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All these temporary critics have masters degrees with the exception of Merrill, whose reading was nevertheless extensive enough to make his essays on Cavafy, Dante, Ponge, and Bishop more than exercises in pure appreciation.

EMILY DICKINSON inhabited a world of daisies, calla lilies, bourbon roses, sweet sultans, and verbena (among other flowers), not only in her symbolic use of such flowers in her poetry, but literally, as a horticulturalist who spent many hours cultivating her garden. ...

I SAT DOWN to read American Ghosts with high expectations. Here, after all, is the personal story of David Plante, author of fourteen books, including the famed Francoeur Trilogy, The Ghost of Henry James, The Catholic, Difficult Women, and The Family. ...

WILL FELLOWS’ A Passion to Preserve is really two books. One looks at living gay men who have devoted their lives to restoring and preserving old houses and other American antiquities. The other documents some similar men who did the same sort of work in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. ...

GILGAMESH IS the first significant work of literature in history-not Western history, but all of history-an epic that was first written down (ca. 2100 BCE) over a thousand years before The Iliad and The Odyssey or the Bible. ...

FOR THE MILLIONS of Americans, including most gays and lesbians, who awoke on November 3, 2004, aghast to find maps of the United States awash in Bush Red, Thomas Frank offers a witty yet incisive study of how conservatives swept the American heartland. ...

DIARIES ARE curious things. They are private records, but when they document the lives of public figures, those divisions become murky. In the case of Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-86), whose diaries exceed a million words-hundreds of thousands of which have already been published-they can be downright damning. ...

AMONG THE WRITERS whose names are associated with the Beat Generation-Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the rest-perhaps only Paul Bowles is destined to transcend that association and secure his own place as an artist of the late 20th century. ...

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Anamika Sharma is an overly earnest, overachieving high school girl in a hurry. As the head prefect at her academically rigorous and slightly progressive high school in Delhi, India, she’s respected by most of her peers and teachers. ...

JT LeRoy’s new novella Harold’s End has the shape and feel of a personal diary or journal. Small in size and squarish in shape, the book sports a black cover (under the dust jacket) and, inside, the text is illustrated throughout with drawings of the story’s characters by Australian artist Cherry Hood. ...

THE MALE NUDE has been a staple of photography since shortly after the invention of cameras and film over a century and a half ago, although for much of that time it was an underground staple owing to various conservative, sexophobic and homophobic cultural forces unwilling to view it as anything but pornography. ...

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... At any rate, psychologist Tripp did most vigorously barge into the realm of history. What the historians didn’t fully grasp, I think, is that Tripp was barging in with the sex-research perspective front and center. They must have known to some degree, because, after all, Tripp had published Matrix and had worked for Kinsey.More

The following is the Preface from the recently published book by C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Free Press, 2005).

IN THE LATE 1930’s, Alfred Kinsey had what he thought was a rather simple idea: given that no one had the slightest idea what people really did and did not do sexually, and given-as he discovered from a questionnaire he distributed to his students-that a lack of simple information about sex was causing massive confusionMore

NEARLY 5,000 same-sex couples have been issued licenses to marry in Massachusetts since May 17, 2004, a development that has unleashed waves of political backlash as leaders have tried to undermine the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Goodridge. But ...

DID THE 2004 ELECTION demonstrate that Americans oppose gay rights? After traveling to Oregon and spending ten days volunteering with the effort to defeat that state’s anti-gay constitutional amendment, I came away concluding that this was not the case. ...

It’s the first meeting of the school year for the LGBT student group, and their lounge is completely packed ...

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, on October 14, 1979, an estimated 75,000 to 125,000 lesbians and gay men from all across America marched on Washington at a moment in the movement’s history that was remarkably different from the current one. ...

IT IS HARROWING to watch, but Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation is a stunning, one-of-a-kind achievement. Screened at Cannes and around the world, Tarnation was made for a couple hundred bucks using iMovie. But that’s the least interesting thing about it. ...

... Gay activist Vladislav Topchev echoed Nahorna’s pessimism. “The presentation of us in the media is to satisfy heterosexual interest. Even if journalists are gay-friendly, information tends to be distorted.” He has heard about physical attacks everywhere in Ukraine. Homophobia is rampant both in the industrial, largely Russian-speaking east, and in the Europe-turning, Catholic west,More

Do you care much that greasy ol’ Pizza Hut gave tens of thousands in PAC money to the Republican Party last year? How about the fact that Taco Bell stopped pumping out their happily toxic semi-rancid meat-like substances just long enough to write a fat check to the conservative Right? ...