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In his new book Vicious and Immoral, John Gilbert McCurdy reports on at least one case of child abuse whose details are still sickening to read about. And then there were the class resentments that the “subalterns” (anyone below the rank of captain) felt vis-à-vis the officers who outranked them.

“‘FETCH A TOWEL,’ he called, ‘and come on!’” So begins Cyril and George’s steamy swim in D. H. Lawrence’s first all-male erotic scene, which is found in his debut novel, The White Peacock.

Dalí and Lorca met briefly at the opening of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster in 1935. They told a journalist: “We haven’t seen each other in seven years but it seems like we never stopped talking.”

While Bernstein welcomed Richard Romney to Tanglewood, Felicia Montealegre (his fiancée) had to force her way in.

Matthew Hays chats with a superstar philanthropist.

Windham met Campbell at the studio of artist Paul Cadmus. Brimming with charm and wit, they were friends wth the leading writers of the day.

Unsuitable is likely to surprise and enlighten even readers with an extensive knowledge of the history of women-loving women. It would make a great basis for a documentary film.

Alexander’s book is the first full-length biography of Billie Holiday since Donald Clarke’s Wishing on the Moon (1994). Holiday herself wanted to title her autobiography “Bitter Crop,” the last two words of her signature song, the still shocking “Strange Fruit.” Focusing on the last year of her life as a unifying thread, Bitter Crop shiftsMore

Isherwood’s early life resembles a Masterpiece Theatre period drama.

The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts, focuses on Oscar Wilde’s long-suffering wife Constance and their two young boys, Cyril and Vyvyan, as they cope with Oscar’s philandering and the aftermath of his trials and exile.

Coming Out Republican ends with a brief vignette about Donald Trump’s lack of more than a pro forma interest in the anti-gay agenda. There is little conservative about Mr. Trump, whose blaring, elephantine ruckus conserves nothing and damages institutions as old as the nation. We are left wondering whether most of today’s Republicans are inMore

Winter Kept Us Warm is long overdue for a reassessment. As Canadian film historian, critic, and gay rights activist Thomas Waugh told Dupuis: “It’s so important for a film like this to be preserved, because it really speaks to what it was like to be gay in this time and place. It’s a way toMore

THREE NEW BOOKS, two novels and a memoir, help reveal the struggles and victories of LGBT Syrians. For all the beauty of the country, Syria is a land of horrific oppression, where gay men in particular, fearing exposure from the police and informers, must find secret places for sexual encounters or social interaction. They remindMore

Maya Cantu’s meticulously researched biography, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, reveals the extent to which Ropes based his backstage novels on his own Broadway experiences.

PERHAPS there is no one as romantic, or as wistful, as a poet in old age. Likewise there is nothing that spurs a poet’s ruminations so profoundly as loss. Three new collections explore old age and loss in various ways (one in an almost uncategorizable way), each with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Esther Pressoir is both an engrossing biography, with its roots in serious research, and a beautifully illustrated art book. It showcases the many modes in which Pressoir worked: lithography, etchings, linocuts, scratchboard, watercolors, oils, and more.

Because My Body Is Paper contains undated work, it’s less about [Gil Cuadros'] evolution as a writer than about our experience of his deeply felt concerns: the pleasures and horrors of the body, the link between spirit and nature, the sense of meaning we can derive from carefully tended relationships.

AS A POET AGES, he’s often faced with several choices. He can keep doing what he has always done, or he can, by seriously confronting himself, seek another voice. Jason Schneiderman has done the latter brilliantly in his new book, Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. He reflects humorously on his lifeMore

  AN EVENING WITH BIRDY O'DAY by Greg Kearney Arsenal Pulp Press. 336 pages, $21.95   IN HIS GENTLY COMIC NOVEL An Evening with Birdy O’Day, Greg Kearney manages, among other things, to spin a poignant tale sustained over the course of sixty years, employing antiheros as the two main characters. Roland, our narrator, isMore

There are moments in Pathologies when Johan is reminiscent of Goethe’s Werther in his suffering and hunger for romance, or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in his desperation and destitution.

Short reviews of the books Exit Wounds by Lewis DeSimone, Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle, The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss, Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco, and Where the Forest Meets the River by Shannon Bowring; and of the exhibit American Apollo at the Des Moines Metro Opera FestivalMore

As captured in its title, Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting, the Ogunquit exhibit’s overarching premise is that Cheney should be considered a Modernist painter, even if he resisted the pull of abstraction that dominated painting at this time, and his subjects tended to be domestically oriented, such as his and Matthiessen’s homesMore

Many believe that de Falla was a repressed homosexual. Never married or known to have a lover, de Falla had many queer friends in Spain and Paris, including Lorca. Unlike de Falla, Lorca fully acted on his gay desires, notably in his turbulent relationship with artist Salvador Dalí. Flamenco is deeply embedded in Lorca’s poetryMore

Earlier this year, I conducted a Zoom interview with Judy Grahn on the occasion of the republication of her 1984 classic The Highest Apple. This interview was originally aired on May 7, 2024, on the Vermont-based cable-access show All Things LGBTQ. The following is a short excerpt.

  Reality Bites  After Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) president Charles Moran went on X to proclaim that the RNC Platform had been “stripped of all anti-LGBT language,” he was shocked when rank-and-file Republicans called him a “pedophile,” a “groomer,” “disgusting,” etc. One tweeter was sure he had MPox. But could Moran really have been so surprised?More

Readers' thoughts.

From the Editor.

FROM: Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965. July, 29 and 30, 1940 Captain Jack’s Wharf, Provincetown, Mass.

JENNA ORTEGA kisses Sabrina Carpenter in Sabrina’s new music video, and we swoon. “It’s a lesbian renaissance!” declares an influencer on the Internet. Chappell Roan is at the height of the music industry after coming out as a lesbian, as are Billie Eilish and Renée Rapp.