Darwinism and Diversity
HOW YOU SEE a rainbow depends upon your vantage point. The author of Evolution’s Rainbow is a male-to-female transsexual and a highly respected evolutionary biologist at Stanford University. …
MoreBrowsing: Harbingers
July – August, 2004
Not Your Average Tennis Champion
The first line of dialogue in Big Bill is “Fifteen-love.” In A.R. Gurney’s bio-drama of the pre-World War II tennis phenomenon, Bill Tilden, it is no accident that the tennis term for zero is the adult emotion that, in Tilden’s life, is essentially absent. …
MoreAndré Gide’s “New Self”
ANDRÉ GIDE lived for his art. Born to a wealthy family, as a young writer he had no financial worries and he could afford to be experimental in his writing. For a brief time he associated himself with poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the Symbolist School. Later, his affiliation with the Communist party and his brief attraction to Christianity were both heightened and terminated by his aesthetic sensibility. Throughout his life, however, …
MorePosterity Is Here for Warhol’s Time Capsules
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Perhaps the most fascinating item in Time Capsule 21 is a hand-written, pen-and-ink illustrated letter from seventeen-year-old Lance Loud inviting Warhol to a party in late December 1968 at his family’s home in Santa Barbara. …
MoreDemocrats Waffling on Marriage Amendment
You’ve got to hand it to the Bush administration- they take care of their own. From tax breaks for the wealthy to cheating New York City out of 9/11 security funds in favor of “red” states like Wyoming, key Bush constituencies have been rewarded. Perhaps nothing is more glaring, however, than what has been done to cater to the demands of the religious right. …
MoreAmy Lowell wasn’t writing about flowers
WHEN I FIRST discovered the poetry of Amy Lowell, I was so taken with a group of her erotic poems that I suggested to my writer friend Judith that she do a one-woman show as Lowell reading her work. … But when I started reading some of the poems aloud, I realized that the lesbian love lyrics were too explicit to be read to the target audience, which I envisioned as a largely college-age crowd of mostly women. One of the most explicit, “The Weather-Cock Points South,” was typical of these love poems in its use of flower imagery …
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Short Reviews
Reviews of On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men who Sleep with Men, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, and Between The Palms: A Collection of Gay Travel Erotica.
MoreIs There a Downside to Same-Sex Marriage?
The fact that the gay and lesbian rights movement has put same-sex marriage at the top of its agenda is not hard to fathom: marriage is the hub from which so many of our cultural, legal, economic, and religious institutions extend. … Then why do I think we’ve taken up the wrong battle in fighting for the right to marry? …
MoreJared French’s Iconic Enigmas
IN HER 1993 BOOK on Jared French (1905-1988), the first devoted entirely to this painter, Nancy Grimes remarks on the interpretive difficulties that spring from the painter’s private symbolism, difficulties compounded by our inadequate knowledge of his life: …
MoreLust in Action
FOR MANY of the characters in Richard C. Reinhart’s The Consequence of Sex, sex is an easy but ineffective salve for the twin pains of loneliness and despair. While its author doesn’t tend to moralize, The Consequence of Sex is aptly named. …
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