Blog Posts View all
Mama’s Boy: A Brief Review
By Steve Warren
As inspiring as it is informative, Mama’s Boy, streaming now on Max, made me cry more tears—happy and sad—than any film in years.
Framing Agnes: A Brief Review
By Steve Warren
The six characters and the actors who play them are humanized to some extent, but there’s too little time to get to know them. Still, if Framing Agnes weren’t so good, I would not be left wanting more.
Dykes to Watch Out For, 40 Years Later
By Martha K. Davis
This year, the 40th anniversary of the appearance of DTWOF, another incarnation of Bechdel’s work is available on Audible: a ten-episode podcast series based on early episodes of the comic strip.
Here's My Story View all
Queers in Class
By Lori Horvitz
A handful of students claimed homosexuality was not natural; others said they’d think about killing themselves if they had the virus. At the time, I struggled to come out.
Gay Pride: Body, Mind, and Spirit
By Anne Ierardi
A year later, psychologist and grandmother Buffy Dunker spoke at Gay Pride from the same stage, exhorting us to leave the moth balls behind and come out. She wowed those of us in the closet that day. If she could come out at age seventy, I could do it too!
Book Reviews
Short Reviews
Short reviews of the books RAVING: Practices by McKenzie Wark, QUEER PRINT IN EUROPE edited by Glyn Davis and Laura Guy, AMERICAN CLASSICIST: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman, and WHEN LANGUAGE BROKE OPEN: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent Edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez; and the film FRAMING AGNES directed by Chase Joynt.
Community of the Dispossessed
Kids on the Street is an admirable, thoroughly researched, and carefully documented history of the once vibrant queer culture of the Tenderloin and Polk Street. Featuring scores of interviews with one-time Polk Street denizens, it is also a lament for the displacement of the multiracial, multigender culture of San Francisco’s first post-Stonewall queer district. Drawing attention to that once-thriving, often overlooked culture, the book is a valuable contribution to queer history.
Poetry Briefs
Short reviews of To the Boy who was Night: Poems Selected and New by Rigoberto González, So Long: Poems by Jen Levitt, and Romantic Comedy: Poems by James Allen Hall.
Short Life of an Actor in Un-gay Times
Mallon’s investigation of Kallman reads like an autopsy, even though the reader is warned that his story “is inspired by actual events considerably altered by the author’s imagination.” Yet there’s an authenticity that’s both frightening and compelling. Mallon has pierced the heart of darkness at the root of Kallman’s soul. Kallman might deserve to be forgotten, but Mallon’s portrait of a sad thwarted tragic talent as a sour parable on ambition is unforgettable.
Design for Living, Living for Design
George Austin Dennison and Charles Frank Ingerson’s 55-year relationship is at the heart of The Splendid Disarray of Beauty, and it’s what readers of these pages may find most fascinating.
X = Writer + Artist + Composer + …
CATHERINE LACEY’S new book, Biography of X, is an innovative novel chronicling the life of an influential, outré, fictional performance artist named X, narrated by her grief-stricken widow, an investigative reporter, CM Lucca, who is contemplating suicide. Angered by a recent unauthorized biography of X written by a man who never even met her, CM decides to write her own “corrective” biography of X.