Letters to the Editor
Readers’ thoughts on articles in The G&LR.
MoreBlog Posts
Remembering Three Who Made a Difference
Obituaries for Ned Rorem, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Charles Silverstein.
More
Carson McCullers’ ‘Imaginary Friends’
When she was a Wunderkind, McCullers created poetic fables and mythical archetypes of a kind that our contemporaries no longer invent.
More
Amber Hollibaugh, Human Rights Activist
Amber always managed in her activism to “say out loud what everyone had agreed not to notice.” She constantly called for a “new revolution” that included the sexual desires that so many experience with shame and feel forced to keep secret. She insisted that we embrace “our most dangerous desires” and “fight for a world that values human sexual possibility without extracting a terrible human price.” She strove “to create a movement willing to live the politics of sexual danger in order to create a culture of human hope.”
MoreNovember 1978: The Agony and the Irony
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1978. The Castro District of San Francisco was buzzing with an infectious, sexy energy. Since last November, the gay community has been on a high after Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors—the first openly gay man to be elected in a major U.S. city. Like so many gay people, I was downcast and pessimistic during the Nixon years. Harvey changed all that. Nevertheless, ahead of us were considerable headwinds at the state level.
More
Ciao! Magazine: The Gay Dolce Vita of the ’70s
CIAO! The World of Gay Travel was a bimonthly magazine published by George Desantis in New York City. Desantis had been a school teacher but lost his job when they found out he was gay.
More
The Invisible Man
Interest in Rustin’s life and work has been growing. Previous works of note include John D’Emilio’s 2003 biography, which probed the impact of Rustin’s work and his struggles to maintain a public leadership role, and a collection of Rustin’s impassioned correspondence titled I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters, edited by Michael G. Long and published in 2012. Long has now edited a collection of essays by a range of Rustin scholars titled Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics.
More
Another Brother Who Made It Happen
Since Strayhorn’s death, a handful of writers have worked to rescue him from Duke Ellington’s shadow. David Hajdu’s 1997 biography Lush Life and Walter van de Leur’s Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn have solidified Strayhorn’s position as a major force in American jazz. To those titles we can add Lisa Barg’s new Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration, a scholarly examination of Strayhorn’s work and life as a queer Black artist working in a time of overt racism and homophobia.
More
Will & Grace & Maurice
Maurice is placed by media professor David Greven in a tradition of melancholy and lyrical gay films exemplified by Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, and later Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Will & Grace’s pedigree is more I Love Lucy.
More
Dramatist of Our Lives
Christopher Byrne’s biography, “A Man of Much Importance,” is welcome on several counts. First, despite the choppy way that it consigns McNally’s plays, operas, and work for television to separate chapters, the book does offer an accurate overview of McNally’s life that’s surprising in some of its details. For example, while McNally had spoken publicly about his parents’ alcoholism and his father’s beating him for his artsy behaviors and sassy comebacks as he grew up in Corpus Christi, Byrne is the first to report that McNally’s mother “interfered” (Byrne’s word) with him during his teenage years, which perhaps explains the sexually troubled relationship between mothers and sons in his plays.
More