Reviews of Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, My Mother Says, Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, Swollening: Poems, Friedrich Nietzsche (Critical Lives), and the album Homosexual by Darren Hayes.
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Our Flag Means Death is unlike any other show out there, although I must warn viewers beforehand not to expect a clichéd fairy-tale ending. And yet, if Season 1 comes to an end, can Season 2 be far behind?
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The exhibition Coyote Park: I Love You Like Mirrors Do, curated by Stamatina Gregory, is the inaugural project for an initiative called “Interventions,” which “engages queer artists and cultural producers to dive into the museum’s extensive collection and creatively present their research, building new narratives and interpretations from diverse subjectivities.”
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We tend to assume that positive gay-themed imagery is a phenomenon of the post-Stonewall world. But to look at these illustrations by Leyendecker and his contemporaries is to see overt depictions of sensual male beauty.
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The opera The Hours brings to the stage the LGBT love lives (including their failures) of Laura Brown, Kitty, Clarissa and Sally, and Richard and Louis. Indeed it adds one same-sex relationship to the mix. A key incident in both Mrs Dalloway and in the 1990s Clarissa story involves Clarissa buying flowers for the party. In the opera, the florist, Barbara (sung beautifully by Kathleen Kim), has an extended coloratura flirtation with Clarissa as well.
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CHICAGO’S WRIGHTWOOD 659, a private institution focused on socially engaged art, mounted a landmark exhibition, The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930, last fall. A team of international scholars, led by art historian Jonathan D. Katz, assembled a groundbreaking show with over 100 paintings, prints, photographs, and film clips that reveal how, as Katz notes, “while language narrowed into a simplistic binary of homosexual / heterosexual, art gave form to a nuanced range of sexualities and genders that can best be described as queer.”
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My Policeman and Spoiler Alert could not be more dissimilar in tone, but they both portray men in love as dismally doomed from the get-go. Neither challenges the cultural script that male relationships must end disastrously, though My Policeman does offer the two principles some redemption as old men.
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The Magnolia Ballet is an intensely American, intensely human story told with great poetry and compelling imagery. As for the demand of the father to his son, Guest provides his take on whether one must choose between a mythic heritage and acceptance of one’s sexuality and personhood.
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Another provocative idea buried in the script by Eichner and co-writer Nicholas Stoller is that all romantic love is not the same, which flies in the face of the love-is-love mantra that LGBT folks often espouse. The awkward sex scenes bear out this idea when Bobby and Aaron wrestle in their underwear, sniff poppers, and end up with post-coital grins to match.
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Lucioni enjoys a reputation as the “painter Laureate” of Vermont, and on the face of it, he looks like many American scene painters of the 1920s and ’30s. Picture a very different world from the one we find ourselves in now, a rural America before the Civil War. Imagine pristine mountains, upland pastures, aging barns, silos, and an occasional church spire. Communities are tidy, neat, predictable, and secure in their routines.
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