December 16, 2008.
It is good to have good reading and lists of resources during the cold weather.
It seems we didn’t get a time of “rest” from the 24 hour news “talkers” since the moment the election was settled we had the coverage of the passage of Proposition 8 in California.
Both events got many people to seriously thinking about what the future holds and who gets credit and blame for what happens. I would hope the “leaders” of the community/movement would take time to think about our issues, some of which are covered by the articles — mostly based on books, plus book reviews, in this issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review.
Sometimes we can be so busy being busy and just marching in the streets that we don’t have time to read a book or sit down and have a discussion of the issues and how best to deal with them. A good resource would be some of the articles, such as the two on sodomy laws — “Sodomy in the land of the Magna Carta” and “The fate of sodomy laws in the U. S.” Homosexual pioneer and my former co-worker Don Slater would sure like the phrase in the latter article: “Another factor was a libertarian conviction that the private sphere be protected from state intrusion.”
But as to being active, the article on the work against Dr. Laura is good.
I do wonder about the statistics on how many books are published each year: 2,000 and G&LR gets 400 for review, since I keep hearing that books aren’t selling, and newspapers are folding. But perhaps they should be putting pictures of cowboys on the covers — as in your article “Cowboys on the Cover of a Magazine.” (Think even earlier than Brokeback Mountain.)
Some of the books in the ads sound interesting, but most of us will never be able to see them as few libraries will know of them, even those from university presses. Two examples are Gay Rights and Moral Panic, by Fred Fejes (Palgrave Macmillan), and Respectably Queer, by Jane Ward (Vanderbilt University Press).
I think it is good to have a sort of bulletin board telling of research being done on aspects of homosexuality, as G&LR has in the back pages.
