Lovers Are for Characters
A Dangerous Liaison is a well-researched, thought-provoking biography. It reveals the complex, sometimes distressing human beings behind two of the most influential philosophers and writers of the 20th century.
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On Broadway
ONE THING that becomes entirely clear as you read Herbert Keyser’s latest book, Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre: The Composers and Lyricists, is that the author is a font of knowledge about song on stage. As his bio tells us, the book is based on the lectures Keyser delivers to passengers on cruise ships. Even if the author is conspicuously heterosexual (his bio lists a loving wife, six children, and ten grandchildren), there’s something innately gay about a book on the topic of musical theatre.
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The Making of a Magazine
Gay history is still being told, and Thompson’s conversational, short volume Advocate Days & Other Stories adds significant information to what we know. Despite the fact that there are some tough truths in this book and that it covers some dark times …
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Another Jersey Boy Makes It Big!
The current collection, I Shudder, And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey, finds Rudnick reviewing his life as a mild-mannered Jersey boy getting his first tiny studio apartment in Greenwich Village under the critical gaze of two aunts and a mother …
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Reflections of Two Activist Observers
TWO NEW BOOKS by longstanding gay community activists and political essayists Martin Duberman and Sarah Schulman are useful if not indispensable for addressing big problems and painful if still-unconscious contradictions impacting our movement nowadays. It seems we’ve made momentous progress in civil rights—five states allow same-sex marriage—and even consciousness raising, but we still seem so regressive socially and personally in basic ways.
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‘Come back to the raft, Huck honey’: Reprise
Once upon a time, American men could openly express intense love for each other without shame or self-consciousness, without any sense of being effeminate or unnatural. Such ‘manly love’ did not preclude emotional, sexual, or conjugal relationships with women. This is Axel Nissen’s argument in Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction. …
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How a Paris Rag Outlived de Gaulle
Much of Jackson’s account in Living in Arcadia reads as an uninterrupted story of government persecution of homosexuals and Baudry’s attempts to navigate—or circumvent—its laws.
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The Boys in the Short Play
SUGARLESS, James Magruder’s juicy, fruity new novel, is a 70’s coming-of-age story that combines the heady flavor of adolescent hormones with original cast albums and high school speech competitions.
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Of Frogs and Faggots
THIS DIVERSE COLLECTION of essays by the author of the novel Gods and Monsters stretches over a remarkable variety of topics that range from AIDS fiction to the sexuality of Henry James. While most of the essays touch on some aspect of “the gay experience,” there are some that do so only tangentially.
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Divas in the House
IF IT’S TRUE that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then in Mama Dearest, the last novel by the late E. Lynn Harris, it stays close to home through three generations. The novel’s central character,Yancey Harrington Braxton, had been a real star once: a Broadway star with fancy clothes, a fancy apartment, and any man she wanted. So she knows what it’s like to make it big but now finds herself acting in a bus-and-truck company production of Dreamgirls, tromping around the country with a bunch of third-rate actors. The one saving grace of this gig is that it gives her a chance to hang out with her best friend, a gay man. But this isn’t enough to compensate for being around a bunch of wannabe actors. This road show is something she’s only enduring while she waits for her second big break.More than anything, Yancey wants to be famous again.
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