March-April 2022
Although Lynes is usually mentioned in studies of queer Modernism, he is rarely placed in the same category as Paul Cadmus, Christopher Isherwood, or Tennessee Williams—all of whom Lynes knew and photographed. This may change with the publication of Allen Ellenzweig’s George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye, a sumptuous biography that makes a compelling case for Lynes as an important actor in the history of queer representation.
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IN THE 1930s AND ’40s, George Platt Lynes was one of the best-known photographers in New York City. His portraits and fashion photographs were published in such national magazines as Town & Country, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Today, he is best remembered for a vast archive of male nude photography that has since the 1970s been increasingly “rediscovered” by a new generation of queer artists and curators.
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THOM GUNN (1929–2004), though widely recognized as a major British poet of the later 20th century, has often been marginalized by a literary establishment that has never been able to deal fully with his evocative, and explicitly gay, poetry. The publication of Gunn’s letters represents the start of what the poet Andrew McMillan has called “a welcome rebalancing.” As well as providing an intimate portrait of Gunn, the letters also give an insight into the origins of this imbalance. An unmistakable thread running through his letters is the extent to which he was forced to negotiate with a hostile culture as a poet who was a gay man.
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Gregorio Prieto brought an emerging homoerotic presence to the movement that was also present in some of his contemporaries, notably two poets: Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda.
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THE PLOT of The Days of Afrekete is set in motion on page one when the reader learns that the husband of one of the main characters is facing jail time. The stage is fleshed out a couple of pages later as the narrator observes: “Liselle’s forty-one years of research suggested that no matter how distant, abusive, judgmental, unloving, and useless one’s mother was, one called her when things fell apart.” … The novel’s title invokes Afrekete, a figure in Audre Lorde’s woman-centered biomythography Zami and provides a secret code word of alarm between the two women lovers whose college romance haunts the narrative.
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[A] much later piece changed my life: Antonio Canova’s early 19th-century Perseus with the Head of Medusa. At the time, this statue loomed on a landing at the top of a mammoth staircase, its placement making the space around it feel like an altar.
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In Brocken Spectre, the present moment is always haunted, not only by the past, but by the suggestion of something divine that can never be adequately named or proved. The poems grapple with questions of faith from the perspective of an uncertain believer. “Once, I believed in God,” he admits in “Golden Gate Park.” But for all his admitted uncertainty, that space where belief once stood inside him still feels largely occupied. All of the poems remain alert to evidence that there’s more to life than that which we can rationally perceive.
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KISS THE SCARS on the Back of My Neck is a collection of short stories, many of them featuring gay Black men. Several, including the title story, are linked by two recurring characters whose lives are depicted from childhood to adulthood in separate tales, until the final story brings them together.
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AUTHOR Anthony Veasna So died of a drug overdose on December 8, 2020. His first book, the short story collection Afterparties, was published on August 3, 2021, and was named one of the top 100 Notable Books of 2021 by The New York Times—almost a year after his death.
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