THINGS I WAS surprised to learn in William E. Jones’ biography of the legendary pornographer … Boyd McDonald: first, that he got the idea for his magazine Straight to Hell after reading a passage in Myra Breckinridge lambasting circumcision; second …
More“I’M THE LUCKIEST unlucky person in the world. No one wants to be the last man standing,” reflected Peter Greene, one of the eight long-term HIV survivors from the…More
The Lonely City is more particular—about a flâneur’s loneliness (the narrator’s) and the alienation that produces art (her subjects’).
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THE MUSCULAR MALE PHYSIQUE can arrest observers’ gaze involuntarily. Research by social psychologists indicates that muscular male bodies capture and hold the attention of spectators both male and female.…More
PRINCE ROGERS NELSON was as loved by fans at the end of his life as at any time of his career. When he took the stage of the 2015…More
The debate over Lincoln’s sexuality provoked sharp reactions among academics. As far as I know, most of the writers in question haven’t revisited their assessments. Strozier now proves an exception with a new book: Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed.
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THE ELECTION looms. No doubt you are either checking the poll numbers on 538.com and the mini-scandals on Politico on an hourly basis, or you’re studiously avoiding the whole…More
AS I GET OLDER, I am losing hope that I will outlive the need for an article about the impact a forthcoming election will have on GLBT people. At…More
AT THE PEAK of his vitality, age 38, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was sojourning in Genoa, Italy. He cruised the sandy shores in white slacks, a healthy tan, and a Panama hat. Back in his hotel, he wrote in his notebook: “[I am] experiencing a menacing, heart-rending attack of desire and savage, pent-up surges of emotion … moments of sudden madness when the lonely man embraces the first man to come his way and treat him as a precious gift from heaven.”
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Later in the 19th century, the first open polemics would be published, and in 1897 the first activist organization would be founded. This brings us to the recently published Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex, by Robert Deam Tobin, Professor of German at Clark University. This is by no means the first book to cover the early homosexual emancipation movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, I believe that honor falls to …
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