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The “physique” periodicals of the 1950s and ’60s were not just a byproduct of the Homophile movement. They were a catalyst for it.

DOES ANYONE DOUBT that most autobiographers distort reality, embellishing the truth about themselves, altering the facts relating to third parties, and presenting things in their own best interest? This makes Quentin Crisp’s case exceptional. He achieved something that was almost beyond the humanly possible …

Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, was the author and illustrator of a hundred-odd darkly droll little picture books with titles like The Fatal Lozenge, The Deranged Cousins, and The Blue Aspic. Although he grew up in Depression-era Chicago and lived most of his life in Manhattan, first-time readers often assumeMore

Rocking the Closet takes us back to pre-liberation days in the same way that Guy Davidson’s Categorically Famous (reviewed in the November-December issue) reprised the careers of Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin to show how celebrities in the ’60s danced around the subject of their homosexuality while paradoxically opening the closet door.

IN THE YEARS before the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was “very much a work in progress”: most of its roads were muddy mires, neighborhoods were far apart by horseback, and much of the city sat in a genuine swamp to which most Congressmen had to travel from far away. In Bosom Friends,  Balcerski conveys theMore

PARIS, 7 A.M. is a quietly striking novel that imagines poet Elizabeth Bishop’s first trip to Europe in 1937.

WHEN we first encounter the title character of Nicole Dennis-Benn’s intergenerational family saga, Patsy, she’s standing in line outside the U.S. embassy in Jamaica, dreaming of America. The year is 1998.

CHANTAL AKERMAN’S memoir My Mother Laughs is similar to her films: layered, defying time and space, concerned with the quotidian. Her work is woman-centered, often lesbian-centered, and focused on describing the position of women in society, including how the oppressive forces of patriarchy inflict both physical and emotional trauma on women.

Reading Love Unknown is like touring Bishop’s word-ridden, complex, and stirring worlds. With an atlas and a book of her poems close by, it delivers a highly satisfying ride.

Short reviews of History’s Queer Stories, A Wild and Precious Life, and The Householders.

Peter McGough’s memoir I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going captures the silly, desperate decade they lived through and the peculiar ménage which is their major work of art.

FROM the opening pages of this heart-felt memoir, Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas, by Dustin Lance Black, we learn that it is not only a story about his life’s journey but also of his mother Anne and her remarkable life story.

Gorgeously lyrical, unabashedly fanciful, Find Me is one of those delicious literary confections that turns out to be more than just a mess of empty calories. Witty, wise, breathtakingly elegant, Aciman’s novel ultimately tweaks the nose of Henry James and his arch, ironic tragedies, opting instead to embrace and celebrate the brave new world ofMore

The manuscript of Poems Written Abroad was unearthed not long ago in a Midwestern university library and is printed here for the first time. It dates from the summer of 1927, when Spender was a mere eighteen years old.

Beautiful Aliens is a selection of Abbott’s essays, fiction, poems, and poetry cartoons, illustrating Abbott’s creative range and versatility. The book was compiled by Jamie Townsend, a Bay Area genderqueer poet who first encountered Abbott’s work when she was browsing in a bookstore in the Berkshires and picked up a copy of Stretching the AgapeMore

For Powell, even hardcore porn movies helped show viewers the emotional truth of gay male life. He argues that these films, with their improbable plots that always lead to sex and quite often to group orgies, reflect on some level the coming-out experience.

Carved in Bone begins as eighteen-year-old Bill Ryan is dumped at a Midwestern bus station, cruelly discarded by homophobic parents. Naïve and bewildered, Ryan becomes part of the 1970s tidal wave of gay immigrants to San Francisco.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995) left the Barron’s Cove motel on Long Island, drove 100 feet to the 7-Eleven at the foot of the Sag Harbor–North Haven bridge, parked, walked out on the bridge, and jumped. Two kids heard a splash and saw a bald man, fully clothed, doing a casual backstroke—no criesMore

Inseparable since adolescence, both men [Ed Wormley and Ed Crouse] came out to their families at eighteen, and without any notable wringing of hands—perhaps in part because as announced atheists and aspiring æsthetes they’d already come to be regarded as creatures outside community norms. Both men came from financially modest and emotionally cramped backgrounds.

Takes on news of the day.

Readers’ share their thoughts regarding recent articles published in The G&LR.

BY INVOKING the word “camp,” I’m taking advantage of the word’s famous ambiguity, which allows me to cover a number of disparate artists under its umbrella. They’re “leaders” in the sense that they represent a kind of camp that flourished in the era before gay liberation, when homosexuality could only be discussed indirectly, if atMore

AS WE DO every year at this time, we remember some of the LGBT activists, writers, performers, educators, and artists who made a difference and who passed away over the past year. Their lifespans ranged from 24 to 87 years. Unless otherwise indicated, all dates are in 2019.

Beyond “Goat Head,” Jaime is Howard’s most forceful expression of her politics, and it could have only been recorded at this point in American history.