Posts by Sofia:

On this day in queerstory: the US embraces marriage equality

On February 23, 2011, the administration of Barack Obama formally notified the U.S. Congress that it would no longer defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court. The announcement came in a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder, a document preserved in Department of Justice archives and widely reproduced in legal databases. The […]

On this day in queerstory: Andy Warhol dies

On February 22, 1892, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, a date confirmed in municipal birth registers and later reproduced across publishers’ author files, passport applications, and copyright forms. Millay would become one of the most celebrated literary voices of the early 20th century, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in […]

On this day in queerstory: W.H. Auden is born and changes the face of poetry

On February 21, 1907, poet W. H. Auden was born in York, England, a fact preserved in parish registers and civil birth indexes that scholars still cite when mapping the chronology of 20th-century queer literature. Auden would become one of the most influential poets in the English language, and his personal papers—letters, drafts, marginal notes—now […]

On this day in queerstory: a quiet day of plodding on

Unlike some dates that arrive trailing parades of anniversaries and headline-ready milestones, February 20 sits in the historical archive as a quieter ledger page—one that demonstrates a different but equally revealing truth about queer history: not every day produced a riot, a court ruling, or a manifesto, yet the documentary record still shows queer lives […]

On this day in queerstory: Derek Jarman dies

On February 19, 1994, British filmmaker, artist, diarist, and activist Derek Jarman died in London at age 52. Hospital records and contemporaneous press obituaries listed AIDS-related illness as the cause of death, placing his passing squarely within the documented timeline of the epidemic’s cultural toll. By that date Jarman had already completed a body of […]

On this day in queerstory: queer poet Audre Lorde is born

On February 18, 1934, Audre Lorde was born in New York City. A self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde reshaped late-20th-century feminist and queer thought by insisting that identity was not a hierarchy but an intersection. Her essays and speeches—many now standard texts in gender studies, Black studies, and queer theory—were grounded in lived […]