Gender & Sexuality

    'Women and Children First' by Theo Matejko, ca. 1939

    Pariserplatz in Berlin, the Brandenburg gate damaged, a mother lying dead on the ground, her small child in a carriage looking up at the sky.

    Source: "'Bombs Over Us': Prophetic Drawings by a German Artist," Life, September 11, 1939, pp. 27--28, via "a book … recently published in Germany," presumably Das Theo Matejko-Buch: Zeichnungen als Aufzeichnungen aus zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten (Berlin: Kommodore-Verlag, 1938).

    This drawing imagining an air war coming to Berlin was one of a series that Theo Matejko conceived before Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. It seems to convey antiwar sentiment, but the artist supported the Nazi regime, and he regularly contributed to the propaganda magazine, Die Wehrmacht. Given this context, his drawing and the following public explanation might be understood as projection instead.

    An idea which came to me years ago with unholy force and persistence was the image of an air attack over a big city in some future war. I saw in this dreadful vision the merciless heavens pouring destruction upon peaceful people.… I offer these pictures in the deep and sincere hope that these nightmare visions may never become a reality.

    The drawing doesn’t capture anywhere near the reality, but it offers up two powerful national symbols, the Brandenburg Gate and German motherhood. The choice of the latter was an effective way to underline the indiscriminate nature of this kind of warfare while portraying the Germans as innocent victims.

    The Trump administration is slashing the State Department’s annual human rights report — cutting sections about the rights of women, the disabled, the LGBTQ+ community and more.

    The goal appears to be a far thinner report that meets the minimum standards required by the law, according to documents obtained by POLITICO, as well as a current and a former State Department official who were familiar with the plan.

    Nahal Toosi, Politico, March 19, 2025

    America hasn’t felt this upside down since I was a child in an internment camp.

    George Takei

    “Idaho Teacher Told To Remove ‘Everyone Is Welcome Here’ Sign From Classroom,” www.today.com…

    There are only two opinions on this sign: Everyone is welcome here, or not everyone is welcome here," argues Sarah Inama, a sixth-grade history teacher.

    Poster from an Antiwar, Lesbian, Feminist Fugitive, ca. 1970

    Black and white poster showing a drawing of Susan Saxe and the following message from her: 'First, a greeting to all my sisters. Courage, especially to all of my sisters underground in America, stay free, stay strong. I intend to fight on in every way as a lesbian, a feminist and an Amazon. The love I share with my sisters is a far more formidable weapon than the police state can bring against us. Keep growing, keep strong. I am a free woman, and I can keep strong. Pass the word. I am unafraid.'

    Poster with a message by Susan Saxe, depicted in the drawing.1 Based on the text, the poster is probably from around 1970, when its author, a Brandeis senior and antiwar activist, went on the lam after robbing a bank and a National Guard Armory. On the FBI’s most wanted list, she was captured in 1975 and did seven years in prison.2 Her roommate, Katherine Ann Power, surrendered in 1980.3


    1. Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016648550/↩︎

    2. Susan Saxe has a sparse Wikipedia entry. She was Nancy Gertner’s first case, which the latter writes about in In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate Beacon Press, 2011), chap. 1 (sample with salient details). ↩︎

    3. Lucinda Franks, “Return of the Fugitive,” The New Yorker, June 5, 1994, https://archive.ph/5mJ5P↩︎

    This change says a lot about the ambitions and delusions of the current Trumpy regime:

    Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website, part of an effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its online presence.

    WaPo on Bluesky

    Sometimes I hate my state: “NH’s new ID requirements send some would-be voters home to grab passports, birth certificates,” www.nhpr.org….

    Joe Stieb has posted some good history recommendations to help counter Hegseth’s bizarre scrubbing of Department of Defense webpages of race, gender, sexuality, and other content verboten by Trump. https://archive.ph/zLEcs

    The pictures of Putin in Kursk wearing military garb instead of the suit we’ve been seeing him in lately were interesting. It’s almost as if he were taking his cue from Zelensky. Or putting on a show of manliness for his friend in the White House.🤣🇺🇦

    Orange, white, black, brown, and tan poster depicting nine women of various backgrounds engaged in different activities, including arts, activism, and blue-collar work. The accompanying text reads: 'Radical Women Annual Conference – 1976'. 'A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians': 'Women in the Labor Movement', 'Feminism and the Minority Woman', 'Gays and the Class Struggle.' 'Panels; Workshops; Role Playing; Dinner & Party, Saturday.' Held on Sat. and Sun., October 9–10, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, along with addresses, phone numbers, and a few more details.

    A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians. 1976 poster by a Seattle organization called Radical Women.

    Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649885/.

    Two Suffragettes

    1. “Fay Hubbard, 13-year Old Suffragette” in New York on February 9, 1910.

      “Suffragette! Suffragette!” This is the cry of little Fay Hubbard as she goes through the crowd at the suffragette meetings in New York selling copies of the paper… Miss Hubbard is a niece of Mrs. E. Ida Williams, the recording secretary of the Suffragette…

    2. Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919). Dr. Walker served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. She was a Medal of Honor recipient, a suffragette, and a dress reformer.


