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THE FIRST GATHERING to discuss The Homosexual Matrix, which was held on February 2, 1976, was a good deal less fraught than my confrontation with Arno Karlen, though hardly a love fest. Over a five-hour period, most of the hot-button topics relating to sexuality came up for discussion, sometimes in heated exchanges.

A version of this article previously appeared in Physique Pictorial. The author is grateful to Tom DeSimone for his informative discussions of this early period of gay film history.

The G&LR talks with the author of Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography Jeffrey Escoffier.

    FOLLOWING RAINBOWS The Fast Times and Fleeting Fames in Gay Bangkok’s Boy Soi by Mike Maloney Independently published 150 pages, $9.99   CHOOSING TO BE GAY One Man’s Improbable Path from Living Straight to Loving Gay by Mike Maloney Kindle/Direct Publishing 150 pages, $16.     MOST GAY PEOPLE, when they discover the gayMore

MOST READERS of these pages will probably identify James Ivory as the director of those sumptuous film adaptations of E. M. Forster’s novels—Maurice, Howards End, A Room with a View. Some readers will also know that Ivory formed a decades-long personal and professional partnership with the Indian producer Ismail Merchant to make those films. YetMore

IN KEEPING WITH our annual custom, we remember some people who left us during the past year—activists, writers, performers, educators, and artists who made a significant contribution to the LGBT community. They left this mortal coil at ages ranging from 28 to 94. All dates are in 2021 unless otherwise indicated.

A   LOVE TRIANGLE involving a policeman, his male lover, and the lover’s wife is the subject of Bethan Roberts’ new novel My Policeman. Set in 1950s England, the story was inspired by novelist E. M. Forster’s long-term relationship with policeman Bob Buckingham and his wife May. The novel is currently being made into a majorMore

            This story is told from the point of view of Fitzgerald’s original supporting character, Jordan Baker, who is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese-American protagonist taking on the American Dream and all its glittering quirks and failures.

            Wilkinson’s book is about his search for his father and, by extension, his roots and his identity. There was a great-grandfather who hailed from the Canary Islands and stowed away on a ship bound for Uruguay. But even this flimsy fact is cause for disappointment: “No one in my family now knows or caresMore

BRANDON TAYLOR’S second book, Filthy Animals, is a collection of short stories alternating between connected and stand-alone tales. The linked ones tell the story of Lionel, a Black graduate student in mathematics, and his evolving relationship with a white couple, Charles and Sophie, both dancers.

            In its most basic form, sexual racism is rejecting sex with another person based on race or race-based fetishizing and objectification. According to C. Winter Han, associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College and author of Racial Erotics, the problem is larger than just who desires whom as a sex partner.

            Author E. J. Levy, who holds a history degree from Yale, is especially good at detailing the particulars associated with that world and period. This research is often illuminating, as when the narrator explains that Barry could have neither attended Oxford or Cambridge nor held public office, because the Test Act barred Catholics fromMore

REFERENCES to extreme weather appear often in this era of climate change, even in the most unlikely contexts. Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost combines the personal with the universal, and the images of permanent ice and other transparent substances operate on several levels.

Reviews of THE ISOLATION ARTIST: Scandal, Deception and the Last Days of Robert Indiana; HE AUDACITY OF A KISS Love, Art, and Liberation; and EDGEMERE.

            Bolla picks up other thematic strands from Statovci’s earlier works. In it, as in Crossing, he explores the aftereffects of a brief but intense relationship. Bolla, too, is characterized throughout by an atmosphere of oppressiveness, with sharp, unrelenting depictions of both sociopolitical and psychological horrors and the devastation that sits at the intersection ofMore

THOSE OF US with both homosexual and leftist tendencies have always been a little squeamish about examining the relationship between the two, flinching when we remember the Communist party line on homosexuality as bourgeois decadence. But in Love’s Next Meeting, Aaron Lecklider tackles this aspect of American history and untangles a complicated story through sometimesMore

BILLED as a “memoir” in the subtitle, Punch Me Up to the Gods has the artful structure of a novel. Author Brian Broome begins with the book’s framing narrative: A gay Black man recounts his bus ride through modern-day Pittsburgh.

“SURVEILLANCE STATE masculinity” is Christopher Elias’ term for the toxic brew of national security hyper-vigilance and a new concept of masculinity that “saddled men with endless anxiety” that emerged in the “Red Scare” decade, the 1950s. Elias’ Gossip Men is a deeply researched sociological examination of this uniquely American phenomenon as told through the intertwinedMore

            The essays in Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh look at the novelist’s creative incubation from idiosyncratic angles. They describe Cather’s work, connections, and ambitions as a young adult, and several neatly assess characters in her early fiction who disdain heteronormative expectations. The book’s notes are useful, though a brief chronology might make it easier to navigateMore

IN JANUARY, singer-songwriter Janis Ian releases what she calls her “swan song” album, The Light at the End of the Line (Rude Girl Records). With nine Grammy nominations and two wins, the singer at age seventy has nothing left to prove, but she delivers an astoundingly resonant collection, her first full album in fifteen years.

            Released in 1969, the year of the Stonewall Riots, and garnering considerable attention in the media and recognition from the major film award organizations, Midnight Cowboy was a remarkable achievement for its time.

            Why was I so moved at the end of Maurice? I may never have watched an LGBT-themed movie or read a book with gay protagonists, but I had seen queer characters in media before. The names and faces changed but the story remained the same ...

THE “FEMME FATALE” gained a popular foothold in the detective fiction of the 1930s and then, even more visibly, in the great films noir of the 1940s and ’50s. In these narratives, the femme fatale often seizes command of the straight male gaze and harnesses it to her own purposes, her own pursuit of power.More

Takes on news of the day.

Readers' thoughts.

THIS ISSUE’S THEME has a subtitle: “The postwar origins of LGBT sex culture.” The “sexual awakenings” of the title are ones that began to stir after World War II and culminated in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. It’s true that everyone woke up to sex in a new way in this eraMore

DURING the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the Third Committee adopted the resolution “Strengthening the role of the United Nations in the promotion of democratization and enhancing periodic and genuine elections,” which included an explicit reference to sexual orientation and gender identity. This is only the second UNGA resolution that explicitlyMore