ON APRIL 28, 2006, “March of Toleration,” a gay parade, was attacked in Kraków. Youth activists of the parliamentary party League of Polish Families threw stones, eggs, bottles, and slurs at peaceful GLBT marchers. …
MoreCan three decades have passed since I sat in a darkened Manhattan cinema transfixed by the cherubic-faced Robby Benson giving the performance of a lifetime as the innocent and emotionally troubled Billy Joe in the movie Ode to Billy Joe? Any gay person watching that landmark flick could immediately identify with the conflicted protagonist and both sympathize and empathize with his plight.
MoreWIDESPREAD INDIGNATION at the suggestion that Abraham Lincoln might have enjoyed sharing his bed with other men, that he delayed marriage to make it last as long as he could, and that he occasionally returned to the practice even in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was away, suggests the fragility of tolerance for homosexuality.
MoreTHE POLITICAL DUST STORM kicked up by the Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain, however predictable, found right-wingers railing that yet another symbol of American “family values,” the cowboy, was being desecrated. A typical Christian blogger screamed: “Now they’re out to destroy the American legend of the cowboy. God help us, and John Wayne forgive us!”
More
Today we tend to take lesbian images for granted. While k d lang, Ellen DeGeneres, and Melissa Etheridge are visible lesbian icons, there is no uniformity to the lesbian image because, unfortunately, lesbians are still held up next to straight women rather than next to other lesbians to construct categories of normal. Tiraz True Latimer’s Women Together / Women Apart doesn’t make this mistake. …
More
IN THE GAY ARCHIPELAGO, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff of the University of California, Irvine, sets out to define, interpret, and reflect upon what it means to be gay in Indonesia. …
MoreODESSA, IN WEST TEXAS, feels like the remote edge of something in the way you might imagine Vladivostok: far from anywhere, exotic, but not the kind of exotic that attracts tourists. It’s an oil town, mainly. Buildings are tacky, functional. The land is flat, dry, barren, with a local culture to match: the big deal in Odessa is, famously, high school football. West Odessa, bleaker still, is the scrubby outskirts where they put the “adult” stuff that Odessa doesn’t want.
More[Edmund] White shared his thoughts about his new book just prior to its April release at his home in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, where he has lived with Michael Carroll since 1995.
More“WHEN THE FIRST Christian pervert, St. Paul, made nature a crime against Christianity, civilization was finished,” writes poet Harold Norse in “Nocturnal Emissions” (1973). “Had he been handsome instead of hideous, the whole course of history might have been happier.” Norse’s opinion is shared by novelist Gore Vidal who, in Live from Golgotha (1992), presents Paul as a sexually maladroit troll obsessed with the handsome, teenaged Timothy.
MoreFUNNY, MOVING, FURIOUS, and dazzling, Eleanor Lerman’s Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande, 2005) sounds the note of the times, the era of American Imperialism, the days of our Bush-filled lives. Lerman is able to capture brilliantly the wacky and weary sense of stymied idealism of a generation that grew up hoping for better things for America.
More