    Images via Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92510578/ and https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005684835/.

    The Kyiv Independent’s Anna Belokur packs a lot into one of the best comments I’ve seen about the Trump-Vance debacle during Zelensky’s visit this past Friday (Feb. 28). See the first eight minutes of “Ukraine this Week,” youtu.be…. 🇺🇦🇺🇸

    📽️ “Conclave,” dir. Edward Berger (USA/UK, 2024), is one helluva good movie. Made differently, the same story could have yielded a drama, but here it is a thriller, driven by dialog, cinematography, and sound—with superb use of space, ceremony, and costumes.

    📽️ “Cloak and Dagger,” dir. Fritz Lang (Warner Bros., 1946), is good as a thriller and as a war film. Unfortunately, it never develops its initial premise, the race to develop the atomic bomb.

    Given that the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1946, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge about weaponized applied nuclear physics would have been politically problematic anyway.

    Fighting fascism, however, was a-okay. So were women serving as counterintelligence agents and partisans in this early Atomic Era film. Gary Cooper stars as an American physicist turned agent, who falls for a gun-toting Italian played by Lilli Palmer.

    📽️ I am really enjoying Irene Dunne in her old comedies, most recently “Lady in a Jam,” dir. Gregory La Cava (Universal, 1942). It involves a lost fortune and a psychiatrist too sure of his professional knowledge, which he posits has a kind of mathematical accuracy. Love, however, has other ideas.

    Spoiler alert! Screenshot of Dunne sitting on her costar's lap at the end of the movie.

    Good piece: “The history and resurgence of The Transexual Menace” by Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris, Gay City News, February 25, 2025, gaycitynews.com….🏳️‍⚧️🗽

    “Theodora Goes Wild,” dir. Richard Boleslawski (Columbia Pictures, 1936) is great fun. It roasts performative morality, gossip, and small-mindedness. The main attraction, though, is Irene Dunne, who soon comes to handle it all with aplomb.

    📽️ A well reviewed historical drama is streaming on Paramount+ in the United States: “Suffragette,” dir. Sarah Gavron (UK, 2015). The struggle it dramatizes was about getting the vote in order to shape the laws and policies that affected women in uniquely cruel ways.

    🏳️‍⚧️ The U.S. federal government has opened public comments on its dehumanizing passport regulations vis-à-vis trans people. These comments will be public, so weigh carefully how much, if any, personal information you can safely include.

    There are three different parts to this, but they’re all about passports. I provided the same comment for each.

    https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6771
    https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6772
    https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6773

    'When you're famous, they let you . . .'

    “When you’re famous, they let you grab ‘em by the pussy,” bragged a choad from Queens. But in 2020–21 we didn’t let him. He lost the election and his coup too.

    Now the butthurt swine is fucking the entire country. He’s letting Musk and Putin have a go too.

    “When you’re famous, they let you do it. If they don’t, you must do it anyway. You must say it’s all their fault because they didn’t negotiate, I mean, submit.”

    “Now stop complaining, Republican senators. Say Daddy’s name like you mean it! You, too, Ukraine. You know you want it!”

    'A Bit of War History' – Three Paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood (1865–66)

    Description from The Met: 'This work, painted at the close of the Civil War, forms a narrative triptych … of African American military service. In 'The Contraband' … the self-emancipated man appears in a U.S. Army Provost Marshall General office, eager to enlist.' He is raising his hat, and the U.S. flag is visible behind him.

    "The Contraband"

    'The Recruit' depicts the same man as a proud new soldier wearing union blue with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

    "The Recruit"

    In 'The Veteran,' the same man appears on crutches because he is missing his lower left leg. His clothes are civilian, but he's got a Union army cap on. He is saluting.

    "The Veteran"

    The word “contraband” referred to an enslaved person who had escaped. Given that the term usually indicated illegally imported or exported goods, its dehumanizing quality in the context of someone who has escaped bondage is palpable. Here, however, it stands in contrast to the painting, which shows a man, not a chattel or a caricature.1

    The other two paintings see the same figure transformed into a soldier and a veteran. Both of these images underlined the figure’s manhood. With time, in fact, military service came to be associated with masculinity and citizenship in an age of people’s wars fought in North America and Europe.2

    From this point of view, the paintings represent a message not only of self-emancipation through military service but of modern masculine citizenship shortly before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. In the West, this image of manhood and military service reached its high point in World Wars One and Two.


    1. Digital images via The Met, objects 84.12a, 84.12b, and 84.12c↩︎

    2. Mark Stoneman, “War, Gender, and Nation in 19th-Century Europe: A Preliminary Sketch,” blog, June 23, 2017. ↩︎

    Photo is described in common caption. Ernestine Eckstein can be seen from the side, one Black woman in the midst of white men.

    Photo is described in common caption. In this one Ernestine Eckstein is facing forward and enough of her sign is visible to deduce the rest.
    Photo is described in common caption. In this one Barbara Gittings is facing forward, and her sign reads

    Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.

    Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766

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