May – June, 2013
ONE OF THE MOST prestigious art galleries in Havana is La Acacia, is placed in a highly touristic zone of the city. An unusual art show took place in that gallery from January 18 to February 28 of this year called Sex in the City, a collective exhibition of homoerotic Cuban art.
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DEAHN BERRINI’S How To Earn Your Keep is a tentative novel, full of almosts. It has aspects of a legal thriller, shadings of chick lit, and something akin to a coming out story, braided into a larger narrative about finding one’s moral compass in trying times. It’s an engaging mix, if hesitant in its delivery. …
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I’M LOOKING at 25 photographs of retired, wrecked masters of the sea, ocean liners laid up and languishing in disuse and decay. These photographs, from Stranded: The Twilight of the Ocean Liner: Photographs by Martin Cox, at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, illustrate the reverse velocity of technology, steely in these old ships …
MoreIN 2012, a Cuban friend who is an accomplished gay artist was able to visit the United States for the first time for a few months. Because Americans generally get their impressions of Cuba from either government propaganda or leftist sympathizers of the Cuban regime, I wanted to get the views of a nonpartisan independent Cuban with no particular axe to grind. I asked him to discuss life in Cuba near the end of his visit. For security reasons, he cannot be further identified. …
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WILLIAM DRUMMOND STEWART was part of the landed aristocracy in 19th-century Scotland, albeit a second son, who ultimately became baronet of Murthly Castle late in life upon the death of his childless older brother. With limited cash and not a lot to do prior to inheriting the title, he set out for ‘pleasure trips’ to the Rocky Mountains, spending several years there as he had adventures and explored the beauty not only of the frontier landscape but also of the young, virile men who flocked to the Rockies to explore and escape as well. …
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New Delhi witnessed an event last November that’s becoming increasingly commonplace in India. It was the 5th edition of the Delhi Queer Pride Parade. … The first such gay pride parade in India took place in 2003. …
This development in India over the last couple of decades reflects the increasing willingness of gay people to come out into the open. …
However, not all segments of the community have come out to the same extent.
EARLY IN 2010, a legal trial in Malawi made international news when two individuals were sentenced to fourteen years in prison for holding a traditional engagement ceremony or ‘chinkhoswe.’ The couple were a transgender woman named Tiwonge Chimbalanga and a man named Steven Monjeza, whose act of mutual devotion was deemed an ‘unnatural offense’ under Malawi’s highly ambiguous criminal code …
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IT IS POSSIBLE that you’ve already heard of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which was a featured selection of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, still a potent force in publishing and enough to guarantee that Ayana Mathis’ debut novel would be an instant best-seller. The book is of a piece with many of Winfrey’s selections …
MoreAs in the United States, where ten states and the District of Columbia have marriage equality, Israel has marriage equality of an indeterminate nature, but in a different way. Same-sex couples in Israel cannot get married on Israeli soil. But if they travel abroad to marry in jurisdictions that allow them to, the Israeli government will then register their marriages in Israel.
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THIS IS a remarkable exhibition to be found touring three lesser-known provincial art venues in southern England. One of the venues, Falmouth, fully makes sense, in that many of the paintings by Cedric Morris and Christopher (‘Kit’) Wood gathered here relate to periods spent in St. Ives and across Cornwall, and they feature the usual subjects: fishermen, village life, rural scenes, and tin miners. But other paintings describe a very different pair of trajectories …
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