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Today we tend to take lesbian images for granted. While k d lang, Ellen DeGeneres, and Melissa Etheridge are visible lesbian icons, there is no uniformity to the lesbian image because, unfortunately, lesbians are still held up next to straight women rather than next to other lesbians to construct categories of normal. Tiraz True Latimer’sMore

IN THE GAY ARCHIPELAGO, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff of the University of California, Irvine, sets out to define, interpret, and reflect upon what it means to be gay in Indonesia. ...

THE NAME “Ivor Novello” is perhaps only recognized on these shores by those Robert Altman movie fans who saw the director’s stylish British manor house whodunit Gosford Park (2001).

FROM SHAKESPEARE to Mrs. Doubtfire, gender deception as a plot device usually has a predictable trajectory. The elaborate subterfuge, no matter how it’s initially conceived, ends up revealing more to the deceiver than s/he ever anticipated. After much hand-wringing, not to mention comedy, the costume comes off, the truth comes out, hearts are (perhaps) brokenMore

THOMAS GLAVE describes himself as “a Jamerican” to reflect both his Jamaican and his American heritage. Indeed, he often has difficulty reconciling these two identities: traveling back and forth between the two countries, he often wonders “which passport to use on this trip or that one, Jamaican or U.S.-which citizen will I be this timeMore

... a fast-moving novel about the artists and writers who flocked to Luhan’s salon in New Mexico in the 1930’s. ...

THE CHALLENGE for any writer of a memoir is to make the story interesting to someone else who, unlike a psychotherapist, isn’t being paid to hear it. A writer’s fame can guarantee an audience, but those lacking fame often resort to hyperbole and sensational drama. This is not true of Wade Rouse in his coming-of-ageMore

GAVIN BUTT’S BACKSTAGE exposé of the New York art world of the 1950’s careens between artsy jargon and artsy gossip. He rather defensively lays out his thesis in a lengthy introduction peppered with breathless 55-word sentences stating his themes. Doubtless the author is on his guard because he incorporates hearsay, rumor, and urban legend intoMore

A “RICE QUEEN” is generally defined as a white man who’s attracted to Asian men, while a “potato queen” is an Asian man who’s attracted to white men. The terms are often used disparagingly, with rice queens seen as sexual imperialists and potato queens as self-hating race traitors. For this reason, it takes some nerveMore

A GATHERING OF ANGELS, by gay Texas poet Larry Dean Hamilton, relates a remarkable life story through a lyrical, sometimes dreamlike prose style. ...

“YES, ABSOLUTELY, this was the greatest day of my life,” declares Trisha Driscoll, the fourteen-year-old outer suburbanite narrator of Michelle Tea’s latest whirlwind street-girl adventure, Rose of No Man’s Land. ...

Reviews of Getting Bi:  Voices of Bisexuals around the World, Bi Men:  Coming Out Every Which Way, High Pink:  Tex-Mex Fairy Tales, and Inside Out:  Straight Talk from a Gay Jock.

Can three decades have passed since I sat in a darkened Manhattan cinema transfixed by the cherubic-faced Robby Benson giving the performance of a lifetime as the innocent and emotionally troubled Billy Joe in the movie Ode to Billy Joe? Any gay person watching that landmark flick could immediately identify with the conflicted protagonist andMore

On the release of her latest album Folk is the New Black, the singer-songwriter spoke with me in person for the G&LR.

MY PARTNER in commitment claims he is straight, always has been straight, and could never imagine himself engaging in sexual activity other than with a woman. He says he did not choose his straightness, this is just the way things are.

Thoughts on news of the day

Readers' thoughts

WIDESPREAD INDIGNATION at the suggestion that Abraham Lincoln might have enjoyed sharing his bed with other men, that he delayed marriage to make it last as long as he could, and that he occasionally returned to the practice even in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was away, suggests the fragility of tolerance for homosexuality.

THE POLITICAL DUST STORM kicked up by the Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain, however predictable, found right-wingers railing that yet another symbol of American “family values,” the cowboy, was being desecrated. A typical Christian blogger screamed: “Now they’re out to destroy the American legend of the cowboy. God help us, and John Wayne forgive us!”

ODESSA, IN WEST TEXAS, feels like the remote edge of something in the way you might imagine Vladivostok: far from anywhere, exotic, but not the kind of exotic that attracts tourists. It’s an oil town, mainly. Buildings are tacky, functional. The land is flat, dry, barren, with a local culture to match: the big dealMore

“WHEN THE FIRST Christian pervert, St. Paul, made nature a crime against Christianity, civilization was finished,” writes poet Harold Norse in “Nocturnal Emissions” (1973). “Had he been handsome instead of hideous, the whole course of history might have been happier.” Norse’s opinion is shared by novelist Gore Vidal who, in Live from Golgotha (1992), presentsMore

FUNNY, MOVING, FURIOUS, and dazzling, Eleanor Lerman’s Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande, 2005) sounds the note of the times, the era of American Imperialism, the days of our Bush-filled lives. Lerman is able to capture brilliantly the wacky and weary sense of stymied idealism of a generation that grew up hoping for better things forMore

FOLLOWING OUR FLING with the faraway world of gay cowboys, Boy Culture returns us to the more familiar turf of contemporary urban gay lives-and thus to a movie that’s likely to have none of the “crossover” appeal of Brokeback Mountain. But it’s a fine and fascinating movie that explores the complexities of gay life usingMore

ON APRIL 28, 2006, “March of Toleration,” a gay parade, was attacked in Kraków. Youth activists of the parliamentary party League of Polish Families threw stones, eggs, bottles, and slurs at peaceful GLBT marchers. ...

[Edmund] White shared his thoughts about his new book just prior to its April release at his home in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, where he has lived with Michael Carroll since 1995.

On April 25th at 7:00 p.m., I arrived at the Hasted-Hunt Gallery in New York City’s gay ghetto, Chelsea, where a robust reception for the youthful participants of Soulforce’s Equality Ride was being held. The Equality Riders, some of whom have been the victims of hate crimes and expelled from Christian colleges because of theirMore