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By all means check out The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray, especially if you’ve already read the original novel, or use it as an excuse to read The Picture of Dorian Gray if you haven’t.

THIS ENGAGING STUDY investigates the many associations that have been drawn, in both literary works and historical events, between gay men, Jews, and communists as potential traitors and spies.

IN HER LIFE, Liza Monroy confides in The Marriage Act, there have been three important men: her father, her boyfriend Julian, and her best friend Emir.

Death in Venice, California is McCabe’s homage to Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella. Like Gustav von Aschenbach, Frame is an aging writer who finds himself facing a crisis of the spirit ...

THE PROJECT that finally became this book began as a web trail from the British Museum. It is a pictorial sampling of items from that museum across centuries and cultures of mostly visual representations of same-sex desire and gender ambiguity. Each depiction has a paragraph or two of explanation, much as you would find onMore

  Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home by Catherine Reid Beacon Press. 184 pages, $24.95   FOR THOSE OF US who grew up city-side, the idea of discovering yourself, of settling into place by returning to a landscape of woods and water, not to mention hills and fields replete with indigenous wildlife exquisitelyMore

Carl van Vechten receives the copious and discriminating biographical analysis he has long needed, in the form of The Tastemaker, an exceptional publication and Edward White’s first book.

EDITOR Nigel Simeone has selected some 650 letters for this collection of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence over a span of six decades of the 20th century. The first letter is from 1932, written by a fourteen-year-old Bernstein to his piano teacher, Helen Coates. The last is from 1990: a letter to conductor Georg Solti.

  Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika Picador. 232 pages, $25.   HIGHLY ACCLAIMED when it was published in the UK in 2002, Bitter Eden is a novel by a South African writer named Tatamkhulu Afrika (his chosen name means “Grandfather Africa”). The author died shortly after the book, which was written years before, was finallyMore

Strub covers a lot of highly personal ground in Body Counts. Gay men his age lost staggering numbers of friends, on a scale otherwise known only to wartime soldiers. It was the kind of loss that soldiers famously find hard to discuss; maybe this is a reason that relatively few AIDS memoirs have been publishedMore

Reviews of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, Growing Up Golem, With: New Gay Fiction, and Fault Tree.

  Sweatin’ with Cong. Schock  When Barney Frank came out as gay in his forties, he was relieved to discover that his constituents really didn’t care about the sex life of a middle-aged man, and the world moved on. The same cannot be said for a colleague of Frank’s in the U.S. House, the stillMore

  Update: Cherry Grove Theater Lives!   To the Editor: My essay “America’s First Gay Town” introduced a historic Cherry Grove, New York, to your readers in the Nov.-Dec. issue. The essay concluded with a reference to the listing of Cherry Grove’s “Community House and Theater” on the National Register of Historic Places by theMore

  The content of this essay was first presented at the Camp/Anti-Camp Conference at the Hau Theater in Berlin in March 2012, curated by Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel. The presentation of the paper was itself intended to be somewhat camp, both in the outdated academic style of the writing and in its mode ofMore

  Mothers and Sons by Terrence McNally John Golden Theatre, New York City   TERRENCE MCNALLY has become the American theater’s great poet of the urgency of interpersonal relationships. “We gotta connect. We just have to. Or we die,” Johnny warns in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune—a play that movingly defines “aMore

  The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy Liveright (Norton). 752 pages, $35.   YOU BEGIN to get at the problem of James Purdy by noting, as almost everyone writing on him does, that Dame Edith Sitwell praised him: “I am convinced that, long after my death, James Purdy will come to be recognized asMore

  THE WORLD’S FIRST gay comic strip was arguably Harry Chess: That Man from A.U.N.T.I.E., which first appeared in the Philadelphia homophile publication Drum from 1965 to ’66. The strip pits the hirsute pectorals of protagonist Harry Chess, secret agent #0068 7/8 of the Agents’ Undercover Network to Investigate Evil (A.U.N.T.I.E.), and his muscular butMore

  VAMPIRES HAVE BEEN a part of popular culture in the West for several centuries. American vampire stories are rooted in the folklore of Eastern Europe, but similar creatures have also turned up in Western Europe, India, and China. The contemporary vampire story has roots in traditional folklore, in 17th- and 18th-century pseudo-science, and inMore

  ONE OF THE EARLIEST literary depictions of gender bending can be found in Homer’s Odyssey, telling of the adventures of the mythical hero Odysseus, after the fall of Troy in 1200 B.C., as he makes his voyage home. “Bright eyed Athena,” sometimes also referred to in the transgender community as the “Bigender Goddess,” actsMore

  The Diving Board by Elton John Capitol/Mercury Records   THOMAS WOLFE was right: you can’t go home again. That’s the sad-but-true wisdom at the heart of “Home Again,” the first single from Elton’s John’s latest album, The Diving Board. Sir Elton has cultivated one of the most cosmopolitan voices in popular music, and, trueMore

  A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk Exhibition: The Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) Curated by Fred Dennis and Valerie Steele   A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk Edited by Valerie Steele Yale.  248 pages, $50.   FRED DENNIS, senior curator of costumes at theMore