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In 1782, an Austrian officer reported on a network of depraved but sophisticated well-heeled men, a whole clandestine subculture organized around a specific social identity.

Magnus Hirschfeld qualified as a doctor in 1892, when Berlin was the host to a fledgling gay subculture.

George Cecil Ives founded the Order of Chaeronea in 1897, named after the site of the battle fought by the Sacred Band of Thebes, made up entirely of male lovers.

With her speech to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1904, Anna Rüling became the first known lesbian activist.

  ON AUGUST 10, 1948, Harry Hay wrote a prospectus that anticipated the goals, forms, and institutions of today’s international lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement to an extent that was truly prophetic—and for six decades, he brooded over this new movement as it sputtered to life, nudging it onto its feet in the 1950s,More

Through the Mattachine Society of Washington, Frank Kameny charted a whole new direction for homophile organizations based on “civil liberties and social action.”

  IT’S THE FINAL HOUR of the year 1966. In L.A.’s Silverlake district, things are hopping at the Black Cat bar. Colored balloons cover the ceiling. Boys dance with boys, the jukebox wails, and a couple of undercover cops play pool over in the corner. Six or seven additional plainclothes officers mill around in theMore

  IN THE YEARS since the Stonewall Rebellion, an event that achieved legendary status almost before it was over, its power as a symbol has continued to rise more or less unabated. Four decades later—after two books, one film, several radio documentaries, countless articles and news stories; after hundreds of gay events and organizations namedMore

DAVID HOCKNEY:  Paper Trails Edited by Shai Baitel SKIRA. 221 pages, $65.   I WELCOME any chance to see artworks by David Hockney, directly or through printed reproductions; but David Hockney: Paper Trails is not what I had hoped for. The book serves as the catalog for the Modern Art Museum Shanghai’s Hockney exhibition, whichMore

Our Evenings is deeply nostalgic, and that is one of its great strengths. It’s by far his most emotional book. The core of the novel is the relationship between mother and son.

Coinciding with the release of Almodóvar’s first English-language film, which recently won Venice’s Golden Lion Award, the 75-year-old director has released a book of stories, translated by Frank Wynne.

CRAZE by Margaret Vandenburg Jaded Ibis Press. 248 pages, $17.99 THE PREFACE to Margaret Vandenburg’s latest novel, Craze, is the opening paragraphs of a 1933 article in the weekly tabloid Broadway Brevities under the headline: “6,000 Crowd Huge Hall as Queer Men and Women Dance at 64th Annual Masquerade.” The article goes on: “Queer peopleMore

Reviews of Song of Myself by Arnie Kantrowitz, Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino, and Invasion of the Daffodils by Dino Enrique Piacentini

The momentum of Fathers and Fugitives is maintained by its elegant prose and intricate plotlines. While the thematic complexity, subtle narrative twists, and provocative imagery produce a challenging narrative, the payoff is well worth the effort.

Love Is a Dangerous Word is both vigorous in its rage and intimate in its approach to what it means to be a queer man of color fighting for the simple right to love.

THE TENDERNESS of Silent Minds is primarily about musical work and its cultural underpinnings, yet it is fragrant with philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum’s appreciation not only for music but also for the joyous gay life of composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, tenor Peter Pears.

Shilts became the first openly gay reporter for a mainstream newspaper, San Francisco Chronicle, and the first to cover the queer community full time, writing three seminal books on the subject.

THE SPRING before Obergefell, poet Ben Grossberg’s debut novel, takes place in the months before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage. This 2015 ruling will have a special resonance for the novel’s protagonist, Mike Breck, a lonely, middle-aged gay man living in small-town America.

SEEING THROUGH is composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s detailed, passionate recollection of his life and career. Discovering opera as a child, Gordon found it a means of escaping a tumultuous home life, which included sexual abuse as well as drug and alcohol addiction, even as he developed an appreciation for beautiful music. In a conversational style,More

Although these memoirs were written over six decades, they read as a seamless recollection of an age and speak to the dread, the joy, and the angst of coming out at a time when doing so could be life-threatening. In our own troubling times, her reflections become all the more germane, reminding us of theMore

RECENTLY SHORTLISTED for the 2024 Booker Prize, The Safekeep may seem at first to be a historical novel about a complicated lesbian relationship. But this debut novel soon evolves into a fraught tale about interpersonal attraction and layers of generational pain based upon deceit.

Dual review of Super Gay Poems:  LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall and Archive of Style:  New and Selected Poems

LOS ANGELES has always been a destination for eccentrics seeking personal transformation. In what other city could a pioneering rocket scientist lead occult rituals, a satanic Hollywood studio secretary publish one of the first lesbian zines, or a communist musicologist forever transform queer identity? A fascinating exhibition, Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and theMore

This movie feels like a journey, even an adventure, not only to a different time and place—into the Amazon, along for a psychedelic trip—but further inward. If each person contains an entire universe, Guadagnino, like [William S.] Burroughs, endeavors to chart a course for the stars, despite the deep holes that await him along theMore

  Livin’ in the Age of Impunity  The proposition that the intensity of a politician’s homophobia rises in direct proportion to the darkness of his desires received a boost soon after Election Day when a mega-MAGA spokesman was arrested on eight counts of possessing child pornography. Jason Yates was the CEO of My Faith Votes,More

Readers' thoughts.

  THIS ENCORE ISSUE takes up the age-old question: when and where did the LGBT movement truly begin? The convention of dating its origins to the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 is all but written in stone by now, but it has not gone unchallenged. This issue brings back eight articles from past issues, sevenMore