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  WHEN I MOVED to New York after college in the summer of 1980 to find a job in publishing, I took regular breaks from my daily search at a midtown bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The hardcovers and paperbacks that once filled the windows there have long since given way to other displays, including overallsMore

SEPTEMBER 1965: a half century on, it’s not easy to follow my movements with perfect accuracy, but here goes. I was staying up in Westchester County with Cheryl R., a fellow undergraduate a couple of years younger. We’d become friendly during the previous year, as part of the small huddle of Emory’s brainy misfits, aMore

THE INTERWAR YEARS, from the Armistice of 1918 until Pearl Harbor, were fertile for cultural productivity in New York City. Gay men and lesbians were at the heart of accomplishments in the literature, music, and dance of the period. And their creativity only increased after World War II in the new arena of mass entertainment.More

THIS YEAR, as America’s two oldest women’s music festivals—Michigan and National—prepare to celebrate landmark fortieth anniversaries, a number of powerful organizations have signed a petition against the Michigan festival, endorsing an economic boycott of all artists who perform there.

Dana Thomas’ book Gods and Kings is about two gay British designers, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, and their remarkably parallel careers.

Reviews of Michelle Tea’s memoir How to Grow Up, Voices from the Rainbow, and The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature.

JOHN MARSH proposes something here that may cause many readers to shake a skeptical head, but hear him out. In Walt We Trust addresses our generally fixed beliefs about death, money, sex, and democracy, and proposes that the writings of Walt Whitman can serve as a guide on the path toward human connection and personalMore

  JAMIE BRICKHOUSE freely and blithely admits in his new memoir that he “had no business being a child.” Then again, he never was a child, really, as becomes evident from his earliest memories. Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir by Jamie Brickhouse St. Martin’s Press. 288 pages, $25.99    

  JUST AFTER World War I, in London, Frances Wray and her mother are living alone in a large and declining family home, located in an upper-middle-class neighborhood called Champion Hill. We see the story exclusively through Frances’ eyes. Both she and her mother are in mourning. Two brothers have been lost to the war,More

While Long highlights Kameny’s accomplishments and his central role in the 1960s and early ’70s gay rights movement, Gay Is Good is not a hagiography-in-letters: Kameny’s importance is undeniable, and Long’s smart commentaries do not need to present Kameny as a saint.

Reviews of Space Traveler by Benjamin S. Grossberg, Unions by Alfred Corn, and Nothing to Declare by Henri Cole.

GREAT HERA, Wonder Woman lives! Noah Berlatsky, comic commentator and editor-blogger for the Hooded Utilitarian, takes the reader on an eye-opening exploration of the subtexts of the Wonder Woman comics from the series’ inception in 1941 to 1948. He focuses on the ideas of William Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, and of Harry Peter, the seriesMore

The Disappearance Boy by Neil Bartlett Bloomsbury. 282 pages, $26.   “ALL I’D SAY by way of a warning is that you need to remember that a magician is not someone who deceives, but someone who keeps his promise. Which is to deceive. All right?” We can consider this Neil Bartlett’s warning, or promise, aboutMore

In the first chapter of The Sexuality of History—a play on Michel Foucault’s famous title, The History of Sexuality—Susan S. Lanser argues that the basic trappings of modern Western civilization, everything from eating with forks to the “rights of man,” first appeared in the 1600s and have been developing since then.

    “ARCTIC SUMMER,” the title of an unfinished novel by E. M. Forster, well suits this fictional biography of the English writer. It’s hard to imagine a writer further away from the romantic image of the struggling, mercurial artist. Forster was born in 1879 and died in 1970, at age 91. An only childMore

Flanagan provides deft plot summaries and sensitive readings of Mishima’s fiction and deploys a wide array of Japanese sources currently unavailable in English, producing a rich portrait of this very strange and complicated man. As Flanagan tells it, Mishima’s life was one long, extreme, calculated performance, and that assessment seems apt. It’s a performance that,More

Another new series, Netflix’ Grace and Frankie, charts the same fallout from the perspective of a gay man’s wife—make that two wives—whose husbands have left them for each other.

  THE CURATOR of the recent show Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York (Feb. 13–May 3, 2015), Jennifer Tyburczy is an art historian whose mission it is to explore the history of censorship by galleries and museums, especially in the realm of GLBT-themed art. The exhibition spotlights some importantMore

Every visitor to the Fire Island Pines should leave with a sense that they entered a world different from “mainstream” America for myriad reasons, not the least of which was that we were a predominantly gay community. Helen Irwin was one of a rare breed of Pines residents: a straight woman. As Helen states inMore

Reviews of the film Compared to What? The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank, Madonna’s album Rebel Heart, the play The Submission.

My Huckleberry Friend: The relocated Whitney Museum opened in Manhattan last May in a blaze of glory, but not without a note of disharmony when a sculpture that had been commissioned for its outdoor plaza failed to materialize. The work by Charles Ray was titled Huck and Jim and depicted Mark Twain’s legendary characters as colossalMore

Why So Easy on Gore Vidal?   To the Editor: After reading Andrew Holleran’s review [May-June issue] of Michael Mewshaw’s memoir, Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, and watching the Vidal documentary The United States of Amnesia for the second time, I find it difficult to feel much sympathy forMore

IN A NATIONAL REFERENDUM on May 22, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, not by judicial or legislative action, but by a popular vote. How did a country long assumed to be a conservative Catholic stronghold, which only decriminalized homosexuality in 1993, become the first to take this courseMore

  DURING THE MANY 25th anniversary celebrations of the Stonewall Riots in 1994, I was somewhat surprised to hear so many people saying they had been there that night in June, 1969. I remember once adding them up and concluding that, if everyone who said they were there, actually had been present, they not onlyMore