Current Issue

Colin Carman converses with the author of Cleavage

The Nazi Movement can teach us a lot about social progress and queer history. Here are nine lessons from the Weimar era that may be applicable to our own time.

What emerges when one examines queer life in postwar Germany is a climate in which political, legal, and social freedoms periodically increased and then shrank back.

Will the current moral panic over gender identity and transgender rights follow a trajectory similar to that of the Lavender Scare?

How did the trans community get here? An atmosphere of dissatisfaction looms over the transgender public as liberal politicians continuously fail to improve their situations. Many trans people feel abandoned by and alienated from mainstream liberal politics.

Efforts of resistance, while still limited, are expanding as more people (such as readers of this article) become aware of what is taking place. These efforts show a growing realization that the removal of inclusive literature is both a First Amendment issue and a human rights issue.

Larry Carver’s Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure is the fifth full-length monograph on Rochester to appear in the past fifty years, and the first to treat The Farce of Sodom as a pivotal work in Rochester’s development as a poet and satirist rather than as a piece of cheap pornography.

“THIS IS A BOOK about a staircase and the men who lived on it.” Thus Simon Goldhill begins his alternative history of Cambridge University. The staircase is located in the Gibbs Building, a beautiful 18th-century structure where the teachers and students of King’s College have lived and learned together for centuries.

Organized in six parts, Black Panther Woman contains many revelations. Besides describing Huggins’s family background, the first part details her rejection of her mother’s Old Testament Christianity and the early self-protective thought practices she developed to cope with her father’s physically abusive behavior.

Elias commissioned essays from nineteen artists, critics, writers, and scholars for Speculative Light, including Baldwin biographers Nicholas Boggs, Robert Reid-Pharr, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Leeming.

BY WAY OF the complicated life of poet Countée Cullen and the influence of the Harlem Renaissance, an autobiographical meditation emerges from Kevin Brown’s combination of family recollections and literary essays: Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History. This engaging narrative, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, is structured in 24 essays thatMore

In Spent, her fifth semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Bechdel has a successful TV series based on her previous graphic novel Death and Taxidermy, which is streaming on Schmamazon (after Amazon, of course).

IN It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the  Time, veteran comedy writer Bruce Vilanch shares stories of a life spent crafting legendarily campy TV shows and other media projects, giving details of his involvement and the stars and creative teams he worked with. He wrote for many types of shows, from variety TV toMore

Reviews of the books Red Hot + Blue, by John Garrison, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 by Thomas Mallon, and Nonbinary Jane Austen; and the movie, Clean Slate

In Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, editor Daniel Kane, an American literature professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, compiles a collection of Brainard’s undated letters to various friends and lovers.

IN The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf, Kaila Adia Story makes a compelling case for recognizing the continuing racism, classism, transphobia, and sexism in today’s queer communities, a legacy of the limited “gay rights” movement that gathered strength after the Stonewall Riots of June 1969.

BRUCE SPANG’S latest novel, River Crossed, is a long and somewhat convoluted coming-out story set in the mid- to late 1970s in West Virginia.

Walk Like a Girl is an unflinchingly honest account of a life lived precariously, never accepted fully in any circle he moves in. His acknowledgement that even fashion design is political, his clear-sighted awareness of his own complicity in some systems of oppression, and his conscious attempts to challenge those systems makes this a memoirMore

THE SUBTITLE of Fierce Desiresannounces an ambitious agenda: “A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” hinting at a challenge to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s influential book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, first published in 1988 (with subsequent editions in 1998 and 2012), which conceptualizes American sexuality as the historical developmentMore

Reviews of the movies: Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, The Wedding Banquet, The Rebrand, I’m Your Venus, and Heightened Scrutiny

A NICE INDIAN BOY is an exuberant film as well as a touching celebration of unconventional romantic love defying expectations. Director Roshan Sethi’s film also touches upon issues of family loyalty, cultural misunderstanding, and intergenerational conflict.

WHILE DELVING into the Berg Collection archive at the New York Public Library, I recently unearthed a postcard sent in 1962 by a professor at the Pennsylvania college I attended. The card was addressed to William S. Burroughs, an old Harvard buddy of his then living temporarily in Paris. Burroughs, it will be remembered, wasMore

WHEN L. FRANK BAUM began writing his tales of Oz at the end of the 19th century, he could not have foreseen their endurance in popular culture well into the 21st. In addition to The Wizard of Oz and Wicked on screen and on stage, Baum’s characters have been re-imagined into many literary works, includingMore

  The Big Guns  It took a series of improbable connections, but somehow a gay American porn star has become a symbol of resistance for Ukrainians in their war with Russia. It happened in the city of Kursk in a contested region of western Ukraine that’s currently controlled by Russia, which decided to install aMore

  BY “THE SITUATION” we* have in mind the current state of American politics and LGBT rights. But because things are changing so rapidly, and because this is a bimonthly magazine, we cannot hope to provide an up-to-date analysis of “the situation” as it tumbles out of one man’s head (or so it seems). WhatMore

At the Publishing Triangle Awards ceremony on April 17 at the New School in New York City, writer and editor David Groff, a cofounder of the group, received the Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award. Below are excerpts from his speech accepting the award.

LET ME BEGIN this informal survey of reactions in Scandinavia to the Trump presidency with salient developments relevant to this region’s LGBT people. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has been accompanied by a litany of executive actions that have changed the course of world politics.