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AS RESEARCH for Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, author William J. Mann befriended the famed film director and became his documentarian during the last two years of Schlesinger’s life as a stroke patient in Palm Springs. As a result, there is a loose, conversational tone to the book that places it somewhereMore

IN CHOOSING to show some of his own skin for the cover of his essays now collected as Beneath the Skin, John Rechy remains the consummate rebel. He appears shirtless and sexy with a cigarette dangling from the lips. ...

THE SUBTITLE of this wonderful new glimpse into the lives of gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers and their friends is an accurate description of its contents. ...

The fact that homosexual themes figured so prominently in the works of the greatest French writers had the dual effect of bringing these themes to the forefront of literary criticism and infusing the emergent queer culture with a peculiarly literary quality. In this remarkable little book, Lawrence R. Schehr, a professor of French at theMore

Reviews of Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort, and I Am a Red Dress.

  Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology by John F. Galliher, Wayne H. Brekhus, and David P. Keys University of Wisconsin Press. 214 pages, $18.95   LAUD HUMPHREYS was the author of what was in 1970 a landmark research monograph, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Humphreys, an Anglican priest during the VietnamMore

BERLIN’S SCHWULES museum opened its permanent exhibition in December 2004, featuring 200 years of gay German history, 1770-1970. The German word schwul translates as “gay male” and excludes lesbians. Under the direction of the museum’s co-founder Andreas Sternweiler, the comprehensive new exhibit sums up a historical record compiled by twenty years of museum projects inMore

ARTHUR DONG makes documentary films that examine anti-gay attitudes in American culture. His open-ended approach encourages viewers to situate themselves in relation to the issues he investigates, which include homophobia and racism, among others. ...

IT WAS SEEING the movie Kinsey that triggered a heated discussion about bisexuality between me and my girlfriend Meg, whom I had “accused” of being bisexual in light of her history of dating men several years earlier. She vehemently denied that this earlier life made her bisexual, giving rise to that age-old discussion of justMore

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CIRCUIT PARTIES are weekend-long, erotically-charged, drug-fueled gay dance events held in resort towns across the country. There’s at least one major circuit party every month somewhere in the U.S.-New York’s “Black Party,” South Beach’s “White Party,” Montreal’s “Black and Blue Party,” and so on-and people travel far and wide to take part. ...

... Conceptions of sex, after all, vary from one cultural epoch to the next, but also during the lifespan of an individual. The urge to reproduce is an arc, you might say, that rises into the sky, like a rainbow, and then returns to earth. Once it occurred to me to ask a friend who’dMore

IT WAS over twenty years ago that a major sex study disclosed what was then a rather startling finding: lesbian couples engaged in sexual activity significantly less frequently than did both heterosexual and gay male couples ...

THE GAY COMMUNITY has a long history of alcohol and drug abuse above the rate that occurs in the heterosexual population. Research suggests that gay men use drugs in specific situations, such as during sex or during visits to specific “homosocial” venues like bars, clubs, sex parties or bathhouses. Thus, for many gay men, aMore

ON THE AIR since 1990, HBO’s documentary series Real Sex has proven to be hugely popular with millions of cable subscribers curious about the sexual practices and fantasies of their fellow Americans. Ostensibly unscripted and nonfictional, the series’ ring of authenticity adds to its appeal. ...

MANY YOUNG GAY MEN are perceived by themselves and others as “whores,” but it’s a label that other gay youth are consciously rejecting. An earlier generation of gay men embraced sexual liberation as the driving goal of gay liberation itself, and found it empowering to be a “whore” or a “slut.” “Sexual objectification is aMore

JEAN COCTEAU proclaimed friendship to be his only politics. “I would rather be celebrated for constancy of the heart than for any doctrine of the mind,” he remarked in his essay “On Friendship.” Cocteau considered friendship to be an art and equated it with the “fellow feeling” of Walt Whitman. “It continually corrects itself, setsMore

IN 1965, a 22-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Toronto set out to make his first feature-length film. The result was David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm, a story about two young dorm-mates who fall in love-innocent, occasionally awkward, but groundbreaking as a love story between two men, and an autobiographical one at that.More

Recently a friend emailed me pictures of his new home in San Francisco-a Victorian remodel that cost, well, let’s just say that the price rivals some nations’ gross national product. When I opened the photos, I immediately recognized the house-not that I have ever actually been there. It’s the same house that I’ve seen inMore

A recent study published in the journal Child Development found that, in terms of psychosocial health, school behavior, and romantic relationships, teens with two mothers develop as well as those raised by heterosexual parents. As a high school teacher and the daughter of same-sex parents, my academic assessment of this finding is a resounding “Duh!”More

The stereotypical images of southern Italy as a land of pasta and mafia vendettas needs to be replaced with a new understanding of the Mezzogiorno, as the southern regions of Italy are collectively known. The region now has the distinction of electing the first openly gay regional president in the history of the Italian republic.More

... I interviewed Bill Condon by phone last April just before the DVD release of Kinsey. Highly recommended, the DVD includes many bonus features, including an informative documentary about the making of the movie, The Kinsey Report: Sex on Film.