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Reviews of Ultimate Gay Sex, The Gay Man’s Kama Sutra, and Best Gay Asian Erotica.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST’S new novel, The Line of Beauty, begins in 1983, just when The Swimming Pool Library left off—though its leading man is not the confident cocksman of the first book.

In Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire, Amy Villarejo, an Associate Professor at Cornell University, takes the quest for lesbian visibility on a journey beyond the bounds of what we know for sure.

Interviewing over forty eyewitnesses and carefully analyzing the times and milieus of Greenwich Village, where he lives, Carter has produced the first work that can be considered a comprehensive factual rendering of the Stonewall riots.

Alice Walker’s autobiographical essays have been widely published, and the video of her life (Alice Walker) is eye-opening for its depiction of the Jim Crow world of her childhood, where there were “whites-only” and “colored” drinking fountains, restrooms, and building entrances and exits.

Beyond Shame is a unique and strangely moving account of what went right—and what went wrong—with gay life in America over the past 35 years.

  The Sexual Organization of the City Edited by Edward O. Laumann, Stephen Ellingson, Jenna Mahay, Anthony Paik, and Yoosik Yim University of Chicago Press 418 pages, $35.   HBO’s Sex and the City gave us a New York that was essentially a sexual playground for upwardly-mobile white women in their thirties—a fantasy that ChicagoMore

In Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, theatre historian Richard Mangan has compiled reams of Gielgud’s extant letters from 1912 to 1999, which offer a one-sided conversation with everyone from Martin Hensler, Gielgud’s longtime lover, to Judith Anderson and Noël Coward.

  The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts Edited by Claude J. Summers Cleis Press. 373 pages, $29.95 (paper)   THE 200 ENTRIES in The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts cover individuals, artistic movements, time periods, countries, and topics in which art history is revisited to illustrate (both literally and figuratively) the range ofMore

  Clay’s Way by Blair Mastbaum Alyson Books. 242 pages, $12.95   BLAIR MASTBAUM’S impressive comic debut novel, set in Hawaii, presents the serious love choices of its fifteen-turning-sixteen-year-old narrator Sam, an unskilled skateboarder who has a crush on the slightly older Clay, an accomplished surfer. Rebel Sam listens to music “with lyrics about notMore

IN THIS, his second book in a proposed three-volume series, literary interviewer Richard Canning offers up more of the meaty, critically rich interviews of the kind that he gave readers in his first book, Gay Fiction Speaks (which I reviewed in the Fall 2001 issue of this journal). The twelve writers in Hear Us OutMore

  Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex by Jameson Currier Green Candy Press.  288 pages, $14.95   THE TITLE of Jameson Currier’s book of short stories, Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex, making use of four words that need to go on a ten-year hiatus, kept my initial expectations for this book low. The opening story, “Lessons,” a taleMore

  THE MOST INSIDIOUS FORM of anti-gay representation is not in religious broadcasting—which speaks only to the converted—but in seemingly gay-positive films and videos. It’s not just that Will of Will & Grace is never allowed to have a boyfriend or that “the Fab Five” in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy have no lifeMore

Takes on news of the day

The following article has been adapted from a piece that first appeared in the on-line journal, Slate.com.

  IN JULY 2003, Bravo premiered Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a reality series in which five urbane gay men give lifestyle makeovers to straight men, and it became an overnight cultural phenomenon. That same summer, The New York Times made the coinage “metrosexual”—a straight guy who grooms himself like a stereotypical gay guy—aMore

  KNOWING THAT WE LIVE in a time of hope as well as of threat, I am skeptical of claims that poetry is alive and well in America and that gay and lesbian poetry has been fully embraced by the “mainstream.” While some people insist that we are living during a renaissance of American poetryMore

  “HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?” straight people invariably ask when they learn that I write and publish gay male erotica. I always listen for the inflection, as the question comes in two varieties. If the emphasis is on the “how,” it indicates genuine curiosity about the process and its origins; if it’s on theMore

  AMONG THE MANY THINGS of which gay men have been accused is one, at least, that is true: that we often move into and invade somewhat impoverished neighborhoods of major cities, and lend our “queer eye” sensibility to improving them, while increasing the property values and drawing in a new population of upscale residents,More

  DESPITE the wedding band on her finger and all the other conventional markers of femininity—the makeup, the dress, the pretty, delicate features that would make most people read her as “straight”—Nancy Unger does not wish to identify herself, in her words, “as straight, as queer, as anything.” Unger, a professor of history at aMore

Following are the transcripts of two speeches delivered at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last July. No corresponding GLBT leaders were invited to speak at the Republican Convention.   Barney Frank Congressman from Massachusetts Hello. Thank you, thank you. But if you clap later, it doesn’t come out of my time.          I want to begin,More

  Last season on the hit television series Law and Order, a young, “straight-acting” African-American male from a black neighborhood stood trial for the murder of a gay white man with whom he seemed to have no connection. The twist in this story was that the white man had threatened to reveal his sexual relationshipMore

COLE PORTER has been considered by many to be the best writer of popular songs in show business history, but his impressive œuvre has been significantly incomplete until now, as the following stories of a number of lost songs demonstrate.

  Salvador da Bahia is perhaps best known to tourists as the most “African” city in Brazil. The administrative center of Bahia State, the third-largest city in Brazil and the country’s first capital (until 1764), Salvador displays the profound and abiding influence of the African slaves who were brought to its shores for over 300More

  BORN AUGUST 7, 1975, Charlize Theron grew up in South Africa during the last years of apartheid. Her first love was dancing, but after a knee injury she began to pursue a modeling career in Europe and the U.S. Her acting break came in the form of two small roles in two small films beforeMore