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LAST YEAR, editor Tom Cardamone with his new imprint the Library of Homosexual Congress at Rebel Satori Press reissued gay writer Allen Barnett’s classic collection of short stories, The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories. Barnett died in August of 1991 of AIDS-related causes, just a year after his collection was published. He was only 36 years old, but in his short lifetime he had become a tireless gay activist, an AIDS educator, and a promising writer.

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HE STARES dreamily at someone over your shoulder, his mouth open and poised to sing. In his hands he strums the lute that gives him his name. Flowers decorate the desk before him. The flowing white blouse he wears is open, displaying an unusually broad rib cage and rounded shoulders. His too-boyish face and luscious curls give him a feminine appearance, making his gender and age ambiguous. He’s beautiful and mesmerizing yet somehow haunting or, perhaps, haunted.

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DIRK BOGARDE (1921–1999) was a British film actor of the postwar era who was a major star in Europe and even made inroads into the American dream machine. His first Hollywood film was the underwhelming Song without End: The Story of Franz Liszt (1960).

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LORD BYRON died 200 years ago, in 1824, at the age of 36. He succumbed to a fever in Greece, where he was helping to fund the Greek war of independence from Turkey. Today he’s more famous as a poet and a lover than as a fighter. One estimate puts Byron’s renown as a poet second only to that of Shakespeare.

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Monica Majoli’s portraits are of centerfold models who were photographed between 1976 and 1979. Her artist statement reveals that “these images showcase a tragedy that had yet to unfold, as they were photographed on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic.”

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BY DAY, the pseudonymous Jennie June lived a respectable, middle-class life in early 20th-century New York. By night, he traipsed through the shadows of working-class communities as a woman, cruising soldiers and other trade. If he’d been born a century later, he might have seen himself as a trans woman or nonbinary person, but in the language of his era he identified as a “passive invert,” a “Uranian,” a “fairy,” a “boy-girl,” or an “androgyne” …

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Maumort is not so much a novel as a fictionalized memoir—at least in its present state. Du Gard changed his mind several times while writing it regarding how exactly to tell the story; more on that later. What surprised me the most was a) how little known it is today, and b) how incredibly frank and nonjudgmental it is on sexual matters in general and on homosexuality in particular. Indeed, du Gard, who was a close friend of André Gide (in fact, the work is dedicated to him), spends a lot of time contemplating why the Lieutenant-Colonel did not turn out to be homosexual, despite the fact that many of his early sexual forays—one could even argue, his most significant ones—were with men.

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IN 1949, more than five years before writing his landmark poem “Howl,” a 23-year-old Allen Ginsberg was for eight months a patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (PI),…More

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AS A SUPERFAN of Neil Bartlett—I’ve raved about four of his works in these pages—I recently went back to his first novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1992), reissued in 2017. In the new introduction, Bartlett acknowledges his debt to “two of my favourite collector’s items in the pre-history of British gay fiction, Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and the screenplay for the film Victim (1961).” I’d seen the film (Dirk Bogarde suffers, fabulously), but didn’t know the novel, and wondered what a seventy-year-old novel might have to say to me. Fortunately, the always valiant Valancourt Books reissued it in 2014, with a splendid introduction by none other than Bartlett himself.

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