September-October 2025
Store owners often turned to their young clerks to act as sex guides to the back alleys and elegant bordellos of Manhattan. Clerks would trade tips with one another about the best places to engage sex workers, both for themselves and for their out-of-town clients, frequently sharing unnecessarily detailed descriptions of their encounters.
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Amid the animosity and violence between North and South, homosocial and even homoerotic elements endured. Confederate Sympathies is the study of these elements in American literature and politics before, during, and after the Civil War. Author Andrew Donnelly finds homoerotic feelings in novels, political cartoons, photographs, and other ephemera throughout this era.
MoreA few decades ago, researching something else, I stumbled upon a bit of history that had long been silenced, a tale that may be one of the oddest gay American love stories of the early 20th century. In his day, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) was hailed as a popular and prolific novelist as well as a cultural and literary critic. He became one of his era’s most prominent intellectual spokesmen for Jewish and Zionist causes and was a founding faculty member of Brandeis University. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962) gained fame as a poet, memoirist, and editor of a national magazine, with friends including Theodore Roosevelt.
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As far as I know, “lesbienne” first appears in print with its current denotation in neurologist Jules Cotard’s Études médicales (1870). He was part of a wave of European neuropsychiatrists obsessed with the “sexual perversions,” including “sexual inversion.” Historian Tamara Chaplin opens Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France with this 19th-century context for the emergence of lesbian identity. However, her rich documentation of Belle-Époque dance halls and women’s cabarets brings to life a world of lesbians who bypassed the shaming pathologization of homosexuality.
MoreNOTWITHSTANDING this issue’s theme, the cover features Charles Hefling’s gentle caricature of writer Edmund White, who passed away in June and is remembered here by three friends. …
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The Los Guilucos incident came amid a national wave of prison riots. Twenty-five major inmate uprisings had taken place in the previous year at institutions across the nation. After a massive disturbance involving more than 2,000 men incarcerated at the Southern Michigan Prison, Warden Julian Frisbie told the press that homosexuality was responsible for 98 percent of disciplinary problems.
MorePlatforms have already begun implementing AI-driven moderation to curb hate speech and harassment. But questions arise…
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THE FRENCH PIANIST Léon Delafosse was an over-achiever in his youth. By age 22 he had won first prize in piano at the Paris Conservatoire (at just thirteen), become…More
IN 2017, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture acquired the papers of author and gay icon James Baldwin. Consisting of more than 81 boxes of material, much of it previously unavailable, this archive chronicles Baldwin’s life from the age of fourteen in 1938 to his death in 1987. Author Nicholas Boggs took full advantage of this vital material to write the first major biography of Baldwin since 1991’s Talking at the Gates. A monumental work of research and literary analysis, Baldwin: A Love Story significantly expands our knowledge of the legendary author.
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The activity of the Johns Committee in Florida’s schools and universities is an important part of the state’s queer history and has produced a wide range of studies, both academic and popular. Robert W. Fieseler’s new account, American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, both draws upon this work and adds important new dimensions and facts.
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The Gay & Lesbian Review