Illicit Love

Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and colonizers in times of nation formation. The romantic relationships of well-known and ordinary interracial couples provide the backdrop against which McGrath discloses the "marital middle ground" that emerged as a primary threat to European colonial and racial supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds from the Age of Revolution to the Progressive Era. These relationships include the controversial courtship between white, Connecticut-born Harriett Gold and southern Cherokee Elias Boudinot; the Australian missionary Ernest Gribble and his efforts to socially segregate the settler and aboriginal population, only to be overcome by his romantic impulses for an aboriginal woman, Jeannie; the irony of Cherokee leader John Ross's marriage to a white woman, Mary Brian Stapler, despite his opposition to interracial marriages in the Cherokee Nation; and the efforts among ordinary people in the imperial borderlands of both the United States and Australia to circumvent laws barring interracial love, sex, and marriage. Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. A tour de force of settler colonial history, McGrath's study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged.

Poem on the alleged affair between Henry II, King of England, and Rosamund Clifford, inspired by the ruins at Godstow where Clifford was said to be buried.

Trapped under the reign of a cruel keeper, Ellen Harding longs to be free. Under his oppression, her soul and conscience have died while her body lives on, fulfilling his dissolute desires. She is empty-a vessel-deaf to the voice of morality and blind to shame. When her eyes are drawn to a beautiful man for no other reason than his looks, she imagines what it would be like to escape her chains for a night by giving her body to him. Edward is restless, lonely, and a little angry with his lot in life-it is his only excuse for being drawn to another man's mistress. The woman's dark hair and pale eyes are striking, and he cannot take his gaze off her while she watches him over the top of a fan with an illicit intent in her eyes. Once he's known her, he cannot forget her, and once he's seen the evidence of her supposed benefactor's brutality, he wants to help her. But how can he when she will not run any more than she will speak of her past? When a desperate Ellen finally relents and shocks Edward from his sleep, he doesn't hesitate, he helps her flee. He just doesn't know he's running headlong into the secrets of her past.

A Queer Film Classic on the 1992 feature documentary on lesbian experience from the 1940s to the 1960s as seen through the lens of lesbian pulp fiction. This award-winning movie became the most popular ever produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and became emblematic of the bold new queer cinema of the early 1990s. In 2014, the NFB re-released the film in a digitally remastered version. Jean Bruce and Gerda Cammaer are both associate professors in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto.

"Wedding New Worlds revises histories of interracial love, sex, and marriage amid legal and cultural barriers created to regulate and make illegal the liaisons between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Australia and the US from the late 18th century to the 20th century"--

On The Dark Side of Passion is about deeply intimate moments and the penalties of those who choose love over all else, regardless of the consequences.