the first openly gay rabbi of a large synagogue in Canada, was preparing to begin rabbinical school, she faced a daunting choice: love or serving God. Her world was suddenly turned upside down in the late 1990s while she was studying religion at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and […]
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Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Play | RadioPublic | Stitcher Is consumer activism an effective political strategy? Has corporate America become a force for social liberalism? This week on “The Argument,” the columnists talk “woke capitalism.” Ross Douthat thinks the burgeoning phenomenon reflects a […]
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SEOUL, South Korea — The army lieutenant knew his career was irrevocably damaged when military investigators visited him in 2017, demanding that he admit having had sex with another male soldier — a crime in South Korea’s military. When the investigators put him on a video call with his ex-lover, who admitted to the relationship, […]
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MELBOURNE, Australia — It took universal health care, political will and a health campaign designed to terrify the public, but nearly four decades into the H.I.V. crisis, Australian researchers say the country is on a path toward making transmissions of the virus vanishingly rare. The fight is not yet won, the experts caution, and the […]
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Recent Broadway revivals of “Angels in America,” “M. Butterfly,” “The Boys in the Band” and “Torch Song”— shows dealing with the gay experience — have attracted star power, awards and attention. Earlier this year, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s acclaimed Broadway debut, “Choir Boy,” focused on a charismatic gay youth who runs into trouble at his boarding […]
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When Naomi Wolf appeared at the Strand in Manhattan last month to promote her new book, “Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love,” it might have seemed like your average book-tour event. There were several dozen people in folding chairs, a softball Q. and A. by a friendly interviewer and mingling over cookies brought […]
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WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday the creation of a commission to review “the role of human rights in American foreign policy,” and consider questions about the intended meaning of the concept that was memorialized in a 1948 United Nations declaration. “What does it mean to say or claim that something […]
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SAN JUAN, P.R. — Puerto Ricans mourned so many losses after Hurricane Maria that the closing of a beloved tiki bar in San Juan might have seemed of little consequence, another casualty of the battered post-storm economy. But the bar — El Escondite, or the Hideaway — was not just a place for a strong […]
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On the quiet, promising first morning of June, I received a text message from my brother in Abuja, Nigeria. “Please, refrain from all these shameful acts,” he wrote. “Everyone is tired of you. Mummy is crying, Daddy is crying. If you don’t value relationships, we do!” My brother had written after I had posted a […]
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In 1969, Forest Hills was a long way from Christopher Street, and a bizarre incident of vigilante tree chopping showed just how far. Only days before the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, a mob of some 20 local men descended on the southern edge of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Using power saws and axes, they […]
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I rang the doorbell of my grandmother’s house before remembering to pull off my wedding ring. I slipped it into my pocket and, just like that, I was someone else — an actor playing a fictional version of me. In Los Angeles this past December for the holidays, I had arranged to see my grandmother […]
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