[L]et us try to summon up inspiration from our illustrious ancestors, those forefathers who had they opened their mouths, would have made our cause great a few years earlier, had they had the guts to cry out “here I come, ready or not” to all and sundry, the world at large and stood there long enough to have their toesies counted, would not have placed us in the mess we’re in today. I am of course talking about Leonardo and Michelangelo and Napoleon (who had a small one) and Socrates and Aristotle…

WRITES EDMUND WHITE in his new memoir City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960’s and ’70’s, “[Susan] Sontag once said to me … that in all human history in only one brief period were people free to have sex when and how they wanted-between 1960, with the introduction of the first birth control pills, and 1981, the advent of AIDS.” White’s move from Ohio to Manhattan in 1962 put him at the beginning of this unique period in the cultural history of the last century, allowing him to record his own experiences against a backdrop of a city just awakening to the possibilities of sexual freedom.

NO ONE TALKS about gay literature anymore. The topic sounds quaint, hardly cutting edge. And indeed its moment may well have passed. Edmund White says that it “has come and gone as a … serious movement.” Yet, I think we need to talk about gay literature again, because the silence may tell us a good deal about how we live now. My approach to the topic, however, may seem a little recherché: I want to discuss gay literature as a minor literature.

Ardi may also knock a brick or two out of another wall-that of conventional evolutionist dogma. Some scientists can be no less dogmatic than scripturalists when they set their feet in concrete on a position that they believe to be settled. Already there are hot debates about which prehistoric primates Ardi was related to, and what sex might have been like in Ardi’s world. We GLBT people can add our own questions about sexual orientation and gender differences that may have left their fossilized footprints upon that distant horizon.

The theme of Maurice can be described as essentially the search for a compatible social construct by which the protagonist can understand himself and go on to self-actualization.

HAUTE COUTURE took a distinct “downtown” turn in the 1980’s with

the emergence of Stephen Sprouse, who set the fashion world on fire as

the first designer to successfully merge street culture, punk, and high

fashion in edgy clothing designs incorporating graffiti, vibrant and at

times even garish colors, plus a fine arts sensibility.

“LINCOLN’S SOUL MATE and the love of his life was a man named Joshua Speed,” John Stauffer writes in his dual biography of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Stauffer refers to carnal love, not to one of those asexual “romantic friendships” in vogue with certain scholars. He chairs the History of American Civilization Department at Harvard; Stauffer’s perspective can’t be easily dismissed as fringe. But that did not deter Sean Wilentz.

CONSERVATIVE FORCES in the U.S. have succeeded in shifting the debate about same-sex unions from a question of equal protection under the law to one about protecting the meaning of the word “marriage.” The phrase “defense of marriage” emerged as a touchstone in the conflict after passage of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which limited marriage to heterosexual couples in matters under federal jurisdiction. Since then-spurred by the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2003-many states have moved to ban same-sex marriage by enacting laws or amending their constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.