A Sexuality of One
The title of Linda Leavell’s expansive and eye-opening biography, Holding On Upside Down, suggests a life that, like Marianne Moore’s poetry, involved the unusual.
MoreBrowsing: May-June 2014
May-June 2014
Blog Posts
Blink and You’ve Missed Him
I’VE REWOUND, fast-forwarded and paused but I still can’t find him. At one point I thought I’d spotted him in the closing circus scene of 8½. Or was that him,…More
Glenway Wescott’s World
SAY THE NAME “Glenway Wescott” at a cocktail party or gay studies conference and most people will draw a blank (“Glenway Who?”). But every so often someone may dimly recollect this 1920s expatriate American writer …
MoreAre ‘The Monologues’ Transphobic?
THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES is certainly not a “gay” play; nor does its author, Eve Ensler, market it as such. It is considered primarily a “feminist” play, but ever since its…More
Why Roger Casement Still Haunts Us
ON AUGUST THIRD, 1916, Roger Casement, a retired British consul and renowned humanitarian, was executed by the British government for treason. This was a death penalty offense, but he…More
Asking the Musical Questions
[Ethan Mordden’s] latest book, Anything Goes, far from being merely a rehash of his earlier works, offers the surest description to date of the roots and evolution of the musical, and represents Mordden’s own revised conclusions after almost forty years of considering these issues.
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‘Always a Godfather, Never a God’
THERE’S A REASON why Henry James burned his papers in the garden of Lamb House: when a famous writer dies, he’s vulnerable. People swoop in and write up his life, often in a way that Joyce Carol Oates would later call “pathobiography.”
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