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Currently, what passes for camp in popular culture is sadly lacking in this innovative critique. In brief, camp has gone mainstream, and there’s no better example than the current mega-exhibition titled Camp: Notes on Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mounted by its Costume Institute, which attempts to piggy- back on camp’s gay legacy during the Stonewall 50 anniversary.

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Rise Up is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, but one thing you take away from it is that New York was hardly the origin of the gay rights movement. It really began in Los Angeles and then spread to Washington, D.C.

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What remains is the problem of reconciling Rand’s professed disgust for homosexuality with her apparent fascination with it in The Fountainhead. Let’s start with the premise that Rand herself was powerfully attracted to men. When entering into the minds of some of her male characters, she may have unconsciously written her own attraction to men into their psyches, finding this a more natural writing task than describing an attraction to women.

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Most people know Andrea Dworkin as the radical feminist who launched a campaign against pornography in the 1980s and ’90s, but this is only one slice of a fascinating life of activism. I’ve recently completed a full-scale biography of Andrea Dworkin that will be published by the New Press in 2020. It’s based on her remarkably rich (and previously closed) archive at Schlesinger Library at Harvard.

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The Journalist of Castro Street is the result of copious research and interviewing, though Stoner does not use the narrative style that makes some biographies read like novels. It’s a book by a professor of communication studies about a journalist. It looks at the ethical choice Shilts faced between objectivity and advocacy.

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We are currently digesting abundant information about the networks of men the police called ‘sodomites’ before 1750 and ‘pederasts’ after that year.

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Bentley knew Gibaut as a parishioner and as a student at Harvard when he entered in 1782, but the first mention of the young Gibaut in Bentley’s diaries was in 1786, when he was in trouble at Harvard (for reasons unknown; a reference to “bad habits”). However, Bentley wrote to the president of the university: “Gibaut is thought by his friends at Salem to be in such habit as requires an experiment of Sea air.”

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Briefe über die Galantieren von Berlin has none of the militancy of the Encyclopedists. The polemic intent of the latter is charted by Robert Darnton in his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). The Austrian officer’s letters are leagues behind a work such as Thérèse philosophe (1748), for instance, in which free thinking is associated with sexuality.

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SUSAN S. LANSER, professor emerita of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University, is a specialist in 18th-century European literature, with a focus on women writers and issues related to gender and sexuality.

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THIS YEAR marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Cyrano de Bergerac, but not the one you have in mind. Edmond Rostand’s hit play of 1897 invented an ultra-Romantic Cyrano, a magniloquent swashbuckler with a promontory of a nose. Hopelessly in love with his cousin Roxane, he sacrifices himself so she may wed the man she loves, ghost-writing his rival’s amorous declarations. This Cyrano—master duelist, improvisatory poet, independent spirit—has entered the popular imagination and spawned scores of imitations.

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