In his new memoir Unprotected, Porter reveals the truth, much of it painful to remember, about his formative years and early career in a book that’s a good story, a soulful ballad, and a scream for understanding, among other things.
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The editors of OutWrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Julie Enszer and Elena Gross, focus mostly on reprinting the keynote speeches, but the book also includes other material, notably a history of OutWrite, a brief rundown of the political in-fighting that plagued OutWrite’s various factions over its decade-long run …
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As a prose stylist, White is a master. What he says about Ruggero’s conversational style—“full of radical shifts in register from hieratic to demotic, serious to frivolous, flipping lightly from a big subject (the Czech baroque) to a small one (the best way to cook perfectly round potatoes fondant in the oven)”—very much describes his own literary mode. It’s a style I’d call Classical High Gay. It will delight some readers and probably turn others off.
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It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful makes a compelling case for the significance of Gran Fury’s imagery to the efficacy of ACT UP. Lowery also sees a larger significance: “Maybe the most important lessons from Grand Fury aren’t about AIDS explicitly, or even about pandemics, but rather the ability for this kind of work to sway public opinion, to shape our attitudes, and to change our worldviews.”
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Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about a woman giving a party. In that spirit, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway is not a book to be read and then hidden away on a shelf in your study. It belongs on your coffee table so that your friends and even casual acquaintances can enjoy the visuals while you’re in the kitchen making the coffee.
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Reviews of The Damage: A Novel; A Long Way from Douala; Because Art: Commentary, Critique & Conversation; Twilight Manors in Palm Springs, God’s Waiting Room; and A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah.
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Although Lynes is usually mentioned in studies of queer Modernism, he is rarely placed in the same category as Paul Cadmus, Christopher Isherwood, or Tennessee Williams—all of whom Lynes knew and photographed. This may change with the publication of Allen Ellenzweig’s George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye, a sumptuous biography that makes a compelling case for Lynes as an important actor in the history of queer representation.
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THOM GUNN (1929–2004), though widely recognized as a major British poet of the later 20th century, has often been marginalized by a literary establishment that has never been able to deal fully with his evocative, and explicitly gay, poetry. The publication of Gunn’s letters represents the start of what the poet Andrew McMillan has called “a welcome rebalancing.” As well as providing an intimate portrait of Gunn, the letters also give an insight into the origins of this imbalance. An unmistakable thread running through his letters is the extent to which he was forced to negotiate with a hostile culture as a poet who was a gay man.
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IN 2009, Heather Love’s first book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History established her as a soft-spoken rock star in the world of Queer Theory. Why, then, in a panel discussion uploaded to YouTube from 2016, did she attest that she was in the middle of a “personal crisis in the humanities”? She expressed impatience with the limits of her academic training and wanted to test its assumptions. That prompted her to ask a question that’s usually lobbed by skeptics: “What is Queer Theory about?” Her answer can be found in a new book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory.
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AUTHOR Anthony Veasna So died of a drug overdose on December 8, 2020. His first book, the short story collection Afterparties, was published on August 3, 2021, and was named one of the top 100 Notable Books of 2021 by The New York Times—almost a year after his death.
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