Articles

Blog Posts

0

Although Brokeback is too painful a movie to watch many times, the curious thing is it makes you want to fall in love again. Instead, one listens to the soundtrack, which alternates between the pastoral beauty of Gustavo Santaolalla’s theme on the guitar-so spare, so haunting-and the raucous, messy world of the bars, where Matthew Shepard met his killers. I’m not sure why Brokeback is so moving. But in the end I think it has something to do with its being what McMurtry called it: “a tragedy of emotional deprivation.” This is surely a universal experience, but at a certain point in life most gay men seem to conclude that it’s the particular fate of being gay.

More
0

IS IT POSSIBLE to talk about gay sex in the 1970’s without talking about hiv/aids in the 1980’s? Are we justified in presenting the 70’s as the decade in which gay men had anonymous sex in public parks, backrooms, and bathhouses, all under the guise of “gay liberation”? The release of a new documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, raises these and other questions.

More
0

While Lynch is a master storyteller and Sweet Creek’s good-versus-evil plot makes it a page turner, the characters are so vividly drawn as to overshadow the action of the book. So interesting are their inner lives that one suspects Lynch’s storylines are merely an excuse to delve into the human soul.

More
0

While bringing to life the vibrant homoerotic tradition in Islamic culture, El-Rouayheb concludes that male same-sex desire was not the same as our current understanding of homosexuality, but rather something else, and that “sodomitical” acts were intensely problematical during this 300-year period, just as they are today.

More
0

STANDING IN LINE for Brokeback Mountain the afternoon it opened in Washington at a little theater near Dupont Circle, I saw two kinds of people: silent gay men of a…More

0

I AM STRUCK by those on the left whose hostility to Israel is so total that they ignore the fact that, by the values important to liberals, conditions inside Israel are greatly superior to those within any of its Arab neighbors. This does not mean that one needs to agree with Israel’s position on Israeli-Arab issues.

More
0

IT IS A TRUISM that Abraham Lincoln was incompetent with women. Scholars emphasize that as a young man, his awkwardness and shyness and uncouth appearance so embarrassed him that he avoided their company. He botched the niceties of courtship, tripped over himself, was almost a laughingstock. Lincoln in his twenties attempted to court a woman named Mary Owens whose verdict is widely cited in Lincoln literature: he was “deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness.”

More
1

The Wilde debacle-he served a torturous term in prison, then exiled himself to France, where he drank himself to death-so transformed the emerging discussion of homosexual rights that it’s difficult to tell what would have happened if he hadn’t pressed his hopeless prosecution. On the one hand, Wilde put the issue of gay rights on the agenda of every socially progressive industrial country. On the other hand, he ensured that homosexuality itself would be perceived by the public as something to be stamped out ruthlessly.

More
0

ON THE ELEVENTH NIGHT of February 1967, over 200 people from all walks of life-artists, teachers, factory workers, bankers, street cleaners, retired military men and women-filled the corner of Sunset and Sanborn in the heart of LA’s Silverlake district. Legal experts, clergymen, and local activists spoke on police brutality and homosexual rights while protestors waved signs demanding “No More Abuse of Our Rights and Dignity,” “Abolish Arbitrary Arrests,” and “Peace!” Across the street, nervous police clutched their batons while unmarked squad cars circled the protest like vultures.

More
1 … 293 294 295 296 297 … 324