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Byron went on to have a yearlong affair with a Greek-born French teenager named Nicolo Giraud when he moved to Athens.

BRUCE LABRUCE’S CINEMA occupies a liminal space between haute couture pornography and experimental narrative film. The prolific artist-provocateur is releasing his new book, The Revolution Is My Boyfriend, to coincide with his fifteenth feature film, The Visitor. 

In late 19th-century America, most physicians shared Dr. Monroe’s revulsion at the very idea of same-sex activity, but an enlightened few noted that in Europe things were beginning to change, and they asked their fellow physicians to reconsider their loathing.

It was Evelyn Hooker who pointed out that defining homosexuality as a “mental illness” was based on an untested assumption.

Harry Benjamin spearheaded the medicalization and the legitimization of transgender health care.

Developing the bomb was not the only secret that Schwob was harboring. There was also the matter of his sexuality—something of an open secret.

This memoir is the fourth book from the world’s most famous drag queen, who cemented his celebrity status in the 1990s with his hit single “Supermodel” and now inhabits popular culture with his long-running reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, with its many international spin-offs.

Cynthia Carr’s new, rigorously researched biography Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar traces the short, difficult, and remarkable life of Candy Darling from her early school years through her painful death from leukemia and lymphoma in 1974 at age 29.

HERE ARE three recent titles from among an abundance of new poetry from independent publishers. The variety and mastery of these poets’ distinctly different voices are exhilarating: Our tribe of LGBT poets contains many song languages, and we need their full range.

Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life provides illustrative backstories and perceptive insights into Gunn’s life and work. Nott was a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn (2022) and draws upon that research, along with interviews as well as the artist’s notebooks and diaries, to produce the new biography.

CHARLES BUSCH’S landmark plays for the Theatre-in-Limbo (1984-1991) were the product of a very particular yet short-lived cultural moment, the final flourishing of the Theater of the Ridiculous movement that goes back to the mid-1960s and is most closely associated with Charles Ludlam.

THE ORIGIN STORY for Diarmuid Hester’s Nothing Ever Just Disappears begins in Cambridge, England, when the author had a realization that the queer history of that place was disappearing.

CHANGE by Édouard Louis Translated by John Lambert Farrar, Straus & Giroux 256 pages, $27.   EDOUARD LOUIS’ memoir Changer: Méthode, published in France in 2021, has recently been translated into English by John Lambert under the title Change. The work functions as a sequel to The End of Eddy, Louis’ inaugural autobiographical novel, whichMore

CAMEROONIAN WRITER Musih Tedji Xaviere’s debut novel, These Letters End in Tears, focuses on the illicit love affair between two women who are willing to risk their lives to be together.

Seasons of Love traces the influence of Rent on theatrical productions with LGBT elements since 1996 and on composers such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, who directed Tick, Tick... Boom!, a film about Larson’s efforts to create a musical earlier in his career.

Conversations with Sarah Schulman offers a wide range of opinions and biographical details. The writer discloses important biographical material about the current state of her health and about the influence of such literary legends as Audre Lorde and Grace Paley.

BOOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES are full of coming-of-age books by gay men, but Blessings isn’t your usual novel in that genre—an aspect that’s both appealing and aggravating.

Reviews of the books Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film, Dinner on Monster Island: Essays, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, On Bette Midler: An Opinionated Guide, Imperative to Spare, One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field, and XXX, and the exhibit George PlattMore

Challengers stars Zendaya (already a Gen Z icon because of her role as Rue Bennett on Max’ lurid Euphoria series) as Tashi, Josh O’Connor (a young King Charles III on The Crown) as Patrick, and the lesser-known Mike Faist (a standout in the role of Riff in Spielberg’s West Side Story) as Art.

Each story [in Conversion] is told in stages through the course of the film, which also examines the particular hold of conversion therapy in religious communities and its powerful reach through charismatic male leaders like Alan Chambers and Joe Dallas of Focus on the Family, and McKrae Game of Hope for Wholeness.

AFTER A BRIEF HIATUS, here resumes my annual roundup of some of the films I saw at the Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) in June. While not an LGBT festival, there are always plenty of suitable entries for this magazine. Here are four.

TRANS AND NONBINARY director Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, I Saw the TV Glow, is a disturbing and powerful meditation on queer identity and popular culture.

Brilliant Exiles represents the culmination of years of research and study to restore the suppressed history of America’s female moderns. It belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in the cultural legacy of this period and beyond.

A measure of The Front Runner’s cultural reach is that it has made its way into other works of gay literature. In Tales of the City, author Armistead Maupin credits The Front Runner with starting the craze for wearing running shoes when clubbing.

A pivotal moment in her personal and professional life occurred in 1935, when Gisèle Freund met the feminist writer and publisher Adrienne Monnier at her renowned bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres. 

Takes on news of the day.

Thoughts from our readers.

From the Editor