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FOR LESBIANS of a certain age, reading June Thomas’ A Place of Our Own may bring on a wave of nostalgia, especially the parts about the 1970s and ’80s. Thomas has written a breezy yet substantial history of six types of spaces that have been important to our culture: lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, the softball diamond, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy stores, and vacation destinations. Each sort of space has its own unique vibe, but they all share a history of lesbians trying, and often failing, to make it in a heteronormative capitalistic society while prioritizing lesbian feminist ideals. The efforts were often heroic and the results transformative in the lives of the women who spent time in these spaces.

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PLAYWRIGHT CHRISTOPHER DURANG, who passed away on April 2, 2024, at the age of 75, was one of the American theater’s most celebrated satirists. His plays could be hysterically funny and deeply disturbing, in a style he described as “absurdist comedy married to real feelings.” Among the targets of his Obie Award-winning works were religious dogma, psychoanalysis, and dysfunctional families, all critiqued from a distinctly queer perspective.

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WE TEND TO FORGET that Andy Warhol was a writer, sort of. During his lifetime, he published several books, notably a: A Novel (1968), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A…More

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WHEN Cincinnati-born poet, essayist, and teacher Sjohnna  McCray succumbed to diabetes last summer, barely making it into his fifties, he left behind a trove of remarkable work. Much of it is included in his award-winning book Rapture, a debut poetry collection that plumbed the complexities of growing up in a family with aliases—the studious son, the hardworking Vietnam veteran father, and the demure Asian mother: “In my family we all had our secret identities.” As someone who also grew up with secrets, McCray’s work speaks to me.

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LAST YEAR, editor Tom Cardamone with his new imprint the Library of Homosexual Congress at Rebel Satori Press reissued gay writer Allen Barnett’s classic collection of short stories, The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories. Barnett died in August of 1991 of AIDS-related causes, just a year after his collection was published. He was only 36 years old, but in his short lifetime he had become a tireless gay activist, an AIDS educator, and a promising writer.

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HE STARES dreamily at someone over your shoulder, his mouth open and poised to sing. In his hands he strums the lute that gives him his name. Flowers decorate the desk before him. The flowing white blouse he wears is open, displaying an unusually broad rib cage and rounded shoulders. His too-boyish face and luscious curls give him a feminine appearance, making his gender and age ambiguous. He’s beautiful and mesmerizing yet somehow haunting or, perhaps, haunted.

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            In 1871, prominent Boston surgeon Henry Bigelow built a summer home on the west end of Tuckernuck Island, a home he called “Tuckanuck” (spelling the name of the cottage the way the locals pronounced the name of the island itself). The building was rustic and isolated, without indoor plumbing or gaslight, but sea breezes provided a welcome break from Boston’s stifling summer heat. The home was eventually inherited by Henry’s only child, William Sturgis Bigelow, who set about turning it into a summer retreat for a very different sort of family.

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