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More Than a Sanskrit Sex Manual  Padlock Icon
Doniger translated from the original Sanskrit text, while Kakar translated the Hindi commentary. Their translation was widely praised as more accurate than the original 1883 English translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton.
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Bernstein’s poetry derives from a culture of ceaseless contact, but tenuous closeness. It is filled with psychoanalytic lingo and sexual explicitness.
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Cecil Dreeme is remarkable, compelling, and utterly unclassifiable.
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If, in the end, Aphrodite’s Daughters leaves the reader wanting more, that’s perhaps a good thing, and perhaps it will serve to generate new interest in all three writers. For the time being, Honey has made a remarkable case for the restoration and addition of these three remarkable women into their rightful place in theMore
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  Tender: A Novel by Belinda McKeon Little, Brown and Co. 416 pages, $27.   IRELAND has changed dramatically over the past half-century. Ragged gypsies aren’t huddled with barefoot children on the bridges over Dublin’s Liffey River, begging for alms—a common sight in the late 1960s. The low-level but savage sectarian war over Northern IrelandMore
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Couples in Flux
THE ACTION in Weekend takes place over a mere two days, and it all happens on a small island in Ontario, where a celebratory getaway reveals fracture lines running through the relationships of the participants.
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Fans of a Transperson  Padlock Icon
In sharing her stories, Jennings is cheerily upbeat, though she says that she does encounter haters and sometimes suffers from depression. She confides these deeply personal matters with an honesty that readers don’t generally get from an adult.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of the books: The Man Who Loved Birds, Gay American Novels, 1870-–1970: A Reader’s Guide, The Argonauts, and Communal Nude: Collected Essays and the album Love You to Death.
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Of Country Matters  Padlock Icon
Queering the Countryside is a quirky, interdisciplinary collection of essays that question this assumption of “metronormativity” while also challenging whether a city of strangers is always the best place for a gay or lesbian person to find true love.
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The China Closet
Beijing Comrades is set against a backdrop of cultural and political upheaval in China during the late 1980s and early ’90s.
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Casa Finlandia
The photos in this book comprise a veritable walking tour of the home. The rooms are filled not only with Tom’s drawings and paintings (and those of other artists), but also with sculptures, dildos, leather apparel, fetish gear, packed bookshelves, and a wide array of salacious curios.
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The Factory from the Inside
Even if you don’t recognize the name, you are probably familiar with some of the images captured by photographer Billy Name.
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Straight Abe: Back Like a Bad Penny  Padlock Icon
The debate over Lincoln’s sexuality provoked sharp reactions among academics. As far as I know, most of the writers in question haven’t revisited their assessments. Strozier now proves an exception with a new book: Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed.
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[In Black Sheep Boy: A Novel in Stories, Martin] Pousson layers and lacquers sentences in such a way that the reader gets the colors of regionalism through the universal longing for escape.
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    Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 294 pages, $26.   THIS ENGAGING, highly literate second novel by Darryl Pinckney follows a young gay black man’s adventures in Berlin during the 1980s, the final decade of the Cold War. The novel’s narrator, Jed Goodfinch, originally from Chicago, struggles to make aMore
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Mother of Morocco  Padlock Icon
Infidels is perhaps best read after being introduced to Taïa’s earlier work in translation. In its multiple first-person voices, Taïa has certainly moved into new and challenging narrative territory. Like his previous work, Infidels is short and austere. He has created in Slima a memorable woman, neither a victim nor exactly a martyr. She isMore
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    Holding the Man Directed by Neil Armfield Screen Australia, et al.   WHILE Australian movies have pursued gay themes before, few until recently have dared to go much beyond hyperbole or homoeroticism. That changed last year with the release of Holding The Man—recently released in the U.S.—with its unapologetic portrayal of a trueMore
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The Light of Day
Review of Packed in a Trunk documentary about Edith Lake Wilkinson
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  Hopelessness by Anohni Secretly Canadian Records   In addition to the name- and gender-change, Anohni has radically altered her musical style on her solo album Hopelessness. Goodbye gloomy chamber rock, hello electronica. The new album contains eleven songs on nakedly political topics. It opens with “Drone Bomb Me,” sung from the perspective of aMore
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HIV Survivors and the ’16 Election  Padlock Icon
  “I’M THE LUCKIEST unlucky person in the world. No one wants to be the last man standing,” reflected Peter Greene, one of the eight long-term HIV survivors from the San Francisco Bay area, featured in the new documentary Last Men Standing. Greene personifies the ambiguous fate of many long-term HIV survivors. Having been votedMore
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The Beatniks Smoldered in 1960  Padlock Icon
    A CHEAPLY MADE black-and-white film, The Beatniks (1960) was voice actor Paul Frees’ only directing venture. It succeeded with neither critics nor the public, and it boasts a pitiful 2.1 rating on IMDB. However, I would contend that this B-minus movie is significant for its homosexual subtext. The Beatniks was badly mistitled. BeatnikMore
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  I FIRST encountered Sarah Schulman in January 1996, when she was a speaker at “Literature in the Age of AIDS” in Key West. That seems a lifetime ago. We met again a couple of years later at UNC-Asheville, where she was beginning to articulate her ideas about “familial homophobia,” the central idea in herMore
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BTW
  Outside of Convention The Republican National Convention seemed equally divided between vitriol and wrath, but at least some of the delegates were having a good time, and the result was a yuge upsurge in business for Cleveland’s male sex workers. One hustler reported that his income surged six-fold during the four-day event; another tookMore
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Readers’ Thoughts
  John Boswell’s Precursors: An Exchange To the Editor: In his homage to John Boswell in the May-June issue, Brian Bromberger failed to mention one of the three books that was favorable toward gay Christians and that preceded John Boswell’s 1980 Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. In 1978, Harper & Row published Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?More
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The Lonely City is more particular—about a flâneur’s loneliness (the narrator’s) and the alienation that produces art (her subjects’).
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  THE MUSCULAR MALE PHYSIQUE can arrest observers’ gaze involuntarily. Research by social psychologists indicates that muscular male bodies capture and hold the attention of spectators both male and female. Whatever our æsthetic sensibilities, the unconscious mind seems to think the mesomorphic or muscular body type is worth looking at. Since at least the mid-20thMore
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  PRINCE ROGERS NELSON was as loved by fans at the end of his life as at any time of his career. When he took the stage of the 2015 Grammy Awards, even the stars were star-struck. The entire audience leapt to its feet at the sight of him and roared its approval. But theMore
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Can the GLB Vote Swing an Election?
  THE ELECTION looms. No doubt you are either checking the poll numbers on 538.com and the mini-scandals on Politico on an hourly basis, or you’re studiously avoiding the whole sordid affair (a phrase that seems to describe this year’s election especially well). In any case, by the time you read this, the numbers willMore
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All 3 Branches at Stake in November
  AS I GET OLDER, I am losing hope that I will outlive the need for an article about the impact a forthcoming election will have on GLBT people. At some point our right to be protected against bigotry will not only be established, but will no longer depend on electoral outcomes. But we areMore
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  WITH THE BLOOD from the massacre on Pride Day in Orlando barely dry, let me put forth a modest proposal: the word “homophobia” is inadequate and a misnomer, and it needs to be retired. The term “homophobia” was first coined by Dr. George Weinberg, a psychologist, in the sex magazine Screw, in 1969, andMore
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