“I ONCE asked Christopher Isherwood if he’d mind if I kissed him,” begins an essay in Alfred Corn’s latest book, Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007. With an opening line like that, what curious gay reader could resist reading further?
MoreGalloway’s new memoir tells her story from the inside out, creating a bridge to hearing audiences. An actress, writer, and performance artist, she is dexterous in her use of words and devastating with a sense of black humor that brings numerous laugh-out-loud delights. There is no political correctness here, only a poignant life journey of unexpected challenges.
More… Got til it’s Gone is the kind of novel that will make you wish Johnnie Ray Rousseau was a flesh-and-blood person so you could find him and spend an evening in his company-such is author Larry Duplechan’s deftness in telling a story. …
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… Heterosexual Africa? explores how Africa’s singular identity as a heterosexual continent came about. Author Marc Epprecht’s 230-page explanation, however, is far from simple. Rather, it is a Kafkaesque labyrinth of the stories of researchers who either ignored evidence of African homosexuality or were blind to it or chose to suppress what they found due to homophobia …
MoreTHIS BOOK began, like many good ideas, as a conversation. During a public administration conference in Washington, D.C., Kenneth Oldfield, a straight, white, married emeritus professor in Illinois, and Richard Greggory Johnson III, a gay African-American assistant professor in Vermont “with dreadlocks to die for,” began talking about the ways in which academia, for all its professed liberalism, routinely fails to confront its own prejudice against working-class people, especially those within its ranks.
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Reviews of Truman Capote? Enfant Terrible, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage, and Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox.
MoreLATE IN EVELYN WAUGH’S Brideshead Revisited (1945), narrator Charles Ryder finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage and still in love with a married woman, Lady Julia Mottram, whose physical likeness to her brother Sebastian is what Charles has been drawn to all along.
MoreDESPITE President Obama’s lifting of the ban on prohibiting abortion information and services overseas, the issue is not settled. In the past fifteen years, right-wing groups unleashed a vast, many-pronged “culture war” to manipulate sexual anxieties and dictate what goes on in America’s bedrooms.
MoreWHEN the incomparable James Purdy passed away in March on Friday the 13, 2009, at the prodigious age of 94, he had been pretty much out of the publishing mainstream for nearly two decades. One of his last short stories, “Reaching Rose,” published in the 2004 collection Moe’s Villa and Other Stories, was a remarkable piece of semi-confessional fiction about a lonely bar fly coming to terms with his own mortality:
MoreAndy Warhol is signing his latest book of Polaroids at a large bookstore in Manhattan, hundreds of fans pressing around the table. A young man at the edge of the crowd walks slowly behind the table, arm-length from Warhol, adroitly snatches his wig, tosses it to an accomplice waiting near the door. Both run out into the anonymous streets of New York.
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