… Bechdel’s memoir became an international literary sensation-a bestseller that some people wanted to ban from public libraries. This work was game changing for the genre, as Bechdel disrupted the straight male pantheon of comic literature with her unabashedly queer sensibility. Her book was virtuosic and ingenious in its visual construction and literary execution, demonstrating that graphic novels were not solely the domains of youth. Now Bechdel returns with a new graphic work, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, which fills in the back story of her tumultuous childhood on up to the writing of her earlier memoir.

… I sat down with Professor [Lois] Banner at her Santa Monica home to discuss her new book, Marilyn Monroe: The Passion and the Paradox (Bloomsbury Books), which promises to be as controversial as it is fascinating.

ONE camp-disco-rock ensemble from New York City has seized the stage and captivated us for over a decade with the swift hips and flawless falsetto of down-home boy Jake Shears, the fabulous, loud, and tattooed Ms. Ana Matronic, and their virtuoso, if only slightly more demure comrades, Babydaddy and Del Marquis. …

… In his fourth book, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back (Vantage Point), [Michael] Musto rants about the celebrity culture to which he has harnessed his career, waxing philosophical on everyone from Grace Jones and Madonna to Sarah Silverman and Lindsay Lohan. …

I spoke with Michael Musto by phone from New York last October.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, the Freedom Riders made history. It was an ugly time, much more divided and dangerous even than our own. … One rider was an Episcopal priest in his late thirties: a sexually confused, former Hollywood executive named Malcolm Boyd …

Kaufman, who lives on Manhattan’s upper West side with Jeffrey LaHoste, his artistic collaborator and life partner of over twenty years, took time out from tweaking preview performances of One Arm to speak with me.