HomeAuthor: Greg Varner

Author: Greg Varner

Greg Varner

Current Issue:
Age of Enlightenment
Special 25th Anniversary Book
Features From Current Issue

Essays

The Paris Cruising Scene in 1750

IF YOU HAVE VISITED Paris in the last five years, you may have seen a plaque embedded in the pavement in the pedestrianized blocks of rue Montorgueil that commemorates Bruno Lenoir and Jean Diot, the last men executed for sodomy (not homosexuality, as the inscription indicates) in France, on 6 July 1750. This plaque has undoubtedly provoked not only horror and sorrow but also questions in the minds of natives and tourists alike.

Essays

The Short Historic Life of Randy Shilts

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.

Essays

Cyrano’s Sodomitical Circle

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.

Features

‘The sapphic is far from a site of silence.’

The G&LR talks with the author of The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser, professor emerita of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University, and a specialist in 18th-century European literature, with a focus on women writers and issues related to gender and sexuality.
Blog
1. July 7, 2019 Secret Penises at the Met
2. June 26, 2019 Rat Rage
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