Language alert extends to this one, too.
Queer History 331: Evelyn Hooker – Homphobes Can Suck a Big Dick, And She Proved It by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
Read on Substack
In 1956, when the entire psychiatric establishment was convinced that homosexuality was a form of mental illness requiring treatment, cure, or containment, one woman looked at the scientific evidence and said, “This is complete bullshit.” Evelyn Hooker didn’t just challenge conventional wisdom—she demolished it with the kind of methodological precision that left her opponents scrambling for excuses and the LGBTQIA+ community with something they’d never had before: scientific proof that there was absolutely nothing wrong with them.
But this wasn’t some abstract academic exercise conducted by a dispassionate researcher in an ivory tower. Hooker’s work was personal, political, and profoundly revolutionary in ways that extended far beyond the confines of psychological journals. She was a straight woman who risked her career to defend people she cared about, a scientist who refused to let prejudice masquerade as objective research, and a human being who understood that the difference between pathology and normalcy could literally be a matter of life and death for millions of people.
Her story is one of scientific courage in the face of institutional pressure, intellectual honesty in an era of willful ignorance, and the transformative power of rigorous methodology applied to questions that society would rather not examine too closely. It’s also the story of how one woman’s determination to follow the evidence wherever it led helped liberate an entire community from the tyranny of psychiatric pathologization, proving that sometimes the most radical act is simply insisting on the truth.
The Making of a Scientific Revolutionary (snip-MORE)
Queer History 573: Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
The Badass Bitches Who Told Paris to Go Fuck Itself and Made Art History Anyway Read on Substack
Listen up, you beautiful fucking souls, because today we’re diving headfirst into the absolutely goddamn legendary love story that rewrote the rules of art, literature, and what it meant to be authentically, unapologetically queer in the early 20th century. We’re talking about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein – two women who said “fuck your heteronormative bullshit” and proceeded to create one of the most influential artistic partnerships in modern history.
These weren’t just two women living together because society expected spinsters to share expenses. Hell no. This was a love affair that burned so bright it illuminated the entire fucking modernist movement, and their relationship became the beating heart of Parisian avant-garde culture for nearly four decades.
The Fierce Fucking Beginning
Picture this shit: It’s 1907, and Alice Babette Toklas, a sharp-as-hell California Jewish woman with an eye for detail that could cut glass, walks into Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris. The moment their eyes met, the world shifted on its goddamn axis. Alice later described hearing church bells ringing – not metaphorically, but literally – because apparently when your soulmate walks into the room, even the universe knows it’s time to celebrate.
Gertrude Stein wasn’t just any woman. This brilliant bitch had already established herself as a radical writer whose experimental prose was making traditional literature scholars shit their conservative pants. Born in 1874 in Pennsylvania to a German-Jewish immigrant family, Gertrude had studied psychology under William James at Harvard’s sister school, Radcliffe College. She understood the human mind in ways that would make Freud jealous as fuck.
Alice, born in 1877 in San Francisco, came from a middle-class Jewish family and had been living what society deemed an “appropriate” life for a single woman. But the moment she encountered Gertrude’s magnetic presence, all that conventional bullshit went straight out the window. Here was a woman who wrote things like “A rose is a rose is a rose” and made it sound like the most profound shit you’d ever heard.
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