Queer people in red states are agents of change. They are in the trenches of the culture wars with the battle scars to prove it. For decades, LGBT people in Utah fought to make visible what the conservative culture hoped to exterminate. Utah has long been a place for “alternative lifestyles” where the resilient and creative thrive. To outsiders, Utah may look like a political wilderness; but it is a wilderness rich with peculiar opportunities.
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THE SOAP OPERA, that quintessentially American genre, has been a fixture of popular culture since the early days of radio. As such, the soaps have played an important role…More
Jeremy Mulderig claims in his introduction that The Lost Autobiography is one of the great queer diaries of the 20th century (one wonders how many of these there actually are; still, the claim does not seem wildly off base). Here is a witness to some of that century’s great personalities, living defiantly through the strictures imposed by society during those times, and asserting at every turn that he had as much right to be happy as anyone else.
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ust when you thought you knew everything about the life of Oscar Wilde, there’s more. Making Oscar Wilde turns out to be not just about Wilde, however; it’s about the U.S. at a time when when P. T. Barnum was drawing them in with exhibits like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” minstrel shows were exceedingly popular, and Darwin’s idea that we are descended from apes was on everyone’s mind.
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TO BEGIN somewhere in the middle of this stretch of time, in medieval England, we home in on an icon of heroic manhood, King Richard the Lionheart. Long before he gained this epithet, Richard was the intimate boyhood friend of Prince Philip II of France, and their special fondness for each other carried over into adulthood.
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FOR THOSE INTERESTED in tracing the origins of homosexual relations in history, or in the literary history of the West, it is customary to begin with the ancient Athenians…More
Calypso by David Sedaris Little, Brown. 259 pages, $28. OF COURSE the book is funny; it’s by David Sedaris. We’ve known this about Sedaris since the morning of…More
Uglow’s portrait of Lear is intricate and sympathetic, and her analysis of his creative achievements sharp. She is informative about English society and culture in the 19th century, as well as events that were happening abroad. If Mr. Lear is short on details of the nonsense writer’s private life, it seems only in keeping with his exquisite perception of boundaries.
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Gillian Rodger’s Just One of the Boys is a welcome and fascinating addition to the history of cross-dressed performance and 19th-century Anglo-American theater more generally.
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THE OTHER DAY is a play that grows on you—in a good way. This bare-bones production staged at the Theater at the 14th Street Y begins with two men dawdling after a meeting of their twelve-step program.
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