FEW AUTHORS have been more intent on making a reputation for themselves than Gertrude Stein. The fact that her name is known today by many people who have never read a word she wrote testifies to the success-but also somewhat to the failure-of her endeavor. As depicted most recently by Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which examined the continuing American fascination with an image of Paris in the 1920’s that Stein did a great deal to create, Stein is better known for the artistic careers she fostered than for her own creative output.

FOR THOSE who are skeptical of a gay rights movement that aspires only to enable GLBT individuals to join the cultural mainstream, this book will seem as refreshing as water in a desert. Judith Halberstam looks at a variety of media to find ‘queer’ subtexts that undermine a mainstream conception of personal success as based on heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and the accumulation of property.

I CONFESS to having been somewhat surprised upon learning about another book on that doomed cowboy-on-cowboy love story, Brokeback Mountain. But as editor William R. Handley shows in this new anthology about Jack and Ennis’ tortured, unrealized, lifelong love affair, there is still more to be said about the movie that elicited such a wide range of responses, so many of them extreme and at odds with one another, since the movie’s 2005 release.

IN THIS relatively short study, Jeffrey Angles explores the theme of love between men and boys in the literature of Japan’s modernist period, concentrating on three writers from this period: the poet, short story writer, and painter Murayama Kaita (1896-1919); the detective novelist and essayist Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1963); and the avant-garde prose writer Inagaki Taruho (1900-1977).

It is to Michael Schiavi’s credit that he manages in Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo to give equal weight to both sides of Russo’s work: as a student of Hollywood and as a gay activist. …