IT’S EASY TO FORGET that same-sex marriage bans did not start with California Proposition 8, nor did they originate with the rash of marriage bans across the country in 2004. They did not even start in 1998 in Hawaii and Alaska.
MoreCOULD what we call “camp” turn out to be, like aqueducts and concrete, an invention of the ancient Romans? Roman poets such as Catullus, Martial, and Juvenal are notorious for their ridicule of freeborn Roman males who submit to sexual penetration. These poets regularly label their male peers with Latin terms such as cinaedus, pathicus, impudicus, and mollis, none of which has a precise English equivalent, but all of which are pejorative words that mark men as effeminate and sexually submissive. I ask you to consider here the possibility that some Roman poems that use this kind of language are not earnest homophobic ridicule at all, but a very early instance of what we in the 20th century came to call “camp.”
MoreTHE ACHIEVEMENTS of antiquarian and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the representative gay æsthete of his century, are not in dispute. Winckelmann, the son of a northern German cobbler, moved to Rome and became the librarian of Cardinal Albani and curator of Roman antiquities in the Vatican. He was the leading spirit behind the first wave of Neoclassicism, an international art movement centered in Rome. Arguably he created the discipline of art history as we now know it, transforming the traditional, dry archaeological description into fervent and poetic art criticism that expressed his love of Greco-Roman beauty.
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IN RECENT YEARS, biographers of Henry David Thoreau have begun to speculate more openly about the sexual orientation of “the patron saint of environmentalists,” a man who never married in an age when marriage was de rigueur. …
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IN THE HISTORY of homosexuality in Victorian England, Simeon Solomon has re-emerged as a significant figure. A Jewish painter among the Pre-Raphaelites, Solomon was arrested on February 11, 1873, in a public urinal with another man and charged with attempted sodomy. …
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This article focuses on commercially produced postcards that were printed in large numbers and circulated widely throughout the world. Real photo postcards, in contrast, whether produced by professional or amateur photographers, also provide valuable insights into social history but were most often printed in limited numbers, and their images can be difficult if not impossible to identify. … The postcards reproduced here are from my personal collection, and my hope is that they will offer a flavor of the shifting sex and gender ideas of this era.
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Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942), although known to a few gay scholars, is not exactly a household name. This is not surprising, if only because he always hid behind a pseudonym when writing his gay-themed works. He also lied about his age and enjoyed hoodwinking an audience whenever he could. More to the point, his works are to this day not easy to find. The general outlines of his life are established, though details are hard to come by. …
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The World of Tennessee Williams Revised and Updated Edition by Richard Freeman Leavitt and Kenneth Holditch Hansen Publishing Group LLC 118 pages, $14.95 Tennessee Williams in Provincetown by David…More
CRYSTAL WAS WORRIED that she had male orgasms. So she came in to the Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) Clinic three years ago for a consultation with a phalanx of specialists: a urologist, a geneticist, an endocrinologist, and me, the psychiatric consultant.
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THE ANNALS of gay history are littered with examples of men in the public eye who have successfully hidden their gay lives from view. … Eugen Sandow was, for a short time, an exception to the rule. He was internationally known as the apotheosis of male beauty and the most perfectly formed man on the planet. Little remembered today, Sandow was the father of modern bodybuilding-and, for a short time at least, he was open about his sexuality
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