Hidden Dragon
In his mid-eighties, [Ross] Terrill has published the diary he kept between 1963 and 1989, edited by Philip Gambone. Surprisingly sexually explicit for its era, this is the first in a planned two-volume set.
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Somerset Maugham Does Penang
In The House of Doors, Tan skillfully mirrors that competent, lucid style. There are no frilly flights of descriptive prose, no subplots, no psychological probing, no distractions from the rather simple plot: A famous writer travels to an exotic land to collect tales from the natives and writes a collection of six stories that tell those tales. Lesley’s telling of the Proudlock murder trial story unfolds like any straightforward detective story. Thus, in both content and writing style, Tan has paid homage to Maugham as one of the masters of unadorned prose.
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Broadway Unbound
Books under review: Gays on Broadway by Ethan Mordden, and Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre by Kelly Kessler.
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H.D.: Everything All at Once
Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Charles Doolittle, a math and astronomy professor at Lehigh University, and Helen Wolle Doolittle, a painter and musician. Charles Doolittle was a widower who brought two sons into the household. In addition to these half-siblings, Hilda had three brothers. She enjoyed a happy childhood and loved the natural beauty of her hometown, which was then a small rural Moravian community. When Hilda was eight, the family moved to Upper Darby, PA, so her father could teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Her life continued smoothly as she excelled in high school, studying Latin and the ancient Greeks, and got into Bryn Mawr College.
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Get to Know Charles Causley
For in this quiet novel (Mother’s Boy) — and Gale’s fiction grows quieter and quieter, so even a bomb blast is muffled—Gale refuses to judge his characters. I sense that this is from a genuine generosity of spirit, a desire to allow the characters time to develop on their own. Quietly we learn that to become a mother’s boy requires the cooperation of both the mother and the boy, and it may lead, as in the case of Charles Causley, to some of the finest poems of his generation.
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Who’s Afraid of John Ashbery?
POET JOHN ASHBERY (1927-2017) is described by Jess Cotton in Critical Lives as “at once notorious and celebrated” owing to the perceived difficulty of his work. Cotton’s short but thorough explication of Ashbery’s life and work does a fine job of placing him both as a 20th-century poet and as a leading figure among gay writers.
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Revisiting Past Selves
[McKenzie] Wark’s latest memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death, returns to letter-writing as a way of revisiting past lovers and past friends, and those who fall somewhere in between. She turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hindsight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, past relationships: “Changing sex edits your relation to a lot of things. Including history.”
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As Sitcom Goes, So Goes the Nation
Hi Honey, I’m Homo offers a fast-paced sweep across LGBT representations over time. They’re important because the media play such an important role in defining what’s normative and what’s cool. “Television isn’t just a piece of furniture to watch,” writes Baume, “it’s a conversation, a tool, a weapon, a war, a party, an instrument, and an opportunity. It’s a project to participate in rather than passively watching in the dark.” LGBT people are no longer invisible on TV, but calls to participate proactively rather than remain complacent are as urgent now as they were in the 1960s and ’70s, as the forces of resistance and intolerance have never gone away.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of Queer Heroes of Myth and Legend: A Celebration of Gay Gods, Sapphic Saints, and Queerness Through the Ages, Spring in Siberia, A Novel, Movies that Made Me Gay, Who Does that Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, and The Queer Film Guide.
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Something Truman Capote Might Say
Such Good Friends is highly readable. Truman Capote is the beating heart of this novel. As the decades roll on, it has become increasingly apparent—and ironic, after all the newsprint and media noise about Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Eugene O’Neill, and Arthur Miller—that midcentury American literature belongs to three gay men: W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote.
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