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 I’ve interviewed more than a hundred of his friends and associates, and I’ve been given access to his as yet unpublished diaries.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.
More“WHAT The Well of Loneliness did for the man-woman, this most unusual tale does for the woman-man.” This is how an early gay classic was blurbed in advertisements and on the dust jacket flap by Samuel Roth, its first publisher, in 1933. A Scarlet Pansy, by Robert Scully (possibly a pseudonym), is a skillful and mature American novel about forbidden sex, complete with sensational packaging. That a book like A Scarlet Pansy could be displayed and sold openly in 1933 is itself remarkable.
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TO WHAT EXTENT did Walt Whitman consciously pitch his books to men who were attracted to other men? We know that he carefully crafted his public persona in general, right down to writing pseudonymous reviews and letters that praised his books but also focused on his character and appearance.
MoreBoylan has been married to Deirdre Finney (or “Grace” as she’s called in She’s Not There) for 22 years. The couple has two teenage sons, Zach and Sean, who refer to Jenny not as “Mommy” or “Daddy,” but as the hybridized “Maddy.” This interview was conducted in February via e-mail (a medium that Salinger probably dreaded).
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IN 1972, the Rho-Delta Press of Los Angeles published Tamotsu Yato’s book Otoko: Photo-Studies of the Young Japanese Male. The book has long been out of print, and it usually commands a hefty price from rare book dealers. But the story of its origins and eventual publication is notable-and ultimately poignant-because it intersects with the life of one of Japan’s most complex and fascinating literary figures.
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