[Boswell] argued that the Bible is not hostile to modern understandings of homosexuality, having been misinterpreted by modern readings, and claimed that it wasn’t until the 12th or 13th century that any real hostility toward gay people emerged …
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In fact, Bacon tells Peppiatt in Francis Bacon in Your Blood, Dyer simply saw the painter and his pals in a club in London and introduced himself, because they seemed to be having a good time.
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I HAVE LONG MARVELED that my hero, the subject of my dissertation and book, Frances Kellor (1873–1952), is not as famous as her contemporary Jane Addams. You’ve probably heard of Addams, who started settlement houses for immigrants, most famously Hull House in Chicago. Kellor worked with immigrants at the same time. And yet, Addams is in every high school textbook on U.S. history, while Kellor is nowhere to be found. While a few explanations are plausible, I believe Kellor has been written out of history mostly because she was a lesbian and because she publicly challenged gender norms.
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For its first year, inter/VIEW was an underground film magazine, serving to promote Warhol’s own movies, such as Flesh and Trash. It provided Warhol easy entrée to the film crowd. Who could turn down an invitation to do an interview for inter/VIEW?
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AROUND THE TURN of the 20th century, “virile” (from the Latin virilis, manly) was an adjective frequently used by art critics to characterize American paintings. The boldest and most independent painters were conventionally designated as “virile,” while those who depended on European models were by implication not as masculine or even effeminate. Thus there were also nationalistic overtones to this term. “Virile” had connotations of mental health and moral purity as distinct from European decadence and corruption. Modernism itself was judged a European import that American artists would do well to avoid.
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Aligning himself with black and Latino graffiti artists and poets on the Lower East Side, including the legendary Puerto Rican writer and ex-con Miguel Piñero, his friend and sometime lover, Wong nevertheless described himself as a “tourist” there. If indeed he felt like an outsider—and Wong, Asian and gay, could certainly look like one, flamboyantly dressed, as he often was, from head to toe, like an urban cowboy—as an artist he penetrated deeply into the social terrain that he was observing.
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Tiantian Zheng is a straight Chinese woman who teaches anthropology at SUNY-Cortland and went back to China over the course of three years to gather data about gay men in a provincial city on the coast northeast of Beijing …
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MY LIFE TRAJECTORY took an unexpected tum one sunny October day in 1955 as I was crossing the street at Lexington Avenue and 48th Street in New York. I…More
In the spring of last year, the Asia Society in New York hosted the premiere of a film about Mu Xin’s life, made by documentary filmmakers Francisco Bello and Tim…More
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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