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Reborn is a study of a complex women whose private life and secret self, including her sexual ambiguity, are at least as mesmerizing as her published works.

PIONEERING PHOTOGRAPHER, book publisher, and friend to a generation of artists and writers beginning in the 1890’s, F. Holland Day has not until recently received the respect he deserves. Scholarly essays and theses and a retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2000 showed rising interest, but a new book finally does justice toMore

EDWARD CARPENTER (1844-1929) was the most important early pioneer of gay liberation. Before him, writing in German, Heinrich Hössli had defended the “male love of the Greeks” (1836-38) and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had decried the persecution of “male-male love” (1864-1880).

LYDIA LOPOKOVA is not a name that comes to mind when one thinks of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding this year. Bloomsbury Ballerina, a superb new biography by British dance critic Judith Mackrell, should help remedy this situation.

“I ONCE asked Christopher Isherwood if he’d mind if I kissed him,” begins an essay in Alfred Corn’s latest book, Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007. With an opening line like that, what curious gay reader could resist reading further?

Galloway’s new memoir tells her story from the inside out, creating a bridge to hearing audiences. An actress, writer, and performance artist, she is dexterous in her use of words and devastating with a sense of black humor that brings numerous laugh-out-loud delights. There is no political correctness here, only a poignant life journey ofMore

... Got til it’s Gone is the kind of novel that will make you wish Johnnie Ray Rousseau was a flesh-and-blood person so you could find him and spend an evening in his company-such is author Larry Duplechan’s deftness in telling a story. ...

... Heterosexual Africa? explores how Africa’s singular identity as a heterosexual continent came about. Author Marc Epprecht’s 230-page explanation, however, is far from simple. Rather, it is a Kafkaesque labyrinth of the stories of researchers who either ignored evidence of African homosexuality or were blind to it or chose to suppress what they found dueMore

THIS BOOK began, like many good ideas, as a conversation. During a public administration conference in Washington, D.C., Kenneth Oldfield, a straight, white, married emeritus professor in Illinois, and Richard Greggory Johnson III, a gay African-American assistant professor in Vermont “with dreadlocks to die for,” began talking about the ways in which academia, for allMore

Reviews of Truman Capote? Enfant Terrible, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage, and Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox.

MY COPY of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation is forty years old and was published by Dell for 95¢. It was a time when literary criticism could be sold as a mass market paperback. A photo of Sontag takes up most of the cover. She is young and pretty, the skunk-like swatch of white not yetMore

I interviewed Cooper face-to-face at the Sundance Film Festival last January.

Wartime Diary is a snapshot of a woman at a defining moment in world history, as well as a defining moment in her own career and philosophical development.

News of the quirky

Letters to the editor

THE STORIED HISTORY of print publishing by and for the GLBT community goes back to the 1950’s and 60’s-some would say earlier still-and its dominance as the medium of choice for that community remained unchecked until quite recently. ...

IF YOU’RE OF A MIND to write a book about and for gay men and the Internet—or, say, fly fishing and the Internet, or careers in advertising and the Internet—know that your work will be hopelessly outdated about two hours before your publisher agrees to put forth the thing in ink.

OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, new voices have entered the public discourse over anti-gay ideologies. One of the loudest and most hostile toward us is the “ex-gay” movement, which attempts to de-homosexualize homosexuals under the pretext of saving souls in the name of Jesus. On the Internet and in the press, we are increasingly hearingMore

WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Los Angeles to matriculate at the University of Southern California in 1998, ...I did not even know that ONE had existed, that many homosexuals in the country-and the world-had looked to the people in these neighborhoods for support, encouragement, and inspiration. But gradually these ghosts revealed themselves-and they demanded toMore

WHEN I BEGAN my online diary, “Living in the Bonus Round,” in March 1996, there was no way I could have anticipated that eleven years later it would lead to my being invited by pop star George Michael to play John Lennon’s “Imagine” piano. The route was unexpected, circuitous, and completely unplanned. But it wasMore

FOR A CENTURY or more, it seemed impossible for literary biography to acknowledge a subject’s homosexuality, and this was due in part to the reticence of some writers to allow an accurate record of their private life to circulate. Before his death, for example, Henry James systematically burned all of his private papers and encouragedMore

What I almost never saw from my seat at my favorite haunt-the Café de Paris, chosen because, not attached to a hotel, it always attracted more Tunisians than tourists-were any signs of a visible, easily identifiable gay or lesbian culture.

LATE IN EVELYN WAUGH’S Brideshead Revisited (1945), narrator Charles Ryder finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage and still in love with a married woman, Lady Julia Mottram, whose physical likeness to her brother Sebastian is what Charles has been drawn to all along.

WHEN the incomparable James Purdy passed away in March on Friday the 13, 2009, at the prodigious age of 94, he had been pretty much out of the publishing mainstream for nearly two decades. One of his last short stories, “Reaching Rose,” published in the 2004 collection Moe’s Villa and Other Stories, was a remarkableMore

... People in this part of Sub-Saharan Africa have some access to the Internet and young “gay” men visit websites where they are learning what it’s like to be homosexual in Western societies. Young gay men here are aware of the legalization of homosexual unions, and its related debates, in Europe and the U.S.

From his new office in New York City, Weise discussed his vision for Alyson going forward and shared his views of the current state, as well as the recent history, of GLBT literature.

DESPITE President Obama’s lifting of the ban on prohibiting abortion information and services overseas, the issue is not settled. In the past fifteen years, right-wing groups unleashed a vast, many-pronged “culture war” to manipulate sexual anxieties and dictate what goes on in America’s bedrooms.

Andy Warhol is signing his latest book of Polaroids at a large bookstore in Manhattan, hundreds of fans pressing around the table. A young man at the edge of the crowd walks slowly behind the table, arm-length from Warhol, adroitly snatches his wig, tosses it to an accomplice waiting near the door. Both run outMore