May-June 2004
… The author of Warrior Poet, Alexis De Veaux, is a poet, playwright, novelist, and the chair of the women’s studies department at the University of Buffalo, New York. In a short and serviceable introduction, De Veaux explains that she divides Lorde’s life into two lives, “before cancer” and “after cancer.” …
MoreFIRST you fall in love with the title. You imagine mismatched pieces of fragile china, translucent, in delicate greens and floral pinks. Your mind hand-feeds you memories of sweet petit fours, frosted pastel lavender and yellow, you smell jasmine tea steeping in a perfectly shaped tea pot, steam blooming from the spout like fragrant ghost petals.
Then …
MoreIT IS OFTEN ASSUMED that same-gender relationships followed a stereotypical pattern and set of protocols in ancient society. In classical Greece this would take the form of pedagogical pederasty associating a man (usually before the age of marriage) and a freeborn boy, while in Rome it would take the form of a merely physical relationship between a Roman citizen and a young slave. However, the texts reveal …
MoreTHE TITLE of Brian Teare’s debut volume of poetry, The Room Where I Was Born, proves apt: it is indeed about origins, about confronting how the room, house, family, town, and finally trauma of our childhood can shape our relationship to self, language, and even our view of history. …
MoreIT MAY SEEM difficult to say anything new and fresh about same-sex desire and love in the ancient Greek and Roman world. After all, the publication of Sir Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality in 1978, … was followed by a veritable outpouring of books and articles which continues today. … But, apart from refining what Dover said a quarter-century ago, have any new insights emerged? …
More… In Liquor, Poppy Z. Brite has set out to chronicle the lives of some New Orleans residents in a more realistic way than most other writers, including Brite herself, have done in the past. …
MoreIT SEEMS THE GODS will have their revenge, or at least their ironic outcomes. Thus we owe it to a woman and a lesbian to have written the most authentic and beautiful prose about romantic love between men in all of literature. …
MoreCIVIL WARS is a chronological account of Vermont’s landmark adoption of a law mandating civil unions in December 1999. …
MoreFOR MOST of the last 4,000 years, all major, long-running imperial regimes from one end of Asia to the other have had one common feature: the presence of eunuchs in management. … Yet the image of an empowered eunuch-a diplomat, a chamberlain, an ambassador-is not the one that most people have of eunuchs today. …
More“I CAN imagine a book made up entirely of examples,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is the first of many quotes that James McCourt uses as a chapter heading in his new book, Queer Street, and it’s a revealing one. …
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