The Artful Dodger of Nazi Berlin
Gad Beck started out as a gay Jewish boy and ended up leading the most successful resistance cell in Nazi Berlin—and he survived the War.
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How Hans Scholl Took on the Nazis
They started to write anonymous pamphlets accusing the Nazi regime of mass murder and demanding its end.
MoreRichard Hall’s Forgotten Masterpiece
THE 1990s saw a plethora of AIDS-related deaths in the literary community. Many, like Gordon Stewart Anderson (The Toronto You Are Leaving), Allen Barnett (The Body and Its Dangers),…More
Rock Hudson: A Tragedy of the Closet
The irony and the misfortune is that Rock Hudson himself needed saving. As Hollywood’s premier box office draw, the revelation that he was gay would have cost the studios millions of dollars. Women would have been distraught. Some men may have gloated, while others would have been crestfallen. Everybody would have been disgusted in this pre-Stonewall age when homosexuality was viewed as a psychological disorder.
More‘Autosexual’: The Label to End All Labels?
My hope is that what I set forth in this essay does not question the raison-d’être of the LGBT community nor feed the vanity of whoever proudly and surely naïvely identifies as “straight.” What I propose is the last of the labels: autosexuality. And what I attempt to do is shake the very foundation of a hydraulic landscape, to continue that metaphor, an approach that encourages us not to follow an increasing number of separate streams but to perceive them as converging into a single waterfall.
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The Lord Won’t Mind at Fifty
FIFTY YEARS AGO, Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind hit the bookstore shelves. The novel, Merrick’s fifth, set forth the romantic relationship between Charlie Mills, a dashing Ivy-educated actor, and Peter Martin, a sensitive beauty destined for West Point. Although it was published in hardcover with an innocuous cover, the novel was boldly advertised in The New York Times as “the first homosexual novel with a happy ending.”
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How Mao Skewered Chinese Values
What did Mao achieve by pulling puppet-strings to unleash this chaos? His class foes both real and imagined lost their jobs and some, their lives. Score one goal for Mao. A more sinister outcome of the Cultural Revolution was wreckage to Chinese people’s behavior. To locate a fresh “enemy” was to earn glory.
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Letters to the Editor
Thoughts from our readers.
MoreStop Straightwashing Susan B. Anthony
THE LEGENDARY FEMINIST Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) is too often the silenced queer elephant in the room of U.S. history. As we observe the 200th anniversary of her birth, which was on February 15th, it’s important to ask ourselves whether we as a society are finally willing to see her not only as a heroic fighter for women’s suffrage but also as a lesbian.
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