The archive has been portrayed by historians for many years as a ‘magical’ place of neutral enquiry. In fact, it has historically been used in the perpetuation of many abuses by the state and continues to play a role in privileging some narratives above others at the expense of disadvantaged groups within society. Increasingly, a new breed of activist archivists are paying attention to what can be done to correct the imbalances within the archival record.
Early modern women and men possessed complex capacities for friendship, love, and devotion, and the nuances of these partnerships defy and challenge our received assumptions about early modern heterosexual and heterosocial relationships. Amanda E. Herbert explores radical friendship in 17th century Britain…
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.
