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A national LGBT museum would be a place of remembrance for our struggles to overcome injustices and of celebration for our successes in surmounting them.

Letters to the editor

THIS MAGAZINE would not exist were it not for Ellis L. Phillips III, known to the world as “Larry” but to me as “Lars,” which is how I’ll refer to him here, with your indulgence. It was Lars who recruited me to join an alumni organization and take over the editing of its quarterly newsletter,More

Scientists in Britain have created a machine that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to perform the perfect blow job. The development of “Autoblow” follows the publication of a paper titled “Analysis of Movement in Oral Sex Performed Upon Men,” based on 108 hours of nonstop blow job videos.

IN KEEPING with our annual tradition, we remember some of the many LGBT people who made a difference and who passed away last year. They were artists, writers, activists, educators, and performers whose time on this planet ranged from 41 to 95 years. Unless otherwise noted, all deaths occurred in 2018.

PIERRE LOTI was a 19th-century French writer who was admired by writers as various as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, and Marcel Proust, but is now almost totally forgotten.

  WIDELY REGARDED as the greatest living composer in the American musical theater, Stephen Sondheim has in recent years become very open about being a gay man. While coming to terms with his sexuality was a prolonged process, and his public coming out did not occur until he was nearly seventy, the Sondheim phenomenon onMore

Jim Elledge’s The Boys of Fairy Town brings to life this world in all its multiracial diversity from Chicago’s 1837 incorporation until the 1940s: sometimes hidden in the shadows, but often all the rage and thriving openly.

ACTOR Thom Bierdz’ return to reprise his starring role on the daytime soap opera The Young & the Restless sounds like something out of—well, it sounds like something that could only happen on a daytime soap opera.

BORN IN 1962, Malcom Gregory Scott, is an American writer, activist, and AIDS survivor. As a young man he joined the U.S. Navy, but in 1987 he was discharged for homosexuality. Upon his release, Scott also learned that he tested positive for HIV. A decade later, his battle with AIDS nearly ended his life. Miraculously,More

HOW DID the gay liberation movement of the 1970s evolve into the “LGBTQ” lineup of letters that we have today, and what are the implications for building a movement out of such divergent sexual and gender minorities? I offer here a thumbnail history of this accretion process from Stonewall to today.

Trans marginalization in post-Trump feminism is embedded in the continued use of gender-essentialist rhetoric and symbols. Slogans such as “Pussy Power,” “Pussy Grabs Back,” and the ubiquitous pink pussy hats worn by a large proportion of women attending the [Women’s March on January 21, 2017] centered genitals as the primary symbol of womanhood.

Even before Mineo’s version, Fortune and Men’s Eyes shocked people with its homosexual and prison life content. Young Smitty is sent to prison for a minor crime. His aggressive cellmate Rocky offers an option: basically, submit sexually …

I was able to read David Bottrell’s book – memoir, Working Actor: Breaking In, Making a Living, and Making a Life in the Fabulous Trenches of Show Business – in manuscript, and we had a freewheeling conversation about all things DDB in December.

In Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, we see the artist as vulnerable and self-questioning. For two periods in his life, 1981–’82, and 1988–’89, he ad-libbed into a tape recorder touching on topics such as life in the city versus living close to nature, the distractions that interfere with artistic output,More

ADRIENNE RICH (1929–2012) was a 20th-century poet who wrote essays and criticism with the same ease and effectiveness that she brought to her major craft.

[Dear America] ends—around the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration—with Vargas confessing to feeling “lost and alone.” He wonders if it’s time to return to the Philippines. Despite this gloomy conclusion, Dear America is a story that highlights one man’s courage, honesty, and humanity in the face of an appallingly callous immigration system.

Bledsoe grew up in Portland, Oregon, and now lives with her partner Patricia Mullan in Berkeley Hills, California. A novelist and nonfiction writer, she has been awarded two National Science Foundation fellowships for writers, and her books have been translated into five languages. Exploration and discovery on a personal and global scale mark her work.

Short reviews of Stonewall Strong by John-Manuel Andriote, In Your Hands by Inês Pedrosa, Drag & Draw Andy Warhol by Nina Schleifand, and Andy Warhol, Publisher by Lucy Mulroney.

Ginsberg’s major themes involved madness, homosexuality, drugs, his mother’s mental illness, and his critique of society’s repressive rules and roles. These ideas recur throughout his published works, including his journals. Iron Curtain Journals: January–May 1965.

In I Can’t Date Jesus:, Michael Arceneaux writes about his childhood sexual experiences, his early religious indoctrination, his love for female recording artists (particularly Beyoncé), his struggle to make a living as a writer, coming out, and dating.

Sketchtasy, with its detailed and well-researched descriptions of gay life in Boston twenty years ago, is itself educational, showing younger readers what the city was like before the Internet ruined gay night life.

What’s Left of The Night tells the story of the early years of the poet C. P. Cavafy when he was simply Constantine. Set during three days in Paris in 1897 while Cavafy is traveling with his older brother, it shows him slowly discovering his voice and subject matter while exploring the city and rememberingMore

BASED ON the age of its characters, Last Night in Nuuk falls squarely in the New Adult market, and the novel closely aligns with current trends in that genre.

JODIE McCARTY had been given a life sentence behind bars. But there she was, ready to leave after only eighteen years inside Jaxton Prison, a ticket in her hand, along with $400 borrowed from her twin brothers. Jodi McCarty was going home to West Virginia. So begins Mesha Maren’s novel, Sugar Run.

My Butch Career joins a distinguished list of lesbian herstories that includes Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Lillian Faderman’s Naked in the Promised Land. It is for readers interested in the psychological and cultural challenges for an individual who identifies as a butch lesbian, as well as readers who are interested in lesbian herstory within the greaterMore

Bohemian Rhapsody is essentially a biopic about Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991. In the starring role, Rami Malek (the Emmy-winning star of Mr. Robot) struts about onstage in ballet tights and presents himself, in more ways than one, as the whole package.

The Favourite has many strong suits, the most impressive of which is its ability to cultivate our emotional investment in a group of characters whose motives are largely veiled. The only fully transparent character is Abigail, who declares: “I am on my side. Always.”