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Hopes for change on the issue in Australia were raised and quickly dashed following September’s leadership spill in the centre-right Liberal Party, in which Malcom Turnbull defeated Prime Minister Tony Abbott, 54 votes to 44. Once seen by advocates of law reform as a champion of marriage equality, the new Prime Minister stated his intention to maintain the coalition’s position on the issue.

The post Marriage equality in Australia: will 2016 bring a change in the law? appeared first on OUPblog.

Title: Traffick (sequel to TRICKS) Author: Ellen Hopkins Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books, November, 2015 Themes: sex trafficking of minors, tricks, homosexuality, homophobia, transphobia, family relationships, romantic relationships, abuse, Las Vegas Genre: Contemporary YA Ages: 14+ Opening: A Poem By Cody Bennet Can’t Find The courage to leap the brink, free-fall beyond the … Continue reading →

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month (LGBT Pride Month) is celebrated each year in the month of June to honour the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. This commemorative month recognizes the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.

At Oxford University Press we are marking Gay Pride month by making a selection of engaging and relevant scholarly articles free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online. These chapters broaden the scope of LGBT scholarship by taking a psychological approach to sexuality, examining the arguments of biological difference, and generating important debates on the psychological impact of society’s treatment of minority sexualities.

‘Biological Perspectives on Sexual Orientation’ in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identities over the Lifespan: Psychological Perspectives

What determines an individual’s sexual orientation? Is it biological, environmental, or perhaps a combination of the two? This chapter analyses the argument that sexuality is biologically-determined, carefully weighing the purported evidence, whilst still giving due respect to the often-fluid spectrum of human sexuality throughout the history of our species.

‘Students Who Are Different’ in Homophobic Bullying: Research and Theoretical Perspectives

Being “different” at school can often single a student out for harassment and abuse from their fellow pupils – whether they be of a “different” religion, race, sexuality, or special needs. Setting out the ethnic and cultural factors which influence young people’s aggressive toward behaviour at school, this chapter goes on to a detailed examination of homophobia in educational contexts.

‘The School Climate for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Students’ in Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs

Examine the school climates out of which bullying can develop. It argues that an understanding of this is absolutely crucial for analyzing policy innovations and student wellbeing, and goes on to suggest progressive changes in school policies that could create a more positive school climate for LGBT students.

‘Gay-Friendly High Schools’ in The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality

What makes a high school gay-friendly? Positive changes have occurred not because of institutions, but because of the increasingly-progressive and inclusive attitudes of the students themselves. Whilst this chapter links the findings with other research that documents decreasing homophobia in the Western world, it also urges continual challenging of the victimization of gay youth, and sets out a masculine identity based on inclusivity, and not heteronormative exclusion.

‘Same-Sex Romantic Relationships’ in Handbook of Psychology and Sexual Orientation

Marriage equality is one of the most hotly-contested social topics currently being debated in Western society, and stirs up passionate arguments from both camps. In ‘Same-Sex Romantic Relationships’, the arguments used by the Conservative Right to prevent marriage equality are examined with empirical evidence. Stereotypically, same-sex relationships are portrayed as being unhappy, maladjusted and promiscuous – is this really the case? Does the legitimizing of same-sex relationships truly have negative social and psychological impacts on society, as opponents of marriage equality often argue?

‘History, Narrative, and Sexual Identity: Gay Liberation and Post-war Movements for Sexual Freedom in the United States’ in The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course

Trace the conception of prejudices and stereotypes which LGBT people still face today. Providing a useful and contextual history of modern and contemporary depictions of homosexuality, this chapter reviews the changing narratives of queer sexuality – from Cold War fears of communism and sexual perversion, to the move toward liberation and acceptance during the 60s and 70s, right through to the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and the association of homosexuality with illness and death, and the subsequent panic narratives of the 1990s.

Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is a vast and rapidly-expanding research library, and has grown to be one of the leading academic research resources in the world. Oxford Scholarship Online offers full-text access to scholarly works from key disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, science, medicine, and law, providing quick and easy access to award-winning Oxford University Press scholarship.

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Image credits: Flag LGBT pride Toulouse by Léna, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The post LGBT Pride Month Reading List appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, whose primary skill is spewing hate speech without moving his lips, has brought his shtick to animation with an hour-length animated special called "Achmed Saves America."

