JEAN COCTEAU proclaimed friendship to be his only politics. “I would rather be celebrated for constancy of the heart than for any doctrine of the mind,” he remarked in his essay “On Friendship.” Cocteau considered friendship to be an art and equated it with the “fellow feeling” of Walt Whitman. “It continually corrects itself, sets itself aright, and avoids the wars of love. Friendship maintains its balance so that we can maintain ours in it.” …
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AS RESEARCH for Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, author William J. Mann befriended the famed film director and became his documentarian during the last two years of Schlesinger’s life as a stroke patient in Palm Springs. As a result, there is a loose, conversational tone to the book that places it somewhere between biography and memoir. …
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IN CHOOSING to show some of his own skin for the cover of his essays now collected as Beneath the Skin, John Rechy remains the consummate rebel. He appears shirtless and sexy with a cigarette dangling from the lips. …
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THE SUBTITLE of this wonderful new glimpse into the lives of gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers and their friends is an accurate description of its contents. …
MoreThe fact that homosexual themes figured so prominently in the works of the greatest French writers had the dual effect of bringing these themes to the forefront of literary criticism and infusing the emergent queer culture with a peculiarly literary quality. In this remarkable little book, Lawrence R. Schehr, a professor of French at the University of Illinois, analyzes these effects through the writings of Gide, Proust, Cocteau, Willy, and others.
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Reviews of Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort, and I Am a Red Dress.
MoreLaud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology by John F. Galliher, Wayne H. Brekhus, and David P. Keys University of Wisconsin Press. 214 pages, $18.95 LAUD HUMPHREYS was…More
BERLIN’S SCHWULES museum opened its permanent exhibition in December 2004, featuring 200 years of gay German history, 1770-1970. The German word schwul translates as “gay male” and excludes lesbians. Under the direction of the museum’s co-founder Andreas Sternweiler, the comprehensive new exhibit sums up a historical record compiled by twenty years of museum projects in western Germany. …
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IN 1965, a 22-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Toronto set out to make his first feature-length film. The result was David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm, a story about two young dorm-mates who fall in love-innocent, occasionally awkward, but groundbreaking as a love story between two men, and an autobiographical one at that. …
MoreRecently a friend emailed me pictures of his new home in San Francisco-a Victorian remodel that cost, well, let’s just say that the price rivals some nations’ gross national product. When I opened the photos, I immediately recognized the house-not that I have ever actually been there. It’s the same house that I’ve seen in Miami, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Phoenix. …
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