Let There Be Art
Elias commissioned essays from nineteen artists, critics, writers, and scholars for Speculative Light, including Baldwin biographers Nicholas Boggs, Robert Reid-Pharr, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Leeming.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2025
July-August 2025
Blog Posts
TV Projects Even Bruce Couldn’t Save
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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Divided Loyalties
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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‘Any time is horny time.’
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.
MoreShort Reviews
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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A Graphic Plan to Beat Late Capitalism
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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A Crack in the Harlem Closet
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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Those Sexy, Scary ’70s
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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An Outsider Looks Inward
Walk Like a Girl is an unflinchingly honest account of a life lived precariously, never accepted fully in any circle he moves in. His acknowledgement that even fashion design is political, his clear-sighted awareness of his own complicity in some systems of oppression, and his conscious attempts to challenge those systems makes this a memoir that may earn an important place in the history of fashion.
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Sex and Exceptionalism
THE SUBTITLE of Fierce Desiresannounces an ambitious agenda: “A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” hinting at a challenge to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s influential book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, first published in 1988 (with subsequent editions in 1998 and 2012), which conceptualizes American sexuality as the historical development of privacy, moving from the primacy of the family toward greater individualism.
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