Writer/civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1969 IMAGE/Wikimedia Commons
June is LGBTQ Pride Month, so JSTOR Daily gathered some of our favorite stories to celebrate. All with free and accessible scholarly research.
June is LGBTQIA+ Pride Month in the United States, so we’ve collected
some of our most popular stories on a range of topics—from pronouns to
politics—that highlight the history of the LGBTQIA+ community. As
always, links to free JSTOR scholarship are included with each of these.
Livia Gershon April 6, 2025 Lesbian relationships among government workers were seen as a threat to national security in the 1950s. But what constituted a lesbian relationship was an open question.
Sara Ivry
September 18, 2024
Portico helps preserve underrepresented
community content and collections, including the wide-ranging materials
of the Digital Transgender Archive.
Ray Levy Uyeda May 26, 2021 The first DSM, created in 1952, established a hierarchy of sexual deviancies, vaulting heterosexual behavior to an idealized place in American culture.
Livia Gershon
February 18, 2023
In the late nineteenth century, historian John
Addington Symonds fought back against his colleagues’ refusal to
acknowledge historical same-sex relationships.
It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: “America’s right to know.” It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ”America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?” None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac Asimov was a prolific author as well as a renowned scientist. He wrote many popular science books. I personally found out about him at a younger age through his highly regarded science-fiction novels. I grew up reading most of them.
The excerpt quoted above has been reproduced numerous time online. I thought I could produce a copy of the whole article which really is interesting in its entirety. The article is also listed in A Guide to Isaac Asimov’s Essays in the “Various Source” section. It appears with a mention signaling the fact that it was never republished in any collections. Here’s another excerpt from the same article:
There are 200 million Americans who have inhabited schoolrooms at
some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read
(provided you promise not to use their names and shame them before their
neighbors), but most decent periodicals believe they are doing
amazingly well if they have circulations of half a million. It may be
that only 1 per cent–or less?of American make a stab at exercising their
right to know. And if they try to do anything on that basis they are
quite likely to be accused of being elitists.
I contend that the slogan “America’s right to know” is a meaningless one
when we have an ignorant population, and that the function of a free
press is virtually zero when hardly anyone can read.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to a capacity crowd during an event at UW-Parkside on March 7, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. IMAGE/ Scott Olson/Getty Images
Everyone wants to live a long, happy, and productive life. If you’re working class in America, that’s tough to do.
Last
month, I asked Americans to share their stories about how financial
stress is affecting their lives. The response was overwhelming,
heartbreaking, and infuriating. Working people are dying years before
they should. Stress kills.
Put simply: Being poor or working class in America is a death sentence.
Patrick from Missouri wrote: “Living paycheck to paycheck while
supporting a family stresses me out. We are always just one financial
emergency from being homeless.”
Taryn from Alabama shared that she
pays $400 for her children’s asthma medication. On top of struggling to
pay for groceries and basic utilities, she worries about astronomical
medical bills every time her daughters go to the hospital.
I
recently asked a crowd in rural Wisconsin: “What is it like living
paycheck to paycheck?” Their responses? “You can’t keep the heat on.”
“You have to figure out how to eat between paychecks.” “You have to
choose between getting glasses for yourself or your kids.”
Sadly, these stories are not unique. This is what life looks like for
millions of working-class Americans. They are struggling. They are
exhausted. And they are dying far too young.
A recent report I released as ranking member of the Senate
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee found that the bottom
50 percent of Americans can expect to live seven fewer years than those
in the top 1 percent.
In some places, the gap is even wider. If
you live in a rural, working-class county, you are likely to die 10
years earlier than someone in a wealthy suburb.
For example, if
you live in McDowell County, West Virginia, where the median household
income is just $27,682 a year, you can expect to live 69 years.
Meanwhile, just 350 miles away in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the
median income is $142,299, life expectancy is 84 years—a 15-year gap.
Why?
It’s simple. Day after day, the struggle just to survive takes a
horrific toll on a person’s body and mind. Financial stress kills.
If
your landlord raises your rent by 30 percent and you can’t afford it,
what do you do? Where do you live? Will your kids be forced to sleep in a
car?
If you get sick, and end up with a $20,000 hospital bill, will you go bankrupt? Or will bill collectors hound you every day?
Former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman: “The masters of the universe are Jews!” VIDEO/Youtube
Ex-GOP Senator and Republican Jewish Coalition chair Norm
Coleman proclaimed with a straight face that Jews control the world
during a Jerusalem conference featuring a speech by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
Former US Senator Norm Coleman has
raised eyebrows by declaring that “the masters of the universe are Jews”
at a major Zionist lobby event in Jerusalem. In an address to a summit
hosted by the Adelson-funded Jewish News Syndicate on April 27, Coleman
pointed to various major technology firms founded by Jews, suggesting
the shared religion of the companies’ creators should translate into a
greater zeal for censoring criticism of Israel.
