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Significant LBGT collection goes to the University of London

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Jonathan Cutbill, the co-founder of Gay’s The Word bookshop in London's Bloomsbury neighborhood who died last year, has left his collection of 30,000 LBGT+ items to the University of London.  The collection, which has items dating back to 1760, will arrive having already been completely cataloged and cross referenced by Cutbill. Cutbill has been at the forefront of the LGBT struggle for justice for years. In 1984 his shop was raided by customs officers and he was accused of conspiracy to import obscene material. The charges where later dropped. photo by Stu Maddux Maria Castrillo, head of special collections and...

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The Cost of Reading in Prison: In West Virginia it’s 5 cents a minute

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It is hard to fathom how they got here but the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation is charging inmates to read! As part of their contract with a private company inmates are provided "free" tablets in which they can access Project Gutenberg, an emporium of free, public domain texts. Sounds great right? Well, seems like free ain't free. From the Appalachian Prison Book Project: The per-minute charge will bring in far more profit than an e-book vendor who charges a set price for downloads, as the cost to read a book far exceeds the cost to purchase one....

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The Maine Event: Local pastors lose it when when they spot LGBTQ books in banned books display

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Those of us living in the Northwest corner of the US have always had a quiet affinity with our brethren living in the Northeast corner. I think those days might be over. The unconscionable vote by Maine senator Susan Collins  to help put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is a gamechanger. Then this story out of Rumford, Maine doesn't help either. It appears that local pastors got all bent out of shape by the LGBTQ books that were part of this display of banned books at the Rumford Public Library. So what do they want to do? They want to to ban...

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Allen Ginsberg on censorship, language and police brutality

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[youtube]https://youtu.be/rj17WbJ1k7k[/youtube] In 1968 Allen Ginsberg appeared on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. The topic was the Avant-Garde but it wasn't long before Ginsberg, who Buckley refers to as "the hippie's hippie, the bohemian prototype," turns the discussion to the power of the media, censorship and language. He points out how the language of the media is a far cry from the language of the everyday and how the language the police use "toward hippies and Negroes" never enters the public discourse so one can never get a true picture of what happened.  This was almost 50 years ago!

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