The Mad & the Marvelous
Almost Obscene contains poems referring to Mary Renault, Stendhal, and Constantine Cavafy, plus a string of poems on mythological and historical figures, including Theseus, Medea, Antinous, and Scheherazade.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2023
July-August 2023
Blog Posts
The War That Broke Us
FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Aleksandar Hemon believes in the transcendent power of an enduring passionate love to allow one to survive the world’s horrors and indignities. This belief is what drives his new novel, The World and All That It Holds.
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Three Poets
HARDLY FIND a more diverse group of books than this: one by a pioneering Jewish lesbian poet originally from Poland; one by a French surrealist; and a third by a gay man living in Dallas. All are propelled by completely singular impulses, and all have something wonderful to offer.
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A Life in History
Reaching Ninety, is a summing up of a long and remarkable life as [Martin Duberman] reaches his ninetieth birthday. In it, he covers some familiar ground, but more than in previous memoirs, he’s willing to speak out about matters that he was reluctant to speak of before. At ninety, one imagines, he doesn’t really care if he offends anyone or if someone disapproves.
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Briefs
Reviews of Love Leda: A Novel by Mark Hyatt, Aubrey Beardsley: 150 Years Young by Margaret D. Stetz, Confidence: A Novel by Rafael Frumkin, and Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust by W. Jake Newsome.
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A Star Turn for The Golden Boy
OFFICIALLY CHRISTENED Eternal Youth but generally known to natives of Winnipeg by its nickname “The Golden Boy,” the statue high above the dome of the Manitoba Legislative Building seems to have been inspired by Giambologna’s Flying Mercury in Florence’s Bargello.
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Joseph Hansen’s Pre-Stonewall World
In the early 1960s, Hansen argued that magazines like ONE and Tangents should be aimed primarily at heterosexuals, not homosexuals. The same could be said of his novels, which are written as much for straight readers as for gay ones. Let’s hope that the new edition of the Brandstetter novels wins for them the wider readership they deserve. Hansen’s carefully crafted novels deserve permanent currency both as mysteries and within the canon of gay fiction.
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Nan Goldin’s Song of Herself
Goldin is one of the documentary’s producers and its principal protagonist. The film thematically weaves together two complex narrative strands: her personal story and the protest against the Sacklers. The latter takes place against the backdrop of images from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), her autobiographical slide show set to music that became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s and elevated Goldin to prominence as a photographer.
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We’re Heroes, We’re Queeroes…
Like muscles in spandex, comics are where queer representation dwells and swells today.
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The Spark That Lit the Gay Publishing Boom
In the preface to On Christopher Street, Denneny muses on the reasons for assembling writings that often reflect immediate concerns, largely forgotten by his own generation and ancient history to younger readers. He acknowledges that contemporary readers might find some of the book irrelevant, but his aim is “to show what the unfolding of gay liberation was like for one person, in specific situations and over time.”
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