Author: Ben Edward Akerley

Ben Edward Akerley

Articles in GLReview

Blog Posts

May-June 2023
Features From Current Issue

Essays

How Diaghilev Reimagined Ballet

By Allen Ellenzweig: THE BRITISH DANCE and opera critic Rupert Christiansen has written a history of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that is not aimed at scholars or specialists. Referring to his morbid addiction to “watching, thinking or dreaming about classical dance and dancers,” Christiansen chooses “to [make] connections that can explain the allure of ballet to those uninfected with my mania.”

Book Review

The Way Things Were

By Andrew Holleran: YIDDISH has entered the American language so extensively by now that most people have probably heard the word “shiksa”—especially if they’ve read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s the Yiddish word for a gentile woman. Robert Hofler’s new book on the making of the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford movie The Way We Were (1973) is about its masculine equivalent, the much less euphonic “shegetz.”

Essays

Lincoln Kirstein’s Greatest Get

What follows is excerpted from a longer piece that will soon appear in The Line of Dissent, a collection of the author’s essays published in this magazine over the years. Some of the material that follows has previously appeared in these pages (in 2017)—in a three-part essay on impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who cofounded the NewMore

Art

Léonor Fini, Impresario of the Self

By Emily L. Quint Freeman: As Léonor Fini gained a reputation, her subject matter included erotic scenes of lesbianism. Fini freely acknowledged her experience of same-sex love but refused to accept a lesbian identity … Her explicit homoerotic paintings include Le Long du Chemin (1967) and L’Entre-Deux(1967). Both depict an erotic scene involving two women.
Blog
1. June 5, 2023 The Spanish Far Right: A Clear and Present Danger to LGBTQ Rights
2. May 22, 2023 Saleem Kidwai, India’s LGBT Activist
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