The mask can refer to being closeted, disguised behind a false identity. During the Covid pandemic, masks have been politicized, as condoms were by abstinence-only homophobic religious activists during the AIDS plague.

the house had books—books I’d been accumulating and hadn’t looked at in many years. A lot of them were in a bookcase I discovered only when a friend took an old recliner that I’d stashed on the porch long ago to the town dump. The moment he did, I realized it had been hiding a bookcase all these years, and in that bookcase were books I hadn’t looked at in ages. And that was how I began my own experience of the coronavirus lockdown: I read my way through it.

Samuel Pozzi was every-where, like a Parisian Zelig. A brilliant surgeon, he had a following in Parisian society and affairs with some of his patients.

THE HORROR FICTION of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) is best known for its tentacled monsters, demented occultists, and adjective-heavy phrases like “dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness.” Lovecraft’s work appeared primarily in cheap pulp magazines like Weird Tales, and while he died penniless, he is now considered one of the world’s great horror writers. Toys, games, and movies based on his stories continue to pour out of the dream factories, and his writing has been the subject of academic conferences, philosophical treatises, and essays by Joyce Carol Oates. …

IT HAS BEEN almost three decades since the publication of my novel The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley, which is being re-issued as a digital edition. This event coincides with the first major exhibition of Beardsley’s work in fifty years, which is scheduled to open at the Tate Britain in London in June (as of press time, after a postponement due to Covid-19). Another Beardsley show is slated to open in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay in October.

Beardsley’s drawings seem to indicate that he intended to shock, even though he was safely detached from the reality of sexual experience.

CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI, Dowager Queen of France in the age of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabelais, had bad luck with her sons. Although each was to ascend a throne, as…More

[A]s Maria DeGuzmán puts it in jargon-laden prose in her new book, Understanding John Rechy, his “critique of U.S. society and its expectations and delusions [is] achieved through the protagonists’ dissent from compulsory heteronormativity.”