Tough Gay on the Block
Rub Out the Words starts in 1959, when Naked Lunch was first published in Paris, and ends in 1974, when, after living abroad for 25 years, Burroughs returned to New York City to take a teaching job at City College.
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A Visual Artist Who Could Write
JOE BRAINARD (1942-1994) is a name that doesn’t appear in comprehensive reference books on gay American writers and artists, though his accomplishments included drawing, poetry, prose, theatre design, and more. The omission makes this beautifully realized compilation of Brainard’s writings an essential work for anyone interested in mid-century gay life and culture. …
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Watching Out for Mom
ABOUT TWENTY PAGES into Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? you realize that this isn’t a memoir so much as a suspense story, the question being, “Is Bechdel going to be able to pull this off?”
MoreThe Affluent Metropolis
Sarah Schulman’s latest book, The Gentrification of the Mind, is in large part a set of provocative arguments about what gets preserved and promoted in American culture and why. …
MoreMore Curious Than Wise
MY UNCLE WILL (1885-1941) is introduced as “queer” in a blurb for this fascinating book about him. He was indeed as odd and self-contradictory as that word implies …
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Psychopathia Sexualis
Hanne Blank is an engaging writer, and her personal stake in the subject makes her analysis both interesting and immediate. This book is a useful addition to a general opening up of binary conceptions of sex and gender that seems to be happening in our society.
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A Place in the Shade
GORDON BALL’S memoir is a beautiful, poignantly sad time capsule by a participant in Allen Ginsberg’s East Hill Farm in upstate New York. …
MoreSlaves and Vampires
K. MURRY JOHNSON’S Image of Emeralds and Chocolate is a black gay love story set in both contemporary and slave times, a book that’s destined to become a classic in black and gay vampire literature. …
MoreIdentity Shifts
It was mid-1970 when Bornstein-twenty-something, anor-exic, altruistic, and seeking spiritual meaning-started a cross-country pilgrimage that landed him in Colorado. There, while looking for new boots, he found a Scientology center. He entered, and he stayed. …
MoreOldest Living Hollywood Hustler Tells All
SCOTTY BOWERS’ love affair with movie stars began when he was still a boy whose divorced mother had moved from a failed farm in the Depression Midwest to the city of Chicago, where Bowers not only learned to sneak into movies but earned money for his family the way any hero in a Horatio Alger novel might start out: delivering newspapers, shining shoes, and letting local priests have sex with him. But …
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