September-October 2005
PAUL ROBINSON states at the beginning of Queer Wars that “the emergence of gay conservatism as a political and intellectual force is arguably the most important new development in the gay world.” It’s an ambitious claim, and one that would be hard to sustain with reference to today’s political organizations. …
MoreRECENTLY, a first-of-its-kind book, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets was published by the University of Michigan Press, a collection of interviews with some of the most prominent poets alive who also happen to be gay. On the occasion of the book’s release last June, The Gay & Lesbian Review asked interviewer Christopher Hennessy to invite all of the poets who appear in the book to write a paragraph about how their artistic sensibilities have been shaped by their identity as gay men. Their thought-provoking answers appear below, …
MoreAT ONE TURNING POINT in this moving and romantic book, author Jeffrey McGowan, at the time a U.S. Army artillery lieutenant, hits bottom as he goes to war in Operation Desert Storm, knowing that he must hide the fact that he’s gay and in love with a fellow officer. He asks himself: “Why could I be a soldier, but not a man?” …
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IN 1890, Weda Cook, a 23-year-old singer, posed for the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. Cook later reflected that the painter had inspired in her “love and fear.” The same emotions haunted Eakins. Eakins Revealed, easily the most provocative book ever written about Thomas Eakins, shows how thoroughly love and fear of the body shaped Eakins’ work. …
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… Shevelow’s book … is carefully researched and informed by extensive knowledge of English social and cultural life of the period. …
MoreTHIS THOROUGH and harrowing book gives us the information we need to assess Oscar Wilde’s place in the creation of modern Western culture and in the history of gay rights. …
More“The West thinks of itself as masculine-big guns, big industry, big money-so the East is feminine-weak, delicate, poor … but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom-the feminine mystique … I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.”
– Song Linling in M Butterfly
IN THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED play M Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang, the main character, Song Linling, explains his ability to fool a French lieutenant into believing that he was a woman for nearly two decades, a feat based not on his mastery of deception but on the lieutenant’s inability to see him as anything other than a woman. …
MoreTHE MARTYRDOM of gay artists has become something of a cliché. Oscar Wilde, if not the first, is perhaps the most famous. But since then were Yukio Mishima, Reinaldo Arenas, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. To this list we could also add the name of the poet Jean Sénac, who’s widely believed to have been the victim of a 1973 Algerian government assassination.
MoreThree young poets who have published their first books of poetry in the last year participated in a “virtual panel,” moderated via e-mail, in early summer. In it, they tackled such slippery questions as whether there’s a “gay æsthetic” and the limits of sexual explicitness in contemporary poetry. The panelists included the following:
Jason Schneiderman … Richard Siken … [and] Aaron Smith.
More… If poetry anthologies are any indication of what various segments of society are thinking about at a given moment in time, gay anthologies show not only the importance of rendering visible a love continually at risk. They also trace an arc of how our concept of gay love has changed over time. The first gay male poetry anthologies, which began appearing with the 1973 publication of The Male Muse followed by Angels of the Lyre (1975) and Orgasms of Light (1977), contain many poems that show gay men’s search for an identity. …
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