Me and Curtis Sittenfeld. Photo by Matt Carlson. I loved playing with Barbies when I was a kid. Because it was the seventies and my mom subscribed to Ms., I was as familiar with the feminist critique of beauty standards, “girls” toys, and mandatory high heels as I was with Malibu Barbie’s intriguing tan lines. But by the backlash eighties I had a tight perm and an aching sense that feminism was history, literally. Or
I’ve been reading and loving Marilyn Hacker’s poetry ever since her first book, Presentation Piece (1974), which means just about my entire adult life. I can’t think of another poet who combines so many opposites: she’s a swashbuckling formalist, a love poet who’s obsessed with politics, a Francophile (she’s lived in Paris for many years) whose continuous self-making is quintessentially American. Whether she’s writing about lesbian love or croissants in the shop down the block or
Priscilla & Elvis Herselvis, San Francisco, 1991. Photo by Phyllis Christopher. AT AGE TWENTY, estranged from my family back in Boston, I ran away to the desert with Kym, my opinionated and authoritative girlfriend who, being like five years older, seemed to know how to live. Kym, like me, had recently gone gay with gusto. I would follow her anywhere: Provincetown, Tucson, back to Provincetown, then back to Tucson, where I flipped a coin to
Emily Saliers and Amy Ray c. 1990. Photo by Michael Lavine. ONE OF THE most powerful revelations in Alexandria Bombach’s new documentary about the multiplatinum, still-touring-and-recording Indigo Girls is the fact that Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met when they were twelve years old. I fucking knew it! I screamed at the screen. I didn’t know it in the wikipedia sense of knowing, but more so knew it in my bones. I didn’t go to
The original 2001 “Rockin’ Road Map,” a guide for campers, volunteers, and parents, created by Misty McElroy. BETWEEN COVID AND kids, parties had fallen off my must-do list. It was an exotic feat that I, en famille, managed to travel across town this past Christmas Eve to a Hanukkah party where, noshing on smoked fish and sugar cookies, I learned that the original Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls was kaput. I was shocked. Misty
AS A TWENTY-SOMETHING feminist in the early-nineties recession, I hit the job-jackpot: Ms. magazine. I’d grown up with the magazine. I’d internalized its references to back- alley abortions, men who “just don’t get it,” and workplace discrimination. The fact that nothing we published was by or about feminists of my generation or younger who’d grown up taking women’s rights for granted was, weirdly, not weird to me. One fateful editorial meeting, Barbara Findlen circulated “Your
October 2021 The sun is out, and Julie’s still in bed at noon, one, three, and still at half-past four. Another bright October day, one more spent walking, writing e-mails, solitude become habitual, there, here. My mood depends on the temperature outdoors, and if the sky is bright or going dour. I take one of two morning walks, once I’ve had mint tea. Coffee, awakening’s elixir, leaves a sour taste in my mouth now, a
I met Jimmy and Troy at a Santa Barbara gay bar on a trip back home for my dad’s eyelid surgery. I had been back the month before, too, trying to score a job on the set of my My So-Called Life—the lesbian therapist who seduced me when I was sixteen arranged a meeting with one of the producers—but had returned to New Mexico when I got the call that the show was cancelled. Now
In 1991, a fat teenaged girl with a prosthetic leg named Nomy Lamm wrote and distributed a xeroxed-and-stapled, passport-sized zine called i’m so fucking beautiful. Part manifesto, part personal essay, it offered a nuanced critique of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, the 1978 self-help best-seller that theorized the psychological and political context around women and eating. That book’s glamorous British author, Susie Orbach, the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre, was therapist to none other
Regnery Publishing, May 2023, 248 pp. Twice the editors of LIBER asked the publisher of Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs by Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) for a review copy. Twice, they were met with silence. Undeterred, the editors went to Amazon. I now have a copy of this screed, in which the author fashions himself as prophet, life coach, and imperfect spiritual striver in our broken world. The jacket photo shows a white man
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