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LET ME step in as your editor to fill a lacuna that I perceive in an issue devoted to “alternative sexualities,” to wit, something on polyamory, which has been variously described as a sexual orientation, a lifestyle, and a movement.

What my colleagues and I are addressing in our research and practice are what can be seen as alternative sexualities that go beyond the standard monosexualities of homo- and heterosexual, i.e., the romantic and/or sexual attraction to one sex or gender. These alternative categories can include behaviors, identities, and communities that stand in contrast to,More

Neopronouns are new coinages that were created as an alternative to “they.” Some of them go back further than you might guess, and new ones have cropped up over the years.

Not all straight women who visit same-sex porn sites are feasting their eyes on handsome hunks; sometimes they’re there for woman-on-woman action. Reports journalist Haley Swanson: “According to 2018 user data from Porn Hub, ‘lesbian’ was the number one used search term for female-identifying users.” James Besanvalle writes that a 2014 Pornhub study “found womenMore

Remember the days when homosexuality was considered abnormal? Now it’s solosexuality that’s challenging what’s normal sexuality for an adult.

            Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan was a comprehensive retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum, curated by Joel Smith, the institution’s groundbreaking first curator of photography. Michals’ photography epitomizes the conceptualist method—narrative and performed, illusionistic and dreamlike.

            A letter from Mrs. Smith closes the collection, like a Greek chorus commenting on the tragedy. “I am glad you agree with me that we must not grieve for our friend,” she writes to Porter’s friend Jean Howard after he died in 1964, “for he will never have to suffer again. This is theMore

Noted back-country climber David Oates is perhaps best known for Paradise Wild, his manifesto on the way humans fit into the natural world. In that book and in The Mountains of Paris, a recurring theme is his upbringing in a conservative religious household (“I am the gay son they never wanted”).

            What makes this memoir special to some reviewers is that it is a creative nonfiction memoir that involves two women. In it, the narrator recounts her infatuation as a graduate student with an unnamed woman she meets at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In the Dream House is a phantasmagoria of Machado’s feelings about anMore

  How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones Simon & Schuster. 193 pages, $26.     HOW WE FIGHT for Our Lives is a deeply compelling and personal memoir about growing up black and gay in a world where being either can be challenging, and the combination can be deadly. Saeed Jones, authorMore

            Another important moment in the book comes in a coda that ties up many loose strings, even as it leaves a big one dangling in the form of a last-minute character who hasn’t been present but who seems, in retrospect, to have haunted the story unseen. Just what this character has been up toMore

SET in Communist-era Poland in 1980, Tomasz Jedrowski’s first novel, Swimming in the Dark, is a compelling and tragic story in which two young men fall passionately in love.

IN 1977, the year in which Carolina De Robertis’ novel, Cantoras, opens, Cabo Polonio was a remote fishing village, a rocky yet serene outcropping on the coast of Uruguay. When the novel begins, its five main characters—Romina, Flaca, Paz, Malena, and Anita a.k.a. La Venus—arrive at the village late at night, having endured a five-hour-longMore

ON MAY 25, 1959, Joseph Caldwell was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn on his way to his tenement apartment in lower Manhattan. So begins his memoir In the Shadow of the Bridge.

JAMIE ANDERSON’S An Army of Lovers is a pre-digested compilation of material that would be hard to find in any other single place.

JEANETTE WINTERSON’S latest novel raises two basic questions: What does it mean to be human? And what are the limits of reaching for immortality?

South American Journals, edited by Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher, is one of those big important historical documents. Scholars of the Beats and lovers of Ginsberg will find much rich ore to mine here for years to come.

            “The Decay of Lying” was as much a critique of the realism of Victorian literature as it was an argument for the pleasure of artifice in art. For Vivian, the beauty of artifice was precisely what gave art its power. But what of the artist himself? What becomes of literary forgeries, imitations, and outrightMore

THE CENTRAL THESIS of Public City/Public Sex is an interesting and original one. Andrew Israel Ross argues that the attention to and interdiction of men seeking sex with other men in 19th-century Paris …

            Moser is the most damning of Sontag with respect to her insistent avoidance or denial of her sexual orientation. As the author of Notes on Camp (1964), she displayed an intimate knowledge of gay life that no heterosexual at this time is likely to have had. Later on, although her lesbian affairs were anMore

            Greenwell’s prose shines and shimmers with each page turn. His narrator’s first-person exposition reveals personality via off-handed comments about third parties and their reactions.

            My research has turned up the fact that a number of paintings are of Rhode Islanders from past centuries. One striking example is an oil portrait of Christiana Carteaux Bannister painted by her husband, Edward Mitchell Bannister, in 1860. Carteaux Bannister was an abolitionist and a successful businesswoman who was part African-American and partMore

            The irony and the misfortune is that Rock Hudson himself needed saving. As Hollywood’s premier box office draw, the revelation that he was gay would have cost the studios millions of dollars. Women would have been distraught. Some men may have gloated, while others would have been crestfallen. Everybody would have been disgusted inMore

            My hope is that what I set forth in this essay does not question the raison-d’être of the LGBT community nor feed the vanity of whoever proudly and surely naïvely identifies as “straight.” What I propose is the last of the labels: autosexuality. And what I attempt to do is shake the very foundationMore

FIFTY YEARS AGO, Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind hit the bookstore shelves. The novel, Merrick’s fifth, set forth the romantic relationship between Charlie Mills, a dashing Ivy-educated actor, and Peter Martin, a sensitive beauty destined for West Point. Although it was published in hardcover with an innocuous cover, the novel was boldly advertised inMore

Takes on news of the day.

Thoughts from our readers.

  THIS ISSUE’S THEME refers to sexual orientations that are not generally covered in this magazine, whose style manual recommends the use of “LGBT,” but the phrase could also extend to any sexual orientation that isn’t covered in the pileup of letters that appear in many other publications, with “LGBTTQQIAAP” a popular standard. Doubtless moreMore

THE LEGENDARY FEMINIST Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) is too often the silenced queer elephant in the room of U.S. history. As we observe the 200th anniversary of her birth, which was on February 15th, it’s important to ask ourselves whether we as a society are finally willing to see her not only as a heroicMore

            What did Mao achieve by pulling puppet-strings to unleash this chaos? His class foes both real and imagined lost their jobs and some, their lives. Score one goal for Mao. A more sinister outcome of the Cultural Revolution was wreckage to Chinese people’s behavior. To locate a fresh “enemy” was to earn glory.

Playing in two parts that run to nearly seven hours, and the fact that it explores the impact of AIDS on the lives of gay men in America, The Inheritance inevitably invites comparison with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.