January-February 2018
Maupin’s latest book, the memoir Logical Family, is his first book of nonfiction, yet he brings to it the unique storytelling gifts that have animated his fiction, and he more than delivers on the “tap dancing” that will win his readers’ attention and engagement.
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The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne Hogarth. 580 pages, $28. JOHN BOYNE has published nine novels in Ireland and a number of books for young adults, including…More
Reviews of Writers Who Love Too Much; David Bowie Made Me Gay; Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture; and Our Horses, Ourselves.
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Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatre Company by Sean F. Edgecomb Michigan. 246 pages, $70. FOR THOSE who liked…More
ONE STRIKING ASPECT of this book is the author’s animus toward the literary executors and biographers of the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron. John Lauritsen is correct that until the early 1980s most academics and biographers resisted acknowledging “homoeroticism in the works and lives of canonized authors.” This resistance is now more historical artifact than ongoing force. Not so for Lauritsen, …
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Fun Home avoids simple resolution of complex issues, and the musical feels faithful to the tone and storyline of Bechdel’s 2006 memoir. But memoir and musical are distinct forms. The former relied on its author’s childhood journal and an astonishing cache of saved letters, memorabilia, notes, photos, news clips, and literary quotes to generate drawings and captions. The musical, on the other hand, displays not thoughts or images but behavior: it uses actors to tell the story.
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This interview was conducted by telephone in late September 2017.
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BATTLE OF THE SEXES recounts what was in fact the battle of the decade: the women’s movement and the sexual revolution versus the inevitable male chauvinist backlash, all telescoped into a single event in 1973.
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JUAN BASTOS is a portrait painter whose work was on exhibit at a major retrospective at the Denenberg Fine Arts Gallery in West Hollywood, CA, in November. Included in the exhibition were the covers of several issues of The Gay & Lesbian Review that featured Juan’s art.
I had a lively conversation with Juan about his career as an artist and about the exhibition, which was part of the massive Getty Museum project, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a celebration of Latin American art in Southern California, with dozens of galleries participating. Juan’s covers for The G&LR, of which there were a dozen in the early 2000s, included portraits of Tennessee Williams, Susan Sontag, Rudolf Nureyev, Ian McKellen, and Gore Vidal, with whom he developed a friendship late in the great writer’s life.
I interviewed Juan in October at the lovely L.A. home that he shares with his partner Tom Parry. — Chris Freeman
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IN THIS POWERFUL MEMOIR, filmmaker Parvez Sharma describes the physical, emotional, and spiritual journey he embarked on while going on the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca.
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