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THIS BOOK is a great idea and, sadly, rather a great disappointment. The subject - broadly speaking, the relationship between the spiritual and sexual aspirations of three key gay male writers of the last century has long warranted investigation. It is only lately, and in passing, that Forster’s engagement with Eastern society and religion hasMore

IN 1949, alerted by his friend William Burroughs that his name had appeared in compromising letters seized by police in a drug raid, a 21-year-old Allen Ginsberg worried where to secure his journals and manuscripts of poems lest authorities suddenly descend upon his own apartment and confiscate these records of his drug experimentation and ofMore

As it happens, the unexpected discovery of Katharine Hepburn’s true birth date forms an integral part of the story of William Mann’s first significant exposure to the subject of his lengthy biography, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn.

Hidden from history until the early 1990’s, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore resist easy categorization. This book, which is part biography and part art history, is the first book in English to explore the range of their creative and political lives.

THIS IS an eclectic anthology of engaging essays and memoirs whose message is that the desire to be someone other than who we are is an integral and universal aspect of coming of age.

  Gay Life and Culture: A World History Edited by Robert Aldrich Universe, 384 pages, $49.95   THIRTY, even twenty, years ago, a book titled Gay Life and Culture: A World History would have been unachievable because much of the research needed to produce such a work did not yet exist. Forty or fifty yearsMore

Short reviews of Queer Youth in the Province of the “Severely Normal”, Talking to the Moon, and Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet.

  Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco by Peter Shapiro Faber and Faber.  369 pages, $17.   AN AUTHOR who promises the “secret” history of anything sets the bar pretty high. There’s an implication that what waits between the covers is insider information previously known to only a few—there’s even a hintMore

  Erzulie’s Skirt by Ana-Maurine Lara RedBone Press.  242 pages, $15.   SET IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, beginning some time after the dictator Trujillo came to power in1930, this book tells the story of two women, their separate childhoods, and their lives together both in the country and in the city of Santa Domingo. TheMore

In his latest book, Michael Lucey, who has already written about same-sex issues in Balzac and Gide, examines very carefully how three French citizens involved with same-sex desire-Colette, Gide, and Proust-took advantage of the newness and fluidity of the concept of homosexuality to advance his or her own unique viewpoint over competing ones.

  35 Cents by Matty Lee Suspect Thoughts Press.  205 pages, $16.95   IN THE WAKE of the recent scandal surrounding the popular yet fraudulent gay author JT LeRoy—not to mention the Oprah Winfrey-fueled outrage over James Frey’s fabricated tale of drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2005)—the question of truth and authenticity in aMore

Gifford, author of the excellent Dayneford’s Library (1995) and a scholar of the writer and critic Edward Prime-Stevenson, whom he quotes frequently, has collected about fifty American writers of prose, poetry, and nonfiction, excerpted some of their most telling works, and provided a well-written introduction that instructs the reader on how to read between theMore

  Homo Domesticus: Notes from a Same-Sex Marriage by David Valdes Greenwood DaCapo Lifelong Press. 214 pages, $22.   WHEN YOU SEE a couple walking hand-in-hand down the street, it kind of makes you smile, doesn’t it? Ah, young love. You know how it is: two people meet and sparks fly. They date for awhile,More

The Lavender Locker Room gets off to a good start by reminding us that the first games recorded in Western history were those organized by Achilles on the beach before Troy following the death and immolation of his passionately loved fellow warrior Patroclus.

  In my youth, I had strong gaydar when it came to literature, reveling in the homosexual undertones of the classics. Looking back now, it’s hard to believe that anyone could be blind to the quintessential gayness of Moby-Dick or Leaves of Grass, but at the time reading such works aroused no suspicion. When IMore

I first discovered the 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness when I was growing up in my academic parents’ house full of books. I became aware that this book had been banned in England, and I believed this was because the English legal system of the time still enforced Victorian morality, unlike the legalMore

The Breeding Imperative First it was New York’s high court, and now Washington state’s has ruled against legalizing same-sex marriage using the old argument, in effect, that marriage is for making babies.

Letters to the Editor

THE COMING OUT STORY is the foundational myth of modern gay life. The term itself dates from outbursts of liberation activity in the late 1960’s and the militant slogan Out of the Closets and Into the Streets.

IN 1922, "one of the most terrible plays ever presented in New York," as the Evening Telegram (Dec. 20, 1922) called it, shocked Broadway with its portrayal of a family that lives off prostitution, a father’s failed attempts at Jewish respectability and, most importantly, a riveting lesbian love scene.

  HE WAS NO ORDINARY JOE: during his short but meteoric career as the baddest queer of the postwar British stage, Joe Orton (1933–1967) was getting it both ways. A working-class rebel and an ex-convict, he rubbed elbows with London’s fashionable circle of closeted aristocrats and theatrical big boys. But while the likes of NoelMore

DURING THE TWO DECADES between 1967 and 1987, dramatist, actor, and agent provocateur Charles Ludlam would rebelliously change theatre in America for the next generation. As the founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and the author of 29 raucous and highly entertaining plays, Ludlam quite literally became the “belle of the ball” of the WestMore

CHICAGO’s TRAP DOOR THEATRE opened its 2006-07 season with a production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The play, written in 1971, and made into a film the next year with Fassbinder as director, tells a story of a famous fashion designer from the title who falls for theMore

  THERE’S SOMETHING RAPTUROUS about watching fabric spin so fast that discrete shapes dissolve into the blurred trails of after-image. Even a few seconds of watching a gifted flag dancer are enough to flip a switch in your mind, unhooking part of your consciousness; it’s the outer border of trance. Born about thirty years agoMore

... the more I’ve thought about what I wanted to say, the more I’ve found myself skeptical that the march is anything more than a footnote in history. ...

  SUNDANCE is undoubtedly the most GLBT-friendly of the major international film festivals. This is true not only because of the large number of gay-themed films on display, but also because the people that attend Sundance are there because they love good films and couldn’t care less whether a film is “gay” by virtue ofMore

The author, currently president of Hampshire College, previously taught classics and comparative literature at Berkeley, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Yale University, and served as executive dean of letters and science at Berkeley. A version of this essay first appeared in Inside Higher Ed (insidehighered.com), January 25, 2007.

EVEN AS the perimeters of GLBT freedom have widened in the 21st century, the once vibrant community of activist gay Republicans finds itself in a crisis threatening its future viability in American political life. The shift in control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections has cost them whatever influence they may have had onMore

The Case Is Far from Closed HISTORIANS Bill Percy and Lewis Gannett had an article called “Lincoln, Sex, and the Scholars” in The Gay & Lesbian Review last year [March-April 2006]—another part of the ongoing effort by Bill and others to annoy heterosexuals by cheekily suggesting that some American idols were actually on our team.More

BORN IN VIENNA, Austria, on July 31, 1932, to an official of the U.S. diplomatic corps and his wife, Barbara Gittings was a daughter dedicated to freedom. With passion, creativity, and relentless determination, she helped shape and lead one of the 20th century’s most significant struggles for social change, the gay and lesbian rights movement.More

A longtime activist for GLBT senior issues, Adelman is the editor of Lesbian Passages: True Stories Told by Women over 40 (1996), and of Midlife Lesbian Relationships: Friends, Lovers, Children, and Parents (2000). This interview was conducted last November via a combination of tape-recorded phone conversations and e-mail exchanges.

... Jo Ann Citron, whose legal analysis of the marriage issue has occasionally appeared in these pages, interviewed Bonauto by telephone in early July.