Louis XIV did indeed have a younger brother named Philippe, but the king was never at risk of being supplanted. Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans, known as Monsieur, is one of history’s most notorious effeminates, whose affections and fortune were lavished on male favorites, from courtiers to opera dancers.
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The story of his encounter with “The Burning Shame” goes back two decades before Huckleberry Finn, to a pitcher of beer that changed the course of American literature.
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Staging back-alley drag balls was one thing; performing for Astors and Vanderbilts was quite another. What’s more, slummers didn’t just indulge in voyeuristic pleasures; they sampled the seafood, so to speak—a metaphor on full display in periodicals like Broadway Brevities, one of several mainstream publications covering the Pansy Craze.
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Butterfly Man makes it clear that Levenson must have been entirely familiar with the gay demimonde that it depicts.
MoreThe following is by a grant recipient in a program launched in 2022 by The G&LR, our Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to three recipients in 2023. The purpose of this grant is to assist advanced students engaged in LGBT-related research, and awardees are expected to produce an article for this magazine as part of their project. This is the third of three articles from 2023’s recipients.
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A Little Queer Natural History shows two things: a) that we are not the only animals to have homosexual sex; and b) that our version of sex is hardly the only one in nature.
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In his new book Vicious and Immoral, John Gilbert McCurdy reports on at least one case of child abuse whose details are still sickening to read about. And then there were the class resentments that the “subalterns” (anyone below the rank of captain) felt vis-à-vis the officers who outranked them.
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“‘FETCH A TOWEL,’ he called, ‘and come on!’” So begins Cyril and George’s steamy swim in D. H. Lawrence’s first all-male erotic scene, which is found in his debut novel, The White Peacock.
MoreDalí and Lorca met briefly at the opening of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster in 1935. They told a journalist: “We haven’t seen each other in seven years but it seems like we never stopped talking.”
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While Bernstein welcomed Richard Romney to Tanglewood, Felicia Montealegre (his fiancée) had to force her way in.
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