Facebook came under fire when its authentic-name policy led to San Francisco drag queen Sister Roma and others being barred from the social network. The policy allows users to report people they believe are using fake names. This caused a stir when a group of drag performers suddenly found that their Facebook accounts had been deactivated. Among them was Sister Roma, who had not registered on the site under her legal name, Michael Williams.
It’s the radiant baby, the barking dog and the dancing man; the badges and the t-shirts; the unmissable mural spelling out CRACK IS WACK. Keith Haring’s career was short but spectacular, and he leaves behind a lasting legacy. From his chalk drawings in city-wide subway stations, to his collaborations with the superstars of his day, Haring’s life was founded on a belief in the power of people to change the world.
In the early 1980s Keith Haring created hundreds of drawings in the New York subway system. He used chalk to paint on unused advertising space, which was covered with black sheets of paper. Haring was caught and fined numerous times.
Songs That Defined the Decade: Hayley Kiyoko’s ‘Girls Like Girls’
Billboard is celebrating the 2010s with essays on the 100 songs that we feel most define the decade that was -- the songs that both shaped and reflected the music and culture of the period -- with help telling their stories from some of the artists, behind-the-scenes collaborators and industry insiders involved.
By Stephen Daw
11/21/2019
In the 20th century India's Mahatma Gandhi famously used the hunger strike as political protest. In America today we demonstrate by eating fast food.
Call it an “eat-in,” call it a “buycott”: By whatever name, it’s a tactic that’s growing in popularity. As Wednesday's Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day indicates, it’s a form of protest Americans find increasingly easy to swallow.
Last night I attended an Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Assault
Speak Out, where people across campus from the LGBT community and
coalitions of color came together in one sacred space to share their
stories with strangers. For many, including me, it was the first time we
spoke out publicly. It was empowering. It was liberating. Rarely do I
let myself shed tears over my repressed memories, yet I cried over every
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
Lawmakers in a Utah House committee soundly rejected a bill that would have penalized doctors for giving gender-affirming health care to minors, then moments later approved legislation that included similar restrictions on transgender health care — minus the punishment — on party line during a lengthy committee meeting Tuesday.
The Fourth of July is upon us, so it’s time once again to sing what is arguably our most baffling national ditty, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Maybe you’ve noticed: Some of the lyrics seem like the work of a prankster on acid. Who else could have conceived a vignette as bizarre as a man riding a pony into town, then sticking a feather in his cap that, for unknown reasons, he insists on calling “macaroni”?
El Rey de la Ruina (The King of the Ruin) has become an act of powerful recognizable symbolism throughout Madrid. In terms of his popular heart symbolism, the artist chose the organ, a heart, as one of his favorite symbols because he was diagnosed when he was little with cardiomegaly, an abnormal increase in the volume of the heart, which is what inspired this organ as his prize art symbol.
ODBK is an activist organization that aims to create a more equal, diverse, inclusive, transparent and democratic art world. ODBK seeks to do this by diversify and increase the number of people who understand and engage with contemporary art.
Dark Matter is a trans South Asian performance art duo comprised of Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian, a prominent pair of voices operating at the intersection of the arts and activism.
UK photographer Alicia Bruce collaborated with Zero Tolerance, a Scottish non-profit to end GBV, to produce a new version of the Violence Unseen campaign, launched for the first time in the 1990s and created by Franki Raffles. The new one was launched in 2018, 25 years after the original iconic Zero Tolerance campaign, shot by the late Franki Raffles.
It has been a tumultuous and anxious week for women in Turkey. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree at midnight last Friday, annulling Turkey's ratification of the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, women poured onto the streets of Turkish cities to protest. Further demonstrations are planned.
A juried exhibition of fiber art created by the Artist Circle Alliance to protest the Trump administration’s actions and policies.
This is a traveling exhibition to 13 venues across the U.S. All work in the exhibition, as well as the nearly 560 pieces submitted for jurying, are shown on our website.
For the completion of her residency as the NYU Steinhardt 2023-24 Scholar-in-Residence, Dominique Jackson collaborated with NYU students to honor the fem queen (trans women) and their historical meaning to not only ballroom but popular culture at large.
Horror stories about treacherous boat journeys from Africa to the Mediterranean far too often make headline news. The men, women and children fleeing their homes to start a new life in Europe become faceless numbers in the media, and are ‘othered’ by conservative politicians for their own agenda.
Original Story: The GOG and Steam store pages for Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear are littered with negative reviews, with gamers trashing the game largely as a result of an encounter that takes place between the player and a transgender character.
A new series of video commentaries with Davey Drumpf, The Donald's long-lost third cousin, twice removed. His views are several degrees to the Left of the Don's. First installment: Co-housing vs. Weaponized Xenophobia.
From 99 Percent Invisible:
By the late 1980s, AIDS had been in the United States for almost a decade. AIDS became the number one killer of young men in New York City, then of young men in the country, then of young men and women in the country.
In November 2015, Chinese LGBT activist Chen Qiuyan met with government officials in Beijing after months of campaigning to have the Ministry of Education remove textbooks which identify homosexuality as a mental disorder.
In 2001, the Chinese Society of Psychiatry removed homosexuality from its list of recognized mental disorders, after the Chinese government decriminalized consensual homosexual acts in 1997.
Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States on November 4, 1980. In less than a year, in the Summer of 1981, AIDS was first identified in medical journals. However, it took until 1987 before he would give his first major address on AIDS.
A small group of gay rights activists gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Valentine’s Day to protest Russia’s antigay laws.
Behind a rainbow banner that read “To Russia with Love,” a dozen activists cheered as three couples puckered up and kissed in front of a countdown clock for the Sochi Winter Olympics outside the embassy’s tall walls.