Browsing: May-June 2021

May-June 2021

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            Everything in Purdy’s Malcolm may be described as “firmly evasive,” which no doubt enhanced the sexual mysteriousness of the novel for its original readers. Early in the novel, unable to follow Malcolm’s explanation of his relationship with Dr. Cox, Estel replies “Of course” by way of encouraging Malcolm to continue, only to reflect suddenly “that he had said of course to something he had not understood in the least.”

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THE DOCUMENTARY Keith Haring: Street Art Boy, directed by Ben Anthony, takes the formulaic, rags-to-riches narrative and runs with it. Queer sexuality, which was fundamental to Haring’s æsthetic and to his iconographic vocabulary, is completely missing from the film. All phallic imagery—even the mere shadow or hint of it—is erased, even though it was utterly central to his art. There’s no mention or glimpse of his final, major work: a large-scale mural painted in 1989, the year before his death at age 31. Once Upon A Time is a mural across four interior walls above the white porcelain tiles and urinals of the second-floor men’s room in New York City’s LGBT Center.

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Bertram Cope’s Year is clearly indebted to the conventions of romantic comedy and the comedy of manners rather than to the tradition of the bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel.

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “whoops,” with its variant “Whoopsie Daisy!” is the exclamation uttered when a harmless accident occurs. The earliest citation it provides is a 1925 New Yorker caption to a Peter Arno cartoon. Arno’s first collection, Whoops, Dearie, came out two years later, when he created the Whoops Sisters. As described by the revue impresario Leonard Sillman, they were “short, squat, look-alike sisters with huge snub noses and puffy cheeks and the eyes of sad seals. They always dressed in black.” These late Victorian ladies, Pansy Smiff and Mrs Abagail Flusser, antiquated in their muffs and leg-o’-mutton sleeves, would engage in cheeky and inappropriate behavior (Figure 1).

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Similarly, Betancourt, [in Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages,] writes with an authentic engagement in an intersectional analysis of race, sexuality, and gender. With his scholarly and political commitment, Betancourt vividly demonstrates that the richness of Byzantium was not just in its gilded surfaces but also in its gender, racial, and sexual diversity—befitting for this crossroads of two continents and myriad cultures and religions.

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OUTRAGES BEGINS in the rare book room of the Morgan Library in New York, where Naomi Wolf has gone to read the manuscript of an unpublished poem that Victorian critic John Addington Symonds wrote at Oxford after falling in love with a classmate—though you might also say that the book began the day Wolf was still a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was handed two volumes of Symonds’ letters by her advisor with the words: “You should read these.” Read them she did, and now, years after publishing such bestsellers as The Beauty Myth and Vagina, Wolf has returned to her doctoral thesis.

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CLEARLY one of this magazine’s missions is to excavate our collective history for relics or antecedents of same-sex desire in the past. What we find, of course, is that for most of Western history such sentiments have had to be expressed in coded or deeply sublimated form, intended for a cognoscenti that “got it” while excluding a wider, disapproving public. Often this meant hiding the message in plain sight by inserting it into a sanctioned or even pious presentation.

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WRITER Jamie James died in Indonesia on February 9, 2020, at the age of 68. His most recent nonfiction books were Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri (2019), The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic (2016), and Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage (2011). He also wrote two novels, Andrew & Joey: A Tale of Bali and The Java Man. The 2014 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, James contributed criticism, travel reportage, and essays to many publications including Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Atlantic, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, among other publications.

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