Blog Posts View all
AIDS as it was, as it has been
AIDS nostalgia fuels Better Davis and Other Stories. This is not to mean a sentimental longing for the return of a time when the epidemic cusped in the early 80s, but rather a writer’s skillful reconstruction of the painful appearance of the scourge forty years ago …
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A Secret Love: A Review
By Michele Kirichanskaya
In Chris Bolan’s touching documentary A Secret Love we see his dedication to telling his great aunts’ love story, an epic romance that spanned over seven decades, told in undeniable and unapologetic detail.
Here's My Story View all
Excavating an Actor’s TV Days
By Mitchell Anderson
Back then, if you were gay in show business, you were pretty much told to shut up about it. “Live your life,” they would say. “Just don’t make a big deal out of it.”
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Jesús and I and Isherwood and Bachardy
By Wynward Oliver
When Jesús announced he’d invited Christopher Isherwood’s longtime lover, Don Bachardy, over for dinner, he acted as if he was daring me not to know my gay history.
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Book Reviews
Saving Lesbian Life
WHY DOES Eve Adams, born Chava Zloczewer, in Mlawa, Russian Poland, in 1891, matter to us today? The answers to this and a host of other mysteries can be found in Jonathan Ned Katz’ new biography, The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams.
But Was He a Gay Writer?
It is unclear exactly where Tiff stands in any canon. But if you love big, well-researched, and more-or-less objectively written biographies—including 112 pages of bibliography, indexes, and family trees—this book could be just what you’re looking for.
Passing from the Night
STORIES ABOUT GAY history often begin with a bar: the Black Cat in Los Angeles, Stonewall in New York. Equally important, our personal gay stories often begin with the gay bars of our youth. Yet these establishments are vanishing across the country for a variety of reasons, most prominently the rise of hookup apps like Grindr and skyrocketing rents for brick-and-mortar venues.
Sex with Exes, Too
Throughout Sex with Strangers, Lowenthal brings together characters and plotlines with a particular knack for plumbing the depths of his characters’ memories to paint rich back stories. Taken together, these smartly crafted stories explore the tensions between desire and restraint—the grand, enthralling fearsomeness of deep intimacy, of fully knowing another person.
A Caribbean in Queens
Not quite a coming out story, Antiman is an illuminating “hybrid memoir,” a record of Mohabir’s coming to terms with himself, discovering who he is, and his embrace of multiple communities and cultures. As he writes: “Diaspora is a queer country/ How can you be at once two species from two places?”
Identical Twins Part Ways
In the end, Medeiros’ story lands on a paradox. We know ourselves to be both unique individuals and utterly interconnected. Who better than identical twins to embody this? Who better than a poet to offer us this truth, and a gay poet at that? Affection and tenderness plunge Self, Divided into the realm of spiritual memoir, where love is the source of meaning.