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THE MYSTERY of the serial murders whose perpetrator came to be known as the Last Call Killer began when a maintenance man was cleaning up a rest area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike one spring afternoon in 1991, and he discovered in one of the garbage bags a freckled piece of human flesh.

TO ANY LGBT PERSON who isn’t accepted enough in their formative years, here’s the drill: you simply wait it out, and eventually find some real family—in the community, in the nightlife, or simply in the world of like-minded adults. That’s when you’ll emerge into your complete acceptance, leading to a worry-free rest of your lifeMore

Matthew Hays talks with Sarah Schulman, the author of Let the Record Show.

AT OUTWRITE 1995, the queer writers’ conference in Boston, an unlikely but lasting friendship was born. Mattilda was a 21-year-old genderblur club kid with a history of radical organizing who felt trapped in Boston except when the Ecstasy hit at 2 a.m. Michael was a 25-year-old former Dartmouth College Woodsmen Team competitor who had recentlyMore

Franco Mormando talks with André Aciman, the author of Find Me.

Ilana Rapp talks with film writer, producer, and director - Alan Ball.

Jaime Cortez's new collection of short stories, Gordo, is set in this region’s agricultural worker camps in the 1970s. These are not fictionalized narratives of hardscrabble destitution but ebullient tales about the chubby, effeminate Gordo and his friends.

THE PRICE OF DREAMS is a fictionalized autobiography of Patricia Highsmith, a translation from the Italian novel by Margherita Giacobino, structured with point-of-view changes in vignettes that move the narrative forward. The title is an allusion to Highsmith’s first novel, The Price of Salt ...

“WHO WOULD ever want to become a parent, if he knew every trouble ahead?” asks a character toward the end of Chinese-American writer Yang Huang’s new novel, My Good Son. The year is 1990, a year after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. ...

FIRST LOVE swirls at the center of Christopher Zyda’s memoir, The Storm, followed in short order by illness and death. The book recounts the fifteen-year period from 1983 to 1998, during which the promising UCLA English literature major who had “set my career sights on writing in Hollywood” meets and falls in love with 33-year-oldMore

WHAT HAPPENS when a gay American man and the heir to the British throne meet and fall in love? In Playing the Palace, Paul Rudnick makes full use of his comedic skills—evident in such screenplays as Jeffrey, Sister Act, and In and Out—to bring this improbable romance to life. ...

FIRST NOVELS, especially coming-out novels, arrive with a certain amount of baggage. I tend to open them with trepidation, prepared to be assaulted by clichés about the closet and bad sex. That’s why Justin Deabler’s first novel, Lone Stars, comes as a welcome surprise. Deabler avoids the traditional landmines of coming-out stories by working onMore

THIS LARGE ANTHOLOGY has three very different introductory pieces: a foreword by Cheryl Clarke; an essay titled “Mouths of Rain: Be Opened,” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs; and an introduction by the editor, Briona Simone Jones. Cheryl Clarke assesses the importance of this book in the context of writing by and about people of African descent,More

THE WASTELAND is an imaginative novel constructed around the secret gay life of poet T. S. Eliot and the creation of his monumental poem The Waste Land, which was published in 1922. It portrays Eliot as a lonely, tormented man, conflicted between finding true love and achieving literary success.

In the end, it seems, [Tim] Dlugos came to question nearly everything, including even his desire to be a poet. But, in his best work, he leaves behind a freshness and honesty that still rings true. New York Diary underscores anew the loss of this beautiful and important voice.

Book Reviews of The Fall of America Journals, 1965-1971 by Allen Ginsberg, On the Red Hill: Where Four Lives Fell into Place, Angels on a Freight Train: A Story of Faith and Queer Desire in Nineteenth-Century America, Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger, As Far as I Can Tell: FindingMore

THE TITLE of Judy Grahn’s sixteenth book beckons readers into a world in which all living species share a net of consciousness, a mind as distinct from the brain as a biological organ. The ten essays and “true stories” in the Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit exhibit an openness to phenomena that enables Grahn to exploreMore

MARCEL PROUST is having a very good year: 2021 marks the sesquicentennial of his birth as well as the centenary of his winning the Prix Goncourt—France’s pre-eminent prize for literature. It also marks the publication in English of a book of new work, The Mysterious Correspondent …

BY THE TIME animal painter Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) died, she had been one of the most famous and financially successful establishment artists in France for half a century. Railway tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt had bought the canvas regarded as her masterpiece, the 8’ x 16’ Horse Fair in Paris (1853), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.More

Among the surprises in Wild Visionary is the extent of Sendak’s devotion to Herman Melville, for whose Pierre, or The Ambiguities he produced a series of wonderfully homoerotic illustrations. And I was previously unaware of Sendak’s work for AIDS causes.

AT AGE 21, John Wieners (1934–2002) was high on poetry. The Black Mountain College student wrote to a friend in the spring of 1955, “I just know now that as long as I live I will be a poet, that my life, way of and function of, will be the writing of poetry, as longMore

ALTHOUGH David Wojnarowicz has been the subject of many essays, studies, and an excellent biography by Cynthia Carr, Chris McKim’s film is the first feature-length documentary to examine his life and work. The film does not have a narrator but makes extensive and effective use of the many tape journals that the artist recorded startingMore

TWO ARTIFACTS of LGBT popular culture in 2021 feel like déjà vu all over again, particularly evoking the zeitgeist of the 1980s. Each in its way has been a stake through the hypocritical heart of America’s religious Right. ...

    AS AN AMERICAN who came out as a teen in Italy in the early 1980s, my favorite gay novel (which I discovered years later) is The Gallery. Written by John Horne Burns (1916–1953), a snide young World War II private from Connecticut, it reveals the dynamic, underground gay life he encountered in chaoticMore

Interview with Paul Rudnick by Frank Pizzoli: PLAYING THE PALACE is Paul Rudnick’s new novel (reviewed in this issue), … He is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and his articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. He is currently writing the book forMore

  The Confirmed Bachelor It was major news in the cultural Cybersphere when the star of this season’s reality show The Bachelor (ABC) came out as gay. And while Colton Underwood waited until after the final episode to break this news, he’d been quite forthcoming from the start about the fact that he was a virgin. HeMore

Readers' thoughts.

  THE working title for this issue was “Who’s Zooming Whom?” with apologies to Aretha Franklin, who had a hit song by that name in the 1980s (minus a “g” and an “m” on the last two words). The title question could be seen as slightly prophetic now that a cyber platform known as “Zoom”More

  RUSSIAN state-sponsored homophobia is notorious around the world. The law banning what the government termed “the propaganda of homosexualism” was a revanchist project promoted by Scott Lively and others of the evangelical Right in the U.S. However self-serving their motives, their project was very convenient for the Russian government, which was looking for argumentsMore

A LETTER to the Editor in the January-February 2010 issue of this magazine sparked my interest in the Knights of the Clock, America’s first integrated gay and lesbian social club, founded in Los Angeles in the early 1950s. ...