Notes on Le Dictionnaire
To the Editor:
Hugh Hagius’ review of Le Dictionnaire historique du lexique de l’homosexualité (Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue) offers a captivating sampling of Nicholas Lo Vecchio’s study of words in European languages that have been used to describe queer folk over the ages. One correction is needed, however.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition, the word “berdache” is indeed attested in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. It origins can be traced from Arabic (bardag, bardaj) to Persian (barda), Middle Persian (vartak), Old Iranian (*varta-), and ultimately, the root *uel– or *welə– in Proto-Indo-European. Over the ages, its meaning has evolved. In Persian and Arabic, it might refer to young male slaves who might be used for sex; earlier it simply meant “seized, captive, prisoner.” In the Mediterranean word, it was likely introduced by sailors from Middle Eastern ports. By the advent of printing, it had already entered Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English, typically in reference to young, non-masculine males who were receptive in sex with men.
The French fur traders who used “berdache” (in various forms) to refer to Two-Spirits among the indigenous people of North America had no way of knowing these ancient meanings. “Berdache” was simply frontier jargon for the nonbinary indigenous people found in many tribes, mostly male-bodied but sometimes female-bodied as well. Since it wasn’t part of the European terminology for prohibited sexual practices, its use in this context was fairly neutral.
Will Roscoe, San Francisco, CA
To the Editor:
Regarding your article on Nicholas Lo Vecchio’s Dictionnaire historique du lexique de l’homosexualité, in my research on male and female impersonators in the Victorian era, I repeatedly came across journalists who used the word “queer” to describe them. Of course at the time they were using it in the sense of “unusual,” but over several decades “queer” slowly became attached to homosexuals in general.
David Williams, Louisville, KY
In Search of Uncle Alfred and HIs Lost Art
To the Editor:
I found particular parallels in Harlan Greene’s article on Herschel Grynszpan [in the Jan.-Feb. 2026 issue]. My mother (who escaped to England in January 1938) lost her parents to the Gestapo expulsion back to Poland and its inevitable conclusion. And I shared his comparison of the Shoah and our AIDS pandemic. By the 1980s I had emigrated to Canada, working as an anesthesiologist in Toronto. Propelled by this similarity, I questioned local “experts,” eventually adding a parttime primary early HIV care practice. Drawing on my U.S. contacts (one year’s training at Stanford) I aimed to introduce U.S. advances (primary care AZT availability, aerosol pentamidine etc), becoming a local activist.
Some eighteen years ago, now in San Francisco, I began to receive messages rekindling my early fascination with the Germany from which my parents (who met in London) had luckily fled. I was potentially able to reclaim works left by my notorious great uncle, art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. I only knew Dad disapproved of Flechtheim’s open homosexuality, and that father was sole heir after his passing in 1937, from leg infections, despite bilateral amputations. I later discovered he died in St. Pancras Hospital, scene of some of my medical training.
I started research into his Francophilia, introducing early Picasso and Braque to a German public. He left his family’s grain business, opened a Dusseldorf art gallery in 1913, resumed post World War I, and expanded to Berlin. He became the “champagne fizz” in heady Weimar society. Flamboyant parties in which he entertained artists George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Rudolf Levy, Max Pechstein, Renée Sintenis, boxers Max Schmeling and Hans Breitensträter, and entertainers Friedrich Holländer and Josef von Sternberg. His fiftieth Birthday Party in Berlin’s Kaiserhof hotel (later Hitler’s pre-Chancellor lodging) featured nine skits in drag.
Flechtheim started publishing portfolios featuring his galleries, and expanded to a full magazine, Der Querschnitt (“Cross- section”), projecting a “distinctly gay aesthetic,” covering art (naturally) as well as sports and “life.” It featured portraits (many nude), travel, gossip, and essays, including by Ernest Hemingway (who dubbed Flechtheim the “noble citizen, prominent Jewish bugger and great art dealer Alfred Flechtheim”), Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, André Gide (in French). It also carried ads for Berlin’s gay nightspots.
These developments prompted several trips to Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, and successful restitutions that have enabled financial support to AIDS research, LGBT organizations, and Jewish charities. They also led to a personal book: Jewish, Gay & Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany: Uncle Alfred Flechtheim’s Unexpected Legacies in Art, AIDS, and Law.
Michael Hulton, San Francisco, CA
Encounters with Boyd McDonald
To the Editor,
Michael Quinn’s Art Memo, “Cruising with Boyd McDonald” (Jan.-Feb. 2026), brought back memories of my 1986 encounter with McDonald, when I interviewed him for a Penthouse Forum profile. As I wrote in my article, McDonald “lives in quarters that would appall most upwardly mobile gay Manhattanites. His ‘lovely home,’ as he calls it, is packed tight with several bookcases filled to overflowing, a cot covered with an Army blanket, a tiny stove and refrigerator, and his writing table. There are also rows of shopping bags stuffed with the sex letters his contributors send him for publication in his books and in the column he edits for the gay newsweekly, The New York Native.”
Some skeptics doubted the letters he published were authentic, but I saw them, and Boyd let me read some of them. (Full disclosure: Boyd included several of my first-person accounts in his “true case histories of men’s groins and rear ends.”)
Boyd was friendly, talkative, and dryly but outrageously funny. The several hours I spent with him were among the most enjoyable I’ve had with anyone I’ve interviewed. McDonald was also a trenchant and hilarious political commentator, and, as he told me, his politics were socialist. In addition to his sex books, he wrote film reviews and essays for Christopher Street magazine, which were later anthologized in Cruising the Movies, published by Gay Presses of New York. They were funny and insightful; Mother Jones magazine observed that McDonald was “one of the nation’s least appreciated and most astute film critics.”
George De Stefano, Long Island City, NY
To the Editor:
Thank you for publishing Michael Quinn’s “Cruising with Boyd McDonald.” He notes that McDonald’s family cleaned out his room after he died in 1993, throwing everything away. This suggests that his papers did not survive, which is not entirely true.
In May 2013, I was hired by Pink Triangle Press (PTP) of Toronto to go to Boston and clean out a storage locker. PTP had purchased The Guide: Gay Travel, Entertainment, Politics, & Sex, a grand old queer publication that had published McDonald. The locker was the final clean-up for the purchase, and my instructions were to clear the locker and to place any suitable material in a queer archive. There were 122 dust-covered boxes mostly containing back issues of The Guide but also an archive of materials by McDonald (correspondence, photos, files, articles) for the period 1975 to 1993, plus 4,200 copies of his last book, Scum: True Homosexual Experiences (1993). I sorted through the pile and whittled it down to 44 boxes. The rest was left for recycling. I rented a U-Haul van, packed it, closed the account, and drove off. I had arranged in advance to gift the materials to the Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY. They received the bulk of the material, but I also arranged to send copies of The Guide to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (now The ArQuives) in Toronto, as well as to Rick Hurlbut’s collection of travel materials at the Pride Library, Western University, London, ON. McDonald’s papers, 14.5 cubic feet in total, are at Cornell, and the finding aid is available online at Cornell’s RMC Library.
Donald W. McLeod, Toronto, ON, Canada
Corrections
In the Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue, a piece by Chase Bryer includes in his bio (p. 13) a dedication to Beverly Little Thunder, who died on August 24th (not July 18th) of last year.
In the May-June 2025 issue, in a feature titled “The First Lesbian Image Makers,” the photo from the Elvira Studio was published in the German newspaper Die Woche (not Die Woke).