“And when you think about it, the
Masters of the Universe are Jews! We’ve got Altman at OpenAI, we’ve got
[Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg, we’ve got [Google founder] Sergey
Brin, we’ve got a group across the board. Jan Koum, y’know, founded
WhatsApp. It’s us.”
“The masters of the universe are Jews!” former US
Sen. Norm Coleman proclaims at the Jerusalem JNS policy summit, calling
on Jewish tech industry CEO’s to counteract Gen Z’s growing support for
Palestine
The remarks came as Coleman lamented
that pro-Israel propagandists are “losing the digital war” in battle for
the hearts and minds of younger generations, and called for more
stringent censorship of pro-Palestinian speech.
“A majority or Gen Z have an
unfavorable impression of Israel. And, my friends, I think the reason
for that is that we’re losing the digital war. They’re getting their
information from TikTok, and… and we’re losing that war.”
As numerous polls show young Americans are increasingly skeptical of Israel – with a recent survey
showing 71% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans under age 49 now hold
an unfavorable view of Israel – establishment politicians have
consistently blamed TikTok’s algorithm for the decline in enthusiasm for
genocide. In February, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence
committee, Mark Warner, revealed that the bill forcing China’s ByteDance
to sell TikTok was motivated by the visibility of pro-Palestine content on the app.
For Coleman, though, it appears this
wasn’t enough. “We have to figure out a way to win the digital battle,”
he told summit attendees. “We’ve got to get our digital sneakers on, so
that the truth can prevail over the lies. And when we do that, the
future of Israel will be stronger because a majority of all Americans
will support Israel. We’ll make that happen, we have to make it happen.
Thank you, Baruch hashem.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu took the stage directly after Coleman’s speech, highlighting
Tel Aviv’s interest in the event, which was billed as the “Inaugural JNS
Policy Summit to address Israel’s pressing strategic issues.”
An archetypal neoconservative,
Coleman started off as an anti-war activist who once worked as a roadie
for Jethro Tull, and was suspended from Hofstra University for leading a sit-in. “I went to Woodstock, and I inhaled!” he boasted at the JNS summit. After
first taking office as a member of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party,
Coleman wound up narrowly losing his Senate seat to Al Franken in 2008
as a Republican.
In addition to serving as the
national chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition and founder of the
Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, Coleman now works as a top lobbyist for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
I believe
cinema must be watched in a cinema. Not on a laptop, not on a phone, not
on a TV—however smart or flat its panel may be. With each shrinking of
the screen, something vital is lost. The medium’s emotional charge, its
visual grandeur, its immersive power—all diminish when its canvas
contracts. That may sound purist, even a little curmudgeonly, in this
era of OTT abundance and algorithm-driven viewing. But I’ll say it
anyway: when it comes to movies, the bigger the screen and the darker
the hall, the more potent the magic.
Don’t believe me? Watch three films: To Each His Own Cinema, an exquisite anthology of 34 shorts by directors from 25 countries, all meditating on the act of watching; Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore’s love letter to the vanished small-town theatre; and Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin, which flips the lens to film women watching a film, their faces lit only by flickers of light and feeling.
Each
of these films captures the same elemental truth: there is a peculiar
alchemy in the darkened theatre. Strangers, briefly released from the
burdens of their own lives, become co-conspirators in collective
dreaming. Walter Benjamin wrote that cinema doesn’t merely entertain,
but it creates a shared space for experience. When the lights go down
and the images begin their hypnotic dance, we see democracy in its most
radical form. Not at the ballot box or on the streets, but in the quiet
surrender to someone else’s vision of what it means to be human (or not;
such a disclaimer is needed in this AI era).
I agree that this ritual has taken on new urgency in our age of
digital fragmentation. Political tribes retreat into algorithmic echo
chambers, cultural dialogue is filtered through outrage cycles, and
shared references grow scarce. Yet, against the odds, humanity still
gathers in darkened halls to lose themselves in story. For those
luminous hours, we become porous to each other again. Vulnerable.
Hopeful. Human. It is indeed not an exaggeration to say cinema is our
last universal language. A visual Esperanto of the soul.
The
impact is visible in the numbers. The global film and video industry
generated more than $300 billion in revenue in 2024, surpassing the GDP
of more than 170 countries (about 85-90 per cent of all recognised
nations). But these figures only skim the surface. In the 1960s, James
Bond films boosted tourism to featured destinations. Bollywood’s soft
power runs so deep across West Asia and South-East Asia that Hindi filmi
phrases have entered everyday speech in countries where few have ever
met an Indian. But cinema’s influence is much more than merely
commercial; it’s mythopoeic. It functions as a collective unconscious,
showing not just how societies look at themselves, but how they wish to
be seen.
“Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” is the title of a soon-to-be-released film featuring photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, the most recent of more than 208 assassinated Gazan journalists.
With no prior knowledge of that film’s content, I knew it
emanated from Palestine. These eight words embodied reiterations of a
portrait that for many months incessantly haunts me, a photo that had
become too routine, and to most of the world, a fleeting image. Even the
few who catch glimpses of those slowing moving tributaries of walkers
with no destination turn silent.
The Gazans walk on, steadily, seemingly
willingly. Away from everything they loved and what each of them is – a
soul, a sentient being, a history. They walk on obediently, now perhaps
less by fear than from habit and dissolution. They walk without a
terminus.
Most refugees worldwide have some geographic objective, however
murky, unrealistic and adaptable. Not Gaza’s Palestinians. They are
simply vacating a place that they have been warned is unsafe. Their
objective is simply to get out of the paths of cordons of ‘predators’
stalking them from all directions, including the sky. If not to save
themselves, they are compelled to help their elders, their sick and
their children.
The number of displaced people and refugees
today is of a staggering magnitude never recorded in any era of world
history. Most often war and military occupation is the motive for their
uprooting. Or famine, or economic sanctions stemming from conflict. From
all across Europe to the Americas; from Tibet to India; from Uganda to
the U.K.; from Vietnam in all directions; from Africa northwards through
destroyed Libya; from Afghanistan east into Pakistan or westwards
anywhere; from Myanmar to Bangladesh; from Iraq and Syria to the Gulf
States, Iran and Turkey; from Rwanda to Congo or Congo to Uganda and
Tanzania; from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Australia; from Bhutan to Nepal;
from Cuba and Venezuela, mostly forced into penury by U.S. sanctions.
They sleep on the road and huddle with strangers in camps. They
thrash around capsized boats, hide in city or forest, then set off to reach a temporary safe haven
where they might file papers to secure asylum somewhere along a route
through several nations. Resourcefully, they gather fragments about the
safest crossing point, the most trustworthy smugglers, where temporary
succor might be found.
Just a few months ago Elon Musk was heralded as a political kingmaker when he had a hand in helping Donald Trump win the US election.
Musk has since meddled in the politics of the UK, Germany, Spain and elsewhere but has struggled to convert his political prowess into victories for his chosen conservative parties.
In fact, being in any way similar to Trump or Musk has been a dead weight around the ankle of political campaigns over the last few months.
It was clear the DOGE dynamism had officially worn off when federal elections in Canada and Australia saw both conservative parties lose by a landslide.
Given that Musk and the other tech bro billionaires have so much influence over how we communicate, why are they seemingly struggling to actually influence our politics?
A bankrupt liberal class, by signing on for the Zionist witch hunt against supposed antisemites and refusing to condemn Israel for its genocide, provided the bullets to its executioners.
The media, universities, the Democratic Party and liberals, by
embracing the fiction of “rampant antisemitism,” laid the groundwork for
their own demise. Columbia and Princeton, where I have taught, and
Harvard, which I attended, are not incubators of hatred towards Jews.
The New York Times, where I worked for fifteen years and which Trump
calls “an enemy of the people,” is slavishly subservient to the Zionist
narrative. What these institutions have in common is not antisemitism,
but liberalism. And liberalism, with its creed of pluralism and
inclusiveness, is slated by our authoritarian regime for obliteration.
The conflation of outrage over the genocide
with antisemitism is a sleazy tactic to silence protest and placate
Zionist donors, the billionaire class and advertisers. These liberal
institutions, weaponizing
antisemitism, aggressively silenced and expelled critics, banned
student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice
in Palestine, allowed police to make hundreds of arrests of peaceful protests on campuses, purged professors and groveled before Congress. Use the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ and you are fired or excoriated.
Zionist Jews, in this fictional narrative, are the oppressed. Jews who protest
the genocide are slandered as Hamas stooges and punished. Good Jews.
Bad Jews. One group deserves protection. The other deserves to be thrown
to the wolves. This odious bifurcation exposes the charade.
In
April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, along with
two board members and a law professor, testified before the House of
Representative education committee. They accepted the premise that
antisemitism was a significant problem at Columbia and other higher
education institutions.
When Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University David Greenwald and others told
the committee that they believed “from the river to the sea” and “long
live the intifada” were antisemitic statements, Shafik agreed. She threw students and faculty under the bus, including long-time professor Joseph Massad.
The
day after the hearings, Shafik suspended all the students at the
Columbia protests and called in the New York City Police Department
(NYPD), who arrested at least 108 students.
“I have
determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and
present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik
wrote in her letter to the police.
NYPD Chief John Chell, however, told
the press, “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no
resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a
peaceful manner.”
Tikal – An ancient Mayan city in Central America. Mayan society is thought to have collapsed from a combination of environmental stress and class conflict.
