UNTIL RECENTLY, it seemed that camp was and would remain a phenomenon of the 20th century—camp, in all its manifestations: as a theory of æsthetics and style; as coded communication and performativity; as a site of humor and parody; as provocative social commentary.
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FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS, same-sex marriage has dominated the American political landscape, but this is not the first time in history this issue has made front-page news. In 1971, The San Francisco Chronicle declared that a “gay marriage boom” was under way. …
MoreLAST AUTUMN, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York hosted the first-ever academic conference on Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries. It was an odd hybrid of a gathering, with many longtime Faeries rubbing shoulders with Marxist theorists and queer academics-a rubbing that occasionally produced friction.
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TWO YEARS AGO [March-April 2011], I reviewed Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries: The Sixties in this publication, in an essay called “Too Much Information!” The title was mine; the exclamation point was not. While I found much of value in the book, as I had in the previous volume, which covers 1939 to 1960, I registered an objection to the decision by Isherwood’s partner, Don Bachardy, and editor Katherine Bucknell to publish the diaries in full. I wrote, “some editing would have been a kindness to Isherwood, who is spared nothing in these pages.” Now that we have the rest of the diaries, I find myself compelled to reevaluate that criticism. …
MoreTHE FIRST FAMOUS PERSON I wrote to when I moved to New York in 1980 was Howard Moss, the long-time poetry editor of The New Yorker. He was the one person, it seemed, that every literary figure—from W. H. Auden to Elizabeth Bishop, Lillian Hellman, or John Updike—knew and liked as a friend.
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… Cheever’s journals reveal his fear of his own homosexuality, in particular his fear that he might betray-or that others might perceive-what he is desperate to keep hidden: that his wife follows his gaze as it lingers on other men, that he indulges in an assignation with another man in the anonymity of a private train compartment, or that his highly critical mother caustically insinuates that he’s “irregular” sexually. …
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… ACT UP is going to be mined by future historians, museum curators, and graduate students for all sorts of things. What France’s film does is assemble what are essentially home movies that give the viewer a visceral sense of what it was like to be at the meetings and demonstrations. Of course, a film about ACT UP is not the whole history of AIDS. A shot of the Quilt, an idea from San Francisco, reminds us how its expression of grief complemented the New Yorkers’ outrage. But try-or don’t try-to imagine AIDS without ACT UP. They fought back, fought AIDS, changed medical protocols, and saved lives. …
MoreASSESSING the state of the LGBT print media universe is like pinning Jell-O to a wall. Whether discussing local or national publications, the situation is changing at such an accelerated pace that no one can predict the future of these media outlets. Because of the dual spears of the economic downturn and the ascent of the Internet, this inability to forecast is true of both gay and mainstream print-based companies. …
MoreRECOVERING or reframing history-creating a “people’s history”-has been important for all identity-based social movements, but it’s been crucial and particularly revelatory for the GLBT movement. …
MoreTHE FIRST GAY PERSON I ever met was also the first lover who died of AIDS. Tom was an ebullient bon vivant who loved to cook, built his own clavichord, and snuck me into the Episcopal church where he was the organist to play Bach works till dawn. Unbeknownst to us when we met in 1980 (my freshman year of college), HIV was silently insinuating itself into the bloodstream of men and women around the globe. It sprung into the public’s attention in 1981 after physicians published a report on an unusual outbreak of Pneumocystic pneumonia (PCP) affecting five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles with weakened immune systems. …
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