Browsing: March-April 2018

March-April 2018

Blog Posts

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The Clothesline Swing is the story of two gay Syrians, lovers and refugees, who flee their war-ravaged country for a new life in Canada. Set in the future, some forty years after they first arrive in Vancouver, the story focuses on the now old couple’s final months together. The narrator’s partner is dying. His only relief comes from the stories that his lover, whom he calls Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic), tells him. “I’m your Scheherazade,” Hakawati tells his sleepless partner. “I offer you souvenirs: my stories, the pieces of my soul, to help you sleep.”

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Jake Shears (real name, Jason Sellards) was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1978, and was shuttled back and forth between there and Seattle during his school years. A showy, bossy gay kid who watched, unimpressed, as baseballs “plunked on the ground yards away from me, like a dead shooting star,” he found himself instead obsessed with David Bowie …

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A Body of Work’s most striking claim, however, is worth repeating. Hallberg praises his first teacher Mr. Han for his very un-American teaching style. Han told it like it was rather than “dousing” his pupils “with positive reinforcement” simply for trying.

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AS ITS TITLE SUGGESTS, Trebor Healey’s short story collection, Eros and Dust, wrestles with life’s inherently dual nature—life and death, love and heartbreak, crime and punishment—as well as the artist’s role in the endless struggle to reconcile these opposing forces.

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Here is a musician who writes pop ballads as catchy as they are forceful. Her music turns on the tension between being young, and thus feeling trapped in unfulfilling romantic relationships (par for the course), and hoping for a better world out there, waiting to be found.

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FOR MORE than three decades, John-Manuel Andriote has been a critical voice on hiv-aids in such periodicals as The Advocate and The Washington Post. In 1999, he published Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America, his landmark book on the LGBT community’s transformation from disenfranchised isolation into a self-affirming political and social force even while grappling with illness, death, and bigotry.

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Millett was forced out of the closet by a woman—probably someone she knew—during a 1970 speech at Columbia. As she later wrote in her memoir Flying (1974), which details the ups and downs that fame had brought her, she proclaim her lesbianism …

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Easy Marks   Residents of Waco, Texas, couldn’t help but notice that the city’s Christmas lights had a different look this year, a certain flair, a je ne sais quoi.…More

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Views on Shelley’s Women Clarified To the Editor: In his review of my book, The Shelley-Byron Men: Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise [Jan.-Feb. 2018 issue], Daniel A. Burr…More