A newly published study (“Economic inequality is fueled by population
scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the
archaeological record,” PNAS, April 14, 2025) provides insight into the
initial rise of class societies across the world. Using data from 1,100
archaeological sites from Europe, Asia and the Americas, the researchers
trace the beginnings of wealth inequality back to over 10,000 years
ago, millennia before the first major civilizations (e.g., Egypt,
Mesopotamia, the Maya). The study elucidates some of the primary factors
in the transition from egalitarian hunter-gatherer social groups to
early farming societies in which indications of wealth and status
differentiation can be discerned.
The initial processes that
eventually led to the emergence of class societies (although the word
“class” does not appear anywhere in the PNAS article) began to appear
during the last stages of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the
Holocene (the post-glacial period in which we have lived for
approximately the last 10,000 years). Since there are no written records
from those times, the researchers employ a proxy data set—dwelling
sizes—specifically the in-ground footprint of structures which are the
usual housing remnants, if any, found in archaeological sites. No
standing buildings survive from the time period in question. The study
gathered data from over 47,000 residential structure remains, documented
at 1,100 archaeological sites from around the world. The large sample
size alone gives a degree of confidence in the study’s results.
The study identifies several commonalities in the initial emergence of economic inequality:
Growth
of wealth differences among households has been a long-term though not
universal trend in the Holocene. Marked increases typically lagged plant
domestication by 1,000 y[ears] or more and were tightly linked to
development of hierarchies of settlement size and land-limited
production. We infer that the social upscaling (growth of polities in
population and area) that typically began one to two millennia after
agriculture became locally common, and continued in some areas
throughout the Holocene, interfered with traditional leveling mechanisms
including enforcement of egalitarian norms.
In
general, in egalitarian societies the dwelling sizes of constituent
family groups tend to be similar at any given settlement, reflecting a
general equality in economic and social status. As wealth and social
stratification developed, the study found that differences in dwelling
sizes begin to appear. As societies become more complex, the number of
levels of dwelling sizes increases, reflecting the different levels of
social stratification.
Afghan refugees who had been removed by force from Pakistan arrive near the Afghanistan-Pakistan Torkham border in Nangarhar province on April 10, 2025. IMAGE/AFP via Getty Images
The US owes Afghans a huge debt, but instead of starting to repair decades of harm, Trump is banning them from the US.
During Donald Trump’s first term, the Afghan American community
dodged a bullet. This time, we weren’t so lucky. The new “Muslim ban
2.0,” the successor to Trump’s original Muslim ban, went into effect
today, with 12 countries on its list, including Afghanistan.
When President Trump began his second term in office on January 20,
he issued an executive order asking for a 60-day review of vetting
requirements for certain nationalities. As of 12 a.m. ET on June 9,
Afghans are now barred from entering the U.S. This news comes as most of
our community celebrates Eid-al-Adha and many Muslims around the world
finish the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
While some of this policy is framed as legal language in the name of
“national security,” it is clear that this masking was done in an
attempt to help the order pass challenges in the courts. Despite its
narrow exception for Special Immigrant Visa holders, this policy is
clearly a sweeping expression of racism and anti-Muslim prejudice.
The U.S.’s Role in Creating This Crisis
Afghanistan isn’t merely a Muslim country that happens to be a target
of this administration’s ire. The U.S.’s role goes back to the 1970s,
when the CIA covertly supported and armed the Afghan mujahideen fighting
back against the Soviet invasion, part of a Cold War era-proxy war.
This was followed by USAID-funded school textbooks in Dari and Pashto
produced by the University of Nebraska that taught young Afghan students
violence in refugee camps across Afghanistan and Pakistan. Years later,
the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 in the wake of the
September 11 attacks and fought a war against elements of al-Qaeda and
the Taliban. During this 20-year war, the U.S. funded endemic
corruption, backed notorious human rights violators and helped build an
aid-reliant government that was essentially a house of cards. The war
killed almost 180,000 people and culminated in bringing back a regime in
2021 that has instilled what many now call “gender apartheid.”
Afghanistan today is the only country on the planet where women and
girls are barred from education past the 6th grade.
This 40-year history means that the U.S. owes Afghans and Afghan Americans a huge debt. Instead of repaying this debt and undoing the harm it has caused over four decades, Muslim ban 2.0 has been yet another deep betrayal and abandonment.
First the U.S. bombed Afghans, then it abandoned Afghans. Now it has barred Afghans.
The decision to ban Afghans will mean that they will be left to fend
off a regime that has targeted anyone that has stood alongside the U.S.
for 20 years. That is not even to talk about the continued deportations
of Afghans by the Pakistani and Iranian governments or the fact that
Afghanistan is enduring a humanitarian crisis in which millions of
people do not have access to more than one meal a day, a situation
caused and exacerbated by U.S. sanctions policy.
