Word: gay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Plotz, who is a deputy public defender in San Francisco, is joined on the pro-divestment slate by Gay W. Seidman '78 and Kenneth H. Simmons...
...Catholic Church is speaking out against the dehumanizing institution of apartheid in South Africa it is at the same time visibly practicing its own form of apartheid along the lines of gender and sexual orientation by limiting the role of women within the Church and by actively perpetuating anti-gay bigotry. Many other world religions, including Unitarians, Quakers, some Protestant denominations and reform Jewish groups are beginning to respect and honor the sexual diversity among people. Now is the time for the Catholic Church to follow suit. Warren Blumenfeld
Thus, Yale History Professor Peter Gay, the eclectically erudite author of such embracing works as The Enlightenment and Weimar Culture, reaches far and wide to define his new subject, the emotional life of the middle classes in the 19th century. It is a challenging subject, and Gay challenges it with polymathic verve. In his first volume, The Education of the Senses, Gay concentrated on sex and demonstrated in exhaustive detail that despite what many people think about the Victorian era, nice girls did it then too. Now, in the second volume of a prospective six, he turns to the slightly...
...Gay rather weightily puts it, "There was in fact one essential principle on which cynics, metaphysicians, researchers, and ordinary bourgeois could cheerfully unite: true love is the conjunction of concupiscence with affection." This seems a rather obvious thesis to attract all the firepower that Gay devotes to it. And though it is doubtless true that Victorians in love behaved much like anyone else--lacking only the modern penchant for boasting--Gay also shows us that the Victorians and their Continental or American contemporaries were oddly different. Their new influence disturbed and bewildered them, and they often diagnosed themselves as "nervous...
This may seem to contradict the main thesis, but Gay is not one of those little minds bothered by the hobgoblins of foolish consistency. And the Victorians were themselves contradictory. What other age could produce such an exemplar of pious perversity as Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and chaplain to Queen Victoria herself? Even before he became engaged to young Fanny Grenfell, Kingsley wrote letters to her that were full of erotic imaginings: "A wanton tongue--yet chaste & holy, stole between my lips! What were you doing?--You were secretly kissing me." Yet whenever he felt that...