5 THINGS TO KNOW

Google’s most searched-for LGBT terms in 2020

Google’s most searched-for LGBT+ terms in 2020 have been revealed, and it is blindingly obvious that the UK needs some serious queer education. On Wednesday (9 December) Google released its 2020 Year in Search, revealing the questions, people, topics and events that were…

5 THINGS TO KNOW

View thousands of AIDS Memorial Quilt panels online today

The National AIDS Memorial has launched a virtual exhibition of the AIDS Memorial Quilt featuring more than 10,000 quilt panels representing all 50 states and U.S. territories to commemorate Dec. 1 as World AIDS Day. Each year on Dec. 1, the National AIDS Memorial…

5 THINGS TO KNOW

California is named after a Black lesbian queen.

Unbeknownst to most people, the state of California was named after Calafia, a fictional Black queen who ruled over a mythic all-female island of Black women just off the coast of Asia. She used an army of flying Griffins to…

5 THINGS TO KNOW

Was Chopin’s interest in men airbrushed from history?

FrédéricChopin’s archivists and biographers have for centuries turned a deliberate blind eye to the composer’s homoerotic letters in order to make the Polish national icon conform to conservative norms, it has been alleged. Chopin’s Men, a two-hour radio programme…

HEROES & HISTORY

The time when lesbian ‘obscenity’ reading was suppressed.

On 9 November 1928 Bow Street Magistrates Court was crowded. D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow had been successfully prosecuted for obscenity in the same courtroom 13 years earlier. Now it was the turn of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.  The perceived obscenity…

5 THINGS TO KNOW

These trans candidates could make history this Tuesday.

When Sarah McBride was growing up, the idea that she could run for office as an openly transgender person “seemed so impossible that it was almost incomprehensible,” she recalled. But slowly, that seemed to change. In 2013, her home state of…

5 THINGS TO KNOW

Photos of men in love who were born 120 years too early.

The new book LOVING: A Photographic History of Men in Love portrays romantic love between men in hundreds of moving photographs taken between the 1850s and 1950s. Now, the authors are sharing some of the never-before-published photos exclusively with…