Calling the Media on Trans Representation
DIRECTED BY Sam Feder, Disclosure is a Netflix original documentary in which notable trans actors, writers, academics, and activists examine the history of trans representation in film and television.
MoreBrowsing: September-October 2021
Blog Posts
But Was He a Gay Writer?
It is unclear exactly where Tiff stands in any canon. But if you love big, well-researched, and more-or-less objectively written biographies—including 112 pages of bibliography, indexes, and family trees—this book could be just what you’re looking for.
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Passing from the Night
STORIES ABOUT GAY history often begin with a bar: the Black Cat in Los Angeles, Stonewall in New York. Equally important, our personal gay stories often begin with the gay bars of our youth. Yet these establishments are vanishing across the country for a variety of reasons, most prominently the rise of hookup apps like Grindr and skyrocketing rents for brick-and-mortar venues.
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Sex with Exes, Too
Throughout Sex with Strangers, Lowenthal brings together characters and plotlines with a particular knack for plumbing the depths of his characters’ memories to paint rich back stories. Taken together, these smartly crafted stories explore the tensions between desire and restraint—the grand, enthralling fearsomeness of deep intimacy, of fully knowing another person.
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A Caribbean in Queens
Not quite a coming out story, Antiman is an illuminating “hybrid memoir,” a record of Mohabir’s coming to terms with himself, discovering who he is, and his embrace of multiple communities and cultures. As he writes: “Diaspora is a queer country/ How can you be at once two species from two places?”
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Identical Twins Part Ways
In the end, Medeiros’ story lands on a paradox. We know ourselves to be both unique individuals and utterly interconnected. Who better than identical twins to embody this? Who better than a poet to offer us this truth, and a gay poet at that? Affection and tenderness plunge Self, Divided into the realm of spiritual memoir, where love is the source of meaning.
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Look Back At Anger
All the Rage is a memoir for a wide range of readers. Every young person who aspires to be an artist should read it. Anyone who wants to better understand how potentially self-destructive anger can be transformed into art should too. It ought to be required reading for critics and scholars who want to understand the arc of Fraser’s career up to 1999.
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A Poet among the ‘Butch-Babes’
FRANCES BINGHAM has written a biography that reads like an Iris Murdoch novel, specifically A Fairly Honourable Defeat. It’s a moving portrait of the life of British poet Valentine Ackland (1906–1969), but it’s also about her longtime companion Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), an accomplished novelist and poet.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris, A DUTIFUL BOY: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance, BEFORE STONEWALL, THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH, and RELEASED FROM THE WHEEL.
MoreThe Company He Kept in Touch With
JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995) was one of the most honored and admired American poets of the second half of the 20th century. As Stephen Yenser puts it in the introduction to A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, Merrill was “different from both his debonair contemporaries in the New York School and the more theatrical and publicized ‘confessional’ poets.”
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