News and Announcements
BY Claire Potter ON November 21, 2014
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Making History at UMass: the adorable Derrick Gordon becomes the first publicly queer player to start a men’s DI basketball game.
This week, Derrick Gordon, of the University of Massachusetts, the only men’s DI college basketball player to come out as gay, made history by starting his first game since the announcement on April 9. Note to campuses trying to recruit athletes: the talented Gordon, like many other queer prospective college students, chose UMass because he knew he would be comfortable coming out there. “I definitely did my research,” he said. “I know it’s gay-friendly on campus. I’d see gay flags from time to time, or gay couples holding hands. So I know it was a great place for me to come out.”
- Also in Happy Valley, on Friday November 21, Edmond Chang, Assistant Professor of English at Drew University, is giving a talk at Smith College, Northampton, MA: “Unloving Mechanics: Queerness + Straightwashing in Digital Games.” For the full details, go to the 5 College Digital Humanities page.
- A powerful essay by Yale’s professor of women, gender and sexuality studies Inderpal Grewalabout explains why racial and gender diversity on the faculty is related to how women, people of color and queers are treated on campus. Check out the section of the comments thread where someone (presumably a Yalie but maybe not) claims WGSS is not getting adequate resources from the university because the courses are easy A’s, providing more evidence for what Grewal has argued.
- “Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History,” a show curated by art historian Jonathan David Katz is up at the Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York from now until January 4, 2015. “These nudes are in every sense of the term iconic; they are the building blocks of our Western visual culture,” Katz argues.
- There’s nothing like a history bar with an S/M theme: The town of Lviv, Ukraine, sports ” a popular spot for dates and group outings” called The Masoch Cafe, honoring the 19th century’s proudest perv (and Lviv native) Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. You can order a caning, a little bondage or some hot wax torture with your drink. “Female customers are far less squeamish than their male counterparts, Sasha Bankovich, a waitress at the cafe said, cradling a whip in her hands. ‘We’ve noticed that men scream a lot,’ she said, adding that requests from customers for a whipping had remained constant throughout Ukraine’s months of [political] tumult. ‘In this respect, things are very stable in our country.'”
Some items in this post have appeared yesterday at Tenured Radical.
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