November-December 2018
A former lecturer at Yale, [Amy] Bloom is currently the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University. The interview was conducted by phone last July, with an e-mail follow-up.
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What was not publicly known during Matthiessen’s lifetime was that he was a gay man, involved in a relationship that looked a lot like a marriage—in everything but name and legal rights—with the American Impressionist painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945).
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Was there ever any doubt about the nature of Bert and Ernie’s relationship on Sesame Street? If so, it was pretty well dispelled when a former writer for the show, Mark Saltzman, disclosed that the two are “a loving couple” based upon Saltzman’s own relationship with his partner Arnold Glassman.
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MoreTHE PROSPER ACT—a bill that would drastically alter several areas of higher education law—could come up for a vote in the House of Representatives in the very near future.…More
Queer people in red states are agents of change. They are in the trenches of the culture wars with the battle scars to prove it. For decades, LGBT people in Utah fought to make visible what the conservative culture hoped to exterminate. Utah has long been a place for “alternative lifestyles” where the resilient and creative thrive. To outsiders, Utah may look like a political wilderness; but it is a wilderness rich with peculiar opportunities.
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THE SOAP OPERA, that quintessentially American genre, has been a fixture of popular culture since the early days of radio. As such, the soaps have played an important role…More
ust when you thought you knew everything about the life of Oscar Wilde, there’s more. Making Oscar Wilde turns out to be not just about Wilde, however; it’s about the U.S. at a time when when P. T. Barnum was drawing them in with exhibits like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” minstrel shows were exceedingly popular, and Darwin’s idea that we are descended from apes was on everyone’s mind.
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TO BEGIN somewhere in the middle of this stretch of time, in medieval England, we home in on an icon of heroic manhood, King Richard the Lionheart. Long before he gained this epithet, Richard was the intimate boyhood friend of Prince Philip II of France, and their special fondness for each other carried over into adulthood.
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FOR THOSE INTERESTED in tracing the origins of homosexual relations in history, or in the literary history of the West, it is customary to begin with the ancient Athenians…More
