Truth and Reconciliation
Mothers and Sons by Terrence McNally John Golden Theatre, New York City TERRENCE MCNALLY has become the American theater’s great poet of the urgency of interpersonal relationships. “We…More
Browsing: Essays
Blog Posts
James Purdy’s World of Extremes
The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy Liveright (Norton). 752 pages, $35. YOU BEGIN to get at the problem of James Purdy by noting, as almost everyone writing…More
The Lives and Times of Harry Chess
THE WORLD’S FIRST gay comic strip was arguably Harry Chess: That Man from A.U.N.T.I.E., which first appeared in the Philadelphia homophile publication Drum from 1965 to ’66. The strip…More
Vampires Are Us
VAMPIRES HAVE BEEN a part of popular culture in the West for several centuries. American vampire stories are rooted in the folklore of Eastern Europe, but similar creatures have…More
Drag Kings by Any Other Name
ONE OF THE EARLIEST literary depictions of gender bending can be found in Homer’s Odyssey, telling of the adventures of the mythical hero Odysseus, after the fall of Troy…More
A Moment with May Sarton
IN APRIL 1984, when a call came asking if I would do a tribute speech to May Sarton (1912–1995) at the annual awards dinner of the Fund for Human Dignity, I hesitated. …
MoreMy Stroke
I HAD a routine procedure a year ago in a famous New York hospital, a heart catheterization (when a wire is inserted up a vein into your heart to…More
On Being Drafted
EVERY AUGUST around the 25th I fall into a peculiar mood that puzzles me until I realize that it was the day on which I was conscripted by the…More
Thirty Years of HIV Research
AS MEDICAL SCIENCE presses forward to find a cure for HIV—and as we mark the thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS—it’s useful in the compressed timeframe known as “AIDS time” to recall one of the most pivotal moments of the now-33-year-long AIDS epidemic
More
The Front Runner’s Long Run
THE FRONT RUNNER would never have been written if I hadn’t started running myself. It started in summer of 1968
More