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Max, the first-person narrator, is a likable character. Readers might find themselves comparing him to the “stone butch” character they met thirteen years ago in Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. But Drag King Dreams is not a sequel-not exactly.

Behind the Mask of the Mattachine makes the case for linking Hal Call’s political and erotic activism. This is no typical biography, but a “chronicle,” marked by extensive quotations from oral history interviews conducted before Call’s death in 2000 ...

I REALLY WASN’T EXPECTING another novel from Joe Keenan. ...

Her [Mary Wollstonecraft] great book-A Vindication of the Rights of Women-was published in 1792 when she was 33. Three years later she began her great experiment: a relationship with William Godwin, ...

(What I Did Wrong) is a road novel that never leaves New York.

THE UNNAMED NARRATOR of this remarkable novel arrives in Washington, D.C., on Martin Luther King Day to try to reboot his life after a long period of paralytic mourning for his mother, for friends lost to AIDS, and for his own lost youth, as well. He is somewhere in his fifties and single. His motherMore

PAUL SWAN, the oldest of ten children, was born in 1883 in rural Illinois. His life was one of legend, but he did not attain lasting star status in the pantheon of gay arts.

ANDREW JACKSON captured the White House in 1828 by turning himself into a symbol of American manhood, a tough backwoodsman who dressed, spoke, and acted the part. David Greven believes that Jackson’s construction of manhood-white male power rejecting any hint of weakness and willing to use violence-has prevailed in American culture to this day.

... Rogers’ new book is much more than a rehash of old arguments that have come down to us from John Boswell and the more popular Daniel Helminiak, author of What the Bible Really Teaches About Homosexuality.

Thoughts on the news of the day

Reader's thoughts

The rat story has been part of Proust’s legend for years, although—in the recent biography by Jean Yves Tadie, and here, in Proust in Love—there is no proof that it is true.

The following is excerpted from Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig, by Judith A. Peraino. University of California Press, Copyright 2006.

AIDS has been a plague since 1982, although officially it never has been called one. I was recently asked by The New York Times to participate in a public forum entitled “AIDS at 25: What next?” I was not allowed to make the following remarks

BEAUTIFUL, charming, talented, and celebrated, the toast of Europe and South America during the heyday of her career, Josephine Baker was born in a black slum area of St. Louis in 1906. ...

SCHUBERT DIED in November 1828, long before his final resting place, the Viennese cemetery known as Zentralfriedhof, was opened in 1874. At first, he was buried in the local cemetery of Währing, near the grave of Beethoven, whom he had idolized. In 1888, the remains of both composers were transferred to the Zentralfriedhof, an occasionMore

OPERA QUEENS are not in short supply, but gay men who love Lieder seem to be few and far between. The German word Lieder is the plural of Lied, which means simply “song.” But it has acquired a particular association, especially among English speakers, with the Romantic German art song. Mozart and Beethoven may beMore

“The composer’s success lies less in comprehending the words he is setting than in feeling them musically, and in being able to convince us of the necessity of his feeling.” - Ned Rorem in Pure Contraption (1974)

DUTCH POET and novelist Jacob Israël de Haan was born in Smilde, the Netherlands, on December 31, 1881, and murdered in Jerusalem on June 30, 1924. As a writer, he is perhaps best known for his first novel Pijpelijntjes, which appeared in 1904 and caused a considerable uproar on account of its explicit description ofMore

SAN FRANCISCO brings to mind many images, such as cable cars, steep hills, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Castro Theater. Add one more image to the mix: the rainbow flag, the symbol of gay pride. Gilbert Baker, a self-described “drag queen from way back who knew how to sew very well,” created it there.More

There’s another argument to be made when we fight state and federal marriage amendments. It has the potential to take back the debate because it’s about the Constitution and the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom.

Before Night Falls, the memoir by Reinaldo Arenas, gay Cuban novelist and poet, political dissident and prisoner, foe of Castro’s repressive regime, was published posthumously in 1993 to immediate acclaim. ... Several of my gay friends were reading the book and enthusiastically recommended it to me. One of them finally put a copy in myMore

I spoke to Maupin via phone in San Francisco about his novel and the new film adaptation, about his æsthetic sensibility in general, and about his views on the future of gay and lesbian people.