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While still in college, F. O. Matthiessen met Russell Cheney on a ship coming back from Europe. It was love at first sight—on Matthiessen’s part at least.

Since 1990, the term Two-Spirit has come to mean many things: “LGBT Native Americans”; or those who blend male and female spirits.

WHEN PAUL CADMUS died … there was barely a ripple in the art world. It’s hard to recall that 65 years earlier he had been the enfant terribleof the art world when his painting of frolicking sailors, The Fleet’s In!, caused an epic scandal.

Commander Uliah Levy’s 1842 trial concerned homosexual liaisons among members of his crew and the role of shame in the exposure of the male body.

NINETEEN TWENTY-SIX proved a banner year for Joe Carstairs—yes, she called herself Joe, not Jo—marking her try as a champion speedboat racer and winning the Duke of York trophy, then the most prestigious in speed racing.

WHEN I LECTURE on Herman Melville, I’m usually asked whether he was gay. I answer, probably not. Then I’m asked if he ever had sex with men. I answer, probably, but only when he was young, and only while at sea.

The Fifties does vividly remind us that the brave activists chronicled in this book started out as preternaturally smart, motivated young people with a broad streak of wildcat in them.

Eleven-Inch is ultimately about more than the dame aux camélias world of teenage gay prostitution. It’s also a scathing portrait of the West’s obsession with beauty, money, and the baubles—bling and boys—that money can buy.

Manywhere brings to mind such classic short story collections as Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. However, Thomas delves deeper than loneliness and steers clear of grotesquerie, adding empathy to a narrative mix in which ordinary queer and trans persons work to build fulfilling lives inMore

Shields argues that Raisin in the Sun was so popular to audiences because it was an “old-fashioned” play that dealt with important social issues. Hansberry, however, felt frustrated that so many white critics and audiences missed the main point of the play, which was to challenge class oppression and capitalism. With mini-portraits of the figuresMore

Secret City flips a light switch on, illuminating over six decades and eleven presidential administrations, from Roosevelt to Clinton. What’s shown is an epic story with a cast of thousands—well-known and forgotten, villains and victims. It’s a history of gay Washington, where the fear of blackmail and the rise of a vast national security apparatusMore

The letters show only one side of the relationship (we don’t have Bosie’s replies), but several of them refer to letters that Wilde received from Bosie, among other items. Wilde avoids mentioning his wife and two sons, and even when he refers to “any of them”—other people he knew—there is an implication that Wilde seesMore

Short reviews of the novels 148 Charles Street, The Other Man, and Young Mungo, and Volume 2 of Samuel Delany's Occasional Views.

JOURNALIST Putsata Reang has written a compelling memoir that offers a glimpse into a world that’s not often encountered in LGBT literature.

Toni Mirosevich’s collection Spell Heaven provides just this pleasure: a chance to settle in, walk around, get a sense of all the characters living in this coastal town full of fishermen and sailors, nurses and professors, people in comfortable homes alongside those who are down on their luck.

[In Queer Whispers] Carregal reveals how, after the 1970s, feminism and gay liberation were popularly perceived as a foreign influence and a threat to Ireland’s cultural identity.

In Lote, things are set in motion when Black writer Mathilda Adamarola volunteers to work in the archives of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, which she does in part in order to pursue her rapturous “Transfixions.” Those that capture her imagination are bohemian and queer figures from the 1920s and ‘30s, such as members of theMore

BEST KNOWN for her poetry, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886 –1961) was also a novelist, memoirist, essayist, translator, and famously the lover of one of the richest women in England, Annie Winifred Ellerman (1894–1983), better known as Bryher. H.D. and Bryher were true lovers for over forty years.

THE NAME Siegfried Sassoon may be known to those who follow English poetry or have an interest in the Great War, or who wish to be versed in LGBT culture, but probably not to many others. A new biopic titled Benediction, by gay English director Terence Davies, is the story of Sassoon told as aMore

Though Firebird is set 45 years ago, viewers will realize that the same repressive system is still destroying lives; little has changed. The film focuses less on politics than on how authoritarian regimes impact ordinary people’s lives, crushing love and inflicting pain and suffering on everyone it touches. And yet, ...

Starting out on uncannily similar footing, the two writers are separated by a categorical boundary that keeps them on separate shelves at your local library. Hemingway was a hardboiled novelist and Crane a rhapsodic poet, the former notoriously homophobic, the latter indisputably gay.

The success of James Kirkwood’s novel, P. S. Your Cat Is Dead,was repeated in 1975 by his play of the same title, which quickly became a staple of regional theaters.

I FIRST SAW José Villalobos’ work in Houston at a performance art festival, Experimental Action. His performance, in which he stained a solid white, western-style suit with the vibrant magenta juice of prickly pear cactus fruit, was spellbinding. I continue to be fascinated by his exploration of Southwestern culture, queerness, and masculinity.

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Letters to the Editor

  THE PHRASE “land’s end” has been applied to any number of seaside locales, perhaps most famously to three places in the U.S.: Provincetown, Key West, and San Francisco. The fact that all three are well known as LGBT meccas is surely not a coincidence. There’s something about these hard-to-reach coastal spots that has madeMore

            Now that “Don’t Say Gay” is law in Florida, DeSantis and his cronies are building on their sinister success by banning books. So far they’ve excluded over fifty textbooks that teach math in favor of books from just one company, Accelerated Learning.

  A  PIONEERING gay author of nine novels for adults, young adults, and children, Steve Neil Johnson died in Los Angeles on December 13, 2021, just one day shy of his 65th birthday. Most of his fiction was in the mystery/suspense genre and featured gay male protagonists. He was twice a finalist for the LambdaMore