Upper West Side Story
AMONG THE MANY THINGS of which gay men have been accused is one, at least, that is true: that we often move into and invade somewhat impoverished neighborhoods of…More
Browsing: Essays
Blog Posts
The New Post-Straight
DESPITE the wedding band on her finger and all the other conventional markers of femininity—the makeup, the dress, the pretty, delicate features that would make most people read her…More
Don Bachardy and His Biggest Fan
THIS OCTOBER marked the fiftieth anniversary of artist Don Bachardy’s one-man debut at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in London in 1961. It was in the cramped, closely hung confines of a basement gallery that the 27-year-old Bachardy exhibited much of the work he had completed that year, notably a series of celebrity portraits.
MoreAuden’s Bardic Return to Oxford
POETS WRITING literary criticism do so to generate income, to communicate aesthetic values to the public, and to build an audience for their imaginative work. Would readers of the 1950’s and 60’s have paid much attention to Randall Jarrell the poet if he hadn’t been a sharp-witted and engaging critic? Probably not. As for W.H. Auden, I can offer some personal testimony from nearly four decades ago.
MoreModernism Comes to Old Albion
IN NOVEMBER, 1910, a small but important art show opened in the Grafton Galleries in London. Titled Manet and the Post-Impressionists, the show was curated by Roger Fry, a member of the Bloomsbury group, a painter, art critic, and at different times the lover of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. This was one of the earliest shows in London dedicated to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist French art.
More
Men in Briefs
Marketers of men’s underwear and swimwear added to the emerging trends of the sexualized male with new styles specifically designed for erotic exhibitionism. Prior to 1950, men’s swimwear always concealed the navel, even though rubberized Lastex yarns shaped and articulated the genital bulge below. In the early 1950’s, though, styles of men’s swimwear began to reveal more skin. Some inched below the navel, peek-a-boo cutaways bared the hips, and the male bikini made its first appearance on American beaches.
MoreHow the Right Pre-empted Equality
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.
MoreRoman Camp: The Case of Catullus 16
COULD 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 Love Letters of J. J. Winckelmann
THE 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.
More
The Natural Thoreau
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. …
More