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AS A CLOSETED TEENAGER in the late 1960s, I came across a glossy 50¢ magazine at a Boston newsstand that spoke to me in a coded language I intuitively understood. It was called After Dark and marketed itself as “the national entertainment magazine.” It could just as well have been labeled “the national gay entertainment magazine,” assuming you could connect to its subtext, which wasn’t all that “sub.” If you were gay the magazine practically winked at you. But you could also place it on the family coffee table and, as a friend once remarked: “It’s the perfect magazine when you don’t want to de-gay your apartment.”

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PERHAPS THERE IS no more famous celebration of madcap fun than “First Fig,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). This gifted writer created extraordinary works while living a remarkable and unconventional life, romancing both women and men. English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy said of her work: “The America of the 1920s made two major contributions to the world: skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

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WHILE DELVING into the Berg Collection archive at the New York Public Library, I recently unearthed a postcard sent in 1962 by a professor at the Pennsylvania college I attended. The card was addressed to William S. Burroughs, an old Harvard buddy of his then living temporarily in Paris. Burroughs, it will be remembered, was one of the most colorful figures in the American literary counterculture of mid-20th-century New York.

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WHEN L. FRANK BAUM began writing his tales of Oz at the end of the 19th century, he could not have foreseen their endurance in popular culture well into the 21st. In addition to The Wizard of Oz and Wicked on screen and on stage, Baum’s characters have been re-imagined into many literary works, including those of an obscure author and publisher named Marsh “March” Laumer.

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George Cecil Ives founded the Order of Chaeronea in 1897, named after the site of the battle fought by the Sacred Band of Thebes, made up entirely of male lovers.

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I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Henry Van Dyke’s 1965 novel Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, which was reprinted for the first time last year, when I read on the website Literary Hub the Foreword to it by Van Dyke’s nephew, Erik Wood. My immediate response was to ask: How is it possible that I, an English professor with an interest, both personal and professional, in gay literature, had never heard of this brilliant novel, or its Black and gay author?

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Many believe that de Falla was a repressed homosexual. Never married or known to have a lover, de Falla had many queer friends in Spain and Paris, including Lorca. Unlike de Falla, Lorca fully acted on his gay desires, notably in his turbulent relationship with artist Salvador Dalí. Flamenco is deeply embedded in Lorca’s poetry and plays, as well as in de Falla’s music. Listen to de Falla’s “El Amor Brujo” or “Nights in the Gardens of Spain” and hear his vibrant, flamenco-inspired sound.

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The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren
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A measure of The Front Runner’s cultural reach is that it has made its way into other works of gay literature. In Tales of the City, author Armistead Maupin credits The Front Runner with starting the craze for wearing running shoes when clubbing.

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A pivotal moment in her personal and professional life occurred in 1935, when Gisèle Freund met the feminist writer and publisher Adrienne Monnier at her renowned bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres. 

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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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