FOR NEARLY A QUARTER of a century, Pedro Almodóvar has been crafting films of increasing beauty and complexity. They are films that explore the political and cultural detritus of the Spanish psyche. Like all great art, they transcend their particularities to offer a vision of the human condition that resonates with all of us.

IN LOVE’S RITE, Ruth Vanita takes us through a memory hole of Asian history to a world where the forgotten (sometimes suppressed) esoterica of same-sex couplings can be found. The country is India and the time is before British colonial rule. According to Vanita, South Asia had “no premodern history of persecuting people for same-sex relations. … Under colonial rule, what was a minor strain of homophobia in Indian traditions became the dominant ideology. The British introduced in India, as in most countries they colonized, a law criminalizing any type of sex other than penile-vaginal penetrative sex.”

IN THE OLD DAYS of television, the late comedian Steve Allen had a regular routine on his show in which he would set up a camera at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles and make funny comments about the people who passed by. Allen Ginsberg’s captions for Gay Day, a coffee table book of black-and-white photographs of the Gay Pride Day Parade in New York City, are reminiscent of that.

There is much in Jennings’ book that I admire. He deftly sifts through existing scholarship to recover the terms and forms of ancient Israel’s worship of a “hypermasculine divinity” whose ravishing of his male followers provided a model both for the warrior-leader’s sexual relations with his male attendant and for the healer’s cure of the sick through the infusion of phallic energy. Likewise, he shrewdly analyzes the transvestite implications of the Chosen People being repeatedly imaged as a lovesick or adulterous female yet invariably represented by a male hero like Moses and Jacob, whose wrestling with the Lord becomes a form of rape …

SINCE HIS 1987 DEBUT, The Object of My Affection, Stephen McCauley has staked his claim to the modern gay comedy of manners. In a series of novels-The Easy Way Out, The Man of the House, True Enough-he has turned a gently satirical eye to the vagaries of love, both gay and straight, demonstrating that neither sexual orientation has a monopoly on dysfunctional relationships. …

In his latest work, Alternatives to Sex, that defensiveness has come to embrace an entire citizenry-and with good reason.

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THE NARRATIVE VOICEOVER for Velvet Goldmine (1998), Todd Haynes’ film exploration of the 1970’s glam rock phenomenon, opens with the accurate words, “Histories, like ancient ruins, are the fictions of empires.” In his formidable new study, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music, Philip Auslander mines the complexly layered history of the “glitter era,” with his focus trained largely on the movement’s heightened sexual overtones.

THE PROJECT of Brian M. Reed’s study of Hart Crane is two-fold: he seeks not only to examine and illuminate the poetry of Hart Crane, but to endorse and revive the practice of literary criticism focused on a single author.