[Lou] Harrison came out as gay during the McCarthy era and immediately began attending the early meetings of SIR, the Society for Individual Rights, in San Francisco. He took poetry workshops from the poet Robert Duncan and, at SIR meetings, taught Ned Rorem how to do the Charleston. Duncan’s 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society” touched on feelings of self-deprecation and alienation.
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Ellis Amburn’s 1998 book Subterranean Kerouac, for example, delved deeply into the writer’s ambiguous sexuality. Regina Marler’s new anthology, Queer Beats, breaks new ground in chronicling Beat sexuality.
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ARTS AND LETTERS is a collection of previously published articles, essays, and book reviews, some of which were rewritten, reworked, or updated for this compilation.
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Alexandria: City of Memory by Michael Haag Yale University Press. 367 pages, $35. IT IS with considerable authority that Michael Haag offers his latest book, Alexandria: City of…More
FOR THE ONLY TIME in history the known world was ruled by one man: Alexander the Great. Considered one of the greatest military generals ever, he conquered the world by leading his vast army through 22,000 miles of battles—on foot, no less. But, hey, you can learn that from any history book.
What you won’t learn (and probably won’t see in Oliver Stone’s movie) is that Alexander was a man-loving, cross-dressing drama queen who frequently burst into hydrogen-powered catfights.
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… [Henry] James very consciously represented in his person whatever intellectual aristocracy the U.S. then possessed.
This is one key to Henry James’s character, and novelist Colm Tóibín has caught it to perfection in his fiction-not novel-The Master, …
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EVEN the erudite student of gay writing will find previously unknown poets anthologized in Masquerade. I love the obscure, so I had heard of Charles Hanson Towne, George Sylvester Viereck, and Adah Isaacs Menken, although admittedly I had never actually read any of their poetry. …
MoreDESPITE its slender size and breezily elegant prose, Looking for Sex in Shakespeare is a richly informative and learned book that endeavors to take a fresh look at a topic that’s been on everyone’s mind for at least the last century: …
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Reviews of Complaint in the Garden, The End of Gay and the Death of Heterosexuality, and Do Everything in the Dark.
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… As David Bergman writes movingly in his new “biography” of the VQ, the story of the most famous circle of gay writers of the last generation must be placed within the context of AIDS. …
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