Little did I grasp that I had stumbled upon one of the last remaining sites from a century-long history of queer life in Brooklyn. But that is one of the many things I learned in reading Hugh Ryan’s immensely absorbing .When Brooklyn Was Queer.
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The Journalist of Castro Street is the result of copious research and interviewing, though Stoner does not use the narrative style that makes some biographies read like novels. It’s a book by a professor of communication studies about a journalist. It looks at the ethical choice Shilts faced between objectivity and advocacy.
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We are currently digesting abundant information about the networks of men the police called ‘sodomites’ before 1750 and ‘pederasts’ after that year.
MoreBentley knew Gibaut as a parishioner and as a student at Harvard when he entered in 1782, but the first mention of the young Gibaut in Bentley’s diaries was in 1786, when he was in trouble at Harvard (for reasons unknown; a reference to “bad habits”). However, Bentley wrote to the president of the university: “Gibaut is thought by his friends at Salem to be in such habit as requires an experiment of Sea air.”
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Briefe über die Galantieren von Berlin has none of the militancy of the Encyclopedists. The polemic intent of the latter is charted by Robert Darnton in his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). The Austrian officer’s letters are leagues behind a work such as Thérèse philosophe (1748), for instance, in which free thinking is associated with sexuality.
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SUSAN S. LANSER, professor emerita of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University, is a specialist in 18th-century European literature, with a focus on women writers and issues related to gender and sexuality.
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THIS YEAR marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Cyrano de Bergerac, but not the one you have in mind. Edmond Rostand’s hit play of 1897 invented an ultra-Romantic Cyrano, a magniloquent swashbuckler with a promontory of a nose. Hopelessly in love with his cousin Roxane, he sacrifices himself so she may wed the man she loves, ghost-writing his rival’s amorous declarations. This Cyrano—master duelist, improvisatory poet, independent spirit—has entered the popular imagination and spawned scores of imitations.
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Commented Richard Schneider: “Alistair was a wonderful writer and an amazingly quick study when breaking into a new field or genre. His interests ranged far and wide, and he soon branched off from workplace issues to LGBT rights, popular culture, history and biography, gay erotica, and so on.”
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Patricia Nell Warren died in Los Angeles on February 9th at the age of 82.
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