May-June 2021
FEAR of her same-sex desires stalked poet Charlotte Mew’s life and haunted her work. She feared that such desire was just another symptom of the family legacy of madness, which she feared even more. On March 24, 1928, afraid that she was succumbing to this trait, she drank Lysol from a cheap brown bottle, …
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WAS SHE or wasn’t she? Again, we face that vexing question regarding the lives of lesbians and gay men, in this case of Molly Dewson, who was known as “the General” in the era of the New Deal. Dewson is the subject of a book by historian Susan Ware that suddenly seems relevant, which prompted me to seek a conversation with the author of Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (Yale 1987).
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MARIO RONCORONI’S FILIBUS was Corona Films’ top-billing serial for 1915. Shot on a tight budget in northern Italy, it’s a silent caper movie in which the title character, a criminal mastermind, employs cunning and state-of-the-art technology to steal a couple of priceless Egyptian diamonds. Along the way, the mysterious Filibus takes some time to seduce Leonora, the beautiful sister of police detective Kutt-Hendy, the man who’s trying to thwart the crime.
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MARK DAVIS has been making mobiles out of his studio in the Roslindale section of Boston for almost thirty years. He began making “three-dimensional art” as a boy growing up gay in Indiana. His work has evolved into a unique and original approach that employs color, whimsy, and playfulness to create works of stunning beauty and grace, and of course, balance.
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In his new biography Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, Richard Bradford chronicles the life and work of Highsmith with an emphasis on what is not widely known about her.
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A new biography by Leslie Brody, Sometimes You Have to Lie, is an exploration of Fitzhugh’s life in its social and historical context. One of Brody’s projects is to reveal the central conflicts in the life and fiction of her subject, who struggled with truth and falsehood, coming out versus staying in the closet, committing to work versus relationships, and other either/or dualities that arose in the course of her short life.
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100 Boyfriends is the fourth book by [Brontez] Purnell, who is also a musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. Indeed, the book is as much a loud, hard-core performance piece as it is a collection of stories: part rant, part stand-up comic routine, part gross-out shtick, part bravura Gen-X aria.
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While [Martin] Duberman ferrets out the private side of Andrea Dworkin, [in Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary,] with aplomb, the public Dworkin, “huge and hollering,” as Ariel Levy once put it, is ever-present too. The events of her political career, often inseparable from her private hurts, are examined: …
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LEAVING Isn’t the Hardest Thing is a memoir that hasn’t got a tidy chronology or a crystal-clear resolution, and its language is often coarse. Yet Lauren Hough’s vivid, darkly humorous essays paint a fresh and powerful picture of two intertwined struggles.
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IN CONFESS, Rob Halford discloses the trials he faced behind the scenes while fronting the heavy metal band Judas Priest. This memoir is that of a man who was torn between being a pioneer in the macho genre of heavy metal—which indeed fashioned a whole new style of masculinity—and his self-discovery as a gay man with all the (mis-)adventures that came with it, which had to be kept under the radar.
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