The Great Secret
Martel’s book made the cover of Le Point (Feb. 14, 2019), France’s answer to Time magazine.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2019
July-August 2019
Blog Posts
Trials of the Plague Generations
THE LATE ACTIVIST Eric Rofes championed a radical new way of thinking about gay men’s health … Two new books echo Rofes’ vision, digging deep into gay men’s hearts and psyches to reveal the wounds we carry and prescribe balms that can heal those wounds.
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The Riots: Before, During, and After
Editor Jason Baumann, the library’s assistant director for collection development, has assembled a first-rate anthology of pieces that tell the story of the first decade of the Stonewall era.
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When Freud Went to the Movies
Film buffs will want to read Sleeping with Strangers, an analytical book that somehow maintains a dreamlike quality. Given the insanely messy connections between the sexual images we consume and our actual sex lives, all of us could probably use more time on the couch (this author included).
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The Inquisition Comes to the New World
As Zeb Tortorici’s Sins Against Nature proves, the Catholic Church has meticulously investigated, documented, and largely kept silent on priestly sexual abuses for centuries.
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From the Promenade to the Navy Yard
Little did I grasp that I had stumbled upon one of the last remaining sites from a century-long history of queer life in Brooklyn. But that is one of the many things I learned in reading Hugh Ryan’s immensely absorbing .When Brooklyn Was Queer.
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The Short Historic Life of Randy Shilts
The Journalist of Castro Street is the result of copious research and interviewing, though Stoner does not use the narrative style that makes some biographies read like novels. It’s a book by a professor of communication studies about a journalist. It looks at the ethical choice Shilts faced between objectivity and advocacy.
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The Paris Cruising Scene in 1750
We are currently digesting abundant information about the networks of men the police called ‘sodomites’ before 1750 and ‘pederasts’ after that year.
MoreRev. Bentley’s Man of Curious Habits
Bentley knew Gibaut as a parishioner and as a student at Harvard when he entered in 1782, but the first mention of the young Gibaut in Bentley’s diaries was in 1786, when he was in trouble at Harvard (for reasons unknown; a reference to “bad habits”). However, Bentley wrote to the president of the university: “Gibaut is thought by his friends at Salem to be in such habit as requires an experiment of Sea air.”
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‘Warm Brothers’ in 18th-century Berlin
Briefe über die Galantieren von Berlin has none of the militancy of the Encyclopedists. The polemic intent of the latter is charted by Robert Darnton in his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). The Austrian officer’s letters are leagues behind a work such as Thérèse philosophe (1748), for instance, in which free thinking is associated with sexuality.
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