J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” appears in our Summer issue (no. 221); it’s Holmes’s first published story. Next year, it will be included in the collection How Are You Going to Save Yourself. Like the other storie…

To write about characters who were black—and therefore inferior to the dominant culture—was my way of finally facing my own invisibility and self-hatred.

“All women talk about it. There’s a period of transition that’s so disorienting … and then you come into a new kind of autonomy you didn’t have when you were young.”

  “He only knew a drawing was good if it got him hard,” writes Dian Hanson of Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland (1920–1991). I’ve been spending my evenings drooling over “Tom’s men,” as they’ve come to be called—fam…