Current Issue

            Feet have never really been “just feet”—they’ve always carried more weight than we’ve acknowledged. They exist between movement and stillness, exposure and concealment, reality and fetish. They are our roots, they move us. From pedestal to platform, from marble grain to pixel noise, the image plugs in at the foot—and so do we. SoMore

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE brought disciplined attention and innate æsthetic precision to the photographic process, exploring the kink of leather men engaged in the paraphilias of S/M in a way that led to greater acceptance of sexual experimentation and of photography as a sometimes risqué art form. The avant-garde artist did the seemingly undoable—he flustered right-wing politiciansMore

While Tumblr was many things to many people, smut was undoubtedly a central pillar of this remarkably queer institution.

Queer BDSM didn’t create sacred eroticism from scratch, but it brought it back to life.

  Editor’s Note: The following is by a pair of grant recipients in a program launched in 2022 by The G&LR, the Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to two recipients last year. Awardees are expected to produce an article for the magazine as part of their project, of whichMore

Hirschfeld believed that scientific knowledge would sweep away the ignorance that was the source of racism, homophobia, sexism, and anti-Semitism.

I  MET JACKIE YAMAHIRO in 2005, when I was hired along with my husband, David A. Lee, to write the feature-film adaption of historian Neil Miller’s Sex-Crime Panic. Jackie is a central figure in the award-winning 2002 nonfiction book, which details how twenty innocent gay men were locked up in an Iowa mental hospital inMore

Curated and published by the private Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand in Brazil in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough is a tribute to and compilation of the works of Gran Fury, the artistic collective that was formed in the 1980s adjacent to theMore

Unlocking the Red Closet is, like other books on this subject, a mix of sociological analysis and transcripts of the subjects’ interviews. There is mercifully little jargon, and the monologs are highly theatrical. And they are what make the book.

Brief Reviews of the books It’s Not the End of the World, Bangkok after Dark: Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies, A Most Infamous Young Swindler: The Short Tragic Life of Thomas Langrel Harris, Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color, Twist, and television series ,Monster: The Ed Gein Story,

Wilke is quick to point out that in 19th-century America there was no sense of a “gay identity.” None of the men and women he writes about would have recognized the labels that would come later.

In The Long Beach Gay Trials, author Gerrie Schipske presents a narrative peppered with newspaper clippings, court records, archival material, and photographs.

BRYAN WASHINGTON’S latest novel, Palaver, is a quietly powerful story about the complexities of relating to family and friends.

LANA LIN both critiques and expands the range of Gertrude Stein with The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam. Taking as a model Stein’s 1933 classic The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which blurred the line between portrait and self-portrait, Lin narrates her story from the perspective of partner H. Lan Thao Lam.

NOTHING CONVEYS the brutality and loss of war more than a child’s perspective. Sam Wachman’s The Sunflower Boys captures the enduring nature of love and forgiveness in the face of abysmal grief, along with the confusion and fear of war. The book is a present-day novel of coming-of-age for two Ukrainian boys in love whoMore

Objects of Desire is a meditation on the conflict between love and fame and the extraordinary lengths to which we will go in pursuit of them.

THIS IS THE BOOK on biology that you wish you could have read in high school. In the introduction to Sex Is a Spectrum, author Agustín Fuentes invites the reader to imagine being a fish called the bluehead wrasse, living off the coast of Florida.

In 2024, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateau-briand presented Opie’s first solo exhibition in Brazil, titled Genre/Gender/Portraiture, as part of a year devoted to queer histories, including the work of Francis Bacon and the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury.

ONE OF THE VIRTUES of having a poet’s œuvre encapsulated in a volume of selected poems is the opportunity it affords not only to evaluate their output but also to see how certain themes have developed over time. Elaine Sexton writes beautifully crafted and understated poems whose concerns appear to be remarkably consistent across moreMore

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN in Danish and published five years ago, My Seven Mothers is a memoir that’s also a historical account of events in the Danish women’s movement between 1970 and 1976.

Swenson’s lesbianism is at the heart of Margaret A. Brucia’s new biography, The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life. Making use of the poet’s extensive diaries, correspondence, autobiographical pieces, and interviews, Brucia has written what is, according to Paul Crumbley and David Hoak, two Swenson scholars who contributed a foreword to the book,More

FIFTY YEARS was a long time ago, but if Benito Skinner’s video series Overcompensating is any indication, the psychic lives of gay men in their twenties remain largely unchanged today.

From the start, the film maintains a tone of emotional austerity, as an early voiceover by Chris Cooper, speaking as the much older Lionel, retrospectively identifies himself as a country boy raised on a Kentucky farm. He explains how his musical and vocal precocity sent him in 1917 to the New England Conservatory of MusicMore

A  SKINNY YOUNG MAN stands with his back to you, hands on his cocked hips. He’s wearing only briefs, socks, and sneakers. His sneakers look a little grungy. His underwear is a little baggy in the seat. Your eye goes right to that gap by the leg hole—and your mind is flooded with erotic possibilities.More

IN THE FALL OF 2025, the New York stage offered three separate productions featuring the word “faggot” in their title. Most prominent was Jordan Tannahill’s play Prince Faggot, directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in the summer and returned for a limited off-Broadway engagement later in the year. The central narrativeMore

An interview with Michael Schreiber by Chris Freeman

  More on the Origins  of “Gay” To the Editor:             I enjoyed Hugh Hagius’ essay on the lexicon of homosexuality [Nov.-Dec. 2025]. Perhaps I can add a bit of history to “gay.”             As Mr. Hagius noted, the word had been adopted by the community by the 1930s. But it was still something ofMore

  THIS ISSUE marks a bit of a departure for The G&LR, as we crack open the bedroom door to explore the practices and paraphilias that interest or obsess some LGBT people, and the roots of their appeal. Several feature articles delve deeply into why certain kinks turn (some of) us on, and whether weMore

OVER TWO DAYS in November 1938, the Nazi Party and its allies orchestrated pogroms, attacking, arresting, and killing Jews; ransacking Jewish-owned stores; and burning synagogues across Germany. Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” is often cited as the beginning of the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews, including almost all my parents’ relatives.

IN KEEPING with tradition, we take time to remember a few of the notable LGBT people who died during the previous year.  

Poems by Joe Bishop, Nick Galinaitis,and Robert McDonald