By Stanley Wells

The great actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is also well-known as a gay activist, was recently quoted in the press as saying that Shakespeare himself was probably gay. Invited to comment on this, I pointed out that there was nothing new in the idea, which for a long time has been frequently expressed especially because some of his sonnets are clearly addressed to a male. Nevertheless none are explicitly homoerotic in the manner of some of his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield, and Michael Drayton, or for that matter of some modern poets such as W. H. Auden or Thom Gunn.

All those that are clearly addressed to or written about a young man, or “boy,” are among the first 126 to be printed in the 1609 volume. Yet Number 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment ….,” one of the most famous love poems in the language, is frequently read at heterosexual weddings. And other poems in the first part of the sequence – such as Number 27 – could even be love poems addressed to the poet’s wife.

Shakespeare’s most idealized sonnets fall among those that are either clearly addressed to a male, or are non-specific in their addressee. His explicitly sexual sonnets, all concerned with a woman and all among the last 26 to be printed, suggest severe psychological tension in a man who has to acknowledge his heterosexuality but who finds something distasteful about it, at least in its current manifestation. An example is Number 147, which begins:

My love is as a fever, longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.

None of the poems that celebrate love between the poet (whether we think of him simply as an identity assumed by Shakespeare for professional purposes or as Shakespeare speaking in his own person) and a “lovely boy” is explicitly sexual in the manner of the frankest of the “dark lady” sonnets. But many of these poems would have had, and continue to have, a special appeal to homoerotic readers. They have also met with castigation from homophobic readers for this very reason, as the history of their reception over the centuries makes abundantly clear. And a number of the sonnets addressed to a male are deeply passionate if idealized love poems which one can easily imagine being addressed to a young man with whom the poet was having a physical as well as a spiritual relationship. Consider for example Number 108:

What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love or my dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet like prayers divine
I must each day say o’er the very same,
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page,
Finding the first conceit of love there bred
Where time and outward form would show

Teachers, social workers, administrators–did you know that you can order a free copy of the DVD Bullied: A Student, a School & a Case That Made History to help deal with anti-gay or homophobic bullying? It looks like a good resource! It’s available from Teaching Tolerance.

You’ve probably seen or heard about the It Gets Better Campaign in response to all the recent gay suicides resulting from homophobic bullying? I hope you have, any way.

I know what it’s like to be bullied, abused, and hated–and to want to kill myself. But I am so grateful I didn’t. There is so much good in my life now!

I hope you’ll consider watching and/or sharing my It Gets Better video for queer youth, anyone who’s been bullied, harassed, or abused and is thinking of suicide.

"The National Day of Silence brings attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools. Each year the event has grown, now with hundreds of thousands of students coming together to encourage schools and classmates to address the problem of anti-LGBT behavior."

If you follow Neil Gaiman on Twitter, you already know this, but for the rest of us: Amazon.com has made the sickening and, apparently, homophobic maneuver of hiding sales ranks for a slew of books with LGBTQ content. These sales ranks are tied in with whether/how books appear on sales lists and come up in searches on Amazon. In other words, we've got an issue of visibility and accessibility as well as (un)equal treatment here.

When Mark Probst, author of a gay YA novel, wrote to Amazon asking why his book's sales rank had vanished, he received a letter clearly implying it was because his book was deemed "adult" material. Since then, dozens (hundreds?) of other books with LGBTQ content with stripped sales ranks have been noted.

Affected books include works of literary fiction and nonfiction. Many (my beloved, squeaky-clean Edwardian romance Maurice, by E.M. Forster, among them; Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah) are classics. Some have no sexual content or speak in the gentlest of metaphors; others have sex scenes but hardly such that they'd be considered erotica by the average reader. Some are YA books—e.g., Alex Sanchez's Rainbow Boys, the groundbreaking anthology Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence. Some are children's books; Leslea Neuman's Heather Has Two Mommies has been stripped of its sales rank. There are even pregnancy guides on the list—lesbian pregnancy guides, but pregnancy guides nonetheless.

In other words, these are not "adult" materials. Yet they're being treated as such by Amazon simply—apparently—because of their LGBTQ content. It's just the latest example of the fallacious equation of "gay" with "pornographic" made by narrow-minded people who can't stop thinking about the "sex" in "homosexual."

Meanwhile, there's plenty of straight romance and erotica (and pregnancy guides) that has not been issued the same treatment. Even Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds hasn't measured up as "adult" content on the Amazon scale.

The Meta Writer community on LJ is keeping readers abreast of the situation. Check out their round-up of what's known and how we can respond to the situation. My personal suggestions: call or write to Amazon, sign Meta Writer's petition, and spread the word.