July-August 2025
How did the trans community get here? An atmosphere of dissatisfaction looms over the transgender public as liberal politicians continuously fail to improve their situations. Many trans people feel abandoned by and alienated from mainstream liberal politics.
MoreEfforts of resistance, while still limited, are expanding as more people (such as readers of this article) become aware of what is taking place. These efforts show a growing realization that the removal of inclusive literature is both a First Amendment issue and a human rights issue.
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“THIS IS A BOOK about a staircase and the men who lived on it.” Thus Simon Goldhill begins his alternative history of Cambridge University. The staircase is located in the Gibbs Building, a beautiful 18th-century structure where the teachers and students of King’s College have lived and learned together for centuries.
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IN It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, veteran comedy writer Bruce Vilanch shares stories of a life spent crafting legendarily campy TV shows and other media projects, giving details of his involvement and the stars and creative teams he worked with. He wrote for many types of shows, from variety TV to movies, stage musicals, award shows, and even a modeling competition.
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BY WAY OF the complicated life of poet Countée Cullen and the influence of the Harlem Renaissance, an autobiographical meditation emerges from Kevin Brown’s combination of family recollections and literary essays: Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History. This engaging narrative, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, is structured in 24 essays that are initially focused on Cullen and other mid-20th-century Black writers, then weave in responses to Cullen’s work by Black artists and writers of the last forty years.
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IN The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf, Kaila Adia Story makes a compelling case for recognizing the continuing racism, classism, transphobia, and sexism in today’s queer communities, a legacy of the limited “gay rights” movement that gathered strength after the Stonewall Riots of June 1969.
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In Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, editor Daniel Kane, an American literature professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, compiles a collection of Brainard’s undated letters to various friends and lovers.
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Reviews of the books Red Hot + Blue, by John Garrison, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 by Thomas Mallon, and Nonbinary Jane Austen; and the movie, Clean Slate
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In Spent, her fifth semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Bechdel has a successful TV series based on her previous graphic novel Death and Taxidermy, which is streaming on Schmamazon (after Amazon, of course).
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BRUCE SPANG’S latest novel, River Crossed, is a long and somewhat convoluted coming-out story set in the mid- to late 1970s in West Virginia.
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