Mary Renault as the First Gay Novelist
BEST KNOWN for her historical novels set in ancient Greece, many with overtly homosexual themes and scenes, Mary Renault began her career with a novel set in modern times…More
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Gore Vidal’s Shot across the Bow
GORE VIDAL died in 2012, at 86, and The New York Times obituary reluctantly conceded that his claim of having been blacklisted by the newspaper for writing The City…More
The Case for The Well of Loneliness
WHILE The Well of Loneliness has generally been granted pride of place as the first lesbian novel, can a case be made for it as the first “gay” novel,…More
Proust’s Search for Things to Come
NO ONE SPEAKS of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) as a gay novel; it’s a novel about fin-de-siècle Paris, about the rarefied world…More
While Maurice Slept
A COMPELLING CASE can be made for E. M. Forster’s Maurice as the first gay novel. Completed 100 years ago this year, Forster’s boldness lay in his revolutionary decision…More
How Gay Was Dorian Gray?
THE AUTHOR of this piece passed away in 2011, having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a book with the somewhat…More
Male Sex Work in Modern Times
The following essay will appear in the forthcoming Male Sex Work and Society, edited by Victor Minichiello and John Scott (Harrington Park Press). Reprinted with permission. THE HISTORY of…More
Down There on a Visit
FOR YEARS I had heard stories of the fabled sex club, the Lab.oratory, located in an abandoned power station in East Berlin. Described by The Lonely Planet as a…More
Soon the Spotted People
IT TOOK LARRY KRAMER nearly thirty years to get a film made of The Normal Heart. His play about the AIDS crisis opened at the Public Theater in New…More
Homologous Tales of the Near East
The Homoerotics of Orientalism by Joseph Allen Boone Columbia University Press 520 pages, $50. ONCE EVERY DECADE or so, a book appears that revolutionizes the field of GLBT…More