I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind for a while now. For many years now, it has been a staple rhetoric of the queer liberation that nobody ‘chooses’ to be gay: a backlash against those who call it a ‘lifestyle’, who try to push conversion therapy and deviant labels on us.
In 1975, Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ which used a psychoanalytic lens to argue that cinema is written, directed and shot from the perspective of male visual pleasure within a patriarchal framework or as she then coined the ‘male gaze’…
There was a time when my room was devoid of mirrors, where the sight of myself disgusted me. Where acknowledging my appearance in such a way was abhorrent to me. I dreamed of transition, of change, that I might escape the form that had been dealt me and become something more than I was. That, given enough time, I would finally be beautiful…
Our Society and Community editor Beth discusses LGBTQ+ sex education in schools and representation in children’s literature…