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What emerges from a reinterpretation of Forster is a rich body of work in which numerous gay characters and same-sex relationships are presented.
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Visions of Queer Martyrdom is essentially the story of the clash between the “muscular Christianity” of the Protestant Church of England and the Anglo-Catho-lics who, while remaining in the Anglican fold, formed a counterculture of their own by turning to Catholic ritual, sacraments, and imagery.
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On Elizabeth Bishop describes how Tóibín was influenced early on by Bishop, not only by her assiduous attention to detail but also by what she left unsaid, by the power of her empty spaces. Conversational in tone, this book is the fifth in Princeton University’s lively series.
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Homo Politicus
While Frank says that no one is too busy or virtuous not to enjoy a private life, we must conclude that the world of politics is essentially where he has lived his life.
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The Company He Kept Company  Padlock Icon
Author Arthur Vanderbilt presents his subject not as someone who speaks for himself but as an appendage to others, usually men of wealth and position and/or noteworthy talent.
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Age enters Thoughts and Things at the end. The forlorn narrator of La Casse, who has spent his life assiduously collecting bits of scrap metal, remnants of tools used to conquer, has a momentary vision of a world where people are linked in a human community.
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Hammer has done a wonderful service, mining every conceivable archive for this mammoth undertaking, but also tracking down as many of Merrill’s peers, friends, and lovers as are now to be found. Hammer comments that his subject “enjoyed people, and needed lots of them.
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Looking at what he terms the “homicidal homosexual” in the history of American theater, Schildcrout asks us to rethink the links between deviant sexualities and murderous plot lines.
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  A Work in Progress by Connor Franta Atria/Keywords Press 212 pages, $16.99   I’VE COME TO AN AGE (65) when I realize I live in an entirely different world than my students. Words like “jalopy” or “fuddy-duddy” mean nothing to them. My mother, who taught kindergarten, used to watch Saturday morning cartoons once aMore
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Short Reviews
Reviews of Fantasies and Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer, Nothing Looks Familiar, and Some Desperate Glory.
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  Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald Tin House Books. 388 pages, $25.95   ADULT ONSET spans one week, but from within that boundary it frequently comes unstuck in time. Its fictional world presents a calm outward surface, but there’s turmoil churning just underneath. These contrasts build and clarify, stretching into a portrait of how weMore
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Darius in the Shadow of Alexander by Pierre Briant. Translated by Jane Marie Todd Harvard University Press. 579 pages, $39.95   HISTORY is written by the winners, but in recent years there’s been a trend toward considering history from the viewpoint of those who found themselves on its losing side. Such an approach is announcedMore
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The Tears in Mortal Things  Padlock Icon
DEEP LANE is Mark Doty’s eighth collection of poetry.
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Robert Beachy’s comprehensive history of gay Berlin from the 1870s to the 1930s shows that the emergence of gay and lesbian cultures in the modern West owed much to what Mirbeau identified as Berlin’s pederasty and invention—its practice and theory—and Beachy makes a compelling case for the “German invention of homosexuality.”
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  Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 385 pages, $28.   AN OLD TRUNK, a cache of letters, and revelations about the life of a great aunt whose secret was buried by her family for decades provide the backdrop for Emily Bingham’s biography of Henrietta BinghamMore
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In It's Not Over, Signorile reports that transgender and gay youths have experienced an uptick in violence and bullying in many parts of the country, where homophobia has become more public and more violent in response to the increased visibility of gay and transgender people in the news and in everyday life.
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The Mad Boy is a thorough, if not exhaustive, look into a long lost world. Its glossy pages, each one of which is decorated with the image of a blue dove, contribute to its heft, and there is a generous supply of photographs.
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Michelle Tea Comes Out As a Grown-up
LIKE a latter-day Jean Genet, Michelle Tea is a writer whose work has always been closely associated with the queer demimonde. For almost two decades, she has produced a series of memoirs and autobiographical novels about her growth as a working-class artist and sexual maverick, beginning with The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of OneMore
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  HISTORIAN Lillian Faderman is an LGBT culture hero who has won several lifetime achievement awards for her groundbreaking scholarship in LGBT history. Her most recent books are Gay L.A. (2006), co-authored with Stuart Timmons, and two memoirs, Naked in the Promised Land (2003) and My Mother’s Wars. Two of her earlier books, Surpassing theMore
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BTW
  Not a Good Match At London’s Pride parade this year, CNN reported spotting a banner representing the terrorist organization ISIS. The implied message seemed to be: ISIS is everywhere, even in a gay pride parade! Only later did someone point out that the flag was adorned not with Arabic letters, as is the jihadistMore
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Readers’ Thought
  Books Today Are a Fungible Affair To the Editor: In “The Price of Going Mainstream” [May-June 2015], Dolores Klaich mourns the fate of gay and lesbian bookstores, which are rapidly going out of business, along with many other independent small bookstores. While this is undoubtedly true, she fails to mention that there now existsMore
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  “I wanna go places, I wanna do some things I wanna be a star, I wanna have a big name.” — Ike and Tina Turner, “Make Me Over”   ON JUNE 16, 2015, the newly resigned president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the naacp came out on national television. But what she cameMore
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Notes on Porn
  1 ANDY WARHOL SAID that when he was in high school he wanted a friend, but then he got a television and he didn’t need a friend anymore. Pornography is like that. 2 The size of the pornographic film industry is debated, with one authoritative source pegging the figure at fourteen billion dollars lastMore
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  WHEN PHILADELPHIA passed the twentieth anniversary of its release in December 2013, it was surprising to realize that the film is still Hollywood’s most successful gay-themed movie to date in terms of box office receipts. The movie’s worldwide earnings still eclipse those of Brokeback Mountain or The Dallas Buyers Club or any other GLBTMore
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Minor White (1908-1976) was renowned as one of the masters of American photography, having worked with Bernice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.
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  THE RECENT DECISION of the United States Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, stands as a milestone in GLBT history on a scale with the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The contrast between 1969 and 2015 demonstrates how epic the intervening 46 years have been. Over a short timeMore
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  RONNIE GILBERT, the bold and provocative female voice in the Weavers folk quartet (which also included Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman) died on Saturday, June 6, 2015. Ruth Alice Gilbert was born in Brooklyn on September 7,1926. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and her mother was a card-carrying Communist.More
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  LEAVE IT to director John Waters to succinctly capture why film scholar and critic B. Ruby Rich is such a pleasure to read: “Ruby Rich has to be the friendliest yet toughest voice of international Queerdom writing today. She’s sane, funny, well-traveled, and her æsthetics go beyond dyke correctness into a whole new worldMore
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IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to imagine the early AIDS years without Larry Kramer, who became the de facto conscience of the plague in the 1980s. His 1978 novel Faggots almost seemed to anticipate AIDS, with its parody of gay men caught up in hedonism and unrestrained sex. His anger at an inept healthcare system, evil politicians,More
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