Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography, which Gill rightly credits with the Virginia Woolf revival of the past half-century, contained other revelations that she seizes upon. The most infamous is the fact that Vanessa and Virginia were both molested as pre-teens by their half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, who were a decade older.
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Schwob did not operate at that level of artistic achievement. She produced photographs that allowed her to play with images of gender fluidity but that do not seem to have attracted much attention. In Paper Bullets, author Jeffrey H. Jackson asserts that her memoir, Aveux non avenus (“Disavowals,” 1930), “captured the interest of many in the avant-garde art world in Paris,” but provides no supporting documentation.
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Glaude summons disparate writing modes to accomplish his aims. The strongest is literary biography, in which he chronicles Baldwin’s hopes for the country that were always paradoxically tempered by apocalyptic doom. This seems to match Glaude’s mood as he reckons with his own “egregious” misjudgment of America as incapable of electing Trump.
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Belladonna opens with Bridget’s June 1956 graduation from a Catholic high school in St. Cyrus, Connecticut. Aiming to escape her family’s preoccupation with an older sister’s eating disorder, she leaves on a two-year program at the Academia Di Belle Arti in the fictional town of Pentila, near Milan. Independently, her classmate Isabella (Bella) Crowley—wealthy, beautiful, and popular—decides to head there too.
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The public restroom holds a particularly important place in the history that Cervini is recounting in The Deviant’s War. In August 1956, a young Frank Kameny—who had just delivered a paper at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco—entered a public restroom and was approached by another man.
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According to Rosanna Warren in her new biography, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, the military discharge established a pattern of expulsion and guilt that would characterize the story of Jacob’s life.
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When gay literature became popular in the 1970s, the novels were all about urban gays living in the fast lane. Now we have books about gays living in the sticks.
MoreTHERE ARE GAY STORIES—mythologies, poetry, cultural artifacts—that set gay people apart, giving a tone to our music, a palette to our art, a philosophy to our wandering. What are the great themes and recurring mythologies—those metaphors of truth that are impossible to convey rationally—that can get at the great questions? To paraphrase Gauguin: Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going?
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Taking the title of the collection from one of the stories included in the volume, Zuckerman notes that Guibert’s stories aim at suggesting experiences that, like powerful memories, continue to resonate with a person even as they fade into insubstantiality, “like a treasure lost in the depths.” However, as Zuckerman reminds the reader, the French phrase for the “invisible ink” in which one of Guibert’s narrators says that his story has been written is “encre sympathique.”
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While “sex variant” was Henry’s term, the idea for the book came from Jan Gay, who had conducted 300 interviews with lesbians and gay men.
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