THE QUEEREST SHOW on Broadway in the summer of 2012 didn’t feature drag queens, buff chorus boys, or lesbian love songs. Instead, audiences attuned to the codes of same-sex relationships may have been surprised to find the delightful zing of transgression in an old-fashioned chestnut about the love between an amiable alcoholic and a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit.
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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 …
MoreONE SPRING DAY in 1922, Virginia Woolf saw her friend E. M. Forster, then 43, on a London street, and later wrote in her diary: “The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.” What would she think of Wendy Moffa’s much-praised biography of Forster, A Great Unrecorded History (2010), with its focus on her friend’s sexuality? …
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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 …
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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.”
MoreThe literary genesis of Cabaret begins, of course, with Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and The Berlin Stories (1945).
MoreWHEN I FIRST STUMBLED across Joe Gage’s film L.A. Tool & Die (1979), which was billed as a gay porn movie, I was astonished. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “this is a real film!” As the mix of cinematography, image, soundtrack, vignettes, and intermittent but increasingly compelling narrative unfolded, the sexual content became powerful to the point of being unsettling. That’s when I realized that L.A. Tool & Die—and Gage’s other early works, Kansas City Trucking Co., and El Paso Wrecking Corp.—were more than “real films.” They were art, of a kind I’d never encountered before.
More[Author’s Note: About a decade ago, I started work on a book about Paul Monette. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred of his friends and associates, and I’ve been given access to his as yet unpublished diaries. Finally, all these years later, the project is beginning to come to life. This essay uses his diaries and a couple of the interviews to revisit one of Monette’s most important books.]
MoreI DO NOT remember being surprised as a high school student in the turbulent 60’s when I earned that W. H. Auden was gay. …
MoreAT A SMALL but select Walt Whitman exhibition mounted by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2006, a tender photograph of Whitman with his partner Peter Doyle was matter-of-factly labeled as such; and my jaw dropped. It was the first time I’d ever seen an American museum correctly name this relationship, announcing in effect that Whitman, arguably our greatest poet, was emotionally involved with another man.
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