Short Reviews
Reviews of Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort, and I Am a Red Dress.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2005
July-August 2005
Blog Posts
The ‘Gay’ Is Redundant
The fact that homosexual themes figured so prominently in the works of the greatest French writers had the dual effect of bringing these themes to the forefront of literary criticism and infusing the emergent queer culture with a peculiarly literary quality. In this remarkable little book, Lawrence R. Schehr, a professor of French at the University of Illinois, analyzes these effects through the writings of Gide, Proust, Cocteau, Willy, and others.
MoreThe Circuit Party’s Faustian Bargain
CIRCUIT PARTIES are weekend-long, erotically-charged, drug-fueled gay dance events held in resort towns across the country. There’s at least one major circuit party every month somewhere in the U.S.-New York’s “Black Party,” South Beach’s “White Party,” Montreal’s “Black and Blue Party,” and so on-and people travel far and wide to take part. …
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Sexual Outlaw Looking In
IN CHOOSING to show some of his own skin for the cover of his essays now collected as Beneath the Skin, John Rechy remains the consummate rebel. He appears shirtless and sexy with a cigarette dangling from the lips. …
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Life and Times of a Cinematic Original
AS RESEARCH for Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, author William J. Mann befriended the famed film director and became his documentarian during the last two years of Schlesinger’s life as a stroke patient in Palm Springs. As a result, there is a loose, conversational tone to the book that places it somewhere between biography and memoir. …
MoreLaud Humphreys’ Emissary to St. Louis
JEAN COCTEAU proclaimed friendship to be his only politics. “I would rather be celebrated for constancy of the heart than for any doctrine of the mind,” he remarked in his essay “On Friendship.” Cocteau considered friendship to be an art and equated it with the “fellow feeling” of Walt Whitman. “It continually corrects itself, sets itself aright, and avoids the wars of love. Friendship maintains its balance so that we can maintain ours in it.” …
MoreGay Youths as ‘Whorified Virgins’
MANY YOUNG GAY MEN are perceived by themselves and others as “whores,” but it’s a label that other gay youth are consciously rejecting. An earlier generation of gay men embraced sexual liberation as the driving goal of gay liberation itself, and found it empowering to be a “whore” or a “slut.” “Sexual objectification is a focus of our quest for freedom,” declared “A Gay Manifesto” of the 1970’s (by Carl Wittman). But gay youth culture has changed dramatically since then. Gay young people in general have veered toward a more heterosexual definition of their sexual relations. Few would agree with the sentiment expressed in another manifesto of early Gay Liberation, that of Martha Shelley in her classic essay “Gay is Good”: “straight roles stink.”
MoreBisexuality and the Case against Dualism
IT WAS SEEING the movie Kinsey that triggered a heated discussion about bisexuality between me and my girlfriend Meg, whom I had “accused” of being bisexual in light of her history of dating men several years earlier. She vehemently denied that this earlier life made her bisexual, giving rise to that age-old discussion of just what makes a person “bi”: …
MoreA ‘Strap-on Party’ for the People
ON THE AIR since 1990, HBO’s documentary series Real Sex has proven to be hugely popular with millions of cable subscribers curious about the sexual practices and fantasies of their fellow Americans. Ostensibly unscripted and nonfictional, the series’ ring of authenticity adds to its appeal. …
MoreCrystal’s Sexual Persuasion
THE GAY COMMUNITY has a long history of alcohol and drug abuse above the rate that occurs in the heterosexual population. Research suggests that gay men use drugs in specific situations, such as during sex or during visits to specific “homosocial” venues like bars, clubs, sex parties or bathhouses. Thus, for many gay men, a unique aspect of gay culture is that drug use is very often specifically connected to seeking or having sex. …
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