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‘AIDS activism kept me alive.’ BORN IN 1962, Malcom Gregory Scott, is an American writer, activist, and AIDS survivor. As a young man he joined the U.S. Navy, but in 1987 he was discharged for homosexuality. Upon his release, Scott also learned that he tested positive for HIV. A decade later, his battle with AIDS nearly ended his life. Miraculously, with the emergence of protease inhibitors coupled with medical marijuana, he survived, and he survives today. …
The Poet As Public Intellectual A theme that runs throughout [Essential Essays: Culture, Politics and the Art of Poetry] is Adrienne Rich’s dissatisfaction with feminists who don’t want to acknowledge the importance, or even the existence, of the lesbian experience in society. She notes that “feminist research and theory that contribute to lesbian invisibility or marginality are actually working against the liberation and empowerment of women as a group.” She considers lesbian existence to be a form of ordinary life and dislikes the term “lesbianism” …
The Rave Decade Both the highs and the lows of that decade [the 90s] are featured in Sketchtasy, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s third novel. The narrator is Alexa, a college-age genderqueer person living in Boston in the 1990s. The term “genderqueer” wasn’t used at the time (and isn’t in the novel), and it’s interesting to read how Alexa and her friends try to navigate gay male culture at a time …
The Masculine Mystique Newton describes herself in her journals as a “‘Commie Jew bastard”—despite the fact that she’s a WASP—who became an anthropologist and contributed to the development of sex and gender studies. By the late 1970s, she answered to the label “butch,” which she defined as someone who “identifies as a woman but whose sense of self is deeply rooted in masculinity.”
That Double Edge of Stardom The original trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody</em drew the ire of the gay press for omitting any referenc to AIDS. Meanwhile, screenwriter Anthony McCarten compressed the timeframe in order to make the Live Aid event a kind of swan song, which it wasn’t. Mercury was diagnosed two years later, in 1987, and such a switcheroo is not just emotionally manipulative but dishonest.
Merrily He Strolled Along WIDELY REGARDED as the greatest living composer in the American musical theater, Stephen Sondheim has in recent years become very open about being a gay man. While coming to terms with his sexuality was a prolonged process, and his public coming out did not occur until he was nearly seventy, the Sondheim phenomenon on Broadway involved revolutionary portrayals of love and sexuality in many of his greatest musicals

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April 16, 2019

Terrence McNally: Documentarian of Our Lives

FOUR-TIME Tony award winner Terrence McNally (born 1938) is the subject of this well-made documentary about a major American playwright many of whose plays address gay themes.

April 11, 2019

HBO’s Takedown of Michael Jackson

EXACTLY FIFTY YEARS AGO, five young boys from Gary, Indiana, became pop music sensations. It has always been difficult separating the truth about their origin from myth because Motown Records…More

April 3, 2019

Hate Crime Crime

The case of Jussie Smollett was a media feeding frenzy, but for you cave-dwellers: Smollett is the gay African-American actor who reported to the police that he’d been jumped…More

March 26, 2019

O Lucky Man!

We’ve followed Aaron Schock over the years, and now he’s back, possibly for the last time. For those who need a refresher, Schock is the former Republican Congressman from…More

March 23, 2019

Gay Artists in the Modernist Era: 3 NY Exhibits

Do you need another reason to come to New York in the year of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising? If so, these three exhibits should provide one. And if you’re going to be in New York in the next month, don’t miss The Young and Evil in particular.

Book Reviews

March-April: The Ampersand Issue
Special 25th Anniversary Book
Features From Current Issue

Book Review

The Enigma of Pierre Loti

PIERRE LOTI was a 19th-century French writer who was admired by writers as various as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, and Marcel Proust, but is now almost totally forgotten.

Essays

Merrily He Strolled Along

WIDELY REGARDED as the greatest living composer in the American musical theater, Stephen Sondheim has in recent years become very open about being a gay man. While coming to terms with his sexuality was a prolonged process, and his public coming out did not occur until he was nearly seventy, the Sondheim phenomenon on Broadway involved revolutionary portrayals of love and sexuality in many of his greatest musicals

Book Review

Before Boystown

Jim Elledge’s The Boys of Fairy Town brings to life this world in all its multiracial diversity from Chicago’s 1837 incorporation until the 1940s: sometimes hidden in the shadows, but often all the rage and thriving openly.

AIDS

‘AIDS activism kept me alive.’

BORN IN 1962, Malcom Gregory Scott, is an American writer, activist, and AIDS survivor. As a young man he joined the U.S. Navy, but in 1987 he was discharged for homosexuality. Upon his release, Scott also learned that he tested positive for HIV. A decade later, his battle with AIDS nearly ended his life. Miraculously, with the emergence of protease inhibitors coupled with medical marijuana, he survived, and he survives today. …
Blog
1. April 16, 2019 Terrence McNally: Documentarian of Our Lives
2. April 11, 2019 HBO’s Takedown of Michael Jackson
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