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Queer people in red states are agents of change. They are in the trenches of the culture wars with the battle scars to prove it. For decades, LGBT people in Utah fought to make visible what the conservative culture hoped to exterminate. Utah has long been a place for “alternative lifestyles” where the resilient andMore

  THE PROSPER ACT—a bill that would drastically alter several areas of higher education law—could come up for a vote in the House of Representatives in the very near future. While it hasn’t been widely discussed amid the chaos in Washington, it needs to be better understand so that its potentially devastaing impact becomes moreMore

Queer people in red states are agents of change. They are in the trenches of the culture wars with the battle scars to prove it. For decades, LGBT people in Utah fought to make visible what the conservative culture hoped to exterminate. Utah has long been a place for “alternative lifestyles” where the resilient andMore

  THE PROSPER ACT—a bill that would drastically alter several areas of higher education law—could come up for a vote in the House of Representatives in the very near future. While it hasn’t been widely discussed amid the chaos in Washington, it needs to be better understand so that its potentially devastaing impact becomes moreMore

The strength of The Children of Harvey Milk is the very detailed stories of legislators in the North Atlantic world whom Reynolds interviewed, often providing us with more detail than a reader can assimilate.

Readers’ thoughts.

Was there ever any doubt about the nature of Bert and Ernie’s relationship on Sesame Street? If so, it was pretty well dispelled when a former writer for the show, Mark Saltzman, disclosed that the two are “a loving couple” based upon Saltzman’s own relationship with his partner Arnold Glassman.

    WHILE sorting a box of donated books for a prison class I was teaching, I noticed that the cover art on a decades-old book was the work of famed fantasy and science fiction artist Frank Frazetta. The cover featured nearly naked muscular men in a variety of poses that suggested—to my “homoerotic mind”—homoerotism.More

What was not publicly known during Matthiessen’s lifetime was that he was a gay man, involved in a relationship that looked a lot like a marriage—in everything but name and legal rights—with the American Impressionist painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945).

A former lecturer at Yale, [Amy] Bloom is currently the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University. The interview was conducted by phone last July, with an e-mail follow-up.

  FOR THOSE INTERESTED in tracing the origins of homosexual relations in history, or in the literary history of the West, it is customary to begin with the ancient Athenians in Greece’s Golden Age. However, it is possible to go back quite a bit further in time, to the epoch in which writing itself began,More

TO BEGIN somewhere in the middle of this stretch of time, in medieval England, we home in on an icon of heroic manhood, King Richard the Lionheart. Long before he gained this epithet, Richard was the intimate boyhood friend of Prince Philip II of France, and their special fondness for each other carried over intoMore

ust when you thought you knew everything about the life of Oscar Wilde, there’s more. Making Oscar Wilde turns out to be not just about Wilde, however; it’s about the U.S. at a time when when P. T. Barnum was drawing them in with exhibits like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” minstrel shows were exceedinglyMore

  Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage by Gillian M. Rodger U. of Illinois Press. 242 pages, $28.   MELISSA MCCARTHY’S Saturday Night Live impression of Sean Spicer (the Trump administration’s first press secretary) was sidesplittingly funny not only because of her incomparable physical comedy, but also thanks to maleMore

  THE SOAP OPERA, that quintessentially American genre, has been a fixture of popular culture since the early days of radio. As such, the soaps have played an important role in reinforcing and to some extent in shaping American cultural mores and norms governing relationships within families, among friends, and especially between lovers and spouses.More

Book reviews of Read by Strangers: Stories, She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak, Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition, The Great Believers, and Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940; and the movie Juliet, Naked.

These two books are not the place where someone unfamilar with Warhol’s œuvre should dive in. Flatley’s prose can sometimes lapse into postmodernist verbosity and opaqueness, a scholarly idiom that this reader found at time impossible to penetrate. Nevertheless, each essay makes a serious and valuable contribution to Warhol studies. The illustrations alone are wellMore

THE OTHER DAY is a play that grows on you—in a good way. This bare-bones production staged at the Theater at the 14th Street Y begins with two men dawdling after a meeting of their twelve-step program.

Juke-box musicals such as Carole King’s Beautiful, ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, and the Four Seasons’ Jersey Boys don’t always have to make sense if the music and staging are truly spectacular. After the Chicago tryout, the creative team behind The Cher Show have their work cut out for them to shape-shift this vehicle into true fabulousnessMore

THE OTHER DAY is a play that grows on you—in a good way. This bare-bones production staged at the Theater at the 14th Street Y begins with two men dawdling after a meeting of their twelve-step program.

Juke-box musicals such as Carole King’s Beautiful, ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, and the Four Seasons’ Jersey Boys don’t always have to make sense if the music and staging are truly spectacular. After the Chicago tryout, the creative team behind The Cher Show have their work cut out for them to shape-shift this vehicle into true fabulousnessMore

Juke-box musicals such as Carole King’s Beautiful, ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, and the Four Seasons’ Jersey Boys don’t always have to make sense if the music and staging are truly spectacular. After the Chicago tryout, the creative team behind The Cher Show have their work cut out for them to shape-shift this vehicle into true fabulousnessMore