WHEN EILEEN MYLES speaks of “unwriting” herself, she means letting go of socially imposed elements of her identity and behavior in order to clear a space where she can live in the world on her own terms. Her work not only joyfully and unapologetically proclaims her own authenticity, but also strives to claim a place for this authentic being in the public sphere. She celebrates her unique perspective as a woman, a lesbian, and a child of the working class …
More… If poetry anthologies are any indication of what various segments of society are thinking about at a given moment in time, gay anthologies show not only the importance of rendering visible a love continually at risk. They also trace an arc of how our concept of gay love has changed over time. The first gay male poetry anthologies, which began appearing with the 1973 publication of The Male Muse followed by Angels of the Lyre (1975) and Orgasms of Light (1977), contain many poems that show gay men’s search for an identity. …
MoreThree young poets who have published their first books of poetry in the last year participated in a “virtual panel,” moderated via e-mail, in early summer. In it, they tackled such slippery questions as whether there’s a “gay æsthetic” and the limits of sexual explicitness in contemporary poetry. The panelists included the following:
Jason Schneiderman … Richard Siken … [and] Aaron Smith.
MoreTHE MARTYRDOM of gay artists has become something of a cliché. Oscar Wilde, if not the first, is perhaps the most famous. But since then were Yukio Mishima, Reinaldo Arenas, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. To this list we could also add the name of the poet Jean Sénac, who’s widely believed to have been the victim of a 1973 Algerian government assassination.
More“The West thinks of itself as masculine-big guns, big industry, big money-so the East is feminine-weak, delicate, poor … but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom-the feminine mystique … I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.”
– Song Linling in M Butterfly
IN THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED play M Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang, the main character, Song Linling, explains his ability to fool a French lieutenant into believing that he was a woman for nearly two decades, a feat based not on his mastery of deception but on the lieutenant’s inability to see him as anything other than a woman. …
MoreCIRCUIT PARTIES are weekend-long, erotically-charged, drug-fueled gay dance events held in resort towns across the country. There’s at least one major circuit party every month somewhere in the U.S.-New York’s “Black Party,” South Beach’s “White Party,” Montreal’s “Black and Blue Party,” and so on-and people travel far and wide to take part. …
More… Conceptions of sex, after all, vary from one cultural epoch to the next, but also during the lifespan of an individual. The urge to reproduce is an arc, you might say, that rises into the sky, like a rainbow, and then returns to earth. Once it occurred to me to ask a friend who’d sired six children if this had lessened his sex drive, and it made no sense when he said No. …
MoreIT WAS over twenty years ago that a major sex study disclosed what was then a rather startling finding: lesbian couples engaged in sexual activity significantly less frequently than did both heterosexual and gay male couples …
MoreTHE GAY COMMUNITY has a long history of alcohol and drug abuse above the rate that occurs in the heterosexual population. Research suggests that gay men use drugs in specific situations, such as during sex or during visits to specific “homosocial” venues like bars, clubs, sex parties or bathhouses. Thus, for many gay men, a unique aspect of gay culture is that drug use is very often specifically connected to seeking or having sex. …
MoreON THE AIR since 1990, HBO’s documentary series Real Sex has proven to be hugely popular with millions of cable subscribers curious about the sexual practices and fantasies of their fellow Americans. Ostensibly unscripted and nonfictional, the series’ ring of authenticity adds to its appeal. …
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