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PUBLISHED last year on the occasion of a major retrospective of Frida Kahlo’s work in the Martin- Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and Bank Austria Kunstforum, in Vienna, the Frida Kahlo Retrospective is accompanied by a coffee table-sized catalog. It is a stunningly beautiful book with glorious color and black-and-white illustrations.

Katherine Bucknell, certainly has a commanding knowledge of [Christopher Isherwood’s diaries] and the details; she provides helpful footnotes and a comprehensive glossary of who’s who.

EVEN those who consider themselves well informed about 20th-century art have probably never heard of Bruce Sargeant (1898-1938). A sculptor, draftsman, and painter (not to mention a sometime poet), Sar-geant’s beaux arts training comes through in works that are focused almost exclusively on beautiful young men. While Sargeant’s art has long been prized by eliteMore

The noted New Yorker editor and writer Robert Gottlieb takes a daring plunge into the complexities of [Sarah] Bernhardt’s life.

Review of two books of poetry: The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Robert Waldron and The More I Owe You by Michael Sledge.

“A WRITER’S OBSESSIONS are more obvious than most,” explains Jeff Mann in the opening sentence of Binding the God: Ursine Essays from the Mountain South. In this collection of seventeen first- person essays, the Lambda Literary Award-winner delineates his many passions, including a voracious leather-bear appetite for BDSM, an ardent fantasy affair with “Major Country-MusicMore

IN WANDERING SOUL, Gabriella Safran has written an erudite biography of the Yiddish radical, Russian revolutionary, writer, ethnographer, and playwright S. Ansky (or An-sky), who’s best remembered for his haunting play, The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds. Drawing from Ansky’s own writings, Safran, who teaches Slavic literature at Stanford, depicts Ansky as a person of multipleMore

ON THE MORNING that Wayne Blake entered the world, the midwife, Thomasina Baikie, did what came naturally: she checked to see if the baby was male or female, and was shocked to discover that the baby appeared to be both.

Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master collects a number of poems from [his] early books, along with a selection from Thompson’s later, posthumously published works, to yield a folio of over forty pages of his poetry. 

Reviews of Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, Gay Shame, Ballets Russes Style:  Diaghilev’s Dancers and Paris Fashion, and Mustn’t Do It.

FEW ARTISTS, even those of great fame or historical importance, receive such magnificent treatment in a published monograph as George Quaintance (1902-1957), painter of beefcake images from the 1940’s and 50’s, receives in this volume. Known mostly to bodybuilders and physical culture fans of those decades and to legions of gay men of the pre-StonewallMore

The International Homosexual Conspiracy is a testament to Larry-bob's consistent growth as a writer. Always curious and never complacent, this collection may just attract that larger audience of readers who will find themselves challenged, examining their assumptions, and frequently laughing out loud.

I DO NOT remember being surprised as a high school student in the turbulent 60's when I earned that W. H. Auden was gay. ...

A TRANSGENDER musician, animator, and filmmaker working in Seattle, Clyde Petersen has released ten albums with the band Your Heart Breaks. He regularly tours with Kimya Dawson, whose childlike voice sweetens the movie Juno’s soundtrack. Despite Petersen’s gentle guitar riffs and soft-spoken lyrics, his musical influences include jarring artists from the feminist punk movement knownMore

All the King's Men are Katie Allen, Julee Antonellis, Leighsa Burgin, Jill Gibson, Maria Kogan, and Karin Webb. I interviewed them in person late last year.

HOW DOES one tell the story of Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev, the impresario whose artistic accomplishments over three decades beginning at the turn of the 20th century seem to surpass what is humanly possible? How did this homosexual Russian émigré who spent the majority of his life exiled in Europe do it?

Takes on news of the day.

SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL, 1983. In one of the earliest spoken-word performances that theatrically represented AIDS in the United States, perhaps the first on the West Coast, an emerging playwright and stand-up comedian named Doug Holsclaw performed Eartha at the White House (later retitled Spice Queen) in a monologue competition sponsored by the One Act TheaterMore

IN OCTOBER 2010, the Smithsonian Institution corrected a decades-long oversight by staging the first major museum exhibition focused on GLBT American figurative art. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, at the National Portrait Gallery, met with critical acclaim and enthusiastic attendance—as well as an explosive controversy worthy of the “culture wars” of the lateMore

The following text is drawn from the catalog for an art exhibit called Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters: 1985–2010, which ran at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston last fall. The international poster collection of James Lapides formed the basis for the exhibit; several of the 153 postersMore

WHEN Carolyn Forché released her groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, she did not include poems from the struggle for gay rights. The anthology was published in 1993, a bleak point in the history of the gay community due to the impact of AIDS on gay men and on the arts community.More

I STARTED TEACHING courses on hiv/aids literature to undergraduates after spending more than five years researching the subject for my doctorate. The period in which I initially sought out and devoured any and all types of “AIDS literature” was uneven enough. During my first year as a graduate student, 1990–91, it felt like a narrowlyMore

THE KIDS Are All Right deals in matters of sexual ambiguity and raises some bold questions about desire and identity-questions that the movie then ignores for the most part. Let me say that I enjoyed watching these fine actors in this artfully written script. It will succeed for many in presenting a normalized portrait ofMore

WHEN the opening credits conclude in the biopic I Love You Phillip Morris with the bold announcement “This Really Happened,” one can’t help but speculate that the creators of this recently released movie knew that what was about to unfold onscreen would challenge credibility. What does happen in this based-on-a-true-story tale is ...

LAST YEAR was an unusually tumultuous one for GLBT rights, at times a trying one, but ultimately a triumphant time for the gay community. By year's end, it seemed we had reached a tipping point in the struggle for equality such that momentum for eventual success had finally gained the upper hand over the forcesMore

The challenge for photographers faced with portraying the AIDS epidemic was to produce an iconography that extended beyond a health story and to overcome the public’s habituation to graphic and shocking images. The photographs selected for this essay had to evoke the mood of the late 1980’s and early 90’s and capture the epidemic inMore

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