Holiday Banner

‘Everybody Was Somebody There’ By Alfred Corn: The Factory itself was a sort of graveyard of delusional dreams whose denizens rarely managed to achieve much outside of its precincts.
Tuckernuck May Call You By William Benemann: In 1871, prominent Boston surgeon Henry Bigelow built a summer home on the west end of Tuckernuck Island, a home he called “Tuckanuck” (spelling the name of the cottage the way the locals pronounced the name of the island itself).
Find Your Muse Here By Anne Charles: The Pagoda was a women’s land community “where lesbians could safely share their creative work and each other’s company.”
The Double Life of Albee’s Woolf By Allen Ellenzweig: Gefter reports that there was “a lingering rumor perpetuated mostly in the gay community that Virginia Woolf was a gay play in drag, that is, about two gay male couples.” Albee denied this rumor and always refused to allow any theater company to cast his play with male couples.
Of Bars and Bookstores Book Review By Anne Laughlin: FOR LESBIANS of a certain age, reading June Thomas’ A Place of Our Own may bring on a wave of nostalgia, especially the parts about the 1970s and ’80s.
The Madonna of the Road Review By Colin Carman: THE ARRIVAL of Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel, could not have been better timed. In the fall of 2023, the pop star launched a concert tour, which she called “Celebration,” as a showcase of her greatest hits.

By David Cameron Strachan
In junior high school, I saw that I wasn’t developing like other boys. I was teased for my small genitals and breast growth. Our family doctor assured my mother that I’d eventually be “normal” but my biology textbook gave me doubts: it said “giants are usually sterile.”

A Quarterly of One’s Own

DECADENT WOMEN Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams Reaktion Books. 388 ages, $30. SET IN THE OFFICES of a Victorian magazine that he edited, many of Anthony Trollope’s later short stories fictionalize his encounters with aspiring authors, whether talented or not, ambitious or retiring, male or female, but overwhelmingly the latter. Given the successMore

An Exhibit to Revisit

A new catalogue for About Face published by Monacelli Press includes elucidating essays and texts by Julian Carter, Anthony Cianciolo, Amelia Jones, Ava L. J. Kim, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Christopher Reed, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Dagmawi Woubshet. This lushly designed book with 300 illustrations is proof of concept for Katz’ curatorial vision.

Of Bars and Bookstores

FOR LESBIANS of a certain age, reading June Thomas’ A Place of Our Own may bring on a wave of nostalgia, especially the parts about the 1970s and ’80s. Thomas has written a breezy yet substantial history of six types of spaces that have been important to our culture: lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, the softball diamond, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy stores, and vacation destinations. Each sort of space has its own unique vibe, but they all share a history of lesbians trying, and often failing, to make it in a heteronormative capitalistic society while prioritizing lesbian feminist ideals. The efforts were often heroic and the results transformative in the lives of the women who spent time in these spaces.

Postcards to Paris

Wojnarowicz’ importance to my thinking about art, life, and death in the age of AIDS has only deepened over the years. But when I went to see “Dear Jean Pierre,” an exhibition of letters and postcards sent mostly between 1979 and ’82 to his on-again, off-again French lover Jean Pierre Delage, I confess I was looking for a different, more intimate connection. The exhibition, curated by Anneliis Beadnell and Cynthia Carr for New York’s PPOW Gallery in spring 2022, didn’t entirely dash that hope. Most of the exhibited material is now available in Dear Jean Pierre, which reproduces the correspondence in full color and scale.

Find Your Muse Here

In keeping with this mission, The Pagoda is just such a work. The book is a well-researched account of a women’s land community that flourished near St. Augustine, Florida, for 22 years. Surprisingly, information about The Pagoda rarely appears in academic literature about women’s communities, and many contemporary lesbian scholars haven’t heard of it. This circumstance is due in part to the intentional secrecy of the community itself.

A Life in Episodes (#1–35)

Another Word for Love unfolds in 35 loosely chronological episodes, but the title prompts an immediate question: What is that other word?

Holiday Banner

Blog Posts View all

Indies in P’town

Indies in P’town

Indies in P’town

Here's My Story View all

Coming Out On (and Off) the Field

Embracing My Identity with New Language