Ramadan deftly captures what it means to be a homosexual in a deeply religious culture racked with political violence, where nearly every aspect of life is dictated by tradition and the Koran, which in turn is driven by the patriarchal and the masculine.
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In Memoriam captures the atmosphere of elite public schools at the time, especially the rampant, barely concealed homoeroticism, often mixed with violence.
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Almost Obscene contains poems referring to Mary Renault, Stendhal, and Constantine Cavafy, plus a string of poems on mythological and historical figures, including Theseus, Medea, Antinous, and Scheherazade.
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FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Aleksandar Hemon believes in the transcendent power of an enduring passionate love to allow one to survive the world’s horrors and indignities. This belief is what drives his new novel, The World and All That It Holds.
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HARDLY FIND a more diverse group of books than this: one by a pioneering Jewish lesbian poet originally from Poland; one by a French surrealist; and a third by a gay man living in Dallas. All are propelled by completely singular impulses, and all have something wonderful to offer.
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Reaching Ninety, is a summing up of a long and remarkable life as [Martin Duberman] reaches his ninetieth birthday. In it, he covers some familiar ground, but more than in previous memoirs, he’s willing to speak out about matters that he was reluctant to speak of before. At ninety, one imagines, he doesn’t really care if he offends anyone or if someone disapproves.
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Reviews of Love Leda: A Novel by Mark Hyatt, Aubrey Beardsley: 150 Years Young by Margaret D. Stetz, Confidence: A Novel by Rafael Frumkin, and Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust by W. Jake Newsome.
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In the preface to On Christopher Street, Denneny muses on the reasons for assembling writings that often reflect immediate concerns, largely forgotten by his own generation and ancient history to younger readers. He acknowledges that contemporary readers might find some of the book irrelevant, but his aim is “to show what the unfolding of gay liberation was like for one person, in specific situations and over time.”
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YIDDISH has entered the American language so extensively by now that most people have probably heard the word “shiksa”—especially if they’ve read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s the Yiddish word for a gentile woman. Robert Hofler’s new book on the making of the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford movie The Way We Were (1973) is about its masculine equivalent, the much less euphonic “shegetz.”
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Henry James Framed is a beautifully produced book. The illustrations are first-rate, and the design allows for easy access to footnotes. Many readers skip footnotes, but Michael Anesko, a professor at Penn State, writes with such wit and clarity, it would be a mistake not to dig further into the delights he has served up in this book.
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