A NEW COLLECTION titled The Selected Shepherd is a very welcome arrival that may encourage readers to rediscover an award-winning, fiercely intelligent poet, anthologist, and critic. Gone much too soon at the age of 45, Reginald Shepherd showed in his increasingly stronger collections that he was well on his way to becoming a major force in American poetry.
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Autofiction is alive and well in Nicolas Pages, a novel by Guillaume Dustan newly translated by James Horton and Peter Valante. In an earlier essay (“A Quite Natural Desire”), he wrote: “I was pleased that everything I wrote about had actually happened. I only changed the names.” Born William Barànes in France in 1965, Dustan adopted his penname in 1995 and released three novels in the following years: In My Room (1996), a story told almost entirely from the narrator’s bedroom; I’m Going Out Tonight (1997), a long night of sexual escapades in the Parisian club and bath scene; and Stronger Than Me (1998), a reflection on the narrator’s past during the height of the AIDS epidemic in Paris.
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On its surface, Serrano’s novel tells two interdependent stories told in separate, alternating chapters. In one narrative, which constitutes the framework of the novel, the narrator (let’s assume, for now, that the narrator is Serrano himself) records and comments on dialogues he has with his (unnamed) husband as they wander from one pueblo to another on a two-week summer holiday in the Basque region of Spain. They discuss sundry matters, primarily Serrano’s plan to write a novel about two heterosexual men, Edorta and Koldo, who share a deep, perplexing love for one another. The second story …
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Reviews of Coachella Elegy, The City Aroused, Adam in the Garden, Born this Way Science: Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, American Poly: A History, Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II, and Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II.
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THE ARRIVAL of Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel, could not have been better timed. In the fall of 2023, the pop star launched a concert tour, which she called “Celebration,” as a showcase of her greatest hits.
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That LGBT people in film are disproportionately represented as killers or as killed (or both) is not breaking news. … Here my focus—and grievance—is with Oscar-winning films and roles after 1985 in which LGBT people perish or come to a bad end.
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Butler begins Who’s Afraid of Gender? with an overview of global “anti-gender” efforts by conservative religious figures and groups from Evangelical pastor Scott Lively’s work in Africa and Spain’s CitizenGo to authoritarian-minded politicians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has called “gender ideology” a threat to the nation itself.
MoreWILD GEESE by Soula Emmanuel Footnote Press. 240 pages, $17.95 THE TITLE of Soula Emmanuel’s debut novel conjures images of migratory birds in flight. And yet, the author informs…More
THIS ISSUE’S THEME is of course a reference to Vito Russo’s 1981 book, The Celluloid Closet, which documented the many films in pre-Stonewall America that hinted at an LGBT…More
The Hollywood star, the museum exhibit, and the book are huge honors for John Waters. It’s been a long, strange trip to mainstream acceptance for Waters, an auteur who specializes in what he calls “art-exploitation” films and who was dubbed the “Pope of Trash” by William S. Burroughs in 1986.
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