AT A TIME in the 1970s when talk at the playground was of the sex scene on page 36 of The Godfather, I was perpetually reading page 47 of The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal.

This is what has become the stuff of legend for many gay men. While the queerness of Davis’ stardom has been deconstructed post-structurally for ages, what has been neglected are the subliminal subtexts of some of her pictures pertaining to the closet. In the case of Edmund Goulding’s 1939 Dark Victory, we can see Davis as one of the first women to struggle onscreen with the coming out experience.

I’M LOOKING at 25 photographs of retired, wrecked masters of the sea, ocean liners laid up and languishing in disuse and decay. These photographs, from Stranded: The Twilight of the Ocean Liner: Photographs by Martin Cox, at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, illustrate the reverse velocity of technology, steely in these old ships …

IN 2003, the controversy over The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown arose from, among other things, the book’s claim that the Catholic Church encodes forbidden knowledge in its images. An instance of this secret practice is supposedly how, in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, there appears to be a blonde female figure seated at Christ’s right that we have always mistakenly accepted as John the Evangelist. Brown’s novel posits that the figure is really Mary Magdalene …

Rubinstein founded her own ballet company, Les Ballets de Madame Ida Rubinstein, in 1928. She starred in each of her shows, commissioning new ballets, scores, and costumes from all the artists with whom Diaghilev collaborated: Ravel, Stravinsky, Bakst, Fokine, Leonide Massine, and many more. Her shows drew crowds, and …

TOWARD THE END of the 1977 documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, Pat Bond remarks that “one of the depressing things about lesbians being accepted is that we lose our sense of the ‘in’ group, the adventure of being different in a straight world.”