Spoiler Alert (Not Really)
The loneliness in All of Us Strangers is established at the start. The high-rise in which Adam lives seems to have no other residents but him.
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On the Road to Hobohemia
Jack Worby was one of the hundreds of thousands of young men who took to the roads and rails of America in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. They called themselves tramps or hoboes or ’boes.
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The Silence of The Bell Jar
SET IN 1953 and published ten years later, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a female coming-of-age story like J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher…More
Figures of the Bay Area
Wonner and Brown frequented the Yuba River, indulging in naked swims. Wonner’s paintings of nude bathers went unquestioned because they aligned with the established tradition of men bathing together. Drawing inspiration from Paul Cézanne, Wonner portrays the bathers as a dynamic mass of interwoven, predominantly male figures. Wonner sent a touching Christmas card to Brown in which he referred to himself as “Paul Cézanne,” an acknowledgment of the influence of the French artist on their work. In contrast to Wonner’s approach, Brown’s bathers, such as Standing Bathers (1993), which is the official image of the exhibition, …
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Butterflies Caught in a Web
Yone Noguchi, this handsome Japanese poet from California, might possibly be the New Kid, someone who was young, racially
exotic, and very talented.
One Hundred Years of Togetherness
WHILE the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York’s Greenwich Village is generally considered the spark that ignited the gay liberation movement in the U.S., San Francisco was the true epicenter of gay life for much of the previous century, as demonstrated by the following chronology of quick takes that briefly highlight some of the pioneering individuals, organizations, publications, and events that took place in San Francisco.
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Lesbians Against Incarceration
In 1987, Revolting Lesbians published “Political Women Prisoners in the U.S.,” a broad primer on women incarcerated for a wide swath of political actions.
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Carson McCullers’ ‘Imaginary Friends’
When she was a Wunderkind, McCullers created poetic fables and mythical archetypes of a kind that our contemporaries no longer invent.
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Georges Eekhoud’s Forbidden Foray
By Michael Rosenfeld: Eekhoud’s reputation as a defender of same-sex love was firmly established after his acquittal in 1900 and he created a network of European queer intellectuals that included Oscar Wilde, Magnus Hirschfeld, André Gide, Edward Carpenter, Rachilde, Jacob Israël de Haan, Eugen Wilhelm, Karl von Levetzow, Elisàr von Kupffer, and others. Together, they discussed queer love in their works and helped each another to find editors and journals in which to publish.
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An Artist Who Survived the Holocaust
According to official records, Gertrude Sandmann no longer existed in 1943. Other Jews had fled or been murdered, but she was still alive in Berlin.
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