Holiday Issue: ‘The Empty Couch’
LET US celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to delist “homosexuality” as a mental illness in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This is the…More
Browsing: November-December 2022
November-December 2022
Blog Posts
How Dobbs v. Jackson Imperils LGBT Rights
LGBT RIGHTS and abortion rights orbited separately for decades around the Constitution, never quite coming into direct contact. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson puts them on the same…More
Letters to the Editor
Readers’ thoughts.
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Julius Eastman: Composer, Performer, Iconoclast
IN 1970’S NEW YORK, Julius Eastman was an outrageous presence in the avant-garde performance scene as a composer, singer, and pianist. Black and openly gay, he was an outsider. He died homeless and forgotten in 1990. As the music world grapples with righting the canon, there is a resurgence of interest in this sui generis artist.
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Confronting the Erasure of LGBT Art
FOR ANY ART LOVER, Florida’s infamous “Don’t say gay” law is a painful reminder of how a similar policy, aimed at erasing queer visibility, has been a mainstay in Western art museums for centuries, all the way to the present time. While there has been significant progress in the last few years, the presence and recognition of LGBT art in major museums is still somewhat tentative and far from secure.
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The Kerouac Century
AS JACK KEROUAC’S centennial year draws to a close, I have been contemplating the open book of his sexuality. He married three times, had countless affairs with women, and was not above crude expressions of homophobia. However, he allied himself with his gay friends Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in the creation of the Beat Movement, and, according to Ginsberg, there were times when Kerouac had sex with him or other men.
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The Curious Case of Gordon Merrick
Who did read Merrick’s books? Not his agent, Merrick eventually realized, or even his editor at Avon Books. But thousands of fans did. Sales figures are sprinkled throughout Joseph M. Ortiz’ new biography, Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel. One refers to over a million books sold. They did well in France and England. French critics considered Merrick a “serious” novelist. It helped that Merrick was fluent in French (one reason the OSS hired him), and so did the fact that he was critical of his own country’s shortcomings.
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Thom Gunn, a Poet on the Move
THE FIRST GLIMPSE I had of Thom Gunn was his picture in a poetry anthology titled The Modern Poets, edited by John Malcolm Brinnin and William Read. It was assigned as a textbook in an English literature class I was taking at Emory University in 1963, with consequences for me that the teacher could not have anticipated. That anthology was the first to include pictures of the poets alongside their selection, a bonus that always makes the reader curious about how the writer’s appearance bears on the work itself.
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Rise and Fall of the Medical Model
The work of Kinsey, Hooker, and others all emboldened a new brand of post-Stonewall gay liberation activists ready to engage in dramatic and confrontational tactics, including disrupting APA meetings and demanding equal time to refute the theories of homosexual pathology.
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