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How to Be a Porn Star  Padlock Icon
It is impossible to read A Pornographer without being aware of the era in which it was written: the Me Decade. Gay liberation was underway, there was no such thing as AIDS, and homosexuals in cities like New York were aware that they were creating new forms of affective linkage—couples who allowed each other secondaryMore
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For everyone, life itself is full of complexity. For LGBT people who are disabled, that complexity is multiplied. For most people, enjoying their sexuality is vital to happiness, so it is vital that therapeutic workers, and society at large, adequately address the special needs, including the sexual ones, of LGBT people.
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  IN HIS 1995 BOOK The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, John Boswell argued that in medieval Europe unions between same-sex couples were acceptable under certain circumstances and even sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. He preferred the term “same-sex unions,” because the definition of marriage has changed so drastically throughout historyMore
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DAVID HOCKNEY: An Exhibitionis a global event, and it is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to the eighty-year-old artist’s career. The exhibition is mounted on a grand scale, with more than 250 pieces, ranging from his early sketches made in the 1960s through video installations constructed in 2015.
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ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN images of Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) comes to us through the lens of the great gay photographer George Platt Lynes in a photograph from 1943, shortly before Hartley’s death. Hartley slumps in a chair, his body casting massive shadows under the influence of Lynes’ harsh lighting.
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The influence of Bonnard can also be seen in Steers’ color palette, in the intermixing and soft suffusion of pale yellow, green, and violet tones on the windowsill, tub, and tiled floor. Yet there is a key difference. Bonnard’s female figures blend in with the walls and the other objects in the picture, as seenMore
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Michelangelo’s Gifts to Tommaso
NEW YORK’S Metropolitan Museum of Art recently mounted an unusually large and comprehensive exhibition of drawings and writings by the Renaissance Italian master Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). Among the scores of drawings in the exhibition, titled Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (which closed in February), one group forms an exceptionally coherent and unprecedented ensemble of drawings thatMore
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Amy Hoffman's The Off Season moves along at a swift pace with short, titled chapters. P’town is brought to life with vivid descriptions of the town and its maritime surroundings.
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Written in 1904, Hirschfeld presents a picture of gay and lesbian life in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. We learn about the tea dances, hustlers, drag kings and queens, lesbian bars, cruising, campy humor and kitschy aesthetics, blackmailers, police raids, and gay ghettos.
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The Diamond Setter is Moshe Sakal’s first novel to be translated into English. His language flows easily in Jessica Cohen’s translation. A quietly affecting novel, it offers an unusual perspective on a thorny part of the world.
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IN HER INTRODUCTION to Sisters in the Life, editor Yvonne Welbon explains the significance of the “minority group” under discussion, namely African-American lesbian filmmakers: “Since the 1922 theatrical release of Tressie Souders’s A Woman’s Error, approximately one hundred feature films have been directed by African-American women. Almost one-third of those films were directed by blackMore
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The Sparsholt Affair could be said to resemble his second novel, The Folding Star, in being about artists, both real and fictional. The new book can be said to be about the effect of World War II on English society, for good and ill, just as The Stranger’s Child was about the effects of World WarMore
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[Nicholas] Frankel describes Wilde’s later life as “entirely unapologetic and uncompromising.” He claims that the narcissistic and aristocratic Bosie showed neither “lack of love” nor “failure of sympathy.” He asserts that Wilde continued a prolific, more authentic artistic life after prison.
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SINCE THE EARLY 1970s, the British writer Alan Bennett has kept “a sporadic diary,” extracts from which have been annually published in the London Review of Books. The diaries are yet another winner among the many books, plays, and screenplays that the enormously talented Bennett ...
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Briefs  Padlock Icon
Short book reviews of Conversations with Edmund White, and Sister Love:  The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974–1989.
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Klawitter has done everyone a favor by taking a nuanced approach to a colorful subject and giving the reader an opportunity to consider the full range of plausible views of a given situation. But make no mistake: this is ultimately a volume for specialists, a detailed library tour through the world of 17th-century poetry builtMore
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The Rest of It is a lively book; it forces readers to engage with the difficult, often contentious personality of a brilliantly accomplished gay man wrestling with his demons.
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When Women Rise
THIS BOOK packs a punch—or rather, multiple punches—reflecting the power and energy of women’s struggles for political and social equality in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.
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Out Came Jann
JANN WENNER is one of those people who seems to have emerged from the womb knowing exactly what he wanted to do. He had journalism in his blood early on. He not only created a neighborhood newspaper as a child but also sold subscriptions to it. As the founder, editor, and driving force behind RollingMore
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Peter Hujar is known primarily for the unabashed, erotic intimacy of his male nudes and the glorious theatricality of his drag icons, but this important show also features searing photographs of urban detritus and stark cityscapes, as well as tender portraits of artists, friends, and animals, in addition to mummified remains in Italian catacombs.
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AFTER DISCOVERING the writings of Boston- and San Francisco-based poet John Wieners (1939– 2002), I was left with a sense of literary regret: Where have you been all my life? 
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IN THE FALL OF 1980, two sixteen-year-old boys in Verona, Indiana, fall in love, are outed and abused in a bigoted community, and commit suicide on the same day, despite the desperate efforts of their few friends. Their fictional story, in Mark A. Roeder’s young adult (YA) novel, The Soccer Field Is Empty
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Thoughts on news of the day.
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Letters to the Editor
Readers' thoughts.
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Tom of Finland’s contribution to this world went beyond the basic raison d’être of erotica, bringing together a new community of gay men that hadn’t existed before.
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SEN. MIKE LEE (R-Utah) has reintroduced legislation in the U.S. Senate seen to enable anti-LGBT discrimination in the name of “religious freedom”—and Donald Trump made signing such legislation a campaign promise.
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Bob [Smith], who broke ground as the first openly gay comedian to appear on The Tonight Show, passed away on January 20th after a long battle with ALS.
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THE OUSTING of Robert Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe in November 2017 was a cause for jubilation for many people, including members of the LGBT community. The hope and expectation was that the end of Mugabe’s thirty-year dictatorship would usher in a new era with brighter futures for ordinary citizens. Some LGBT folks shared inMore
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