March-April 2014
THE PROJECT that finally became this book began as a web trail from the British Museum. It is a pictorial sampling of items from that museum across centuries and cultures of mostly visual representations of same-sex desire and gender ambiguity. Each depiction has a paragraph or two of explanation, much as you would find on the plaques that accompany art works in a museum exhibit. The items are arranged in roughly chronological order.
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Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home by Catherine Reid Beacon Press. 184 pages, $24.95 FOR THOSE OF US who grew up city-side, the idea of discovering…More
Carl van Vechten receives the copious and discriminating biographical analysis he has long needed, in the form of The Tastemaker, an exceptional publication and Edward White’s first book.
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EDITOR Nigel Simeone has selected some 650 letters for this collection of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence over a span of six decades of the 20th century. The first letter is from 1932, written by a fourteen-year-old Bernstein to his piano teacher, Helen Coates. The last is from 1990: a letter to conductor Georg Solti.
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Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika Picador. 232 pages, $25. HIGHLY ACCLAIMED when it was published in the UK in 2002, Bitter Eden is a novel by a South…More
Strub covers a lot of highly personal ground in Body Counts. Gay men his age lost staggering numbers of friends, on a scale otherwise known only to wartime soldiers. It was the kind of loss that soldiers famously find hard to discuss; maybe this is a reason that relatively few AIDS memoirs have been published so far.
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Mothers and Sons by Terrence McNally John Golden Theatre, New York City TERRENCE MCNALLY has become the American theater’s great poet of the urgency of interpersonal relationships. “We…More
The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy Liveright (Norton). 752 pages, $35. YOU BEGIN to get at the problem of James Purdy by noting, as almost everyone writing…More
THE WORLD’S FIRST gay comic strip was arguably Harry Chess: That Man from A.U.N.T.I.E., which first appeared in the Philadelphia homophile publication Drum from 1965 to ’66. The strip…More
VAMPIRES HAVE BEEN a part of popular culture in the West for several centuries. American vampire stories are rooted in the folklore of Eastern Europe, but similar creatures have…More
