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Mary Meigs and Barbara Deming shared a preference for an austere life close to nature, and political involvement based on the principle of nonviolence.

As for [Grant's] relationship with “Randy Scott,” you’ll have to read Eyman’s sensitive if sometimes dark account of Grant to draw your own conclusions. Eyman provides background on the Hollywood studio system and its many players while sounding the depths of Grant’s emotional turmoil. Randolph Scott’s place in the puzzle of Grant’s emotional life isMore

            Samuel Delany’s 1974 novel Dhalgren is described as “psychogeographic.” The novel has a distinct, urban location—Bellona—but it is ultimately impossible to decide whether this peripatetic novel takes place in a dystopian U.S. city or in an incarcerated person’s mind. The answer is: both.

LIBERIAN-BORN Cheryl Dunye grew up in Philadelphia, which is where she began her career as a filmmaker, a term that includes directing, producing, and acting in her films. Her first films were a series of shorts about her experience as a Black lesbian, and they combined documentary and narrative elements in what came to beMore

            Langston Hughes’ name is among the most recognizable in 20th-century American letters. The Harlem Renaissance poet par excellence, Hughes was the writer who brought blues to poetry, the visionary who spoke of knowing “rivers ancient as the world,” the author of the metaphor that gave Lorraine Hansberry’s great play A Raisin in the SunMore

It is unclear exactly where Tiff stands in any canon. But if you love big, well-researched, and more-or-less objectively written biographies—including 112 pages of bibliography, indexes, and family trees—this book could be just what you’re looking for.

STORIES ABOUT GAY history often begin with a bar: the Black Cat in Los Angeles, Stonewall in New York. Equally important, our personal gay stories often begin with the gay bars of our youth. Yet these establishments are vanishing across the country for a variety of reasons, most prominently the rise of hookup apps likeMore

Not quite a coming out story, Antiman is an illuminating “hybrid memoir,” a record of Mohabir’s coming to terms with himself, discovering who he is, and his embrace of multiple communities and cultures. As he writes: “Diaspora is a queer country/ How can you be at once two species from two places?”

            In the end, Medeiros’ story lands on a paradox. We know ourselves to be both unique individuals and utterly interconnected. Who better than identical twins to embody this? Who better than a poet to offer us this truth, and a gay poet at that? Affection and tenderness plunge Self, Divided into the realm ofMore

All the Rage is a memoir for a wide range of readers. Every young person who aspires to be an artist should read it. Anyone who wants to better understand how potentially self-destructive anger can be transformed into art should too. It ought to be required reading for critics and scholars who want to understandMore

FRANCES BINGHAM has written a biography that reads like an Iris Murdoch novel, specifically A Fairly Honourable Defeat. It’s a moving portrait of the life of British poet Valentine Ackland (1906–1969), but it’s also about her longtime companion Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), an accomplished novelist and poet.

Reviews of MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris, A DUTIFUL BOY: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance, BEFORE STONEWALL, THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH, and RELEASED FROM THE WHEEL.

JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995) was one of the most honored and admired American poets of the second half of the 20th century. As Stephen Yenser puts it in the introduction to A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, Merrill was “different from both his debonair contemporaries in the New York School and the more theatrical andMore

THE SACRED BAND is a tourist’s guide to events that took place between 378 and 338 BCE in the location of today’s Greece, but in fact the time period covered includes explanatory material and connective tissue from somewhat earlier times in a region spanning from Sicily to Persia.

            Radiant offers a well-researched account of the scientific and creative processes of two driven experimenters who reached worldwide fame. Marie Curie helped inaugurate the atomic age, with unhappy as well as positive consequences. The institute she founded in Paris is now a research center focused on biophysics, cell biology, and oncology, with an affiliatedMore

Kubrick’s Men doesn’t stoop to psychoanalyzing a director who was far smarter than most of his critics. He simply turns a very keen eye on the photography and the films. As such, this book may be of interest chiefly to Kubrick admirers. But even if Rambuss ends up merely wondering why the homosexuality is there,More

Center Center fabulously combines playfulness and profundity in telling the story of a talented, driven dancer who pursues life to the fullest and repeatedly asks: “Why Not?”

DIRECTED BY Sam Feder, Disclosure is a Netflix original documentary in which notable trans actors, writers, academics, and activists examine the history of trans representation in film and television.

McLane was born in 1944 in Macon, Georgia, but grew up in Wagener, South Carolina, a small town in horsey Aiken County. He was an English major and a member of the Furman Theater Guild. In the decade after he left the college, he forged a minor but significant career for himself in the theater—noMore

THIS IS the unspoken story of the extraordinary relationship between John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), the preeminent portrait artist of high society of his era, and his African-American muse, Thomas McKeller.

WHEN Abstract Expressionism exploded in the 1950s, Edward Melcarth was painting and sculpting construction workers, junkies, and hustlers in an epic style, highly influenced by Renaissance painters like Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto. This link between the past and present was a significant feature of his artistic vision, one that still has a striking effect onMore

Takes on news of the day.

Readers' Thoughts.

SINCE THE TIME of Stonewall, the LGBT+ community has changed in ways that our queer antecedents could not have imagined. We now have multiple resources at our fingertips for figuring out our queer identities and for connecting with a network of people, or even a community, with whom we share a sexual identity. One groupMore

Tim Miller interviews author Steven Reigns.