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AN EXCEPTIONALLY BEAUTIFUL volume to grace the coffee table of any art lover, J. C. Leyendecker is the second major study of perhaps the most successful illustrator, or imagist, as he’s referred to by the authors, of the first half of the 20th century.

In tandem with its publication of Black’s script, Newmarket Press has also published Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk. The book includes a foreword by Armistead Maupin in which he relates the poignant story of Steve Beery, who was Milk’s lover at the time of his death, and an introduction by Black that providesMore

Reviews of Revenge of the Women’s Studies Professor, and America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life.

THIS VOLUME is actually a compilation of two previously published collections of short stories and a set of new ones by Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff, who has taught at various universities in the United States. These stories occupy an impressive range of settings and genres, from contemporary realism to historical and fantasy fiction.

THE ACTRESSES Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis, comedian Gracie Allen, Julia Childs, Queen Elizabeth I, and even two fictional characters, Endora (Agnus Moorehead) of Bewitched and Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) are among the women who make it into My Diva, an anthology of short essays, each a few pages long, byMore

VANESSA & VIRGINIA is a short, imaginative novel of two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, better known as the artist Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf. Written from Vanessa’s perspective, it follows the two from childhood, depicting the tightly knit yet complex relationship between them through Virginia’s suicide in 1941 and into Vanessa’s oldMore

PERFORMER AND AUTHOR Staceyann Chin made her debut two months early, as she explains in this new memoir. Her mother, Hazel, who claimed that she didn’t know she was with child, gave birth on the floor of their small, rented house in Lottery, Jamaica, in her seventh month of pregnancy.

IN LIGHT OF the myriad books about Bette Davis that are out there, one might question the need for another look at the grande dame of the big screen and her body of work. But author Peter McNally would rightly disagree, having written an exhaustive and even original book about the legendary actress’s most memorableMore

The Broadway revival of West Side Story that opened at the Palace Theatre earlier this year was supposed to arrive in time for the show’s fiftieth anniversary at the end of 2007, but didn’t quite make it. Yet it was worth the wait.

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, on June 23, 1992, sculptor George Segal (1924-2000) witnessed the installation of his first outdoor public sculpture in Manhattan, the city center that had inspired much of his work and had made him internationally famous. Titled Gay Liberation, the piece had taken twelve years to find its intended home within the triangleMore

NOW seventy years old, Larry Mitchell has invited me into the labyrinthine apartment he and his lover Richard have shared for 25 years in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the faded gold living room, we sit down to talk over tea and the sounds of the neighborhood streets. Mitchell is the author of four belovedMore

YOU MAY not know Rob Epstein by name but you certainly know his films. A pioneer in the world of GLBT filmmaking, Epstein has been acknowledging and addressing the lives of gay people in his films for the past three decades. In the late 1970’s Epstein’s work burst onto the scene with his groundbreaking documentary,More

SHE HATED the work of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and CarsonMcCullers (Clock Without Hands was “the worst book I’ve ever read”).The sort of book she gave close friends was Romano Guardini’s The Lord,or Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, or Teilhard de Chardin’sThe Phenomenon of Man.

News of the quirky

Letters from readers

ON SEPTEMBER 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Gerald Ford. It was not Ford’s life that changed that day; he would go on, only a few minutes off schedule, back to Washington. It was the man standing next to Moore, Oliver Sipple, an overweight, 33-year-old gay man, who would be changed forever byMore

IN THE FORTY YEARS since the Stonewall Rebellion, an event that achieved legendary status almost before it was over, its power as a symbol has continued to rise more or less unabated. Four decades later-after two books, one film, several radio documentaries, countless articles and news stories; after hundreds of gay events and organizations namedMore

... if you find yourself hankering for some gay history on the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots this summer, here are some spots where you can pay tribute to our collective past.

Note from the author: The first half of this article originally appeared in the December-January 1970 issue of ComeOut! The second half was to have been published in a 1972 issue of ComeOut! Some time before production, the print shop that housed the galleys was raided (perpetrators unknown-at least to me) and the galleys wereMore

VIEWED THROUGH THE PRISM of the eight issues of the newspaper Come Out! that were published by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New York from 1969 to 1972, the Stonewall Riots ignited a decisive and twofold political trajectory that has endured for forty years. Two political models, distinct and dissimilar but not mutually exclusive,More

THE 1960’S IN AMERICA, when I was an adolescent, was a dark time for gay men. A man’s life could be ruined if it were known that he harbored homoerotic desires, even if just in the head. In the political hysteria fostered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, gay men people were purged from government jobs andMore

... Henry James was a gay man, albeit a rather closeted one, and in this respect he is not alone in showing an uncanny insight into the subjectivities of women ... Many of his novels and short stories have been studied by GLBT scholars for their gay subtext, including strong lesbian undertones in his novelMore

... In the aftermath of an unexpected death, the surviving spouse faces a jumble of legal responsibilities, emotional reactions, and practical considerations. At 42, I never expected to find myself planning a memorial service for the 39-year-old love of my life. ...

The movement that followed Stonewall represented a sharp break with the past; the impact over time would transform the world in ways unimaginable to earlier activists. What’s more, scale of change over the ensuing forty years has been breathtaking. What, then, was so special about Stonewall?

THE OSCAR WILDE Memorial Bookshop, founded in the pre-Stonewall year of 1967 and a fixture in New York’s Greenwich Village for 42 years, closed its doors for good on March 29, 2009. It was by most accounts the first bookstore in the United States to carry serious (non-pornographic) gay literature. Having survived the Stonewall RiotsMore

... Moz (as he’s known by his legion of queer-friendly fans) has found a reason to believe. And yet, in his newly released album, Years of Refusal, he sings that “only stone and steel accept my love.”