The Enigma of Pierre Loti
PIERRE LOTI was a 19th-century French writer who was admired by writers as various as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, and Marcel Proust, but is now almost totally forgotten.
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‘I just wanted to freeze a moment.’
THE WORLD knows him as Peter Berlin, but his real name is Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Heune. “Peter Berlin” was a stage name that he adopted upon arriving in…More
The Outing of Pop Music, 1907-2018
MARTIN ASTON is the author of the recently published book Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out (Backbeat Books), a 600-page compen-dium of popular music history from 1907 to the present, specifically the presence and influence of LGBT singers, songwriters, producers, and entertainers across this century. The book is organized chronologically and offers a brisk tour of popular music and its gay movers and shakers for each decade starting in the 1920s.
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How to Be a Porn Star
It is impossible to read A Pornographer without being aware of the era in which it
was written: the Me Decade. Gay liberation was underway, there was no such thing as AIDS, and homosexuals in cities like New York were aware that they were creating new forms of affective linkage—couples who allowed each other secondary boyfriends, people who could have sex with strangers with no consequences, having learned famously to separate “sex and sentiment.”
Squaring the Disability
For everyone, life itself is full of complexity. For LGBT people who are disabled, that complexity is multiplied. For most people, enjoying their sexuality is vital to happiness, so it is vital that therapeutic workers, and society at large, adequately address the special needs, including the sexual ones, of LGBT people.
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Belated Vindication for John Boswell
IN HIS 1995 BOOK The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, John Boswell argued that in medieval Europe unions between same-sex couples were acceptable under certain circumstances…More
David Hockney’s Great Yes to Life
DAVID HOCKNEY: An Exhibitionis a global event, and it is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to the eighty-year-old artist’s career. The exhibition is mounted on a grand scale, with more than 250 pieces, ranging from his early sketches made in the 1960s through video installations constructed in 2015.
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Of Maine, Men, and Marsden Hartley
ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN images of Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) comes to us through the lens of the great gay photographer George Platt Lynes in a photograph from 1943, shortly before Hartley’s death. Hartley slumps in a chair, his body casting massive shadows under the influence of Lynes’ harsh lighting.
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A Certain Gorgeous Bleakness
The influence of Bonnard can also be seen in Steers’ color palette, in the intermixing and soft suffusion of pale yellow, green, and violet tones on the windowsill, tub, and tiled floor. Yet there is a key difference. Bonnard’s female figures blend in with the walls and the other objects in the picture, as seen in Large Nude, while in Steers’ Bath Curtain, the harsh, hot, orange-red and brown flesh tones of the bent figure’s back are in opposition to the low-key colors of the surroundings.
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Michelangelo’s Gifts to Tommaso
NEW YORK’S Metropolitan Museum of Art recently mounted an unusually large and comprehensive exhibition of drawings and writings by the Renaissance Italian master Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). Among the scores of drawings in the exhibition, titled Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (which closed in February), one group forms an exceptionally coherent and unprecedented ensemble of drawings that is only rarely gathered together.
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