Bleak is Beautiful
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell Farrar, Straus and Giroux 208 pages, $23. GARTH GREENWELL is a poet and beginning novelist whose critically acclaimed novella Mitko came…More
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No Rose Without a Thorn
A Little Life deserves a mention in any anthology of gay literature, at the very least, for its unconventional treatment of gay identity.
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The Arc of Activism
The lesson of And Then I Danced is that we need more of the radical, outsider, challenge-the-system activism that once animated Segal but now seems lost to him in an excess of self-satisfaction.
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Selective Reading of a Complex Era
THE PERIOD loosely called “gay liberation” is invariably thought of as falling somewhere between the buttoned-up climate of the 1950s and the emergence of AIDS in the ’80s, but for Jim Downs and many others, it ultimately comes down to the ’70s.
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Finding Love in Old Persia
While A Poet of the Invisible World is not a nonfiction biography of Rumi, and anyone expecting that will be disappointed, it seems a safe bet that Michael Golding drew on the poet’s life as inspiration for this novel.
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The Religion of Art
If both Proust and Scott Moncrieff believed in the divinity of art, the latter was a Scottish Presbyterian who converted to Catholicism after walking into the cathedral of Rouen in the middle of World War I.
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What Ever Became of Lesley Gore?
Personally, as Tolliver writes, while she sang about young love and boys, Gore knew as a teen that she was a lesbian. She didn’t dare to come out to her family, much less to her fans …
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Transitioning in the Real World
JULIET JACQUES’S Trans: A Memoir begins where most transition stories do—on the eve of her sexual reassignment surgery, the supposed start of a new life and the denouement to a journey from male to female.
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When Warhol Came to Look for America
Deborah Davis suggests in The Trip that this experience—with its roadside motels, silver diner meals, brightly colored billboards, and neon lights, all bathed in an Americana patina of mid-century kitsch—would prove a turning point for Warhol and Pop Art.
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In the Age of the Gay Memoir
AN HOUR BEFORE I was due there, I was surprised to read on my calendar that I was part of a reading group at the Huntington Library in San…More