Pride Month: Culture Club and Boy George’s Best Work

For Pride Month, I’ll be sharing pop culture works like literature, film, television, and music to celebrate queer culture. From 1982 to 1986, Culture Club scored nine top-20 hits on the US pop charts. In their native UK, they charted eight times in the top-ten. As a hitmaking machine, they felt unstoppable for the brief...

Pride Month: ‘Jeffrey’ by Christopher Ashley

For Pride Month, I’ll be sharing pop culture works like literature, film, television, and music to celebrate queer culture. The early 1990s saw a renaissance of sorts of queer cinema, coined by B. Ruby Rich "new queer cinema." Mainstream and indie films about queer issues were getting more media attention and openly gay performers were...

Pride Month: Bruce Vilanch

For Pride Month, I’ll be sharing pop culture works like literature, film, television, and music to celebrate queer culture. I can't remember when I first saw Bruce Vilanch or became aware of him. He's such a distinct and unique figure in pop culture, particularly queer pop culture, that he seems pretty ubiquitous. Funny, gregarious, and...

Pride Month: “Homer’s Phobia,” ‘The Simpsons’

For Pride Month, I’ll be sharing pop culture works like literature, film, television, and music to celebrate queer culture. In a 1995 interview with Flux magazine, cartoonist Matt Groening outed his popular characters Akbar and and Jeff from his comic strip Life in Hell. Though Life in Hell preceded The Simpsons, his most famous work,...

Pride Month: ‘The Celluloid Closet’ by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

For Pride Month, I'll be sharing pop culture works like literature, film, television, and music to celebrate queer culture. Vito Russo was the leading queer film critic and AIDS activist of his time. When he died of AIDS in 1990, he left behind a moving and inspirational legacy, one the most enduring was his 1981...

Pride Month: ‘Tales of the City’ by Armistead Maupin

For Pride Month, I'll be sharing pop culture works like literature, film, television, and music to celebrate queer culture. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City is a landmark gay novel that tells the story of San Francisco life in the late 1970s. Coming from a series of newspaper columns, Maupin created characters that become lively...