Whither Gay Literature?
From his new office in New York City, Weise discussed his vision for Alyson going forward and shared his views of the current state, as well as the recent history, of GLBT literature.
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Homosexuality, Tunisian Style
What I almost never saw from my seat at my favorite haunt-the Café de Paris, chosen because, not attached to a hotel, it always attracted more Tunisians than tourists-were any signs of a visible, easily identifiable gay or lesbian culture.
MoreThe Photograph as Art
PIONEERING PHOTOGRAPHER, book publisher, and friend to a generation of artists and writers beginning in the 1890’s, F. Holland Day has not until recently received the respect he deserves. Scholarly essays and theses and a retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2000 showed rising interest, but a new book finally does justice to Day’s achievement.
MoreA Champion of ‘Homogenic Love’
EDWARD CARPENTER (1844-1929) was the most important early pioneer of gay liberation. Before him, writing in German, Heinrich Hössli had defended the “male love of the Greeks” (1836-38) and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had decried the persecution of “male-male love” (1864-1880).
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Classical Economics
LYDIA LOPOKOVA is not a name that comes to mind when one thinks of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding this year. Bloomsbury Ballerina, a superb new biography by British dance critic Judith Mackrell, should help remedy this situation.
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Orientation ‘Globocentric’
“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?
MoreSounds Out of Bounds
Galloway’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.
MoreSecond Chances
… 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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African Queenlessness
… 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 …
MoreHidden Injuries of Class
THIS 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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