A Writer Who Peaked Early
… Literary anecdotes about Glenway Wescott abound. …
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Hear the Voice of a Bard
MAINLY KNOWN as one of the royals of the San Franciscan avant-garde poetry scene, Aaron Shurin has produced a collection of 21 short prose pieces, King of Shadows, which offers up some of the joys of reading a poet’s prose.
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A Bishop’s Calling
WAS your Sunday School teacher right about there being a loving God, or does the Bible condemn homosexuality as an “abomination”? Gene Robinson, the first openly gay priest to be elected a bishop of the Anglican Church, discusses this question at length in his new book, In the Eye of the Storm.
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Days of Wine and Retail
CLAYTON LITTLEWOOD and his partner Jorge owned an outlet of the now defunct designer clothing chain, Dirty White Boy, in the heart of London’s gay mecca, Old Compton Street in Soho.
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Continental Divide
Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States by David Rayside University of Toronto Press. 440 pages, $35. THE 49TH PARALLEL…More
Isherwood’s Inspirations
Review of Isherwood on Writing
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First Chronicles of Lesbian Literature
Review of Sex Variant Woman
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The Anarchist Dream of Sexual Freedom
THE COVER of Terence Kissack’s book depicts a rainbow flag overlaid with the portraits of Benjamin Tucker, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, John William Lloyd, and Leonard Abbott-five important figures within the American anarchist movement during the early years of the 20th century.
MoreLifestyles of the Gay and Banished
THE HEART of this little book is a 72-page essay, Poulenc’s Priest, by the British novelist Paul Bailey. The title stems from an anecdote about the gay composer Francis Poulenc that appeals to Bailey’s “sense of what is right and wrong”: “[Poulenc] confessed to his priest that he’d had a sexual encounter in a park with a stranger, and the priest-exasperated-stopped him short with the admonition: …
MoreFlocking Together in America’s Cities
IN A POEM called “The Dump,” one of the last published by the late Thom Gunn, he describes a dream in which he wanders around a lifetime’s worth of ephemera left behind by a departed friend and fellow author. He sees vast mounds of paper, collections of every note and draft and manuscript the writer ever produced. But he also peruses the more common refuse of the man’s life: “I went in further and saw/ a hill of match covers / from every bar or restaurant/ he’d ever entered.” I thought of this poem as I read Donald F. Reuter’s Greetings from the Gayborhood, because …
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