THE GREAT Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was renowned throughout the world by the time of his death. His major works, including the First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, Romeo and Juliet, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the opera Eugene Onegin, and the ballets Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, were lauded in Russia, Europe, England, and the United States.
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IF THERE’S ANYTHING poet Jack Spicer (1925–1965) and his archivist-biographer, the late Kevin Killian, can teach a reader, it’s that anything can be a poem, even a letter. The letter, as a literary thing, is one of several “occasional” forms, like “Dedication to Your Swimming Pool” by the Roman poet Statius, written to crash a rich man’s pool party, drink his wine, and feel up his spouse. It’s occasional like lectures, introductions, obituaries, sermons, thank-you notes, dedications, dirges, odes.
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THE FEMALE NUDE has been the subject of art for at least 30,000 years. Since the Venus of Willendorf to the present day, the meaning of the female body has remained a flashpoint in art and culture.
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A SKINNY YOUNG MAN stands with his back to you, hands on his cocked hips. He’s wearing only briefs, socks, and sneakers. His sneakers look a little grungy. His underwear…More
IN THE FALL OF 2025, the New York stage offered three separate productions featuring the word “faggot” in their title. Most prominent was Jordan Tannahill’s play Prince Faggot, directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in the summer and returned for a limited off-Broadway engagement later in the year. The central narrative constructs a fantasy future in which college-age Prince George of Wales brings his boyfriend Dev to meet the royal family.
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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.”
MoreWHILE 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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