IT’S THE SEASON of gay revivals on Broadway and Off, and the latest is Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, formerly known as Torch Song Trilogy. The original four-hour production of 1982 has been trimmed into a two-act version under three hours, including intermission. Yet the play still covers the same ground: the travails of Arnold Beckoff, a flamboyantly self-dramatizing and wisecracking drag queen seeking true love.
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Reviews of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, The Kinda Fella I Am, Female Trouble: A Queer Film Classic, and Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination.
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IT OFTEN COMES as a bit of a surprise to discover that, before Kinsey or Stonewall, there was any decency shown toward anyone who lived under the LGBT umbrella. But, argues Emily Skidmore in True Sex, some trans men around the turn of the 20th century received surprisingly sympathetic and thoughtful press coverage as well as community support,
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Although Dollimore is usually thought of as gay, his sexuality is more complex, and he is most interesting when he questions the assumptions of the “authentic self” that’s central to most coming-out stories.
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THE NORTH LONDON neighborhood of Finsbury Park is a prominent example of the demographic and cultural shifts that have marked the city’s emergence into the current century.
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Queer Shakespeare: Desire & Sexuality Edited by Goran Stanivukovic Bloomsbury. 402 pages, $80. WAS SHAKESPEARE GAY, or perhaps bisexual? If so, was it in the way that we think of gay…More
Embedded within this narrative of a Congressional career is the tale of the scandal that rocketed Studds to national fame. This involved his tryst with a Congressional page.
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Disturbing Attachments shows how Genet’s troubling racist and non-egalitarian attitudes are matters that queer theory hasn’t fully dealt with. If the central tenet of queer theory is resistance to the normalization of power and the destabilization of categories like sex, gender, and identity, then Genet shows us how queer theory has more work to do.
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Finkelstein also reminds us that the HIV/AIDS crisis is far from over, analyzing the work of a new generation of queer activists and their responses to narratives around the plague.
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The Clothesline Swing is the story of two gay Syrians, lovers and refugees, who flee their war-ravaged country for a new life in Canada. Set in the future, some forty years after they first arrive in Vancouver, the story focuses on the now old couple’s final months together. The narrator’s partner is dying. His only relief comes from the stories that his lover, whom he calls Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic), tells him. “I’m your Scheherazade,” Hakawati tells his sleepless partner. “I offer you souvenirs: my stories, the pieces of my soul, to help you sleep.”
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