Frank O’Hara insisted that poetry should be ‘between two persons instead of two pages’. The enduring friendship between Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara reveals the ways in which it was possible to resist the post-war ideals of uncompromising heterosexual masculinity and the nuclear family.
This is the first in a series of pieces about Radical Friendship. The feature is intended as an exploration of different configurations of friendship, both intimate and symbolic, and the radical potential of these relationships.
How should we place the incomparable Little Richard in history? Marybeth Hamilton reflects on his legacy.
“I think I was seeking among the tombs of the dead those lost friends; I would not let them go: and with the guiding hand of scholarship and the eye of a historian, against all expectations I found such friendship there in those monuments” wrote Alan Bray in 2003; Tim Reinke-Williams examines his queer legacy.
As an object, the dental dam awkwardly straddles the history of AIDS activism and queer sexuality, acting as an assertion that sex doesn’t require the presence of a penis to be real sex, while acknowledging simultaneously that such sex still carries risks. The dental dam was deployed as an object for sexual use in an attempt to abate the risk of HIV transmission, but its questionable efficacy as a barrier against the virus has reduced it, for some at least, to a latex relic of historical fears.
For LGBTQ history month, HWO are very pleased to republish Anna Hájková’s piece on the need for a queer history of the Holocaust.
Jill Liddington is an award-winning historian and writer. Author of One Hand Tied Behind Us (1978), The Long Road to Greenham (1979) and Rebel Girls (2006), Jill’s work has always championed women’s stories. In 1984 Jill discovered Anne Lister, and the discovery has shaped her life and career ever since.
