Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Our topic is sexual identity and the meaning of gender in elite public discourse. Few topics are more important, for what is ultimately at stake is nothing less than how we raise our children and what kind of people we wish to be. Yet it is also a dangerous, almost forbidden, topic. To say anything interesting about this subject is likely to give offense to many of our nation’s policy and opinion leaders.

Martin, vice president of Dixondale Farms, keeps a bushel of onion lore under his smudged white Stetson. For example, onions are daylight-sensitive rather than temperature-sensitive, he explains. The onions that thrive in the northern states’ 16 hours of summer light will never develop much of a bulb in Texas’ shorter summer days. The North’s longer days produce hotter onions.

Katherine Mansfield—writer of short stories, friend and literary compatriot of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence—had a gift for arousing strong opinions. The reckless abandon with which Mansfield threw herself into sexual relationships with both men and women, and the acerbity of her tongue and pen, could provoke critics, family, and friends, not to mention her enemies.