Spring Break: ‘Artful Dodges’
THE THEME of “Artful Dodges” (with apologies to Dickens) refers to the ways in which artists have set about to circumvent restrictions on the presentation of the human body…More
Blog Posts
A Writer Who Invented Selves
Fernando Pessoa began inventing alternate selves: fictional beings who peopled his imaginary universe and manifested their identities by producing letters, stories, and poems.
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Mad About the Boy
Noël Coward on (and in) Theatre is composed rather like a scrapbook, with photographs, reproductions of Playbills and theatrical posters, excerpts from Coward’s essays on the theater, interviews he gave, his plays, his bon mots, his opinions of fellow playwrights, actors, producers, and critics, and even poems and song lyrics.
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From Big Brothers to the Cubbyhole
LESBIAN BARS have not prospered over the years. The Cubbyhole is the last of two lesbian bars in all of New York City. In the 1970s, in the city of Los Angeles alone, there were at least a dozen lesbian bars. And there were scores more across the country. In the 1980s, there were roughly 200 lesbian bars in the U.S. Today there are only 21 left.
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A Metanovel Set in the Future
As a prose stylist, White is a master. What he says about Ruggero’s conversational style—“full of radical shifts in register from hieratic to demotic, serious to frivolous, flipping lightly from a big subject (the Czech baroque) to a small one (the best way to cook perfectly round potatoes fondant in the oven)”—very much describes his own literary mode. It’s a style I’d call Classical High Gay. It will delight some readers and probably turn others off.
MoreLetters to the Editor
Readers share their thoughts.
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A Fierce Farewell to Artist Louise Fishman
No words of mine can capture Louise’s art and righteous wrath and vigor. There are few artists among contemporary creatives as impressive, knowledgeable, and capable of making universalizing statements as Louise Fishman. The depth of her compassion and kindness defy description, and I am dumbfounded as I face her body of work and the legacy that she has left us.
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‘Lynes marveled at male beauty.’
IN THE 1930s AND ’40s, George Platt Lynes was one of the best-known photographers in New York City. His portraits and fashion photographs were published in such national magazines as Town & Country, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Today, he is best remembered for a vast archive of male nude photography that has since the 1970s been increasingly “rediscovered” by a new generation of queer artists and curators.
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An Artist of Spain’s Generation of ’27
Gregorio Prieto brought an emerging homoerotic presence to the movement that was also present in some of his contemporaries, notably two poets: Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda.
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The Grand Story of Gran Fury
It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful makes a compelling case for the significance of Gran Fury’s imagery to the efficacy of ACT UP. Lowery also sees a larger significance: “Maybe the most important lessons from Grand Fury aren’t about AIDS explicitly, or even about pandemics, but rather the ability for this kind of work to sway public opinion, to shape our attitudes, and to change our worldviews.”
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