Categories

Louis XIV did indeed have a younger brother named Philippe, but the king was never at risk of being supplanted. Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans, known as Monsieur, is one of history’s most notorious effeminates, whose affections and fortune were lavished on male favorites, from courtiers to opera dancers.

The story of his encounter with “The Burning Shame” goes back two decades before Huckleberry Finn, to a pitcher of beer that changed the course of American literature.

Staging back-alley drag balls was one thing; performing for Astors and Vanderbilts was quite another. What’s more, slummers didn’t just indulge in voyeuristic pleasures; they sampled the seafood, so to speak—a metaphor on full display in periodicals like Broadway Brevities, one of several mainstream publications covering the Pansy Craze.

Butterfly Man makes it clear that Levenson must have been entirely familiar with the gay demimonde that it depicts.

The following is by a grant recipient in a program launched in 2022 by The G&LR, our Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to three recipients in 2023. The purpose of this grant is to assist advanced students engaged in LGBT-related research, and awardees are expected to produce an article for this magazine asMore

A Little Queer Natural History shows two things: a) that we are not the only animals to have homosexual sex; and b) that our version of sex is hardly the only one in nature.

WITH A WINK to Oscar Wilde, R. Tripp Evans’ The Importance of Being Furnished celebrates four influential Americans—Charles Leonard Pendleton (1846–1904), Ogden Codman Jr. (1863–1951), Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. (1874–1954), and Henry Davis Sleeper (1878–1934)—whose imaginative houses, now public museums, marked a pivotal shift toward personal expression in home design.

KNOWN for her large-scale collage portraits of Black women, the critically acclaimed artist Mickalene Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971. Introduced to art as a child by her mother, fashion model Sandra Bush, she earned her BFA from New York’s Pratt Institute and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. SheMore

TRANS HIRSTORY in 99 Objects has been my most popular coffee table book this summer. It has beautiful typography and color plates. It has the heft of art books by Taschen, but it’s published by another German art publisher, Hirmer Verlag, in conjunction with the Museum of Trans Hirtory and Art (motha). And it’s theMore

Short reviews of BLOOD LOSS: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art by Keiko Lane and LONG LIVE QUEER NIGHTLIFE: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution by Amin Ghazian.

McKinney does an admirable job of reframing much of the scandal and paying homage to the genius of Pee-wee Herman. The book celebrates that such a singular, queer, and transgressive character ever existed, and the author’s sadness at Reubens’ passing is palpable. It’s a fitting tribute, one that Reubens richly deserves.

Written for lay readers, Straight Acting discusses complex issues in a readable style and includes an extensive bibliographical essay and footnotes. Each chapter begins with a fictional scene from a particular period in Shakespeare’s life.

The gay community is quite right to claim Baldwin with pride, as we’d be hard-pressed to find a better symbol for our own stubborn unwillingness to be forgotten.

ALLEN BRATTON is an American writer whose first novel, Henry Henry, transfers Shakespeare’s “Prince Hal” (Henry V, 1386–1422) to the year 2014, when old Catholic families and a hereditary upper class still exist in England, but theology and rank seem increasingly irrelevant to the issues of the day.

The Gay Imagination is a collection of pieces about poetry and music, areas in which the author proves to be a sharp and knowledgeable writer. [Contreras] applies a keen intelligence and a cultivated taste that reveal an impressive familiarity with a wide range of poetry.

Mama provides an unflinching look at the difficult circumstance of a Black family in struggle and of a young woman’s efforts to care for her half-brother in the midst of it all.

In her two new books, simultaneously published, Joy Ladin continues to engage us in both the depth of her experience and its expansiveness, offering us a reflecting mirror to our own queer selves in this intensely challenging time.

NOVELISTIC AND EPISODIC, Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir Frighten the Horses is written with verve, humor, and specificity. His story begins in an affluent British family, where Oliver was raised to take his state of privilege for granted. Later in life, however, he would have to contend with the social challenges of a different kind of status:More

Funny, ultimately moving, smartly written, and insightful, In Tongues speaks a message well worth listening to, in the voice of a fine novelist.

The Lilac People is a moving, carefully crafted novel with memorable characters trapped in the most inhumane circumstances.

James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance celebrates the 100th anniversary of the writer’s birth in 1924. The exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington is a small but radical combination of faces and events that focus on Baldwin’s Civil Rights activities during the 1960s along with the activists he knew andMore

Haring’s populism, his desire to bring art to the masses, serves as the most prominent theme in both shows. This is captured most succinctly in the title of the show Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody (which traveled from Los Angeles and Toronto to arrive in Minneapolis, and features an expansive catalogue).

DIRECTOR ANDREA ARNOLD's new film, Bird, which she both wrote and directed, premiered at NewFest, New York City’s annual LGBTQ+ film festival. It’s an unsparing yet sympathetic look into the hardscrabble life of the tough but vulnerable twelve-year-old Bailey, played by newcomer Nykiya Adams, an interracial girl who more-or-less presents as a boy, and herMore

A new TV series titled English Teacher, created by and starring Brian Jordan Alvarez, centers on the tumultuous teaching career of the loud and proud Evan Marquez, who vainly tries to inspire his students while standing beneath a sign that reads “English is Infinite.”

I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Henry Van Dyke’s 1965 novel Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, which was reprinted for the first time last year, when I read on the website Literary Hub the Foreword to it by Van Dyke’s nephew, Erik Wood. My immediate response was to ask: How is it possible that I, anMore

WHEREAS this is basically a humor column, or at least one that cherishes irony; and whereas the November election sucked all the oxygen out of the cybersphere and left little to laugh about… We bring you a few reruns from past issues that seem apropos for this political moment.

Readers' thoughts on articles in past issues.

  THE TITLE of this issue borrows a phrase from Billie Holiday’s signature song, “Strange Fruit,” but without the lurid imagery (the song is about a lynching). Repurposed, the phrase refers to the qualities of both strangeness and fruitiness that these articles seem to share. The term “fruit” has long associations with the gay community—aMore

THE RESULTS of the November election are both too sweeping and too dismal to cover in a single op-ed piece. Here are a few takes on the election as excerpted from LGBT media sources soon after November 5th.

Alice Morgan Wright was one of these suffragists. She grew up in Albany, New York, and went on to become a sculptor, an advocate for women’s rights, and a leader of the animal rights movement.

IN KEEPING WITH TRADITION, we take time to remember of few of the notable LGBT people who died during the previous year. Here are three figures of national stature who left a lasting legacy.

A DEAR FRIEND and mentor to me and many others, Jack Sansolo departed our world last October at age 81. The inimitable “Dr. Jack” had been living in L.A. in recent years with his husband Dean. He was diagnosed last year with Stage 4 prostate cancer.