November-December 2005
“CREATIVE NON-POETRY” is how Richard McCann half-jokingly described his unassumingly moving new book, Mother of Sorrows, at a reading. In a fusion of poetic memoir and fictional prose, McCann gently skews the facts both to guard his own past and to acquire artistic liberties. …
More
Reviews of In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot, and School of the Arts: Poems.
MoreBY ALL ACCOUNTS gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youths comprise a disproportionate number of at-risk youths across the U.S. They are substantially more likely than are straight youths to experience homelessness, whether because they run away or because they’re forced to leave home by their families. They’re more likely to attempt suicide and more likely to commit truancy or to drop out of high school altogether to avoid an intolerable situation. …
MoreTHIS BOOK had to happen at some point. Someone had to embrace Whitman as an environmentalist, and thus we have Killingsworth’s Walt Whitman and the Earth, demonstrating yet again that Whitman is larger than himself, extending beyond 19th-century America to embrace the ages. …
More
TO GROW UP gay or lesbian any time before the Internet came into wide use, in most of America, was to experience a profound isolation. There were few places where one could go to see the possibility of a normal life. Many of us wondered whether we were alone in feeling the anomaly of same-sex attraction. Only slowly, as gays and lesbians began appearing in the mainstream media, could youths come to know that homosexuality is out there. Everything changed with the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990’s. …
MoreFeedback from our readers
More… Derrick is not self-hating, homophobic, or confused about who he is. He just doesn’t think he’s gay.
Derrick is not a lone exception. This I discovered through interviewing young women with physical or romantic attractions to women, talking to youths in gay/straight alliances, reading youth stories gathered by others, listening to young people at the annual True Colors conference over the past decade, and reading the scientific literature. …
MoreWHERE ARE WE in the struggle for gay rights in the United States? Are we in the early stages of what will become a successful mass movement for equal civil rights and respect? Or have we reached the highest point of advance for the time being-where we have persuaded many fair-minded people to disdain homophobia, but have lost the momentum to the well-organized and more powerful forces of conservative backlash? …
MorePLAYWRIGHT Craig Lucas, who has written his share of screenplays, makes his film directorial debut in The Dying Gaul, a contemporary tale reminiscent of those past films about tragic figures bought and sold in Hollywood. Adapted by Lucas from his play of the same title, Peter Sarsgaard plays Robert, an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter whose personal life is spiraling downhill just as his professional life is on the way up. …
More
