Georges Eekhoud’s Forbidden Foray Essays, Features
By Michael Rosenfeld: Eekhoud’s reputation as a defender of same-sex love was firmly established after his acquittal in 1900 and he created a network of European queer intellectuals that included Oscar Wilde, Magnus Hirschfeld, André Gide, Edward Carpenter, Rachilde, Jacob Israël de Haan, Eugen Wilhelm, Karl von Levetzow, Elisàr von Kupffer, and others. Together, theyMore
An Artist Who Survived the Holocaust Essays, Features
According to official records, Gertrude Sandmann no longer existed in 1943. Other Jews had fled or been murdered, but she was still alive in Berlin.
Prison and Privilege Essays, Features
The phrase “gay privilege” may conjure images of velvet mafiosi clinking glasses at a bisexual billionaire’s swank Hampton digs, but I came to know an extremely specific and rare manifestation of it at the worst moment of my life. It was right after I had been arrested. A
Gay Assimilation, Chinese Style Essays, Features
SEXUALITY and the Rise of China, by Travis S. K. Kong, reminds me of two books that I reviewed in these pages in 2015: Petrus Liu’s Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, and Tiantian Zheng’s Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China. Like the latter, it is based on interviews—in Kong’s case, with ninetyMore
The Sweat of Vile Bodies Essays, Features
For men, the benefits of entering a celibate community are less clear—unless the men were reluctant to engage in vaginal sex in the first place. Some Shaker men could not separate the idea of sex from sin and were willing to live apart from their wives in return for the promise of a heavenly reward.More
Loving Fassbinder Essays, Features, Film
While he had made a couple of earlier short films, Fassbinder didn’t get to direct his first feature film until 1969. The film was Love Is Colder Than Death, a gangster movie that imitates similar films from Hollywood from the 1930s up to the 1950s, starring himself as a criminal torn between his love forMore
Somerset Maugham Does Penang Book Review
In The House of Doors, Tan skillfully mirrors that competent, lucid style. There are no frilly flights of descriptive prose, no subplots, no psychological probing, no distractions from the rather simple plot: A famous writer travels to an exotic land to collect tales from the natives and writes a collection of six stories that tellMore
Broadway Unbound Book Review, Theatre
Books under review: Gays on Broadway by Ethan Mordden, and Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre by Kelly Kessler.
H.D.: Everything All at Once Book Review, Lesbians
Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Charles Doolittle, a math and astronomy professor at Lehigh University, and Helen Wolle Doolittle, a painter and musician. Charles Doolittle was a widower who brought two sons into the household. In addition to these half-siblings, Hilda had three brothers. She enjoyed a happy childhood and loved theMore
Get to Know Charles Causley Book Review, Poetry
For in this quiet novel (Mother's Boy) — and Gale’s fiction grows quieter and quieter, so even a bomb blast is muffled—Gale refuses to judge his characters. I sense that this is from a genuine generosity of spirit, a desire to allow the characters time to develop on their own. Quietly we learn that toMore
Who’s Afraid of John Ashbery? Book Review, Poetry
POET JOHN ASHBERY (1927-2017) is described by Jess Cotton in Critical Lives as “at once notorious and celebrated” owing to the perceived difficulty of his work. Cotton’s short but thorough explication of Ashbery’s life and work does a fine job of placing him both as a 20th-century poet and as a leading figure among gayMore
Revisiting Past Selves Book Review, Lesbians, Memoir
[McKenzie] Wark’s latest memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death, returns to letter-writing as a way of revisiting past lovers and past friends, and those who fall somewhere in between. She turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hindsight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, pastMore
As Sitcom Goes, So Goes the Nation Book Review, Television Show
Hi Honey, I’m Homo offers a fast-paced sweep across LGBT representations over time. They’re important because the media play such an important role in defining what’s normative and what’s cool. “Television isn’t just a piece of furniture to watch,” writes Baume, “it’s a conversation, a tool, a weapon, a war, a party, an instrument, andMore
Short Reviews Book Review, Briefs, Film, Television Show
Reviews of Queer Heroes of Myth and Legend: A Celebration of Gay Gods, Sapphic Saints, and Queerness Through the Ages, Spring in Siberia, A Novel, Movies that Made Me Gay, Who Does that Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, and The Queer Film Guide.
Something Truman Capote Might Say Book Review
Such Good Friends is highly readable. Truman Capote is the beating heart of this novel. As the decades roll on, it has become increasingly apparent—and ironic, after all the newsprint and media noise about Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Eugene O’Neill, and Arthur Miller—that midcentury American literature belongs to three gay men: W. H.More
A Novel for a Plot Book Review
In Patrick E. Horrigan’s American Scholar, questions are raised and addressed in a narrative about James Fitzgerald, called “Jimmy” in his youth. The reader first meets him in 2016, when he is unwilling to dispose of twelve storage boxes that contain “all that is left” of the life he had with Gregory in the 1980s.More
Yazidi Nation Book Review
RONYA OTHMANN’S debut novel, The Summers, begins with a reversal. At the end of the prefatory chapter, the main character, Leyla Hassan, seems to be speaking for the author as she muses: “You always tell a story from its end. ... Even if you start with the beginning.” In this way, Othmann announces a departureMore
Sex Variants Author Revealed Book Review
BLACKOUTS is an unusual novel, blending fact with fiction, a loose sequel to author Justin Torres’ debut novel We the Animals. The narrator, a young man of Puerto Rican descent who spent time in a mental ward as a teenager, travels to a mysterious building known as the Palace out in the desert. There, heMore
Anne Lister’s First Love Book Review
IN PROSE both tender and assured, Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue delivers a historical novel that transforms a remote historical episode—a lesbian love affair between adolescents at a British boarding school in 1805—into a universal tale. Learned by Heart explores the evolving psyches of its two main characters as they go against the grain of socialMore
Who Is Amy Schneider? Book Review, Television Show, Transgender
IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life by Amy Schneider Avid Reader Press, 288 pages, $28. IF YOU’RE A FAN of the TV game show Jeopardy!, then you’re probably familiar with the incredible Amy Schneider. As one of the first openly transgender contestants on the show,More
The Wages of Narcissism Film, Reviews
LIKE PASSAGES, Ira Sachs’ latest film, his 2014 film Love Is Strange had a gay couple at its center. But while the earlier film featured a longtime pair of sympathetic aging men (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) living apart under forced economic circumstances, Passages focuses on two thirty-something married artists who prosper on the culturalMore
BY DAY, the pseudonymous Jennie June lived a respectable, middle-class life in early 20th-century New York. By night, he traipsed through the shadows of working-class communities as a woman, cruising soldiers and other trade. If he’d been born a century later, he might have seen himself as a trans woman or nonbinary person, but inMore
The French Lieutenant-Colonel’s Men Art Memo, Memoir
Maumort is not so much a novel as a fictionalized memoir—at least in its present state. Du Gard changed his mind several times while writing it regarding how exactly to tell the story; more on that later. What surprised me the most was a) how little known it is today, and b) how incredibly frank andMore