OUTRAGES BEGINS in the rare book room of the Morgan Library in New York, where Naomi Wolf has gone to read the manuscript of an unpublished poem that Victorian critic John Addington Symonds wrote at Oxford after falling in love with a classmate—though you might also say that the book began the day Wolf was still a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was handed two volumes of Symonds’ letters by her advisor with the words: “You should read these.” Read them she did, and now, years after publishing such bestsellers as The Beauty Myth and Vagina, Wolf has returned to her doctoral thesis.

When gay literature became popular in the 1970s, the novels were all about urban gays living in the fast lane. Now we have books about gays living in the sticks.

            Taking the title of the collection from one of the stories included in the volume, Zuckerman notes that Guibert’s stories aim at suggesting experiences that, like powerful memories, continue to resonate with a person even as they fade into insubstantiality, “like a treasure lost in the depths.” However, as Zuckerman reminds the reader, the French phrase for the “invisible ink” in which one of Guibert’s narrators says that his story has been written is “encre sympathique.”

            Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Steuben joined the Prussian army when he was seventeen, eventually becoming an aide-de-camp to Frederick the Great, who was also rumored to have had homosexual leanings. (The conversation of Frederick’s inner court circle was peppered with homoerotic banter, and his residence included a Friendship Temple celebrating the homoerotic attachments of Greek antiquity).

Ultimately, of course, of greatest interest to millions of readers is the unique nature of Tolkien’s genius, and it is here that Smith has made his most enduring impact. His ardent faith in Tolkien’s destiny proved justified, beginning in 1937 with the publication of The Hobbit; and Smith’s spirit lives on in the three books of The Lord of the Rings through the passionate love that grows between Frodo and Sam. Smith deserves to come out from the shadows cast by longstanding homophobia in literary studies and to be given his rightful place in English literature as Tolkien’s most influential muse.

WIDELY REGARDED as the greatest living composer in the American musical theater, Stephen Sondheim has in recent years become very open about being a gay man. While coming to…More