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By Allen Ellenzweig
Based on the autobiographical novel Arrête avec tes Mensonges by Phillipe Besson, Lie With Me presents Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquédec), a renowned novelist, returning to his French hometown for the first time in 35 years to be feted by the local gentry.

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By Allen Ellenzweig
Jake is caught between his demanding father’s (Ryan Mah) expectations for a sports-star son and these new sexual feelings bubbling to the surface.

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By Allen Ellenzweig
The eight-episode miniseries Fellow Travelers written by TV and movie writer Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia; episodes of Ray Donovan and Homeland), examines the attraction between two men employed by powerful U.S. Senators during the 1950s Red Scare.

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Here's My Story View all

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By Scott Bane
My connection to Matthiessen and Cheney came through my sexuality, their relationship, Maine, and Matthiessen’s chosen field of study: history and literature.

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By Lucas Hilderbrand
Early on, strangers also often teased me, amused by the idea that going to gay bars was “research.” Almost imperceptibly, as the years went by, this shifted; people no longer thought historicizing gay bars seemed like a joke.

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Book Reviews

Somerset Maugham Does Penang

In The House of Doors, Tan skillfully mirrors that competent, lucid style. There are no frilly flights of descriptive prose, no subplots, no psychological probing, no distractions from the rather simple plot: A famous writer travels to an exotic land to collect tales from the natives and writes a collection of six stories that tell those tales. Lesley’s telling of the Proudlock murder trial story unfolds like any straightforward detective story. Thus, in both content and writing style, Tan has paid homage to Maugham as one of the masters of unadorned prose.

Broadway Unbound

Books under review: Gays on Broadway by Ethan Mordden, and Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre by Kelly Kessler.

H.D.: Everything All at Once

Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Charles Doolittle, a math and astronomy professor at Lehigh University, and Helen Wolle Doolittle, a painter and musician. Charles Doolittle was a widower who brought two sons into the household. In addition to these half-siblings, Hilda had three brothers. She enjoyed a happy childhood and loved the natural beauty of her hometown, which was then a small rural Moravian community. When Hilda was eight, the family moved to Upper Darby, PA, so her father could teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Her life continued smoothly as she excelled in high school, studying Latin and the ancient Greeks, and got into Bryn Mawr College.

Get to Know Charles Causley

For in this quiet novel (Mother’s Boy) — and Gale’s fiction grows quieter and quieter, so even a bomb blast is muffled—Gale refuses to judge his characters. I sense that this is from a genuine generosity of spirit, a desire to allow the characters time to develop on their own. Quietly we learn that to become a mother’s boy requires the cooperation of both the mother and the boy, and it may lead, as in the case of Charles Causley, to some of the finest poems of his generation.

Revisiting Past Selves

[McKenzie] Wark’s latest memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death, returns to letter-writing as a way of revisiting past lovers and past friends, and those who fall somewhere in between. She turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hindsight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, past relationships: “Changing sex edits your relation to a lot of things. Including history.”

Who’s Afraid of John Ashbery?

POET JOHN ASHBERY (1927-2017) is described by Jess Cotton in Critical Lives as “at once notorious and celebrated” owing to the perceived difficulty of his work. Cotton’s short but thorough explication of Ashbery’s life and work does a fine job of placing him both as a 20th-century poet and as a leading figure among gay writers.