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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CIAO! The World of Gay Travel was a bimonthly magazine published by George Desantis in New York City. Desantis had been a school teacher but lost his job when they found out he was gay.
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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
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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By David Masello: Oliver was never afraid to use certain words in her poems. Cover your ears, for you may be offended. Her language includes nouns and adjectives like beautiful, love, beloved, prayer, loneliness, God, holy, and heaven.
MoreI came across George Cecil Ives while looking for material about sports at the turn of the 20th century. Ives was a huge fan of cricket and kept meticulous records for numerous matches in his scrapbooks. He would later become, inadvertently, the first openly gay first-class cricketer when he took to the field himself …
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