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Peter Tatchell is the doyen of the LGBT rights movement in the UK. Since his arrival in England (from Australia) in 1971, he has been instrumental in founding and energizing a number of key organizations, including Britain’s Gay Liberation Front and OutRage!

John Fryer as “Dr. Henry Anonymous,” wearing a mask, started by stating that he as psychiatrist, a member of the APA, and a homosexual.

This essay first appeared online to mark the 2021 BFI Flare premiere of Rebel Dykes. It is part of Culture Club, a community publishing venture from the queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes.

The Communist Party USA was for most of its history culturally conservative. Socialism has been far more welcoming.

The image that’s etched in most of our minds is Fierstein in full drag belting “I am what I am” in La Cages aux Folles.

As the Empire swelled and the enthusiasm for sports and bodybuilding spread, military and athletic prowess gained ground.

While the historical information in The Paris Bookseller sometimes feels reminiscent of a history book, the novel’s easy style and tender portrayal of Beach and her friends make for a pleasurable reading experience.

            A new monograph, David Hockney—Moving Focus, memorializes not only the illustrious career of one of the world’s most famous artists but also the Tate Museum’s supporting role in it.

“ONCE WE BEGIN to look for them, we see sissies everywhere,” writes Marlon B. Ross in Sissy Insurgencies, noting that this controversial label can apply not only to such obviously gender non-conforming men as author James Baldwin and singers Little Richard and Sylvester James, but also to figures like educator Booker T. Washington, historian HenryMore

Brief reviews of A PROXIMATE REMOVE: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji, ALL OF YOU EVERY SINGLE ONE: A Novel, I’M NOT HUNGRY, BUT I COULD EAT: Stories, and WHAT WE PICK UP: Stories

WHAT any reasonable reader wants when picking up a celebrity memoir is a compendium of splashy anecdotes about other celebrities. Oh look! There’s Whoopi! Baryshnikov! Arbus! Channing! Manilow!—“American cultural royalty,” as Alan Cumming calls them. With this as the gold standard, the song-and-dance man with a new memoir titled Baggage: Tales from a Fully PackedMore

In Queer Country, author Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, assistant professor of music studies at Temple University, discusses how this perception of intolerance has often made LGBT country-and-western fans feel unwelcome in the C&W scene (at least until recently).

FATIMA DAAS’ The Last One follows the journey of the last daughter of Algerian parents who settled in France before her birth. In Algerian Arabic, Fatima is the mazoziya, the last one, the youngest of three daughters. Unlike her sisters, Fatima was born to parents who desperately wanted a son.

WHEN DANIEL HENRIQUEZ, the protagonist of All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running, calls his mother in Jamaica to report the death of Aubrey, a girl he knew back in high school, his mom reminisces about people in her life who have died, including Daniel’s uncle, who left before Daniel was born. She’s sad butMore

In his new memoir Unprotected, Porter reveals the truth, much of it painful to remember, about his formative years and early career in a book that’s a good story, a soulful ballad, and a scream for understanding, among other things.

            In its resetting of Dickens, Furnace Creek reads like an entertaining amalgam of the Victorian tradition and Southern Gothic. Newt’s first-person narration is littered with Britishisms (“hob,” “two weeks’ time”) and often carries the highfalutin syntax of social aspiration, but the legacy of the South is never far away ...

The editors of OutWrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Julie Enszer and Elena Gross, focus mostly on reprinting the keynote speeches, but the book also includes other material, notably a history of OutWrite, a brief rundown of the political in-fighting that plagued OutWrite’s various factions over its decade-long run ...

            The success of Great Freedom depends almost entirely on its two leads, who play a pair of prison inmates who cross paths repeatedly over the years between 1945 and 1969. We’re first introduced to Hans, played by Rogowski, who frequents public toilets looking for hookups. On his most recent arrest and incarceration, in 1968,More

IN ITS ONGOING, heroic effort to bring older gay titles back into print, Valancourt Books sometimes publishes acknowledged classics, like James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, one of my top choices for the Great Gay Novel, or lesser-known works by significant writers, like The Fall of Valor (which I reviewed in the May-June 2017 issue of theseMore

A SCENE in Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog took me back to the years I spent growing up in Montana, where the story is set. Peter Gordon, a boy in his teens whose widowed mother has married one of two brothers who own a large cattle ranch, walks past the open tentsMore

A WELL-KNOWN PLAYWRIGHT and novelist, Sebastian Stuart is the author of a memoir titled What Wasn’t I Thinking: A Memoir of Rebellion, Madness, and My Mother. It delves into his privileged childhood in Manhattan, where he discovered his (gay) sexuality as a teenager, and into his deep friendship with his soulmate and cousin Tina, whoMore

Readers' thoughts.

  WHAT’S “RADICAL” is always defined in relation to prevailing attitudes and norms. The idea of same-sex marriage was so radical in the 1970s—at the height of the Gay Liberation era—that it wasn’t even discussed; but by the time marriage equality was finally achieved in 2015, it was considered “assimilationist” and conservative by many LGBTMore

DO YOU get your information about LGBT organizations, events, books, and so on from social media? I hate to break the news, but that will soon be much harder.

  LARS EIGHNER, gay novelist, memoirist, and chronicler of the lives of the homeless, passed away on December 23 in Austin, Texas. He was 73. Born in Corpus Christi in 1948, he grew up in Houston, attended Rice University, and spent time in Los Angeles before returning to Texas. Soon after gay marriage was legalizedMore

            Stephen Sondheim died in Jeff Romley’s arms on November 26, 2022. The cause was cardiovascular disease. He left us just days before the release of the film tick, tick…BOOM!, which memorializes Jonathan Larson’s deep debt to Sondheim. The aforementioned revival of Company is set to run on Broadway through the end of this year.More

Takes on news of the day.