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Weird Sister: Renée Vivien
By Mildred Faintly
It may be time to have another look at Renée Vivien, an English lesbian poet who’s been sidelined due to a language barrier (she wrote in French)—and even more because …
Kill Your Darlings Howls at Metrograph
By Brian Alessandro
While Allen Ginsberg might have “seen the greatest minds of [his] generation destroyed by madness,” the Lower East Side’s Metrograph theater hosted some of the greatest minds of ours…
The Troubles: Northern Ireland Punk
By Anne Marie Molloy
From the late 1960s until a peace agreement was reached in 1998, Northern Ireland—particularly its capital, Belfast—was devastated by bitter sectarian violence dubbed “The Troubles.”
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What about the children?
By T.C. Kraven
“What about the children?” As an adult, I’ve heard this question countless times. It’s been asked at any moment when opponents of equal rights sought to cling to their versions of normalcy.
In the Right Bathroom
By Charnice Nelson
Once I tried pulling my oversized shirt tighter and arching my back slightly to emphasize the fact that, yes, I have curves. It seemed to make them more uncomfortable than the lineup on my fade.
Becoming Daddy
By Steven Favreau
But beneath that exchange is a deeper craving: to be seen beyond the cutout shape that fits someone else’s fantasy, to be granted an inner life as textured as…
Book Reviews
Cavafy’s Angle on Pleasure
GAY POET Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) has been called the greatest Greek poet of the 20th century, a serious statement about a nation that produced Yiannis Ritsos and Nobel laureates Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis. Cavafy did not actually visit Greece until his late thirties …
A Collector of Artists and Artifacts
I FIRST LEARNED of Max Ewing while researching gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Ewing makes several appearances in the Lynes narrative, both as a young man who moved alongside Lynes in New York’s bohemian circles and as a fellow artist. Ewing used portrait photos to create his own pantheon of artists, movie stars, personalities, and handsome young men—actors, dancers, bodybuilders, and models who caught his eye.
Short Reviews
Short reviews of The Paris Express, The Art Spy, Memoir of a Reluctant Giant, Julian’s Debut, The Portable Feminist Reader, and Love in the Lav
A Writer Whose Life and Work Were One
THERE REALLY IS no point in trying to separate Christopher Isherwood’s writing from the details of his life. His prolific use of those details has led critics to classify his works as examples of “autofiction.”
The Fragility of James Baldwin
JAMES BALDWIN The Life Album by Magdalena J. Zaborowska Yale Univ. Press. 320 pages, $28. IN HER NEW BIOGRAPHY of James Baldwin, Magdalena J. Zaborowska is hopelessly in love with her subject, but this doesn’t distract her from probing deep into the messy complexities and vulnerabilities that shadowed Baldwin throughout his life. She admitsMore
Letting Events Happen
THE IMAGE beckoned: a closely shaved head in profile, double hoop earrings, handwritten neck tattoo above a crisp Oxford collar, typography following the curve of the cranium: Love Me Tender. It was French writer Constance Debré featured on the cover of her first novel translated into English. While the graphics grabbed me, it was the author’s singular voice and the radical simplicity of her enterprise that kept me reading—and made me want more. Now Debré’s trilogy—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name—is available in English translations.