![Lady Day of the Night Book Review By Reginald Harris: A new biography by Paul Alexander, wrestles with this problem but concludes that there’s ample evidence to support the view that [Billie] Holiday was fully bisexual, having had a number of affairs with other women.](https://glreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Holiday-FINAL-600x600.jpg)
Blog Posts View all
Queering Loneliness: A Review of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer
By Brian Alessandro
Like the novel by William S. Burroughs on which it is based, Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation of Queer is less about homosexuality than about the agonies and ecstasies of being a soul trapped in an aging, alienated body.
Gay Korean Culture in Love in the Big City
By Tae Ho Kim
An adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was long-listed for the International Booker Prize, the show will interest anyone curious about learning more about the gay scene in Korea, not merely as a piece of entertainment, but also as a sociological documentary.
We the Parasites: Book Review
By Dale Corvino
We the Parasites is a deeply personal and ekphrastic poem-as-essay. It pursues its end to contaminate criticism with the queerest of methods. Dig in.
Here's My Story View all
The Good War
By Elizabeth Costello
My heart, my gut, my cunt assumed positions of power. If that moment was a tarot card it was absolutely The Tower — the first time I spoke to her I felt hit by lightning. The rules of my gravity changed.
The Closet is My Country
By Damisola Sulaiman
How do you accept that your closet is a country, that the place that made you into the person you are, is where you can’t be yourself?
A Day in Hyderabad’s Flower Market
By Patruni Sastry
I had watched enough Bollywood movies to know that a good pair of sunglasses could shield both my identity and my makeup from prying eyes. I packed my carefully chosen outfit— flowers handcrafted by my partner, and a wig— into a bag, locked the door behind me, and called an Uber.
Book Reviews
She’s Got the Look
Unsuitable is likely to surprise and enlighten even readers with an extensive knowledge of the history of women-loving women. It would make a great basis for a documentary film.
Lady Day of the Night
Alexander’s book is the first full-length biography of Billie Holiday since Donald Clarke’s Wishing on the Moon (1994). Holiday herself wanted to title her autobiography “Bitter Crop,” the last two words of her signature song, the still shocking “Strange Fruit.” Focusing on the last year of her life as a unifying thread, Bitter Crop shifts backward and forward in time, moving briskly through the singer’s life.
A Film of Its Time, or Way Ahead of It
Winter Kept Us Warm is long overdue for a reassessment. As Canadian film historian, critic, and gay rights activist Thomas Waugh told Dupuis: “It’s so important for a film like this to be preserved, because it really speaks to what it was like to be gay in this time and place. It’s a way to pass on to future generations who have no other way to access it.” Happily, you can judge for yourself: the film is available for viewing on YouTube and on Internet Archive.
Poems of Age and Loss
PERHAPS there is no one as romantic, or as wistful, as a poet in old age. Likewise there is nothing that spurs a poet’s ruminations so profoundly as loss. Three new collections explore old age and loss in various ways (one in an almost uncategorizable way), each with varying degrees of effectiveness.
The Fall of the House of Wilde
The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts, focuses on Oscar Wilde’s long-suffering wife Constance and their two young boys, Cyril and Vyvyan, as they cope with Oscar’s philandering and the aftermath of his trials and exile.