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In the introduction to her fascinating study, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, Magdalena Zaborowska opens with a striking quote from the writer: “Perhaps only someone who is outside of the States realizes that it’s impossible to get out.”

IN THE OPENING essay of The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, Eileen Myles neatly summarizes her career as a writer: “I’m a poet and a novelist, one-time college professor, among other things. Generally as many things as possible.” It is that spirit of openness-the willingness to consider what’s surrounding her at anyMore

IT WOULD SEEM self-evident to readers of this publication that the exclusion of gays or lesbians from a public association is a violation of basic civil rights. The Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) rejection of gays from membership seems like an obvious injustice, so perhaps a conservative analysis of the Boy Scouts of America v.More

THE OTHERS is a trance-like excursion into contemporary Saudi Arabian life, where divisions between people inform every aspect of social behavior. Mysterious and commonplace, nationalist yet saturated with American popular culture, Saudi Arabia is a place that makes for a journey both sensuous and strange. And its exploration of lesbian sexuality places it instantly atMore

THE HOUR BETWEEN turned into several hours of guilty pleasure. Sebastian Stuart’s coming-of-age story, set in a private, residential high school, brings together Arthur and Katrina, the Will and Grace of secondary education. (He’s gay and she’s flighty.) Their maturing process is set against the battle of administrators at the school.

On balance, the biggest difference between the two books is their readability. Hart’s memoir is lighter and easier going, a book that you want to read to the end. Agabian’s book, while well-written and insightful, could have ended forty pages before it did. Both are worthwhile contributions to the growing body of personal memoirs fromMore

AS IF peering through a kaleidoscope of twisted history and distorted time, I could not help but become drawn in by the characters and images that J. J. Sagmiller has created in this delightful romp through the raucous world of early 18th-century London theatre.

THIRTY-SOMETHING S. Bear Bergman has already lived several lives and is leaving a trail of documents for us fortunate readers to decipher. A performance artist, memoirist, educator, and more, Bergman’s elegantly written collection of essays chronicles life as a gender non-conformist-on the “transmasculine spectrum”-with a laugh-out-loud sense of humor.

MARGOT CANADAY’S The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America argues that the last century’s evolving perception of sexuality changed the concept of American citizenship. She pursues her thesis with a rigorous review of the archives to illuminate how federal policies were increasingly inflected with an awareness of non-normative sexualities.

In The Sealed Letter, Donoghue takes on the real lives behind a scandalous English divorce case of the 1860’s, a time when divorce was rare and shocking when it occurred.

Reviews of the books Something to Declare : Good Lesbian Travel Writing, Interruptions: A Novel, The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade, Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom, and the film The Country Teacher.

HARRIET HOSMER (1830-1908) was a lesbian sculptor who emigrated from the United States to Rome at an early age to become part of an expatriate community of writers and artists, including a circle of prominent “independent women.” She worked in marble, and the quality of her surviving sculptures is extraordinary. The operative word is surviving:More

This interview was conducted in Jonathan Ned Katz’s art studio in New York City.

BORN on August 6, 1930, in New York City, Martin Duberman graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1952, and earned a masters and a doctorate in history from Harvard in 1953 and 1957. His first book, a biography of Charles Francis Adams, won the coveted Bancroft Prize in 1962, after which he spent nearlyMore

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Letters from readers

WITH HIS ANTI-WAR NOVEL ALF, from the year 1929, the Leipzig writer Bruno Vogel (1898-1987) acquired a prominent place in gay literary history. The novel, which Vogel himself subtitled “A sketch,” describes the love between two high school students, which ends in tragedy. It is the time of the First World War.

[L]et us try to summon up inspiration from our illustrious ancestors, those forefathers who had they opened their mouths, would have made our cause great a few years earlier, had they had the guts to cry out “here I come, ready or not” to all and sundry, the world at large and stood there longMore

WRITES EDMUND WHITE in his new memoir City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960’s and ’70’s, “[Susan] Sontag once said to me ... that in all human history in only one brief period were people free to have sex when and how they wanted-between 1960, with the introduction of the first birthMore

NO ONE TALKS about gay literature anymore. The topic sounds quaint, hardly cutting edge. And indeed its moment may well have passed. Edmund White says that it “has come and gone as a ... serious movement.” Yet, I think we need to talk about gay literature again, because the silence may tell us a goodMore

Ardi may also knock a brick or two out of another wall-that of conventional evolutionist dogma. Some scientists can be no less dogmatic than scripturalists when they set their feet in concrete on a position that they believe to be settled. Already there are hot debates about which prehistoric primates Ardi was related to, andMore

  I Love You, Man Directed by John Hamburg Dreamworks SKG Funny People Directed by Judd Apatow Universal The Hangover Directed by Todd Phillips Warner Brothers   “I HATE THIS. There are no rules for male friendships.” So complains Peter, the friendless protagonist of I Love You, Man, just one of the latest additions toMore

I am a recently separated United States Army Captain, a fiscal conservative, a lifetime member of the Republican Party; and I am angry. I am mortified that these characteristics align me with the forces of sexual discrimination that permeate our nation’s politics and its armed forces.

RECENTLY I completed a federal prison sentence for receiving and possessing a few items identified as child pornography. Federal postal inspectors sent them to me because my name appeared on the mailing list of James Kemmish, an adult porn distributor who was caught at the border with some illegal videos recently filmed in Mexico.