Jonathan Ned Katz Cited and/or Quoted

Most recent citations and/or quotes listed first.

2011, June 22

Tony Phillips. "Erotic Art With a Happy Ending. At this all-male drawing studio, the models touch themselves—but the artists can't." The Village Voice. June 22, 2011.

Noted queer historian Jonathan Ned Katz, quietly painting watercolors in the back of the studio, began attending in 2005 when the group was called the Queer Men’s Erotic Art Workshop.

. . .

Katz is preparing for his own show at the gallery in 2013 to coincide with his 75th birthday. For him, the most unexpected thing about the studio was all the emotions it unearthed. “I was a teenager in the repressive 1950s,” he recalls, “and I’d been punched in the face once, on 8th Street, for looking one second too long at the wrong straight guy.” Today, he celebrates a safe space for the male-on-male gawking. “I am allowed to look,” he says, “encouraged to look, and encouraged to create a piece of homoerotic art based on my response.”

2011, June 16

Mimi Swartz. "Living the Good Lie. Should therapists help God-fearing gay people stay in the closet?" New York Times Magzine, June 16, 2011.

As Jonathan Ned Katz wrote in “Gay American History” in 1976, “Therapists who do not help their homosexual patients to fully explore the possibility of homosexuality as a legitimate option have not helped to expand those individuals’ freedom.”

. . .

Until relatively recently, mental-health professionals considered sexual orientation the most expendable. As Katz wrote in “Gay American History,” gay men and lesbians “were long subjected to a varied, often horrifying list of ‘cures’ at the hands of psychiatric-psychological professionals.” These included lobotomies, castration, hysterectomy, clitoridectomy, hormone therapy, LSD, sexual stimulants, sexual depressants, shock treatment, aversion therapy, electroshock and so on.