THE PROJECT that finally became this book began as a web trail from the British Museum. It is a pictorial sampling of items from that museum across centuries and cultures of mostly visual representations of same-sex desire and gender ambiguity. Each depiction has a paragraph or two of explanation, much as you would find on the plaques that accompany art works in a museum exhibit. The items are arranged in roughly chronological order.
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Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home by Catherine Reid Beacon Press. 184 pages, $24.95 FOR THOSE OF US who grew up city-side, the idea of discovering…More
Carl van Vechten receives the copious and discriminating biographical analysis he has long needed, in the form of The Tastemaker, an exceptional publication and Edward White’s first book.
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EDITOR Nigel Simeone has selected some 650 letters for this collection of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence over a span of six decades of the 20th century. The first letter is from 1932, written by a fourteen-year-old Bernstein to his piano teacher, Helen Coates. The last is from 1990: a letter to conductor Georg Solti.
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Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika Picador. 232 pages, $25. HIGHLY ACCLAIMED when it was published in the UK in 2002, Bitter Eden is a novel by a South…More
Strub covers a lot of highly personal ground in Body Counts. Gay men his age lost staggering numbers of friends, on a scale otherwise known only to wartime soldiers. It was the kind of loss that soldiers famously find hard to discuss; maybe this is a reason that relatively few AIDS memoirs have been published so far.
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WHILE family memoirs are often drenched in anguish, Kamal Al-Solaylee’s Intolerable takes the genre to a new level. The Toronto-based journalist and university professor reaches back to his parents’ history, from Yemen in the ’60s through Beirut, Cairo, and back to Yemen up to the Arab Spring, in agonizing, heart-wrenching detail.
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Perv: The Sexual Deviant in Us All by Jesse Bering Scientific American/Farrar Straus & Giroux. 268 pages, $26. THIS BOOK by Jesse Bering follows closely upon the publication…More
It is Colin R. Johnson’s contention in Just Queer Folks that well into the early decades of the 20th century, “what looks from today’s perspective like decidedly queer behavior was anything but uncommon or unheard of in the hinterland.”
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To Eat: A Country Life by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 194 pages, $25. IN EARLY 1970, when Joe Eck and his partner Wayne…More
