TWO MAJOR BIOGRAPHIES about larger-than-life 20th-century political figures were published this year, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, by Joseph Lelyveld, and Malcolm X, by Manning Marable. The subjects of the books share a common destiny, although not contemporaneously, as victims of assassination, and both became global legends dedicated to the struggle for human rights on different continents …
MoreON AUGUST THIRD, 2011, Rudolf Brazda passed away at age 98 in a nursing home in the northeast of France. In December of 2008, the French gay magazine Têtu heralded Brazda, who survived three years at Buchenwald concentration camp, as “Le dernier ‘triangle rose.’”* After the passing of Pierre Seel, a survivor of the camp Schirmeck-Vorbrück, Brazda became the last documented survivor of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. …
MoreTHE POLITICS OF ILLINOIS from the 1830’s to 1850’s can provide a good case study of attitudes toward gays-partly because the region was then a part of the American West, where political discussion was almost unrestrained, and partly because participants included some of the most famous characters in American history.
Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s famous political adversary and debating opponent, could be quite uninhibited in public in his physical contact with men. …
More
… Saint Sebastian: From Martyr to Gay Starlet was on display last fall at Friday Cottage Art Space, a gallery in one of Columbia’s historic downtown homes. Scheduled to open as part of a week of events leading up to the South Carolina Pride Festival in early September, the show featured the work of García-Lemos and Pierce, as well as work by media and performance artist Santiago Echeverry (from Tampa, Florida), filmmaker Betsy Newman, and a poet, to wit this writer. Other local artists contributed work as the project gained momentum. …
More… ON BALANCE, the Heath presents quite an impressive array of homophobic practices: the closeting of several GLBT authors; the racist construction of queerness as a white phenomenon; the refusal to grant gay or queer identities, communities, and aesthetics the respect and attention afforded to other identities; and the failure to consider sexuality a necessary valence of literary consideration. …
MoreTHE MOST INSIDIOUS FORM of anti-gay representation is not in religious broadcasting—which speaks only to the converted—but in seemingly gay-positive films and videos. It’s not just that Will of…More
The following article has been adapted from a piece that first appeared in the on-line journal, Slate.com.
MoreIN JULY 2003, Bravo premiered Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a reality series in which five urbane gay men give lifestyle makeovers to straight men, and it became…More
KNOWING THAT WE LIVE in a time of hope as well as of threat, I am skeptical of claims that poetry is alive and well in America and that…More
“HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?” straight people invariably ask when they learn that I write and publish gay male erotica. I always listen for the inflection, as the question…More
