Sex, Truth, and Videotape
COVERING a seventeen-year period, these essays chronicle the life and work of Gregg Bordowitz, an AIDS activist who was an innovator in the use of alternative media to educate the public and to document the epidemic. …
MoreBrowsing: Book Review
Blog Posts
Short Reviews
Reviews of Aura by Gary Glickman, and Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, 1979 to the Present.
More
The Gay Artist as Critic
All these temporary critics have masters degrees with the exception of Merrill, whose reading was nevertheless extensive enough to make his essays on Cavafy, Dante, Ponge, and Bishop more than exercises in pure appreciation.
More
Cultivating One’s Metaphors
EMILY DICKINSON inhabited a world of daisies, calla lilies, bourbon roses, sweet sultans, and verbena (among other flowers), not only in her symbolic use of such flowers in her poetry, but literally, as a horticulturalist who spent many hours cultivating her garden. …
MoreTreasures of the Overlooked
I SAT DOWN to read American Ghosts with high expectations. Here, after all, is the personal story of David Plante, author of fourteen books, including the famed Francoeur Trilogy, The Ghost of Henry James, The Catholic, Difficult Women, and The Family. …
MoreThe Antiquarians
WILL FELLOWS’ A Passion to Preserve is really two books. One looks at living gay men who have devoted their lives to restoring and preserving old houses and other American antiquities. The other documents some similar men who did the same sort of work in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. …
More
Adam and Steve
GILGAMESH IS the first significant work of literature in history-not Western history, but all of history-an epic that was first written down (ca. 2100 BCE) over a thousand years before The Iliad and The Odyssey or the Bible. …
MoreHow the Heartland Was Lost
FOR THE MILLIONS of Americans, including most gays and lesbians, who awoke on November 3, 2004, aghast to find maps of the United States awash in Bush Red, Thomas Frank offers a witty yet incisive study of how conservatives swept the American heartland. …
MoreA Life on Trial
DIARIES ARE curious things. They are private records, but when they document the lives of public figures, those divisions become murky. In the case of Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-86), whose diaries exceed a million words-hundreds of thousands of which have already been published-they can be downright damning. …
MoreThe Sky Was the Limit
AMONG THE WRITERS whose names are associated with the Beat Generation-Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the rest-perhaps only Paul Bowles is destined to transcend that association and secure his own place as an artist of the late 20th century. …
More