Reviews of Coachella Elegy, The City Aroused, Adam in the Garden, Born this Way Science: Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, American Poly: A History, Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II, and Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II.
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THE ARRIVAL of Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel, could not have been better timed. In the fall of 2023, the pop star launched a concert tour, which she called “Celebration,” as a showcase of her greatest hits.
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That LGBT people in film are disproportionately represented as killers or as killed (or both) is not breaking news. … Here my focus—and grievance—is with Oscar-winning films and roles after 1985 in which LGBT people perish or come to a bad end.
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Butler begins Who’s Afraid of Gender? with an overview of global “anti-gender” efforts by conservative religious figures and groups from Evangelical pastor Scott Lively’s work in Africa and Spain’s CitizenGo to authoritarian-minded politicians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has called “gender ideology” a threat to the nation itself.
MoreWILD GEESE by Soula Emmanuel Footnote Press. 240 pages, $17.95 THE TITLE of Soula Emmanuel’s debut novel conjures images of migratory birds in flight. And yet, the author informs…More
THIS ISSUE’S THEME is of course a reference to Vito Russo’s 1981 book, The Celluloid Closet, which documented the many films in pre-Stonewall America that hinted at an LGBT…More
The Hollywood star, the museum exhibit, and the book are huge honors for John Waters. It’s been a long, strange trip to mainstream acceptance for Waters, an auteur who specializes in what he calls “art-exploitation” films and who was dubbed the “Pope of Trash” by William S. Burroughs in 1986.
MoreIN THE LATE 1980s, getting a motion picture made about LGBT people that didn’t cast them as villains, psychos, or freaks was a momentous challenge. A mainstream feature film…More
The loneliness in All of Us Strangers is established at the start. The high-rise in which Adam lives seems to have no other residents but him.
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Jack Worby was one of the hundreds of thousands of young men who took to the roads and rails of America in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. They called themselves tramps or hoboes or ’boes.
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