Spring Fever: Victorian Times
THIS ISSUE takes us back to the dawn of LGBT identity as we explore some of the 19th-century writers who first put legibly queer characters and behaviors on the…More
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Dr. Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein
Based on the strange behavior of Drs. Jekyll and Frankenstein and their preoccupation with male spaces, we may question what they are hiding…
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Monte Cristo’s Women in Love
Dumas’ novel not only depicted lesbians in a positive light but gave them a happy ending and an escape from society.
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The Prehistory of Gay YA
Starting in 1887, Prime-Stevenson subverted the boy book form by injecting overt same-sex love between adolescents.
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Lotte Hahm’s Germany
Hahm aimed to create a unified lesbian and trans movement. By 1930, she headed an organization for Berliners regardless of their gender presentation.
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The Lives They Filmed
Queer amateur movie-making between the 1930s and 1960s was an exciting period of experimentation with self-representation.
MoreA Harvard Don’s Radical Roots
THE INFLUENTIAL literary critic, writer, and activist c (1902–1950) measured writers by the degree to which they could express the spirit of the times in which they lived. He lifted this idea from T. S. Eliot, about whom Matthiessen wrote an early book. But even before The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935), he had been moving in this direction in Sarah Orne Jewett (1929), which was the first biography of Jewett, and Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931), which grew out of his Harvard doctoral thesis. In these books, he examined both the literary works and their connections to the cultures from which they sprang.
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Florence in the Time of Leonardo
Phil Melanson keeps Florenzer engaging by setting this novel about Leonardo da Vinci amid a power struggle between the Pope and the Medici family of Florence.
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While Isherwood Was Off Writing…
DON BACHARDY’S prolific sixty-year career as an artist—his body of work encompasses about 17,000 portraits—would be reason enough for a 400-page book about him.
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The Music Set Us Free
IN THE WORDS of queer musicologist Philip Brett, “all musicians, we must remember, are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room.” Author Jon Savage seeks to demonstrate this point across almost 800 pages of The Secret Public, tracing the connection between music and queerness from the 1950s to about 1980, but he also goes well beyond.
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