A letter from Mrs. Smith closes the collection, like a Greek chorus commenting on the tragedy. “I am glad you agree with me that we must not grieve for our friend,” she writes to Porter’s friend Jean Howard after he died in 1964, “for he will never have to suffer again. This is the end of an Era. Three great and good men have left the Waldorf now: General MacArthur, Cole Porter, and Herbert Hoover, this year.”
Only in America.
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The “physique” periodicals of the 1950s and ’60s were not just a byproduct of the Homophile movement. They were a catalyst for it.
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DOES ANYONE DOUBT that most autobiographers distort reality, embellishing the truth about themselves, altering the facts relating to third parties, and presenting things in their own best interest? This makes Quentin Crisp’s case exceptional. He achieved something that was almost beyond the humanly possible …
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Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, was the author and illustrator of a hundred-odd darkly droll little picture books with titles like The Fatal Lozenge, The Deranged Cousins, and The Blue Aspic. Although he grew up in Depression-era Chicago and lived most of his life in Manhattan, first-time readers often assume he was a denizen of gas-lit London.
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Rocking the Closet takes us back to pre-liberation days in the same way that Guy Davidson’s Categorically Famous (reviewed in the November-December issue) reprised the careers of Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin to show how celebrities in the ’60s danced around the subject of their homosexuality while paradoxically opening the closet door.
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Baldwin, Sontag, and Vidal refused to come out, but their sexuality was an open secret. “Proto-visibility” means their homosexuality was visible before it could be acknowledged publicly.
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The casualness of nudity in all-male environments is documented in a wide range of sources right up to the postwar era.
MoreWhile the prevalence of rape may be exaggerated, the threatening and coercive nature of prison itself creates gray areas of consent.
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It is homophobia that was brought by the missionaries who came to Africa and curtailed most of our sexual practices, including heterosexual ones.
MoreThe Supreme Court will hear three cases to settle whether Title VII safeguards LGBT people from workplace discrimination, with decisions likely next June.
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