More Adventures of a Gay Roué
CLAUDE FREDERICKS made the final entry in his lifelong journal on December 26, 2012, two weeks before his death. He died at his beloved homestead in Pawlet, Vermont, with…More
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Cuban Agonistes
A PAIR of itinerant fishermen on a makeshift raft snag what looks like a drowned man floating face-down in the Bay of Havana. As they unhook the rotting corpse,…More
Ruling in India Not the Last Word
“NO GOING BACK!” The message was clear after the Supreme Court of India’s decision to recriminalize homosexuality by reversing the judgment of the Delhi High Court that decriminalized adult…More
Witness to a Genocide in the Making
AS A GAY VIDEO HISTORIAN, I hate being late, because documenting the “before” is just as important as the actual event and the aftermath. So I was pissed off…More
Blink and You’ve Missed Him
I’VE REWOUND, fast-forwarded and paused but I still can’t find him. At one point I thought I’d spotted him in the closing circus scene of 8½. Or was that him,…More
Glenway Wescott’s World
SAY THE NAME “Glenway Wescott” at a cocktail party or gay studies conference and most people will draw a blank (“Glenway Who?”). But every so often someone may dimly recollect this 1920s expatriate American writer …
MoreAre ‘The Monologues’ Transphobic?
THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES is certainly not a “gay” play; nor does its author, Eve Ensler, market it as such. It is considered primarily a “feminist” play, but ever since its…More
Why Roger Casement Still Haunts Us
ON AUGUST THIRD, 1916, Roger Casement, a retired British consul and renowned humanitarian, was executed by the British government for treason. This was a death penalty offense, but he…More
‘Always a Godfather, Never a God’
THERE’S A REASON why Henry James burned his papers in the garden of Lamb House: when a famous writer dies, he’s vulnerable. People swoop in and write up his life, often in a way that Joyce Carol Oates would later call “pathobiography.”
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Notes on Camp – and Anti-Camp
The content of this essay was first presented at the Camp/Anti-Camp Conference at the Hau Theater in Berlin in March 2012, curated by Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel. The…More