January-February 2004
WHILE the World Sleeps is a collection of previously published essays about AIDS from established writers as well as from individuals living with the disease. The range of essays that Chris Bull has assembled underscores the myriad cultural responses that the disease has generated over the last twenty years.
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While it can serve nicely as a coffee-table book, sure to elicit laughs, sighs, and moans from browsers, Women in Pants is also a book of serious scholarship that will, as the authors suggest, “encourage more questions than it answers” and thus send at least some readers on a search for more information about the historical and cultural context for these fascinating images.
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The photos in Picturing Men are organized not chronologically but by photographic setting, be it a studio, the deck of a boat, an athletic stadium, or a swimming hole. Other settings include a meeting of lodge brothers, a raucous drag routine, and lumberjacks on break.
MoreTHE DAY AFTER I gave this talk to the Harvard gay and lesbian alumni/æ group, I was taken to lunch in Dunster House by some undergraduates. After filling our…More
Stephen Harold Riggins and Paul Bouissac have shared an interesting life, having traveled the world and crossed paths with such intellectual luminaries as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, A. J. Greimas, and John Cage. But in The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life, Riggins attempts to provide more than a romantic travelogue or eyewitness intellectual history.
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Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions Edited by Joseph Bristow Univ. of Toronto Press. 334 pages, $60. Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire by Jeff Nunokawa Princeton…More
Of all the famous people that Beaton wrote about, Hepburn received his most extreme wrath. He found her lacking in feminine grace and manners and accused her of being miserly and a bully.
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Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is a fixture in the American imagination: a superhero of anthropology; intrepid explorer; a woman leaps and bounds ahead of her time. Mead’s bisexuality and her lifelong relationship with like-minded anthropologist and writer Ruth Benedict, which Lois W. Banner explores thoroughly in Intertwined Lives, is not an entirely new thesis.
MoreTEN YEARS AGO, the AIDS crisis dominated the discourse and the psyches of the gay male community in America. Friends and lovers had died or were dying. Ten years…More
HOW LONG is ten years in the life of a black gay male? It’s the difference between 51 (when, because people were always telling me, “You don’t look fifty.…More
