WHEN DANIEL HENRIQUEZ, the protagonist of All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running, calls his mother in Jamaica to report the death of Aubrey, a girl he knew back in high school, his mom reminisces about people in her life who have died, including Daniel’s uncle, who left before Daniel was born. She’s sad but also practical.
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In his new memoir Unprotected, Porter reveals the truth, much of it painful to remember, about his formative years and early career in a book that’s a good story, a soulful ballad, and a scream for understanding, among other things.
MoreDO YOU get your information about LGBT organizations, events, books, and so on from social media? I hate to break the news, but that will soon be much harder.
MoreReaders’ thoughts.
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Stephen Sondheim died in Jeff Romley’s arms on November 26, 2022. The cause was cardiovascular disease. He left us just days before the release of the film tick, tick…BOOM!, which memorializes Jonathan Larson’s deep debt to Sondheim. The aforementioned revival of Company is set to run on Broadway through the end of this year. It is far from the last revival of his many great musicals that we can anticipate as the years roll merrily along.
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IN ITS ONGOING, heroic effort to bring older gay titles back into print, Valancourt Books sometimes publishes acknowledged classics, like James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, one of my top choices for the Great Gay Novel, or lesser-known works by significant writers, like The Fall of Valor (which I reviewed in the May-June 2017 issue of these pages), by Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend. And sometimes, fortunately, it publishes oddities like the 1959 British novel Chorus of Witches, by the otherwise unknown and probably pseudonymous Paul Buckland. By no means great, it is completely enjoyable to read and provides a glimpse into aspects of gay British life over sixty years ago.
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A WELL-KNOWN PLAYWRIGHT and novelist, Sebastian Stuart is the author of a memoir titled What Wasn’t I Thinking: A Memoir of Rebellion, Madness, and My Mother. It delves into his privileged childhood in Manhattan, where he discovered his (gay) sexuality as a teenager, and into his deep friendship with his soulmate and cousin Tina, who was stricken with schizophrenia at fifteen. …
The interview was conducted by phone in January 2022.
A SCENE in Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog took me back to the years I spent growing up in Montana, where the story is set. Peter Gordon, a boy in his teens whose widowed mother has married one of two brothers who own a large cattle ranch, walks past the open tents where men who have spent the day haying are resting. The men begin to whistle, “the whistle men give to a girl,” as it is described in the novel on which the film is based.
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The editors of OutWrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Julie Enszer and Elena Gross, focus mostly on reprinting the keynote speeches, but the book also includes other material, notably a history of OutWrite, a brief rundown of the political in-fighting that plagued OutWrite’s various factions over its decade-long run …
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