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Earlier this week, Target announced that they’ll be removing unnecessarily gender-specific signs and color-coded decorations from some departments, including the toy aisles and children’s bedding. Seems like a small change that shouldn’t be cause for any outrage, right? Alas, no. Target’s Facebook page is full of angry (and largely ungrammatical) posts from people vowing to never shop there again…
News in Asia
Greetings and salutations. This week’s “News in Asia” is coming to you after getting a Christmas…
November 16, 1928: Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness was deemed "obscene" by the British courts.
From Wikipedia:
The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the British author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" (that is, homosexuality) is apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as having a debilitating effect on inverts. The novel portrays inversion as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: "Give us also the right to our existence".
The Well became the target of a campaign by James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express newspaper, who wrote "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." Although its only sexual reference consists of the words "and that night, they were not divided", a British court judged it obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women". In the United States the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court.
You can read more about The Well at Wikipedia.
From the article:
In a world where homophobia still has its gnarly roots in almost every culture, gay rehabilitation centers are predominantly still thought of as a U.S.-based phenomenon, even though the practice of trying to “correct” homosexual behavior is not a new or U.S.-centric concept (see South Africa, Jamaica, and well, just about every country). But buried deep in Ecuador, often beyond the tourist attractions and somewhere between the forests and the beaches, lie almost 200 rehabilitation clinics, often publicly known as drug rehabilitation centers, where LGBTQ citizens are sent to be “cured” of their homosexuality through an advertised means of "intense rehabilitation." There are many people, often ex-patients and survivors, who would severely disagree with the cure. According to survivors, these clinics are using forms of torture like those mentioned above, along with corrective rape as a means to “cure” and rehabilitate lesbian women (reports are now coming forward that there are gay men in the clinics as well).
Read more at Persephone Magazine.
