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lgbtq

Photo courtesy of Kara Coley.

This article originally appeared on January 24, 2018


Kara Coley, a bartender at Sipps in Gulfport, Mississippi, got an unusual phone call on the job last week.

"Good evening," Coley answered. "Thank you for calling Sipps!"

A woman on the other end of the line asked, "Is this a gay bar?"

Sipps welcomes everyone, Coley explained to her, but indeed attracts a mostly LGBTQ crowd.



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Identity

6 beautiful drawings by LGBTQ inmates that illustrate life in prison

Their artwork shows their strength, resilience, and talent.

"Acceptance" by Stevie S.

This article originally appeared on 11.14.16


Tatiana von Furstenberg laid out more than 4,000 works of art on the floor of her apartment and was immediately struck by what she saw.

The pieces of artwork were submitted from various prisons across the country in hopes of being featured in "On the Inside," an exhibition of artwork by currently incarcerated LGBTQ inmates, curated by von Furstenberg and Black and Pink, a nonprofit organization that supports the LGBTQ community behind bars. The exhibit was held at the Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan toward the end of 2016.

"I put all the submissions on the floor and I saw that there were all these loving ones, these signs of affection, all of these two-spirit expressions of gender identity, and fairies and mermaids," von Furstenberg said.

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William Shakespeare and Lavern Spicer.

In William Shakespeare's “Sonnet 59,” he makes the point that there is “nothing new but that which hath been before.” Here, he admits that even the Bard himself struggled to come up with new ideas that hadn’t been written about previously.

This problem stems from the fact that people tend to think the struggles we have today are entirely new when they’ve been part of the human drama for centuries. A great example is how society grapples with gender nonconformity. In 2023, there is a vigorous debate, which tends to fall along political party lines, over the use of personal pronouns.

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Identity

5 images of Victorian England that will make you rethink LGBTQ history.

While the rest of society was struggling to define and understand them, they went about with their usual business, living their lives regardless of words.

Photo by Alex Jackman on Unsplash

A rainbow drawing with chalk representing the LGBTQ community.

This article originally appeared on 12.21.16


Officially, there were no homosexual men in Victorian England.

But that's just because the word "homosexual" didn't enter the language until the mid-to-late 1890s. ("Transsexual" and "transgender" would catch on even later.)

There were, however, men who engaged in sexual and/or romantic relationships with each other. They just didn't identify with the same words we use today; in fact, many of them used a special cant-like, crypto-language called Polari in order to communicate without exposing themselves in public.

While the rest of society was struggling to define and understand them, they went about with their usual business, living their lives regardless of words.

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