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Another Jersey Boy Makes It Big!
The current collection, I Shudder, And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey, finds Rudnick reviewing his life as a mild-mannered Jersey boy getting his first tiny studio apartment in Greenwich Village under the critical gaze of two aunts and a mother …
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Reflections of Two Activist Observers
TWO NEW BOOKS by longstanding gay community activists and political essayists Martin Duberman and Sarah Schulman are useful if not indispensable for addressing big problems and painful if still-unconscious contradictions impacting our movement nowadays. It seems we’ve made momentous progress in civil rights—five states allow same-sex marriage—and even consciousness raising, but we still seem so regressive socially and personally in basic ways.
MoreThe Gay McCarthyites
ONE OF THE LOW POINTS in American history was in the early 1950’s when Senator Joseph McCarthy successfully fueled and exploited Americans’ fear and paranoia about secret governmental conspiracies, launching witch hunts to expose allegedly subversive infiltrators and Communists within the U.S. government. A lesser known part of the story is the critical role that a same-sex male relationship, almost certainly a sexual one, played in bringing the crisis of McCarthyism to a head and, in the end, silencing the senator. As it happens, the gay couple involved cannot exactly be considered the “good guys” in the drama.
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The Last Englishman
“I WANT to love a young man of the lower classes, and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket,” wrote E. M. Forster in 1935, “and then I have wanted to write respectable novels.”
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Oscar Wilde’s Excellent Adventure
“I HAVE NOTHING to declare—except my genius,” he pronounced famously on arriving in the U.S. Or did he? There’s no sign of Oscar Wilde’s notorious response to a routine Customs inquiry in any of these 48 interviews with the Irish playwright, who was then known only for his poetry, and scarcely for that. The 26-year old standard-bearer of the Aestheticist creed undertook perhaps twice that many interviews on American soil in the course of his 1882 lecture tour. The editors of this volume have collated the most significant, presenting each in its entirety, replete with fulsome notes.
MoreThe Visible Vidal
Writing a memoir is fundamentally a ritualizing experience, a literary rite-of passage that tends to occur when a writer is facing—and challenging thereby—the implacability of mortality. Gore Vidal wrote that Tennessee Williams “could not possess his own life until he had written about it.” Of his own life, Vidal snarled when asked if he would be remembered, “I don’t give a god-damn.” In a more contemplative mood, he once mused, “As for life? Well, that is a hard matter. But it was always a hard matter for those of us born with a sense of the transiency of these borrowed atoms that make up our corporeal being.”
MoreA Burst of Progress on HIV Policy
At various points in 2009—during gay pride month in June, at the October 11th march on Washington, among others—various media outlets eagerly reported criticism of President Obama by some gay leaders. The September 2009 Advocate ran on its cover a campaign image of a despondent looking Obama; in place of the word “Hope” was the question “Nope?”
MoreA Stubborn Refusal to Act
Disillusionment set in for the GLBT movement even before Barack Obama took office. The incoming President’s decision to accord a central role in his inauguration to the fundamentalist Rev. Rick Warren suggested that reaching out to the religious right was a higher priority for the new administration than GLBT inclusion. The Obama Inaugural Committee’s last-minute choice of openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson to deliver the invocation at an inaugural concert failed to allay concerns when his appearance was mysteriously left out of the television coverage. Civil rights advocates were also disappointed that highly qualified, openly gay candidates were passed over in the selection of the President’s cabinet. Openly gay Rep. Barney Frank’s optimistic assertion that GLBT people would now be part of America’s governing class was already ringing hollow by Inauguration Day.
More‘Getting to Neutral’ on Aging Policy
For older GLBT adults and others concerned with aging issues as they affect our community, the progress we need in federal policy is in some ways a matter of simply “getting to neutral.” Of course, there is nothing simple about it.
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