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Nowadays the way people in the developing world make contact with gay sexual life is through porn and apps like Grindr.

Along with unilateral nuclear disarmament, [Deming] soon added racial equality to her agenda and, by the end of the 1960s, radical feminism and lesbian rights.

[A]s Maria DeGuzmán puts it in jargon-laden prose in her new book, Understanding John Rechy, his “critique of U.S. society and its expectations and delusions [is]achieved through the protagonists’ dissent from compulsory heteronormativity.”

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s work is widely available in its original German and translated into French and Italian. Two of Schwarzenbach’s books, in English translations by Lucy Renner Jones and Isobel Fargo Cole, have been published by Seagull. Her photographs are in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern and in the public domain.

Lemebel’s arc from pariah to celebrated author, embraced by his own people—indeed a queer Chilean folk hero—is unlike any other.

Gad Beck started out as a gay Jewish boy and ended up leading the most successful resistance cell in Nazi Berlin—and he survived the War.

They started to write anonymous pamphlets accusing the Nazi regime of mass murder and demanding its end.

            Aaron Smith is not exactly at the other end of the spectrum, but his work is far more flippant, colloquial, and funny. For example, the title poem, “The Book of Daniel,” refers not to the Bible but to the actor Daniel Craig, with whom the poet is apparently obsessed. Smith’s poems can be veryMore

Reviews of Lot, The Animals at Lockwood Manor, Becoming Man, and Hollywood Chinese.

Set in Provincetown during the height of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s, Later is both a love letter to a place and an elegy for the people lost and for a way of life that can never quite be regained.

Given this relative neglect of his work, Raymond-Jean Frontain’s new book, The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace, is especially welcome. The culmination of many years of study of McNally’s work and of his voluminous papers at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the book offers an insightful assessment of theMore

WHO AMONG US has not wanted to see inside the lives of the most glamorous or intriguing stars of a bygone generation? In Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, Delayed Rays of a Star, we get to know three such stars: Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Anna May Wong. The novel’s first three chapters alternate betweenMore

What makes Carter Sickles’ new novel The Prettiest Star different is that it tells the story not only of Brian, a young man dying from AIDS, but also of his family and the suffering, discrimination, and harassment they went through.

IN What Is the Grass, a dazzling and discursive meditation on Walt Whitman’s poetry, Mark Doty sets out to “see and say” all that his attention is drawn to—both the poetic and the personal—“lifting experience in the direction of another dimension of time, where everything I have loved can be known again, more fully, thatMore

Robbins moved on to dance for the newly formed New York City Ballet, which, under George Balanchine, would soon outstrip the French and Russian schools to become the ballet company of the century. His idea for a contemporary Romeo and Juliet, with Bernstein composing again, opened in 1955 as West Side Story.

            In Toil & Trouble Burroughs writes that he has been a witch since birth and that he inherited his magical talents from his mentally ill mother, someone who has figured prominently in his other books. He doesn’t practice in a coven with other witches but works his magic solo, incanting and occasionally lighting candlesMore

Paul Baker, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University, has made it the focus of two decades of study and promotion. Fabulosa! presents an engaging version of his dissertation (published as Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men in 2002). He easily shifts between the complex linguistic genealogy of Polari and its gay cultural history, focusingMore

FROM THE START, John Giorno wanted two things in life. In 1958, “I was young and beautiful and that got what me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex,” he recounts in his post-humously published book, Great Demon Kings. What we learn early on in this royal paean to the self is thatMore

THE SLYLY TITLED My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a joyful combination of biography and memoir, mixing author Jenn Shapland’s discovery of author Carson McCullers (1917–1967) with her own journey toward embracing her sexuality.

           Released in February, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan tells the story of two young gay men who are determined to defy parental and societal expectations and mold their own happily every afters.

As I write this, the new coronavirus has appeared in all fifty states and around the world. Numbers of cases are rising rapidly in the U.S., but testing continues to be spotty.

  THE 1990s saw a plethora of AIDS-related deaths in the literary community. Many, like Gordon Stewart Anderson (The Toronto You Are Leaving), Allen Barnett (The Body and Its Dangers), and Peter McGehee (Boys Like Us), were young writers just on the verge of realizing their talents, yet already so exceedingly gifted as to leaveMore

  T.J. PARSELL’S NEW FILM Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music opened unofficially with a private screening in Nashville in February, cosponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, Nashville Pride, and WMOT Roots Radio (the largest Americana station in the U.S.). Well before the actual world premiere (and official selection at Frameline), the film project hadMore

As a bilingual Colombian-American immigrant who arrived in Florida in 1966, Manrique’s life as a writer and a gay man during a time of enormous social change has given him a unique and instructive view of the American writing life—American as in all of the Americas.

Takes on news of the day.

Readers thoughts.

AS I WRITE, covid-19 is racing through the U.S. population, with the number of infected climbing exponentially. News about the pandemic is all-consuming, as is its impact on everyday life.