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J.C. LEYENDECKER (1874–1951) was an artist of many firsts. With his illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post, he can be said to have invented what the modern magazine cover should look like. He was one of the first popular artists to achieve a kind of greatness, and, as the most widely seen image-maker of his era, he defined the look of the fashionable American male during the first few decades of the 20th century. As a gay man himself, he did all this while introducing a subtly homoerotic subtext into many of his drawings, thereby prying open a crack in the closet door of his era.

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IN 1949, more than five years before writing his landmark poem “Howl,” a 23-year-old Allen Ginsberg was for eight months a patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (PI),…More

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AS A SUPERFAN of Neil Bartlett—I’ve raved about four of his works in these pages—I recently went back to his first novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1992), reissued in 2017. In the new introduction, Bartlett acknowledges his debt to “two of my favourite collector’s items in the pre-history of British gay fiction, Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and the screenplay for the film Victim (1961).” I’d seen the film (Dirk Bogarde suffers, fabulously), but didn’t know the novel, and wondered what a seventy-year-old novel might have to say to me. Fortunately, the always valiant Valancourt Books reissued it in 2014, with a splendid introduction by none other than Bartlett himself.

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As Patrick himself recalled later in life, the Caffe Cino was the “Ground Zero of the 1960s … a coffee-house, a theatre, a brothel, a temple, a flophouse, a dope-ring, a launching-pad, an insane asylum, a safe-house, and a sleeper cell for an unnamed revolution.” His novel was Temple Slave (1994), a fictionalized but nonetheless revealing history of the Caffe Cino, the birthplace of American gay theater.

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By David Masello: Oliver was never afraid to use certain words in her poems. Cover your ears, for you may be offended. Her language includes nouns and adjectives like beautiful, love, beloved, prayer, loneliness, God, holy, and heaven.

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Moby Dyke is not just the slice of Americana that all road trips provide, nor just a portrait of the splintering of sexual identity in the homosexual community; it’s also glimpses of a writer’s past. Indeed, the sheer specificity of those memories produces its best prose, particularly when the author returns to the state in which she was raised.

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Elan Justice Pavlinich’s Erotic Medievalisms: Medieval Pleasures Empowering Marginalized People explores the range of medieval English literature as well as modern cultural phenomena finding inspiration in the Middle Ages.

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Review of Ann Walker: The Life and Death of Gentleman Jack’s Wife by Rebecca Batley and As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries, 1836–38 by Jill Liddington.

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Kids on the Street is an admirable, thoroughly researched, and carefully documented history of the once vibrant queer culture of the Tenderloin and Polk Street. Featuring scores of interviews with one-time Polk Street denizens, it is also a lament for the displacement of the multiracial, multigender culture of San Francisco’s first post-Stonewall queer district. Drawing attention to that once-thriving, often overlooked culture, the book is a valuable contribution to queer history.

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Mallon’s investigation of Kallman reads like an autopsy, even though the reader is warned that his story “is inspired by actual events considerably altered by the author’s imagination.” Yet there’s an authenticity that’s both frightening and compelling. Mallon has pierced the heart of darkness at the root of Kallman’s soul. Kallman might deserve to be forgotten, but Mallon’s portrait of a sad thwarted tragic talent as a sour parable on ambition is unforgettable.

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