May-June 2020
Paul Baker, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University, has made it the focus of two decades of study and promotion. Fabulosa! presents an engaging version of his dissertation (published as Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men in 2002). He easily shifts between the complex linguistic genealogy of Polari and its gay cultural history, focusing particularly on the vicissitudes of its usage in the past half century and tracking this usage with gay politics.
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FROM THE START, John Giorno wanted two things in life. In 1958, “I was young and beautiful and that got what me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex,” he recounts in his post-humously published book, Great Demon Kings. What we learn early on in this royal paean to the self is that Giorno (1936–2019), who was a poet, an artist, and an activist, had an insatiable appetite for fame. Upon reading this memoir, one realizes that he possessed a surfeit of libido and ego, in addition to a talent for befriending talented people, to launch him toward this goal.
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THE SLYLY TITLED My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a joyful combination of biography and memoir, mixing author Jenn Shapland’s discovery of author Carson McCullers (1917–1967) with her own journey toward embracing her sexuality.
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T.J. PARSELL’S NEW FILM Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music opened unofficially with a private screening in Nashville in February, cosponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, Nashville Pride, and…More
As a bilingual Colombian-American immigrant who arrived in Florida in 1966, Manrique’s life as a writer and a gay man during a time of enormous social change has given him a unique and instructive view of the American writing life—American as in all of the Americas.
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MoreAs I write this, the new coronavirus has appeared in all fifty states and around the world. Numbers of cases are rising rapidly in the U.S., but testing continues to be spotty.
MoreAS I WRITE, covid-19 is racing through the U.S. population, with the number of infected climbing exponentially. News about the pandemic is all-consuming, as is its impact on everyday life.
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Nowadays the way people in the developing world make contact with gay sexual life is through porn and apps like Grindr.
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