Art Briefs
Reviews of the play Hit the Wall, and the albums OUTlaw and One True Thing.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2013
July-August 2013
Blog Posts
A Film about Making a Film about a Film 
WHY did James Franco, rich and famous Hollywood actor/dilettante, want to make a graphic film about the gay leather subculture? That’s what everyone on screen is asking in the resulting sixty-minute film, Interior. Leather Bar., co-directed, written, and edited by gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. A lot of viewers will ask the same question, but nothing in the film will answer it.
MoreLetters to the Editor
In Defense of Harry Hay’s Essentialism To the Editor: What struck me first about Jay Michaelson’s article on gay essentialism (“The Non-essential(ist) Harry Hay”) in the March-April issue was…More
Dark Victory as Metaphor of the Closet
This is what has become the stuff of legend for many gay men. While the queerness of Davis’ stardom has been deconstructed post-structurally for ages, what has been neglected are the subliminal subtexts of some of her pictures pertaining to the closet. In the case of Edmund Goulding’s 1939 Dark Victory, we can see Davis as one of the first women to struggle onscreen with the coming out experience.
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Single Gay Father, Seeking
GAY PARENTING hasn’t received nearly as much attention as same-sex marriage in our recent cultural debates, which makes Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland – a memoir about growing up with her single gay father, the late poet Steve Abbott, in San Francisco, during the 1970s and ’80s.
MoreChristopher’s Kind
IN RECENT YEARS, Christopher Isherwood’s presence in popular culture has been on the rise …
In her introduction to the latter book, Harker observes that much Isherwood scholarship focuses on his place in the modernist canon and on his homosexuality.
A Life on the Narrative Line
Radel has clearly done his homework and deftly steers the reader through all of White’s fiction— from 1973’s Forgetting Elena, a debut which saw few sales but won critical ac- claim from Vladimir Nabokov, to last year’s Jack Holmes and His Friend.
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When Musical Theater Could Rock the Boat
GROWING UP in a leftist family in the 1950s, my cultural education included lectures given by my mother on the connection between politics and the arts. She would tell me of her experiences as a young socialist during the 1930s attending politi- cal theater in New York City. Her favorite socially conscious composer was Marc Blitzstein. Howard Pollack, professor of music at the University of Houston, has written a comprehensive biography that opens a window onto the creative genius of Blitzstein while offering a thorough study of his innovative music.
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Black and Gay: A Special Case
Boykin, an author, television commentator, and Harvard Law School graduate, is to be commended for assembling writers with the audacity to address issues normally shrouded in silence in communities of color in this stirring collection of personal essays by gay men of color.
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