All in the Family came at a time when the LGBT community was just starting to find its public voice. As a vehicle for introducing America to this community essentially for the first time, the show traveled quite a distance during its thirteen-year run.
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McKuen’s turning point coincided with 1967’s Summer of Love, when hippies and other nonconformists took their rebellion against conventional norms into the streets. His stance as a melancholy nonbinary romantic placed him on the more conservative end of the counterculture. It was his ability to connect with the heartaches and longings of countless “ordinary” people that put him in sync with the moment.
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Cheney captured a bleak, stark side of New England, too. His darker paintings, among his best, may well have been a response to Matthiessen’s urging him to explore all of his life experiences.
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Even before Mineo’s version, Fortune and Men’s Eyes shocked people with its homosexual and prison life content. Young Smitty is sent to prison for a minor crime. His aggressive cellmate Rocky offers an option: basically, submit sexually …
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What was not publicly known during Matthiessen’s lifetime was that he was a gay man, involved in a relationship that looked a lot like a marriage—in everything but name and legal rights—with the American Impressionist painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945).
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WHILE sorting a box of donated books for a prison class I was teaching, I noticed that the cover art on a decades-old book was the work of…More
THIS SEPTEMBER marks what would have been the sixtieth birthday of punk musician and Germs front man Darby Crash. As a musician, Darby was active for only a short…More
AFTER DISCOVERING the writings of Boston- and San Francisco-based poet John Wieners (1939– 2002), I was left with a sense of literary regret: Where have you been all my life?
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COLORS play tricks on us. What we see is not always what we get. And what we think is not always what we see. Is seeing the same as…More
That Little Caesar served as the model for the American gangster film is made all the more noteworthy by the way in which Rico is depicted, to the extent possible in this era, as ambiguously gay. Unlike his cohorts, he shows little interest in the opposite sex. When women are mentioned, he snarls contemptuously, “Women! Where do they get ya?”
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